Doing good work in tribal communities takes on many complexities. A couple years back Wabanaki REACH co-hosted a convening of grantees, organizations receiving grant funds for their work intended to benefit Wabanaki communities. The following excerpt was read aloud to set a tone for consideration as we started the day together.  The excerpt comes from an essay by Wilfred Pelletier entitled “For Every North American Indian That Begins to Disappear I also Begin to Disappear.”

“Because of our holistic world view, our attitude towards nature is very different from white society. We see ourselves as part of nature, we relate to its spirituality. As children, when we got up in the morning, we thanked the Great Spirit for letting us see another day. We spent a lot of time helping our parents gather food in the forests and lakes, hunting, picking berries, fishing. We had a great deal of reverence towards nature, but we also felt intimate with it; we looked into the water and it was like blood in our veins. The white man, on the other hand, always sees himself apart from nature, above it in some ways but also threatened by it. His impulse is always to try to master it, never to flow with it.

Let me tell you a story- a personal experience I recently had- which illustrates the two attitudes towards nature. It was summer and I was on top of a mountain in the interior of British Columbia. It was grassland, rolling hills with clumps of poplar and pine as far as the eye could see. I was with a friend of mine. We stood in a little hollow, a sort of pocket of green grass and clover, kept that way, perhaps, by an underground spring or even the drainage of land. All around us the hills were brown, the grass burned out and dried by the sun.

We stood there in the hot sun, looking all around, and my friend said: “Wilfred, try to imagine that we have been appointed by some Board, “The Board in Charge of Everything,” and our job is to improve this place. What improvements would you suggest? 

We stood there and we examined everything with a very critical eye, and I thought to myself: “Well, we might take that big cloud over there in the south and move it a little further to the east.” But then I decided against that. Then I thought: “Maybe we could put a few more birds in the sky,” and I was just going to suggest that, when I noticed an old board, a plank lying at my feet. It had been there a long time. It was grey and weathered and one end was warped. It had sunk into the ground and the grass had grown up all around it. But it had been moved perhaps by a cow who had stepped on it. Anyhow, it was pushed over at one end so you could see a thin wedge of bare ground where it had been lying for so long. On the other side it was lying on the grass, holding that grass down so it couldn’t grow. And I thought: “Ah…this is something we can improve. I can move that board back off that grass, which is getting choked out, and then the grass can grow again.”

So I took hold of one end of that board and lifted it up a little bit to move it over. And under it, right there under the end of it was a spider. And that spider was looking me right in the eye and I was looking back at it. And it was stunned, the spider was in shock. Somebody had just lifted the whole damn roof off its world. Then I lifted the board higher and underneath it was a whole insect community. A thousand ants were scrambling to move their eggs to safety. Woodlice were digging to get down into the ground. Earthworms coiled themselves up like snakes. The ground under that board was a network of insects, paths, and the underside of the board was grooved out, too, to form the upper half of tunnels. Well, I set that board back down very gently. And I tried to put it exactly where it had been before I lifted it up.

I apologized to those insects and thanked them for teaching me a great lesson. You see, the first thing I realized was that my decision to move that board back to where it “belonged” was based on good intentions. I wanted to help the grass grow. I was making an improvement. Another thing was that when my eye fell on that board, I lost sight of the total environment. I made a special case out of that board. And my attention was so focused on only one part of the situation, that bent over grass, that I had no awareness at all of that whole community underneath. It was invisible to me.

That is what happens to Indian communities over and over again. Whites look at those communities from the outside, just like I looked at that board. They begin to feel sorry for all those poor Indians and they want to help them. They have really good intentions, but they don’t see people, they only see Indians. A special category different from what human beings are supposed to be. The organic life in the community, the organization of it, is invisible to them, just as life under the board was invisible to me. So they tear the roof off that community to satisfy their curiosity, to see how it functions, because they assume that there is no organization.”

This excerpt was shared at the convening in a manner similar to traditional teachings that utilize storytelling as a means to convey important information or lessons.  Pelletier’s words demonstrate the importance of acknowledging underlying community dynamics, complexities, and ways of being.  It is why Wabanaki people closely connected with their communities are best at the helm of work intended to benefit tribal communities.  One thing I have always appreciated about the work of Wabanaki REACH is that they lead with the question, “How does this benefit Wabanaki communities?” As the breadth of organizations and people doing good work for tribal communities is expanding, let us all make time to consider the weathered grey plank and the diversity and life that lies underneath the overall task of doing good.

Taken From: Canada’s Indians; Contemporary Conflicts, ed. J.S. Frideres, (1974) Essay, For Every North American Indian That Begins to Disappear I also Begin to Disappear” by Wilfred Pelletier.