cb1111
Newbie
- Location
- Virginia, USA
We work closely with a couple of American Indian educators and they laid out some of the issues - the main one being that the annual change in leadership also leads to a complete change in policies with negotiations and agreements made by prior administrations out the window.
By the time an agreement is reached, the term is nearly over and negotiations need to start all over.
Like on the federal side each change brings all new policies, but four years is long enough to get things done - a year isn't.
It is absolutely fascinating though - we were invited to a meeting of 20 or so educators for a two day meeting. In our world, when we go around the room to introduce ourselves, we look embarrassed and do a two second "my name is John Schmidlapp and I'm happy to be here" - Introducing 20 people takes 15 minutes.
In this meeting, not only did each introduction take 15 minutes, but it was an interactive experience. The intro included things like tribes, mother's tribes, father's tribes, why that was important and what lessons they learned from each one and so forth. It was one of the most interesting meetings I've ever been to.
the two of us there looked at each and said silently "Fuck! What are we going to say". Luckily, because of where we were sitting, we had awhile to think about it and we did a pretty credible job - we both had different backgrounds and could give a couple interesting examples.
