Futuring and Native Leadership

Bill Yellowtail | Emeritus Katz Chair, Montana State University

We Montanans are a people of a proud heritage.

Our cultural heroes, our magnificent landscape, our august statesmen all inspire. But the question for us is what will be our legacy?

Recently I listened to a bright young American Indian man challenge every one of us to, “be a great ancestor.” That’s a powerful order that will demand we be ever mindful and vigilant about ensuring that our descendants, Montanans all, can be as proud of their heritage as we are of ours. That mindset requires a dynamic that I want to call “futuring.” That is, we must have and work diligently toward a vision of our legacy, your legacy, my legacy, our family’s legacy, and our community’s legacy.

Of course everyone mouths the clichés about our future, but I challenge you: What does your future look like to you? How do you plan to argue for it? To be sure, consensus is not going to be easy, even unlikely. There ought to be a robust debate. But are you passionate enough to argue for your vision? How does your personal vision fit with that of your community, for not now, or ten years or twenty years from now, but for the twenty-second century? What is your personal part in perfecting your vision? What is your plan? Who are your allies? What are the obstacles? What is your strategy?

I know these questions sound rhetorical, but I challenge you to actually get together with your family, class, or tribal council and just begin, for starters, brainstorming what your place, whether that means Montana, your town, your household, or your reservation, would be like 3 generations from now. Do you want to shoot for okay or pretty fair? No. Think of it this way: How would it be if your great-grandchildren were to say, my ancestor was, well, pretty fair. Of course not. Remember our goal is to be a great ancestor, and by extension our Montana will fare well.

All of that said as preamble I want to speak directly to Montana American Indian people, especially Indian youth. Futuring, as I call it, is no less a valid and critical necessity for every Montanan, but I argue it is now especially urgent for us tribal peoples to take charge of our own destinies. That is what futuring is about.

We have to stop defining ourselves by our tragedies and begin developing ourselves by our possibilities.

I believe that too many of us Indian peoples have become mired in our tragic history, as if Wounded Knee or the Baker Massacre happened to us personally. We even have a name for this dynamic these days: historic trauma we call it. Some Indian scholars, in fact, have risen this term to a pseudo-science, arguing that this intergenerational trauma is now embedded in our genetic code. Thus, I say, suggesting there is little that we can do about it. I don’t ever wish to be accused of denying the trauma and tragedy that were imposed upon American indigenous peoples, nor that contemporary bigotry is excusable in any form, and we must know that many of our ancestors did indeed suffer unspeakable traumatizing abuse and forced change. History is fact. I acknowledge that some people, even today, do indeed suffer from trauma of various sorts.

But I do object to our perpetuating inter-generational trauma by rehearsing it, groveling in it, teaching it.

There are at least two basic things wrong with such a mindset, which I call victimhood. Victimhood is a powerful narcotic. It’s easy. It relieves one of responsibility because someone else is to blame. First we are guilty of imposing vicarious trauma upon our own children, that paralyzing sense of hopelessness and helplessness. Second, where does intergenerational trauma and victimhood lead, intellectually and spiritually? I argue that they only lead one way: to bitterness, blame, excuse making, dependency, hopelessness, depression.

All in all I would call that a poverty of spirit.

There has to be a better way. I suggest that we begin by outright consciously rejecting victimhood and along with it, reject historic trauma. Those are destructive mindsets. Instead, let us purposely pursue an ethic of optimism. Now this is not going to be easy. It takes energy. Most of all it will take discipline. We are generations deep in victimhood and we have acknowledged that. So it will require great discipline, personal and communal. That is what futuring is about.

We talk about leadership to you young people all the time. We have classes. We lecture. We have summer camps for leadership. We teach things like read Donald Trump or Barack Obama or name your national hero. You have to be brave and bold and innovative and articulate and if you’re really lucky you’re born with charisma. Fine enough. But I argue those are skills that are useful only to the extent that they are motivated toward something. If we’re going to lead we have to be able to lead to somewhere.

We have to know what our vision is. I’ve done this with groups, with classes. Sorry to say I’ve experimented with university classrooms. Begin by brainstorming what your community would be like in the year 2100. What are the intermediate steps that will get to that desired future? The point is that we have to know where we want to get and succeeding generations can build upon and correct our vision; that is their duty and privilege. Classes always say it’s obvious, we want to be healthy, educated, we want to be financially secure and economically self-sufficient, we want our culture to be intact and our language to be vital, we want to be part of the global economic and cultural stage, so on and so forth. We Indian people without fail say we want to be sovereign.

The next question is what do all these mean? What does healthy mean? What does economically self-sufficient really mean? And how educated do we prefer to be? What are the definitions and what are the steps, the stages, for getting there. We take this in bite sized chunks that we can measure in terms of our success.

We can do that. Truthfully we can’t do that in a class period, but it gives us a sense of what the task is. It would take us weeks, months, to devise a strategic plan. It’s built upon long term. We get this idea across in the classroom, and then we talk about what are the attributes that we personally and as a collective, once we settle on a vision, that we will have to have to discipline ourselves? It’s easy we say, we have to be visionary and insightful and open-minded and strategic and creative. We have to be optimistic, energetic, determined. We have to be solution orientated, collaborative, problem solving, and inclusive, patient, and accountable. The list goes on.

Then I ask, what would be the mindset that would be antithetical to our success? Then we’re on a roll. We say, if we’re remorseful or guilty, those are only impediments; if we’re bitter and self-piteous, or dependent or resentful, or passive or despairing, or apathetic or hopeless. If we’re in denial or defeated we will have difficulty.

Now we’ve defined two sets of ethos. Now the question is: do we have the power, the personal power and the power of community to choose between those two sets? I propose that we have the power. We have the agency to decide how we shall live our lives. When we get up in the morning and know we have a finite amount of energy, intellectual and physical, to expel this day and this week, how shall we expend it? Being remorseful or being optimistic?

Choose I say.

Another thing we call it is agency. I am going to use a term that we Indians understand and that we bandy about all the time: sovereignty. It’s personal sovereignty. It’s Indian sovereignty; the right to determine our own future, our own destiny.

With great determination, we will be a great ancestor.