One Can Make a Difference (29 page)

Cops can't stop crime; they come in afterward to pick up the pieces. Gun control can't stop crime; the criminals will find another way to cause harm. We can only stop crime if we try to understand the roots of the problem and to engage kids before it's too late. I found a saying on one of those cardboard coffee holders. It reads, “I wonder if young people were actively engaged in all aspects of society and thought of themselves as community leaders, problem solvers, role models, mentors and key ‘shareholders,' how would the world change? I wonder too.

ROBERT YOUNG

Building Tribal Dreams

These days, Robert Young can be found living in Bozeman, Montana, where he
has bought a home and, together with his wife, Anita, is raising their daughter,
Skylar. It's a long way from the gray bustle of Seattle, where he used to live and
run a business. He can look out at the mountains now and, instead of traffic,
hear the sounds of animals and the wind. It's not just the scenery around him
but his vision of the world and his place in it that have changed.

In the late nineties, Robert cofounded Red Feather Development Group,
a not-for-profit organization that partners with American Indian communities
throughout the western United States to find long-term, sustainable solutions
to the housing crisis facing many of their reservations. Red Feather also teaches
home maintenance and low-impact, edible landscaping techniques. He surprised
the heck out of friends and family when he shut the doors on his former life, but
more strikingly, he surprised himself as well. Robert's story isn't just about how
he has changed the lives of Native Americans who need housing, it's about how
personal change can happen to people who aren't expecting it or looking for it,
as long as they don't hang back when opportunity knocks or a new revelation
comes their way. That fits perfectly with the idea behind this book.

L
ooking back, I was your typical, hard-driven businessman. I ran a sportswear company in Seattle and my life was focused on the Great American Dream: house on the hill, cars, vacations, the good life for my family and me. When it came to charity, I had blinders on. I might put change in a cup somewhere but, if I thought anything about charity, I thought that people who “asked for a handout” had probably brought their circumstances upon them themselves, or that the government took care of what really needed to be done. I was beyond naïve!

I was in a restaurant in Taos, New Mexico, having breakfast with a customer, when I saw a little newspaper called
Indian
Country Today
. I leafed through it and came across a headline that read:“Several More Elderly People Froze to Death in Their Homes on the Reservation.” I found it incredible. What was going on? Who were these people? Why were they freezing? If this was true, why wasn't it on CNN or in my “regular” paper? Surely, the government makes sure such things don't happen. I took the article with me, and it played on my mind.

Coincidentally, at the same time, I started reading the book
Revolution of the Heart
by Bill Shore, which is about a man who, on his way to his Washington, D.C., office, reads an article about tens of thousands of people starving to death in Africa and simply flips the page, something most of us do. When he gets to his office, it occurs to him that once you know something is wrong, you have an obligation to try, at least, to do something about it, even if that something is small. I knew he was right. I shouldn't just ignore the plight of elderly Indians who were freezing to death, now that I knew about it and had resources. I could at least look into it, I thought, maybe link up with some existing organization, and give some money. But, look as I might, I couldn't find anyone who was helping.

I had no interest in becoming a martyr to a cause, throwing myself body and soul into charity work, but after talking things over with my wife and my business associates, I ended up going to the Reservation to have a look for myself. What I saw was a total eye-opener, and what I learned changed me forever. Here were proud people who had been devastated long ago by our government and had never recovered. I met people whose great-grandparents had been killed by the U.S.

Army, who had been banned from performing their rituals, had lost their language, their land, everything. They couldn't get jobs, and they were looked down upon by many people outside the Reservation who had no idea of their hardships, how their ancestors had often refused to submit to white rule and had been slaughtered for it. I learned things that aren't in the history books in our schools about the lives of people who had, up until then, been invisible to me. A friend of mine from South Dakota had Indian kids in their high school, but they came off the Reservation for class and went back on afterward. They had known nothing of their experience, yet there was Third World poverty right in their backyard.

The first person I was introduced to on the reservation was Katherine Red Feather, a seventy-five-year-old Lakota grandmother. When I first met her, she was living in a dilapidated trailer, not a mobile home but the kind of trailer you tow behind a car. The wheels had been removed and it sat up on blocks. She had no running water, only an outhouse dug out back. Although Indians are used to people coming onto the Reservation like some “Great White Hope,” peddling religion or forcing their ways on the people, Katherine was always kind to me. She helped me understand the reservation and Lakota people; she introduced me to her family, to others in the community, taught me about customs, traditions, so much. Gradually, people learned to trust that I didn't want anything. I didn't come with any strings attached. After that first meeting, twelve years ago, I left thinking, “Let's see what we can do!”

I went back to Seattle, talked to my friends to try to get donations and offers of help lined up. I also asked a Peace Corps friend of mine for her advice, because I knew that she had a big heart. Right off the bat, she introduced me to Stone Gossard, from the band Pearl Jam, and he turned out to be a fantastic, decent, caring individual. He not only offered his financial assistance, but also agreed to travel to South Dakota to help build Katherine's home. Since that time, Stone and Pearl Jam have held a number of concerts that benefited Red Feather Development Group, and he participated on Red Feather's board of directors for over ten years. Stone and Pearl Jam's involvement early on gave us credibility and made an enormous difference.

Our first house was built for Katherine. She came every day to excitedly watch this ragtag group of volunteers camping next to her trailer, struggling to get it done. There were a dozen or so of us, most of us absolutely ignorant of anything to do with building. We picked a two-week period in July, thinking we wouldn't be hampered by rain and, boy, were we wrong! It was not only as hot as a furnace out there, but we experienced torrential rain, massive thunderstorms, and lightning strikes that were about as frightening as you can get.We were lucky to make it out of there alive!

The house was a kit home that arrived in a container and was sold to us at cost by Miles Homes, a company that's out of business now. Katherine moved into her house the very day we finished it and has been there ever since.

During the construction of several homes, we had the honor of being given “a sweat.” I learned that Indians were banned from holding sweat lodges for many years during the time of devastation, yet these rituals are integral to many of the tribes, for health as well as for spiritual reasons.The lodges I have gone to have hot rocks placed in a pit in them, and then water is thrown onto the rocks. I can't describe the sheer physical pleasure of being able to enter and cleanse yourself in this way after a day of hard, manual labor. It is an incredible experience. And the fact that it is given to our workers as part of a relationship, as a sign of appreciation, without any preaching of any kind, is so refreshing, it makes me so grateful in return. Each person who has come to build leaves as an ambassador, determined to promote the understanding that nothing is done for people, it is done with people.

Some time after we built our first kit home, we learned to make houses out of straw. It's great, it's organic, it's renewable, and a lot of reservations grow wheat so it's also readily available. We cover the bale walls with lath and stucco, which hardens overnight. Stacking the bale walls is a lot like adult Legos! Big building blocks of straw. It took a long time and a lot of collaboration with Washington University and others to get things right, because the houses must be made to code. If they meet code, then the U.S. government has an obligation to hook up running water, electricity, and other basic amenities. It might take them five years, but they do. Every year our “organization” increases. Since we began, Red Feather's staff and volunteers have finished more than fifty housing-based projects, building homes from scratch, rehabilitating crumbling structures, and even building wheelchair ramps for tribal elders and the disabled.

No one should think that I just jumped into this. My transition was slow. I talked things over with my wife, Anita, and we knew we couldn't do one house and then walk away. In fact, it went from one house to going back with a group of great volunteers every summer, and took me five or six years to move into this full time. I get upset if someone thinks it's all up to others, the way I used to think. It isn't. It's up to each of us to do what we can do to contribute, to ease others' difficulties. Each of us is needed. There is nothing special about me or what I have done. Anyone can do it, anyone at all.

BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH

Verses with Purpose

Benjamin Zephaniah is a British Rastafarian novelist, playwright, and dub
poet (spoken word over reggae rhythms) whose work is strongly influenced by
the music and poetry of Jamaica. He finished school at thirteen and published
his first book of poems by twenty-two. He's met with great international acclaim
and is beloved by adults and children alike. He defines himself as an oral poet,
inspired by the actual sound of words in addition to their meaning. In a time
when the Western world views oral traditions as a relic, Zephaniah encourages
folks to slow down and listen to the language. He fearlessly uses his writing
to tackle political and social concerns. His poems are about racism, misogyny,
animal rights, peace (he thinks armies should be banned), and the safety of our
environment and he uses humor and plain speak to get his points across.

He has recorded an album with The Wailers, their first since the death of
Bob Marley, and hosted Nelson Mandela's Two Nations Concert at the Royal
Albert Hall. In 2003, he publicly (typically, if rejected, it's done privately)
rejected the honor of becoming an Officer of the Order of the British Empire
from the Queen in protest of British government policies, including the decision
to go to war in Iraq. He is the only Rastafarian poet to be short-listed for the
poetry chairs for both Oxford and Cambridge University.

I chose Benjamin because he is always forthright and because he has had
an enormously positive influence on so many people, particularly children. He
encourages them to think for themselves, be true to their own ideas, have great
fun being the individuals they are, and to never be afraid to be picked on as
the odd one out.

F
romwhat I wanted to do and it's exactly what I'm doing now. It was that vivid in my mind. The strange thing was that all the signs were saying, no, you can't do that. A young black guy was always being told you must be a car mechanic, or a painter and decorator, or you must do one of these manual jobs that our parents did driving buses and things like this. And I thought no, I want to write poetry, but I want to write poetry that people identify with. I don't want to write poetry that is pretentious. I want to write poetry that's political and I also want to put poetry into theater and music. And I'd go on like that. And people would say, go on, don't be stupid.

I remember one day my mother said to me, “Look, son, we are guests in this country and we work hard driving buses and being nurses and things like this and you should start thinking of an apprenticeship. You're a black man in a white person's country and you want to be a writer? Now you tell me what person do you know that earns a living from writing?” And I went “Hmmm. . .Shakespeare.” And she said, “He's been dead a long time! And that's what will happen to you, you will die too!” She was trying to protect me really, and she was trying to say where are your examples? And I didn't have any examples. What I wanted was in a little world of my own.

I attended school in England in the late sixties. I was the only black child and so I was really, really bullied a lot. There was no sense of racism or prejudice, it was just the norm; it was a Church of England school and I was different and strange. I remember once telling a teacher that some people beat me up and were laughing at me because I was black and the teacher also just laughed at me because I was black. I don't think England was like the States. I think there was a lot of talk about color prejudice, because our parents were invited over from the Caribbean to work at the jobs that white people wouldn't do. Clean the streets, work in hospitals, and things like this. There were lots of signs; the common sign that any black person of that generation will tell you they saw in those days was a sign that said, “No blacks. No Irish. No dogs.” It was in the public houses, the bars. Sometimes you'd go to try to rent a room, an apartment, and the sign would be there.

One of my first experiences with this was walking to my friend's home after school, I was about seven or eight, and his sister met us halfway and said, “you can't bring him into the house because Daddy's at home.” So I said, “Oh, that's fine, I'd like to meet your father.” So she said, “No, Daddy thinks that all black people should be slaves.” So I said, “What are slaves?” I was an innocent boy, you had to explain to me what a slave was. This boy explained it to me in very crude language: “slaves, that was when all black people worked for all white people.” I went home to my mother and I said,“Mom, Robert said that black people a long time ago were slaves and that his father thinks we should still be slaves. Is that true?” And my mother said, “Well, you see what happened, son, was, a long time ago black people sinned against God so God repaid us by making us slaves. So don't worry because it may be bad here but when we get to heaven it will be okay.” And I remember saying, “Mother, I'm not going to wait to go to heaven to get liberation, no way!” And I managed to live out my vision. The thing that I really feel now that I've come on this journey— although it's always been with me—is that what I had to do was more important than just me. It had to be for other people.