Mary: I guess the...  I don't know, I had an understanding that I was going to be meeting with the counsel today, but I'd just as soon talk to you.

Pete: Yeah, I [...] with the counsel, and I really haven't had the opportunity to sit down and...

Mary: Well, I haven't changed since we have talked before. So maybe you have a little bit of a background. In 1973-74, because the school, which was the newest school in the state, The Evergreen State College, didn't seem to be responsive to the needs of Indian people relative to the fairly well established social and economic developmental plans. There were four people at that time: Darryl Fair, Cruz Esquivel, Mary Nelson, and myself; hired as the token Indians of the Evergreen State College. With not the idea that we would be either interested or willing to work with Indians, but that we would be interested in becoming the token plan for the whites. Well, for one year, 1972-73, kinda gave me an idea that there was a great big group of Indian people that needed some type of formalized educational planning. So, in 1973-74, I wrote a program taking into account the fact that the Indian will never be white, ever. Their best day, they're gonna be Indians. And they're not feeling bad about it. They're not trying to go up the creek and do some voodoo on themselves and turn white. So, I wrote the program as an alternative educational model that was leaning toward the pattern of learning that comes from an oral tradition. And because of the newness of the program, I wanted it to be an open-ended, open-exit, starting with the elders. Of course the elders had been educated so poorly for so long that it wasn't worth doing anything with. What we should do is address the college age people, but between the college age people and the elders that I wanted, we cut about mid-section. We got anyone, well, the middle age is about thirty-five. And so, for 1973-74, we had all Indians. And then as their first step to try and dismember that problem, they asked Cruz Esquivel, who is really, up until 1973-74 he called himself a Mexican, so they asked him if he would take the program and open it to whites. And so, 1974-75, there was 75 whites learning how to make teepees. So I re-emphasized that I was not developing a program for somebody to study Indians, I was developing a programs for Indians to study. Now this meant a whole different ballgame. So I moved over, and the flexibility of the college allowed me to do this through the individual contract concept, and I developed a program that I titled 'Oral Traditions". By now I was getting the idea that what we were really talking about was the university, and that within the university we had some viable disciplinary mechanisms. The ones that I have identified are Indian music, and Indian music translates into a fairly geographical understanding of the use of land, the understanding of community and individual identity. It's all sort of wrapped up in... Oh, hi! It's good to see you.

[Woman enters; she and Pete work out details of plans for later in the week. She leaves.]

Mary: So, I moved over, and I thought, 'Well, literally, anyway, at this time we get the best mileage out of individual contracts,' and so, from that point I started gathering native American students again and got up to about 56, and developed that up to the 100 we had the first year. We recruited the first year, but the subsequent years it was word of mouth, people telling people about it. Well, we maintained about 100, and as I developed my idea of the four major disciplines that we need to use, Indian music, Indian dance, talk and art. The only one that we've been able to develop in any degree of acceptability is talk. Of course the white people have developed the art, and of course their getting the biggest gains from the sophistication of the art form, much more than Indians are. So, in, the Evergreen State College offers the following models of learning that I have talked with the counsel. The first is individual contracts, and this can deal anything that could be comparable to a PhD, Independent study, clear down to the developing of an understanding of what an education is actually about. We could take that whole realm, but more than that, it could zero in on some of the kinds of learning mechanisms that have translated the Indian culture through the years even now. I feel that there could be individual contracts with people working with some of our elders. Not only in art, but in language, in organizing community gatherings, in establishing the kind of relationships that allow people the best advantage of what's left of our community. So that individual contracts cannot only establish an academic learning credibility, it can also establish a traditional learning credibility that can be translated into...

Pete: [...]

Mary: Right. Then a second is group contracts that will allow, say, one of the things that I felt that we must do because of the six years that I have worked without it, see, what I had felt for many years is for any education to have credibility we needed three generations. Well, I feel that to have any kind of education that's going to be credible for the worked we need three levels, maybe even four. That's why I asked to talk to the counsel. We need the worker, we need their supervisor, we need some administrative support, and we need the governmental support. I feel this will, it's kind of hard to say, but it may push the tribal counsel into doing what they're supposed to do: govern a people who are going some place. So, the second area, so I've asked for, and so far I haven't been rejected but I haven't had people jumping up and down over it, because it's going to be hard! But the group contract will allow different segments to develop their training system within that segment; we'll say social work or elders. What others... Medical education, some of the elements of community that have been spin-offs from federal funding. Then of course that can also go into the communities, because we have things that should be done with the parents, we have things that should be done with elders, so again you've got that split down the middle that opens the possibility of self-determination, I feel, in a more viable way. Then the last is what they call the coordinated study, which is mass education, and I feel that if we are to make some compact with Puyallup, that there should be at least one meeting, general counsel wide, that will allow people to generate the psychology of education. And, in some cases, if they're involved in other programs, they can generate the credit by participating in these general counsel meetings where the education can have the best penetration into the community. So those are the four areas that are possible. What Puyallup will be able to do maybe only to seed the population with individual contracts, which are perfectly valuable. Get enough people in that are able to generate an excitement, an enthusiasm for education, then we can take groups so that there will always maintain a high level of variety or the diversity which will allow people to see, 'Well, Gee... I've got this thing way back in my head, this idea; why not pull it out?' And it will also allow people to help each other bring out some of the traditional ways that they thought they forgot.

Pete: Yeah, I think for every person the greatest value of having gone through all these degree requirements, graduate school and everything else, was merely the exposure to diversity. Aside from that, I'm operating in a totally different capacity than I was trained for as a teacher of the deaf. And well...

Mary: Yeah, well, you're going to use it. Well you know, I always tell people that we're living in a society that you die at 20, get buried at 60.

Pete: That's pretty much the way it works if you let it get a hold of you.

Mary: That's right, the frustration is just beyond comprehension.

Pete: I understand they're looking at a training program, looking at an upward mobility type of program, and so far it's geared primarily toward a contract model. Maybe this is my opportunity to express some of my concerns and some of my wishes of anything, and that is that it be as far away from theoretical, philosophical, as possible. It's time to get down to what work needs to be done, what kind of planning needs to be done, the nuts and bolts of the whole [...]. That's really one of my primary concerns... [door buzzes, Pete answers it]. My concern is that we don't spend the majority of our time in theoretical. I've found that we still have some people operating in the mode of the late 60's, early 70's. For a long time, Indian people and Indian tribes were making their discontent known by vocalizing that. Now that vocalizing is essentially to draw attention to certain needs. Once that attention, whether it's to the degree that we want it or not, some attention in some form was then focused toward Indian tribes. Now we're in the kind of ballgame, the here and now, to where we're beginning to get some of the resources that we need in order to do jobs. Essentially we have people that were trained in that 1970's model and how they deal with the regulatory requirements, and even how they get away from the regulations and restrictions sometimes. I find that a problem almost daily. Yeah, there's a lot of people making noise and shaking the trees, and that's good. There was a time when that was the highest priority activity. Now that the nuts are falling out of the trees, we've gotta have some way of catching them. And that's where I find that some of our greatest weaknesses are, that there's a lot of people who can shake that tree, but the aren't that many people who have the everyday necessary to gather up and put it together in some order so it can be rechanneled.

Man: Design a program that can gather nuts...

Pete: Yeah.

Mary: Well, the thing of it is, of course that was a form of genocide, because I know for many years, the B.I.A. picked up the nuts. Of course, their people then got the benefit of them. And most of their people were white. And then the kind of blitzkrieging that's been going on since, say, the 60's, where people have rushed into these federally funded chicken coops and have found that the benefits of making noises scared the people and allowed them to get some of the benefits. But understanding of what the benefits were eluded them.

Pete: Right. That's one of the people where we got lost, and now we've gotta come back to that and redefine all of these things on our own terms, and have people who are versed in the ways of making these regulation and all the other constraints we're working with.

Mary: Now here's one of the things that it's going to seem like treading water because a great deal of that is the carefully re-establishing of a workable and working value system. Because when you messed up your house and the Welfare came in and took your kids and cleaned up your house, that was one thing. But now that you not only have to clean up the house, but you have to maintain a credible day-to-day life plan to keep it clean. Now that's significant, and I have found in working the six years that I have that there are three areas that require people getting together in as non-threatening a way as possible. Merely to talk out whatever was left from the things that have happened to people that define being human. Now there's not very much of a heck of a lot of good people. There's not very much. So this is what I had suggested to the tribal council: If we could develop a group of, I don't know what else to call them but slots, say 20, where people can come in through those twenty slots and an open ended open exit to get the first psychological drainage, you know, get the negative things out of their head, and start building the positive that will allow them... You know, I feel Indians at this point are in the same psychological situation as the alcoholics. They're going to have to say, "Of all the things that I've thought of, I'm Indian." And that pivot point of being Indian has to be clothed in such a way that self-confidence is one of the outcomes of finding out it's not so bad. And you don't have to be dirty and you don't have to be drunk and you don't have to be all these things that the whites have conditioned us to be perceived as conditions of being Indian.

Pete: Yeah, that must be a hard learn, I never did pick that one up. [laughter]

Mary: Well, yeah, and this has value. There are a lot of people who have taken on these things in a very shallow level. They always think of four different. There are people that only need to be shown that they're not that way. There's some people that have taken up the cadence so long that they feel that that's running them. And so they have to be given the information that it isn't. And then there are three or four generations of this and blame, and they have to learn not to blame others, not to blame themselves, but just do. And of course we've got custodial care people, that merely have to be comfortable as long as they live, so that I feel that everybody should have that first round about seeking their own level. Because this is where responsibility has been used on Indians just like cancer. They have been given so much responsibility in order to feel responsibility because they don't value themselves. Now this is where you and I get into the whole ballgame. It is stupid to carry as much responsibility as we have. We know it's ineffective, we know it's inefficient, we know in a way it's subordinate. We still have the white telling us we have to do ten times as much in order to stay alive, and we don't have to. So I feel, as we teach those people, we will more likely deal with ourselves a little more humanely.

Pete: If you look back now at what they consider the good old days, [...].

Mary: And, this is what why I suggested the open entry. A lot of people are going to take three of four runs at it, because it is comforting and confident not to care, and not to do, and there are certain comforts that we're taking from people, that's why I would rather have them take themselves out of it.

Pete: They're a large part of the decision...

Mary: Right, and it's a traumatic thing that they're going to do, and gosh, I don't know how many things I went through before I decided, we really, I let people talk me into things because I thought they were smarter than I was. So I did a little bit of this, I didn't like that. I didn't want to be a secretary, I didn't want to be a filleter, I didn't want to do all those things that they had me training for. And I finally said to one person, "You know, I don't want this. My father taught me how to work; I don't want to work. I want to be an educated person." Didn't know what it was, but... [laughter]

Pete: Where are things now in the development of this [...]?

Man: [...]

Pete: Yeah, I spoke with Ron a couple weeks ago, before I went to D.C., and I told him what I would need to present it to the council and for me to make my recommendations to the council, and I just assumed that he was putting that together. It would involve a brief description of the program, who was going to be involved in it...

Man: [...]

Mary: Well, I think that it's a partnership. The students, while I feel that there are personal growth and development components, there are also work attitude and work psychology that needs to be developed so that we're not just merely training a skill, which will get them into another dead-end alley, but we're really talking to them about developing there own work philosophy and pattern of approaching and decision. And so, I feel that it would be, it seemed to me that it would be appropriate to work on developing that educational planning program either to be, I don't know how many years you folks would accept as proof of success or failure, but I figure education is relatively the same as work, and I feel that a program would need about two years to prove value or not, and that those four areas that I was talking about a little while ago have credible movement elements that you not just saying that everyone has to do this, that it can work on a staggered achievement level so that you're dealing with the different levels of background that the person has without afflicting the whole group with beginning or demanding too much of them. That you're allowing the first approach to education, it really needs three major things: It needs enough time for the individual to talk out his understanding of how much he knows. I figure that the formula really has to be reconstructed individually for that student, and of course we have at least one other elements that has not been accepted in academic traditional school, and that is the person's exposure to and general development of his own traditional background, and I feel more and more we've got to get this into play because as early as the 1700's, the priests were saying it was very hard to determine when an Indian was working. That leads me to believe that we have different patterns of working, and of course this goes into something that I'm very much interested in, and I feel debilitated because I do not have it, and that is a credential that is culturally referenced from which I can design a work credential, so that my best side is the fact that I'm Indian. And among whites, this shouldn't make a bit of difference, but among Indians, it should, and I feel that that is what was left out of the Indian preference policies and procedures, that we had to be Indian like white people saw us in order to take advantage.

Man: I get tired of [...] other people's definitions and...

Mary: Right. So, I think if we can put something together and turn [...]. My feeling is that most people under 25 have there first Humanities 101 systems already in place, so we're really talking about junior and seniors, and the major thing that I try to do is talk out as much as they know, and get it into some working pattern so they keep working from where they are, not from where a program says you should start. Some idea of a beginning, because most of them are not beginning students, and I figured about 50% of the students I'm working with should have started at a masters level in terms of the type of study they were capable of doing and the type of decisions they had been making. So, I figure if we could get a system started that would allow them the opportunity to get into an educational system and start counting their blessings, they can move out if we work it on that 20 slot basis. People can move out without jeopardizing their education, and start developing their own specialized progress, educational progress, so that we're not holding the people that just need to be reminded that they are capable, and yet we're providing for the kind of people that will need the kind of care that will allow them to get the best out of what they do have.

Man: [...]

Mary: I really don't know the kind of questions; I have not in my own mind clarified... I've proposed a twenty-year projected planning period. Of course I haven't even got one year because they shifted it around so much that I don't even have the original idea that I had in mind. [laughter] And yet we have, what I have found out really is that we're going to have to work some way of getting the college to recognize, like cousin Joe, that type of ability will justify and validate the learning that people have done to maintain their own traditional values, and so last year we had one conversation with the school regarding such a degree system, where now cousin Joe's been going for about two years, it should be very clear that his work is beyond the college level, so that a degree that is beyond and honorary degree could certainly be...

Pete: Considered.

Mary: Right. And we have a lot of other people, like Harriet Billbur, Isadore Thom, so that we will be starting to seed the future of educational system with the credibility, the validation of our own people, rather than having to have them cross over and...

Pete: Give up two steps to go ahead one.

Mary: That's right.

Pete: You're working with Ron [...]

[Pete answers phone, tape ends]

[side two blank]