2

THE PRINCIPLE OF COMMUNITY

THE COMMON GOOD COMES FIRST

Regenerative community in Indian country

Images

We are the original people…. We have a message for the world.

—JAMES RATTLING LEAF, SICANGU LAKOTA

Nick Tilsen stood at the front of the bus on the side of a road, gesturing out a side window toward the Wounded Knee memorial. “You can’t really see through the downpour, but there it is,” he said.

It was a darkening afternoon in late May 2015, and we were there on the bus with some Democracy Collaborative colleagues and 20 Native American leaders who were part of our Learning/Action Lab, a multiyear project to aid these leaders in launching or expanding social enterprises and employee- owned companies.1 Our visit to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota had been planned months earlier, so Nick was gamely leading this tour—despite the squall now raging in full fury. He stood silently a moment, as we looked out through the lashing rain.

It was not clear what we expected, but this wasn’t it. We could see an arched gateway of wrought iron, and beyond it, a rise leading uphill, seemingly toward nothing—an open expanse. There were no guides greeting people, no kiosks with postcards. No places even to sit. A single weathered obelisk stood against the sky. We couldn’t see it through the sheets of rain, but we knew the grounds hold a mass grave surrounded by a chain- link fence, marking the trench where in 1890 the bodies of 300 Lakota men, women, and children were heaped after being gunned down by the US 7th Cavalry.

In history, Wounded Knee looms large. It’s the place of the final violent confrontation with the final tribe on the final day—four days after Christmas—of America’s long war against its original peoples. It is also where, in 1973, the American Indian Movement (AIM) waged a 71-day standoff with federal marshals, demanding an investigation of broken treaties and government mishandling of Native American assets. This land is drenched with history.

Huddling there in our seats—many of us hadn’t packed for the cold on this spring trip—there was an unspoken gratitude that we couldn’t get out. Walking these grounds would have felt like being a voyeur, like touching a wound still raw.

Massacres have become disturbingly routine in our day, carried out by solitary madmen with guns or homemade bombs. Here the gunmen numbered 500, and they weren’t mad but were sent by a society bent on eradicating a “savage” people, hunting and shooting them down just as they did the buffalo. Native Americans fell beneath America’s rush to fulfill the manifest destiny of frontier conquest, so integral to the creation myth of the US—the nation Thomas Jefferson proclaimed contained enough free land “for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation.”2 For millennia, Native Americans had roamed this land, yet the courts would declare it unowned. Lincoln, in his seemingly magnanimous Homestead Act, gave it freely to white settlers.

If the cavalry fired the guns of Wounded Knee, it was the “golden spike” completing the Continental Railroad that proved to be the demise of the Native economy. As Charles Francis Adams, president of the Union Pacific, put it, “The Pacific railroads have settled the Indian question.”3 It was here that one American economy gave way to another, as the railroad kings and their financiers—men like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Gould, and Morgan—built the iron roads of the rising industrial economy, the seedbed of today’s extractive economy. Prospectors came westward to strike it rich, as California and the Black Hills of South Dakota were found to contain, in the words of Sioux holy man Black Elk, the “yellow metal” that white men “worship and that makes them crazy.”4

The community- based economy of Native Americans—their way of living lightly on the land—nearly vanished here, along with the 30 million buffalo that had once filled these plains, only scattered ghosts of which remained by the time of the Wounded Knee massacre.

BUILDING THE DEMOCRATIC ECONOMY IN INDIAN COUNTRY

Today, the buffalo are beginning to return. There on the bus with us was someone working to make that happen—Mark Tilsen, Nick’s father. Creating democratic businesses was his chosen vehicle for change.

Mark and his business partner, Karlene Hunter, had developed the Tanka Bar, a buffalo meat stick cured the traditional Native way with cranberries, which made chemical preservatives unnecessary. They’d started Native American Natural Foods (NANF), a company that had grown to millions of dollars in sales, and whose products had found their way into thousands of stores, including Whole Foods and Costco. The company bought 25 percent of its buffalo from Native producers, with a goal of 100 percent. Believing that asset ownership was critical to economic independence for Native families, Mark and Karlene shared partial equity ownership in their firm with employees, a transition The Democracy Collaborative helped facilitate.

The Tanka Bar pioneered an entirely new category of meat snack. It was so successful it attracted fierce competitors, like the Epic buffalo bar by General Mills, whose packaging claimed it was “shaman blessed.” “I even read they named their dog ‘Lakota,’” Karlene said.5

As NANF battled for shelf space with food conglomerates, it was struggling yet still managing to survive. Mark had turned his hand to a new form of democratic company: a cooperative of Native buffalo producers, Tanka Resilient Agriculture. “Part of our mission is to bring buffalo back to the reservation, to bring buffalo back to the plains,” he told our group.

Images

Wounded Knee was where Mark had begun his path in “Indian country”—a phrase he and Nick used often. Mark’s father had been a prominent civil rights attorney in St. Paul, Minnesota, who defended AIM protesters after Wounded Knee. Mark and his wife Joann Tall met at Wounded Knee.

“My mom was part of the spiritual revival that happened here,” Nick said from the front of the bus. “If Wounded Knee hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have happened.”

As Nick spoke, his words were nearly drowned out by a hailstorm that had abruptly begun pelting the bus like machine- gun fire. “Seventeen Congressional medals of honor were given to the cavalry for what they did here,” Nick raised his voice to say. “The marker here used to say, ‘The Battle of Wounded Knee,’ but a board was put over it, changing it to ‘Massacre.’ Some people believe this was where our people’s spirit was broken.” He paused. “It was also where a way was rekindled.”

DESIGNING A BETTER SOCIETY

When our Learning/Action Lab first convened in a hotel conference room in Oakland, California, in 2013, Nick showed up as this young guy in a T- shirt and jeans with a quick smile and a dark braid down his back. We soon learned he was part of a youth revival of traditional spiritual practices on Pine Ridge. The regenerative community he was building had been praised publicly by President Barack Obama and would be visited by Julian Castro, the then-US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Nick had pulled together an extraordinary, collaborative team to help, including luminaries like Bob Berkebile of BNIM—a leading green architecture and planning firm based in Kansas City, Missouri—who’d done the architectural drafting for the regenerative community. Those drawings would hang in the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side as part of the exhibit, “By the People: Designing a Better America.”6

In the five years we worked with Nick, we watched him come into his power, being named an Ashoka Fellow, helping Pine Ridge win designation as a Promise Zone, giving talks around the country, negotiating millions in federal grants, growing his staff from three to more than forty. He was led by—and led others by—a vision rooted in spiritual practice.

There was a time, up until 1978, when certain indigenous religious traditions were outlawed on reservations. The movement to revive these traditions attracted young people like Nick; together they built sweat lodges and learned the Lakota language and ceremonial songs. “Each time we came out of ceremony, we were becoming empowered culturally,” Nick told Indian Country Today. “We began to recognize a disconnect in what was taught in our ceremonies and what was happening out in our communities. We recognized a welfare mentality. We were holding our hand out, waiting for people to put something in it.”7

Tribal nations had for countless generations been self-sufficient. After 90 percent of the Native population was wiped out by disease and genocide, with the remaining few pushed onto reservations, their way of life was reshaped around dependency on government support. With families devastated, land lost, and traditions crushed, cultural trauma set in. It’s manifest today in rampant alcoholism, high youth suicide rates, and massive poverty. Pine Ridge is one of the poorest areas in America, with little infrastructure, few jobs, and tribal government as the only major economic engine.

In their spiritual practices, the young people received a message from the elders, Nick said. “How long are you going to let other people decide the future for your children? Are you not warriors? And they said, “It’s time to stop talking and start doing. Don’t come from a place of fear. Come from a place of hope.”

Nick and others decided to found Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation (CDC), a nonprofit organization independent from tribal government.8 They spent hundreds of hours in listening and planning sessions with community members, creating a vision for the future. “For the first time, they were being asked what they want, not being told what others think they need,” Nick said. As the development moved forward, engineers, architects, and foundations supported the effort, including Northwest Area Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners, and the Minnesota Housing Partnership. Funding came from the US Departments of Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development, the South Dakota governor’s office, and other sources. Thunder Valley worked with many other organizations on Pine Ridge, including the Lakota Funds, Oglala Sioux Housing Authority, and Wild Horse Butte CDC.9 At every step, the vision and building of the regenerative community arose from and within many circles of community.

The result was the design for the $60 million regenerative community that Thunder Valley CDC is now building on 34 acres that it owns.10

This master-planned village is bringing desperately needed affordable homes and rentals, as well as amenities like powwow grounds, an outdoor amphitheater, and youth spaces such as a playground, basketball courts, and a skate park. The plan calls for residents to help build their own homes, their sweat equity helping them save money.

“The entire development is a regenerative, sustainable system,” Nick explained. “Every house is positioned to take in the maximum amount of passive solar. There will be 100 percent water reclamation. Building materials are sustainable. It will be a net zero community, producing all the energy it uses.”

In a community where unemployment has been estimated to be as high as 85 percent—where every time a dollar hits the reservation, it exits within 48 hours—the regenerative community will feature stores, spaces for incubating Native- owned businesses, and a workforce training center.11 Youths get construction skills training as homes are built, and Thikáǧa Construction, an employee- owned company, has been launched. Thunder Valley also created a social enterprise program to launch multiple Indian- owned businesses. The first was Thunder Valley Farms, which in late 2017 took delivery of 500 squawking chickens—a step toward food sovereignty for a community whose residents previously had to drive 80 miles to buy chicken that wasn’t processed, breaded, and in the freezer section. A group of women on the reservation also formed the Owíŋža Quilters Cooperative.12

As Nick puts it, regeneration means the ability of an organism to regrow or restore an original function that has been lost. What Thunder Valley is building is not just homes and other structures. It aims to regenerate many kinds of wealth: community spirit, youth skills, food sovereignty, economic self-sufficiency. It’s empowering families to take responsibility for their future. “This regenerative community can be seen as a living laboratory” for alleviating poverty and building sustainable communities, Nick said. “It is potentially a national and even international model.”13

Images

Thunder Valley is building community wealth. That’s the frame that our project brought to its participants and one that many told us fits naturally with Native American culture. As one participant put it, “what people call a ‘new economy’ is really a return to what our ancestors always knew.”

As the Learning/Action Lab took shape, we at The Democracy Collaborative made our share of mistakes. Initially, we thought our role was to lecture these Native leaders, and at our first gathering, we had multiple PowerPoints at the ready. Participants mutinied, and we were quickly shown the door. With us out of the room, they discussed what they needed. A few hours later they invited us back in, and together we explored how to shift to a practice of colearning. We replaced lectures with panels of visiting experts who met one- on- one with participants in personal consultations.

At another point, Marjorie and our colleague Sarah McKinley, who became director of the project, created a bookmark for the group with the web address for our toolkits. We asked our staff designer to add a feather design on one side. When we handed it out, the group immediately began teasing us. “Slap a feather on it” became a standing joke about failed cultural relevance. (We have a stack of unused bookmarks, if anyone’s interested.)

Something we did get right was working in a circle, under the skillful facilitation of Jill Bamburg, the president of Pinchot University (today called Presidio Graduate School), now retired, who was part of the project team. Jill made a point of getting each voice into the room at the start and end of each gathering. And we always began with a prayer by a participant, often Nick. (In the 1934 book, Black Elk Speaks, Sioux leader Black Elk says that “everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles…. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.” The seasons form a circle, he said, and “The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.”)14

All of the groups faced enormous challenges. Of the half- dozen projects that began the journey, by year five, several had failed outright, while others succeeded modestly. Staff turnover was high in every group. Still, the circle held. The culture of the group, which was intimate, playful, and alive, remained intact; it was a true community of practice.

MITAKUYE OYASIN, LAKOTA FOR “ALL MY RELATIONS”

At the center of it was the principle of community. It’s what gives this framework for economic development a deep cultural relevance for Native Americans. (No need to slap a feather on it.) Bernie Rasmussen, who was part of the cohort as director of the Spokane Tribal Network, wrote to Ted that he was convinced that community wealth building “is already an indigenous model,” and that it “will thrive with the right opportunity.”15 That opportunity would present itself, we found.

Stephanie Gutierrez, who served for a time as director of social enterprise at Thunder Valley, was a latecomer to the group. As she brought herself up to speed on the framework of community wealth building, she and Rae Tall, program coordinator for Thunder Valley’s Social Enterprise Initiative at the time, began long discussions about it with each other and with members of the Pine Ridge community. Rae translated the frame of community wealth building into Lakota (see Table 1). Stephanie partnered with Kristen Wagner to launch a consulting group, Hope Nation, to take this approach out to the broader Native community. The embrace of the framework by these women, making it their own, was for us a bolt from the blue.

It was followed by another. Nick announced he was stepping down as head of Thunder Valley to launch the NDN Collective, which would work with groups like the two dozen Native nonprofits and 40-plus tribes that had approached Thunder Valley, seeking to create something similar. Nick explained that he aimed to create a multimillion- dollar investing fund, a consulting arm, a foundation, a network, and an advocacy arm, “so we can build a world where there are hundreds of organizations like Thunder Valley out there.” NDN is slang for Indian, Nick said; the N also stands for Natives. The “D,” Nick said, was about defending, developing, decolonizing.16

Then we learned that Sharice Davids—at one- time deputy director of Thunder Valley and someone with whom we’d worked closely—had returned to Kansas City, where she was elected to Congress in 2018. She became one of the first two Native American women to take a seat in the US House of Representatives.17

Images

Before the final meeting of our Learning/Action Lab, Stephanie prepared a document telling how she and Rae had discussed the traditional colonized approach to economic development on the reservation. They began to explore the imprint the extractive economy had left on their land, their people, their way of being.

Yet the community wealth building approach didn’t fully resonate until they began a communal process of translation. One coworker told them, “A long time ago wealth wasn’t material things, it was about what you could give.” In traditional Lakota culture, a warrior was one who gave gifts to those who had the least. Prior to colonization, Stephanie and Rae explained, “if a family couldn’t provide for themselves, other members in the tiospaye [broader group of families] would help.”18

The Lakota word for wealth means “to live a happy, well- balanced life, a life of physical and mental health, in balance with creation,” they wrote. “For Lakota, community connotes both geographic place and kinship,” because this culture “is based on kinship and connection to all that is around us: people, plants, animals, the stars, the land.” Before colonization, there was “communal ownership of land and extended, matrilineal, nomadic family structures”; this connection to land is still alive today.19

Stephanie talked about a training session she’d attended at the Main Street Project in Northfield, Minnesota, which had developed a regenerative, poultry- centered agricultural system. The whole system is circular, she wrote, with “free-range chickens feeding off the land, providing nutrients back into the soil through their waste, feeding off seeds and droppings from crops that can be harvested,” starting the cycle again. It was a mirror of the Lakota way from long ago, when they harvested only what they needed, left little waste, and allowed the wisdom of the natural order to flourish.

THE ETHOS OF THE EXTRACTIVE ECONOMY

This ethos of community and kinship with the land is markedly different from that of Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan, and the other founding fathers of the extractive economy. Theirs was an epoch of global colonization by Western powers—a time when it was still acceptable to think of inferior races destined to be ruled. Today’s heroic figure of the self-made billionaire carries an echo of that earlier age. At Wounded Knee, the myth of the frontier comes into focus from a different vantage point, with the suffering and resilience of the colonized in the forefront.

The two worldviews that clashed at Wounded Knee were grounded upon two visions of the individual. One is the root concept of modern economics, homo economicus, economic man as a rational self-seeking individual optimizing his own interests. Ecological economist Herman Daly and theologian John Cobb critiqued this notion in For the Common Good. It was published in 1989, before today’s wide-ranging, nontraditional economic theories, but its critique still rings true of orthodox thinking. “Economists typically identify intelligent pursuit of private gain with rationality, thus implying that other modes of behavior are not rational,” Daly and Cobb wrote. “It is through rational behavior, which means self-interested behavior, that all benefit the most.”

They proposed a contrasting vision of homo economicus as “person- in-community. ” “People are constituted by their relationships,” they wrote. “We come into being in and through relationships and have no identity apart from them,” for how we think and feel, our aspirations and fears, all are shaped socially.20

DEEP STORIES

We carry our cultural narratives largely beneath consciousness. Marjorie recalls the day she was returning from one of our gatherings and ran into a participant, Jo White from Thunder Valley, in the security line at the Denver airport. It was late November, just before a holiday weekend. As the two cleared security and headed off in separate directions, Marjorie waved and called out, “I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving!” Then she paused, and asked, “Do you even celebrate Thanksgiving?” Jo laughed and replied, “Yes, we celebrate keeping you guys alive!”

It was a lighthearted moment, and Jo’s manner offered assurance no offense was taken. But the moment spoke to the power of narrative: how we navigate in the world using deep stories of which we remain often unaware.

Among the deepest of these stories is the notion of what it means to be an economic person. At Thunder Valley, we see how a system can be built around an economic person for whom community is integral to being fully oneself. As the Lakota worldview tells us, self-interest isn’t the only value that arises naturally in the human heart. Concern for others is natural. When self-aggrandizement and wealth accumulation predominate in a society, it is culture that makes it so—not inevitable human nature.

The sense of self as person-in-community is natural to most indigenous cultures. Participants in our project came from many tribes. Winona LaDuke—from the Mississippi band of Anishinaabeg of White Earth Reservation—estimated there are 500 million indigenous peoples worldwide. Their worldview is one in which “human beings exist in intimacy and harmony with the natural world,” LaDuke wrote. Indigenous ways “are the only sustainable ways of living,” she said. “Community is the only thing in my experience that is sustainable … It’s our way home.”21

Images

When Black Elk, a spiritual leader of the Lakota Sioux at the time of the Wounded Knee massacre, told his life story to John Neihardt in Black Elk Speaks, he recounted how his spiritual power had been given to him in a vision during an illness at age nine. Years later, Black Elk shared that vision through dance and ceremony, initiating his evolution as a tribal leader. As he told Neihardt, “a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until he performs it on the earth for the people to see.”22

Nick, too, is enacting a vision for people to see. Many today who embrace narratives of apocalypse and dystopia are also enacting visions for others to see and might be mindful of the powers they’re invoking.

Something Nick said at the end of one of our gatherings has stayed with us. Over the years, we’d seen him endure relentless hardship. Yet at the end of one gathering, Nick made this offhand remark. “I think the best days for Indian country,” he said, “lie ahead.”

TABLE 1. A Lakota Translation of Seven Drivers of Community Wealth Building.

Images

Images

PUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION OF STEPHANIE GUTIERREZ, HOPE NATION.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
44.223.42.120