How can people w conflicting views communicate effectively?: Building trust, face-to-face, over time

Continuing from my previous post about CotC, this post zooms in on how Sheenaand her team consult the Blackfoot, Blackfeet, and CSKT in CotC management decisions. I draw connections to Shawn Johnson's session on conflict resolution too. Sheena said that, in developing CotC as a geotourism site, these tribes want their stories heard and not just have visitors drive through their reservation with them as a background. The Blackfeet identified 6 places for CotC management to direct tourists to, and now they’re trying to study how best to tell their stories.

One such site is a buffalo jump, co-managed by the Blackfoot Confederacy and Alberta government. During the horrific initiative by colonisers to debilitate the Blackfeet Nation by killing all the bison, some bison managed to evade their fate by moving up to Canada. Some of these genetically pure bison thus managed to return to the Blackfeet Nation two years ago, and it was an Inuit initiative to work with the Blackfoot and Blackfeet to let their bison roam free near Glacier-Waterton. “It was a very culturally pure thought”, says Sheena, “they thought, ‘We just want them to come back to the landscape, it means so much to our people.’” I searched for some links you can refer to to understand why having the bison return is so important to the Natives: here and here. Some powerful words I especially liked from the second article that demonstrate what the bison mean to the tribes:

If you are Christian and you don’t see any crosses out there, or you don’t have your corner church […] there’s no external connection, [no] symbolic iconic notion that strengthens and nurtures those beliefs,” said Little Bear. “So it goes with the buffalo.”

They decided to campaign for a UNESCO designation and today the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is a protected area. Buffalo jumps are steep cliffs Native Americans used to hunt bison. The Natives wear coyote skins and herd bison off the cliff, where spears are erected below to make sure the bison die quickly and don’t suffer for long. Remember how the Natives respect and honour every hunt as the animal’s sacrifice for them and treat them with the ultimate reverence (this post)? There is continuity here, the thread of treating all nature as sacred.

And Sheena said the Blackfeet are really good about having conversations, and watching them is fascinating. She recalled that one tribal member asked, hey how about we train them to do tricks like in a circus? Another responded perfectly respectfully, hm, but the bison are who we are. They represent us, they are part of us, maybe this is not the direction we want to go. How can we honour them while also bringing in economic spinoffs? Currently, discussions are still ongoing to develop answers to this question.

I did ask Sheena after the session, though, just before we loaded up our vans for our return to Missoula: how did you guys get the Natives to trust you? Honestly, they’ve been through so much with external parties coming into their land, their most sacred land intrinsic to their identity and community, and ravaging it for their own gains. Sheena's reply was, it takes time. We didn’t explain it to them in one session, we took time to go down and speak with them numerous times. Tribal members are not e-mail or phone call people, and to work with them you would go down to their reservation and meet with them. You need to build trust, and over time we showed them our holistic approach in line with their culture’s holism, that we’re not here for money, that we’ve got all the works: conservationists, companies, you name it.

This is something Mr. Shawn Johnson shared with me privately after his conflict resolution session too. I asked a similar question – how can I get people typically at loggerheads to work with each other? I have always been interested in how to get oil companies and environmentalists in conversation, because I've always felt that disliking each other and alienating one another is hardly the way to go. We need the oil companies on our side. They're such a massive player and refusing to speak to them or just isolating them doesn't seem to be the most effective way forward. Even in developing renewable energy systems – we're going to need them to construct our renewable energy infrastructure. We cannot deny the massive improvements they've made in people's everyday lifes globally, that many things we've developed and grown has been on the backs of petrochemicals.

Of course some people disagree, clear as day from our Greenpeace session. But this is definitely my view, and the role I know I'll play in championing the environmental cause – the bridge, the coordinator, the middle-man who strives to understand the nuances of the 'enemy' and tries to get them onboard. I don't like dichotomising things and it plays out in my view here too. I think Sheena is of the same mind, but I truly am cognisant that some of you Fellows may disagree. Please do. I think we all have different roles to play in achieving our common goal, and I will always support all of you lovely souls no matter what different projects we work on or roles we take.

(8 September 2019)

(Photo source: Montana Office of Tourism and Business Development)