A cultural exchange

I had it all arranged ahead of time. Someone local, a teacher himself, had gathered a panel of teachers to talk to the tour group we were leading. The topic was Native American education.

I don't remember the exact number, maybe six or eight. The idea was that I'd be the moderator, and that we'd talk with teachers and administrators--Navajo and white--about what Native education was like, how it was changing, where it was going.

We met in a church, fifty or sixty in all, and I started in, questioning panel members. As I remember, things were going well apace, when I asked the oldest panelist, a retired public school administrator on the reservation, to comment on a question.

She may have misunderstood the arrangement--I don't know. But what happened taught me a great deal about cultural exchange. She talked and talked and talked, told us all her boarding school experience--it wasn't nice--and ran through her professional lifetime, step by step, a series of stories as comprehensive as it was informative, her life story really--so much of her life had been education.

For me, despite its value and relevance, it was exasperating. I had a panel to run. It was my job to make sure that time was distributed equally. There were people sitting up there in front of the crowd who'd left work to participate. If the discussion was going to go an hour, common decency meant making sure everyone got their ten minutes.

I swear she went thirty. Occasionally, I punctuated what she was saying, trying to tease out a sense that she was talking too long. Didn't work. For her, it wasn't over until she'd said everything she thought needed to be said.

Call her inconsiderate--or senile, maybe. Consider her impolite, if you will. But it's helpful to know that she is and was the child of a culture where time wasn't quite what it is among the Belagana, "the white man," a world where time wasn't measured by clocks but by seasons or sleeps or moons, by the paths of the sun.

That retired school administrator was the child of a culture in which band leaders would get together to discuss a problem and give everyone their say. Across the American West, government officials out to get treaties signed went crazy. The snail's pace drove Washington nuts, discussion creaking along endlessly while every last chief had to be heard.

I thought of that panel on the reservation when reading an article by Ian Bogost in the Atlantic, who commented on the weird story of Alex Jones and Sen. Marco Rubio--maybe you heard. The two of them nearly came to fisticuffs outside a board room in the Capital, when Jones, a shock jock, now banned from Twitter, confronted the Senator.

"The spat," Bogost says, "was a microcosm of the internet itself: A place where widespread adoption of platforms gives anyone unfettered access to almost everyone else, a place that gives people the sense that they deserve an audience, with anyone, on any topic, all the time."

Traditionally, you had to earn the right to speak in Native council. When you had, it was fully expected that what you needed to say would require more than 140 words. And, oh yes, you spoke your view just once.

But of course, those old Navaho and Lakota and Omaha were heathen savages, not human at all. If they were to survive, you know, they simply had to become more like us.

That's exactly what we thought, in far less than 140 words.

Later, back on the bus on tour, what had just happened came to me. That retired administrator who talked way too long had given us all a lesson in cultural exchange.