Natalie K. Munden's Open Salon Blog

Whoreville's OC: Dinner for the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Sun, 9 Oct 2011 13:10:42 -0400

It seems I am not as forgiving as I thought I was. My instinct for this Open Call was to invite all my K-12 teachers, the bad ones and the good, including my mother, who home schooled my sister and me for the first few years of grade school as we traveled. Once everyone was seated, the loud sound of automatically locking doors and windows would shush the room so I could explain.

After welcoming everyone and letting all my guests know the dinner would be wonderful, I would reveal that the purpose of the gathering was beyond eating fine food and very much focused on educating the lousy teachers in the group about their failings. For their less-than-able-to-teach dinner companions, I would encourage the guests who are dedicated and talented teachers, and thus unattacked, to use the red pens and ruled composition books at every place settng to write suggestions for how to be an effective and encouragaing teacher. If they wanted to mention body odor or other issues, I would be fine with that.

Addressing each guest, I would thank those who inspired and taught me. There are many. In fact, at least once a month my 6^th-grade teacher and I talk on the phone. Note that I was in 6^th grade in the 1970s… Pat was a great teacher and is a wonderful friend.

Addressing the teachers at the dinner who made life much more difficult than necessary, I would say I learned not from them but in spite of them.

<i>Ms. S from Seaside Heights: It was probably your first year of teaching, but adding to the homework list until the class finally quieted down did not inspire me to learn; it made me feel punished.

Mr. A from Lavallette: Swallowing regularly so that your spit doesn't build up in your mouth is a good idea, as is wearing clean shirts that do not easily form sweat rings. You were a nice guy, but your personal issues were extremely distracting!

Mr. M from Butte: Giving me an F on my very first English assignment when obviously I was taught how to diagram sentences in a different way, made me despise you. It was my first F. I felt awful and spent the rest of the year working furiously so that I finished two weeks early for every quarter and had the opportunity to sit and stare at you all day. Yeah, yeah. SRAs. I started at tourquoise. Been there, done that at other schools because my family traveled a lot. I almost had the SRA stories memorized. If you had thought to have even the briefest of conversations with me, you could have shown me how you preferred sentences to be diagramed and all would have been well, with me earning an A on the 2nd try at that first assignment. Also, it really bugged me that you said "ray-road" instead of "railroad." You must have known I was bored out of my skull. Why didn't you give me something else to do? It was pure torture.

Mr. R from Butte: When I asked you a question in algebra class, it was not because I had vision problems. "Can’t you see that? What, are you BLIND? You're in ALGEBRA now…" You are the only teacher who ever made me cry in class. I used to love math until you entered my life. I think you were a coach, forced to teach in order to be a coach. I tried making appointments with you before and after school, but you said you were too busy. Fortunately, another teacher in the building very generously helped me with my assignments for a couple of weeks and my grades skyrocketed. She was a teacher. You were a miserable, ugly person.

Mr. Y from Butte: I thought I would give geometry a try, but on the first day, when you seated all the girls in the front of the room and stared at our crotches, I knew I was doomed to walk away forever from classes involving numbers.</i>

Fortunately, all the other people at this fantasy table are true educators. They love kids, they love teaching – and they know how to make subjects, even those that are more difficult, interesting, exciting, and fun.

Even if it makes me a bad person, I have to say that during this dinner I know I would enjoy watching red pens move furiously as the nice, creative and talented educators wrote notes for the dunderheads.

Alysa's OC: Books I Wish I Had Written

Mon, 5 Sep 2011 03:09:45 -0400

Of all the books that have ever been dreamed, written, painted or carved, I wish I could have been the scribe for the words of the holy books of every religion. Perhaps, just perhaps, I might have had the opportunity to write them more clearly, by some means, so that people would not be arguing, misinterpreting, maiming and killing each other.

Things on my Desk

Sun, 2 Jan 2011 18:01:21 -0500

Happy New Year!

I was making great progress on cleaning off my desk, which is my goal for today - that, and getting on my treadmill. SUDDENLY, and it has happened before to be sure, my final stack of papers became unavailable to me.

I know, I know... She works for ME, not the other way around. I'll bug her in a few. She is so comfy right now! ;-)

The Hospital -- True Story for Halloween

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 21:10:43 -0400

On a cold October evening a few days from Halloween, the clear, evening sky was in the beginning stages of a total, lunar eclipse. My mother was in the hospital recovering from surgery to repair a hernia that had allowed part of her intestines to be where they should not. She had been in a lot of pain the previous few days, pain that only morphine could dull, and I knew she was grateful the hospital was able to work her into the day’s surgical schedule.

Just 25 minutes before the end of visiting hours, my boyfriend pulled up to the front entrance of the hospital so I could get out with a bouquet of flowers, a light-weight, lovely, blue, glass vase and a freshly sharpened pair of scissors, usually kept in my kitchen drawer.

Once inside, I found the lobby empty and the information desk deserted. I had been there the day before, so I knew where to find my mother’s room and went straight to the elevator.

In the silence of the corridor, I suddenly remembered a scene from The Godfather, Part II in which Michael Coreleone sends an assassin to kill his nemesis in the hospital. The assassin attempts to suffocate his victim with a pillow, but hospital staff and body guards walk in and shoot the killer to death before the deed can be done.

I passed a couple of nurses on the third floor as I approached room 323 on my own mission. Neither of the nurses asked me who I was or whom I was going to see, so it was very easy to slip into Mom’s room, where she lay curled up on her left side. Her blonde hair was tousled, but looked very soft. She wasn’t snoring, but was breathing heavily under the weight of post-op, anesthetic exhaustion.

There were a few specks of blood on the pillowcase. From a phone conversation with my father before dinner, I knew that earlier, in her sleep, Mom raised her arms above her head for some reason and the IV hep-lock came out, allowing blood to flow into her hair and across her pale face. A nurse started a new IV drip, washed away the blood and, with the help of another nurse, jostled my mother around so they could change the bedding. Dad said that process left new bits of blood on the pillow. It is always so inexplicably fascinating to see blood.

This evening, Mom was alone except for an old woman on the other side of the partition. In between moans, the elderly patient spoke in low tones on the phone to a relative, relieved to hear the drive home had gone safely. She probably felt a little better too, knowing someone else was aware of her pain. The television was on. Though the volume was low, I could hear pundits in salubrious conversation about the presidential election that was just days away. I would be as quiet as possible – and since no one had come to check to see who I was or what I was doing, I knew I could do what I came to do without a soul to stop me.

I placed the vase on the rolling breakfast tray next to the bed. I filled it with water from a cup sitting there that had a straw in it. The straw was the kind made to bend at the tip, the sort little children love to sip from.

I was not near a window, but I knew the earth’s shadow was steadily moving to cover the moon – and I knew the stars were sparkling. Everything about this night was crystal clear as I smoothly removed the scissors from my coat pocket.

The old woman on the other side of the room was still talking on the phone in a near whisper, like a teenager who didn’t want to hear her father tell her to go to sleep.

Time was going by and I needed to think about what I was doing. I cut the plastic wrapping away from the roses and trimmed the stems. But there were too many leaves. That many leaves would suffocate the baby’s breath.

After carefully placing the scissors on the table, I soundlessly stripped the leaves away. Not all of them, but enough so the roses had room to breathe in the vase as they died. The arrangement looked nice.

I picked up the clippings and stray leaves, and put them in the trash along with the day’s newspaper. I thought it would be a nice touch to straighten my mother’s books and magazines, and I placed the water jug and leftover, red Jell-O within easy reach. Everything looked neat and tidy. The roses were spectacular. Visiting hours were nearly over.

As I looked at my mother and took a few moments to think about how brave she was in her pain, not just the physical pain that led her to the hospital, but all the pain in her life including what she put up with to bring my sister and me into the world, I slipped the scissors back into my pocket and leaned over to touch her hand.

The morning would greet her with red, yellow, pink, peach, white and lavender roses.

In the vacant corridor, as I waited for the elevator that would take me to the lobby where my love waited patiently, I recalled again that scene from The Godfather, Part II. I live in a relaxed kind of town. If I were an assassin, I could have murdered my mother in her hospital bed, and the woman next to her, and no one would have seen me do it. There are probably security cameras of some kind installed at various points in the building that might help catch a treacherous, psychopathic killer at a later date -- but it was disconcerting to know that anyone at all could approach my sleeping mother, and the pained old woman on the other side of the curtain, without interruption. It was kind of nice, at the same time, to know that towns still exist where peacefulness is expected and people are trusted.

As we were leaving, my boyfriend and I paused in the parking lot and leaned against the bed of his truck to admire the beauty of the lunar eclipse. By the time he dropped me off at my house about 10 minutes later, the earth’s shadow had completed its slow dance across the full moon, ending in a spooky display of reddish haze.

And my mother slept.

(2004, updated 2010)

Multicultural Lessons On Alaska’s North Slope

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 11:10:40 -0400

I thought I would post an article I wrote in 1996 at the request of my alma mater, the University of Montana. I lived in Barrow, Alaska for seven years and have been up there several times since I moved away. I have great friends at the top of the world.

Enjoy.

An opening paragraph in the script reads, “For thousands of years, We, the Iñupiat people of Alaska’s North Slope, have gathered berries, roots, mosses, leaves, flowering plants, sap and birch cuttings at estuaries, along small streams and across the spongy, tufted tundra of the Arctic landscape.”

The script is for a video I just completed -- a documentary about the use of traditional edible and medicinal plants. The perspective is that of an Iñupiaq Eskimo concerned about preservation of a culture both accepting and resisting assimilation into the dominant, largely white culture we know as America. I am the writer and I am Caucasian, raised somewhere else in a different value system.

The North Slope Borough, geographically the largest local government in the world at 89,000 square miles (142,400 km,) hired me in 1991 to fill the video producer position at the government television studio. My responsibilities include developing ideas for video productions, research, script writing, planning shoots, directing, shooting, editing, narrating when necessary and graphics design. The North Slope Borough TV Studio is an in-house facility. The crew works under the public information office. Our mission is to provide information to internal and external audiences. Some of it is propaganda, intended to sway voters and politicians -- but much of what we do is focused on recording a lifestyle as old as time. The chance to work at the top of the world, where polar bears are not uncommon parts of the local scenery, was exciting, though my relatives thought I was nuts to leave Anchorage for the Alaska Bush, where many people live without toilets and running water.

I was used to being in a hurry. Before coming to Barrow, I worked with companies that had me dragging myself to bed in the middle of the night and spending my days with a phone in each hand. Television production was fun but bad for the health. It could sometimes be hard on the conscience, too. Depending on who was paying, I helped produce programs for Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists or industrialists. I wanted to work somewhere where I possibly could make a difference.

When I stepped off the plane at the Barrow airport determined to do just that, a well-used stopwatch hung on a long cord about my neck; however, I soon discovered that rushing about isn’t the way things are done up here.

My first interview was with the mayor of the village of Kaktovik on Barter Island in what the outside world knows as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or ANWR. I met Mayor Herman Aishanna at the local restaurant and lodge for what I thought would be a 15-20 minute chat that would allow me to arrange some activities to shoot. Since I didn’t want to take up too much of his time or mine, I whipped out my notebook and began asking him about contacts and possibilities. Instead of answering my first query he said, “You sound like you’re from the city.”

“Well, yes,” I affirmed. “I just moved up here from Anchorage.” Where was he going with this? He said, “Let’s order some coffee first. We can talk about (business) after we visit.” The 95-minute coffee break that followed was the start of my first lesson on working in a multicultural environment. I left the camp lodge with his promise to hold a community potluck and Eskimo dance just for our cameras. When I returned with the production crew a week later, without my stopwatch, the mayor met me at the airport with a bear hug.

Six years have passed since I began training myself to act, as the Iñupiat would say, like a real person. Being real means not only respecting the community in which I live, but participating in it as well. Along the way I have broken more than a few rules, but have been forgiven because I honestly try to do better the next time. Doing better means, among other things, successfully resisting the urge to gag when I sample some of the local delicacies, like migaq (pronounced mig-ee-yack.) This highly prized dish is prepared by mixing bowhead whale blubber or maktak (muck-tuck,) meat, whale tongue and blood. The mixture ferments at room temperature for at least a week and whaling captains’ wives carefully stir the mixture three times a day to ensure its perfection. A whaling captain’s wife told me stirring is so important she gets up in the middle of the night sometimes to make sure it gets done.

My first taste of this dish was an experience I’ll long remember. At the blanket toss or nalukataq (nah-look-a-tuck,) festival held after a successful, spring subsistence whaling season, I scrambled past other people in line for a serving to make it to the port-a-potty to puke my guts out. Sheepishly I returned to the gathering of smiling elders who knowingly said “tanik” (ton-ick/white person) and shook their heads not in disgust but in sympathy. I just hadn’t been raised right. Later one of them asked me, “Don’t you think cheese is disgusting?” She had a point. Cheese is rotten, curdled milk left to mold -- but I love it because I grew up with it.

My place in the community as a tanik who at least tries to overcome what are seen as my cultural shortcomings was strengthened when I began talking with the old whaling captains who hang out at the post office every day. After five semesters of studying the Iñupiaq language, I can have short conversations, which pleases the elders to no end. They pat my back and nod approvingly at Qaummaluk. That’s me. My language teacher Fannie Akpik told me the name means, “bright sunshine bouncing off snow.”

Studying the language not only connects me to the community but also improves the quality of my work. I catch mispronunciations, misspellings and can more efficiently work on bilingual projects. I usually don’t understand exactly what someone is saying in Iñupiaq, but I know what he or she is talking about. Some of my Caucasian friends ask, “Why bother saving a language only spoken by a few thousand people?” For starters, some ideas or ways of describing things just don’t translate well. There is a tremendous effort all across the North Slope to preserve the ancient memory and way of being wrapped up in the Iñupiaq language.

Language is a tricky tool. Two people reading the same material may perceive it quite differently. This is especially true for those in a bilingual community. For the tourism video Barrow, Alaska - A True Story that I produced about Barrow last year (for my own company Touch Alaska,) well-known Iñupiaq cultural preservationist Jana Harcharek agreed to read the script and make corrections and suggestions. I never produce material that has not been reviewed by my mentors or by members of the NSB Commission on Iñupiat History, Language & Culture.

After reading the script for the tourism video, Jana made a change I would never have paused to consider. The original version read, “We never lived in snow igloos or rubbed noses, for that matter. We don’t understand how these stories became known around the world.” Jana changed it to, “We don’t know how these stories became known around the world.” For Jana, the words “don’t understand” in the first draft could imply incapable of understanding. What I have learned here is that it is absolutely critical to pay attention to, and respect, the way people perceive things. What makes perfect sense to one person might seem inaccurate or even offensive to another. I continually work at being aware of all the possible nuances in any script I write. To do that, I have to slow down a bit and really think about it. Such a habit among the worldwide media population, in my opinion, would be a very good thing.

I am part of the minority on the North Slope. An Iñupiaq woman I know in town refers to Caucasians as “people of non-color.” A good friend from the Black community thought this was really funny. She asked, “If you are a person of non-color, and a native person is a person of color -- what am I?” Good question. It is also another question of perception. Here, there are natives and non-natives. That’s it. The descriptive “non” seems to have a negative connotation, meaning less-than what a person could be, but I’ve become used to it and regularly refer to myself as a non-native. It could be that using these two titles helps the Iñupiat take back some of the pride that was stripped from them earlier in the century by a country that sold their land to another without asking, by missionaries that insisted many traditional Iñupiat activities, like dancing, were evil -- and by members of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs who took children away from their families and physically punished them for speaking their own language.

I live in a nice apartment in Barrow with all the plumbing amenities including a flush toilet. I go to restaurants in town and am a regular at the video store. As video producer for the North Slope Borough, my biggest challenge is not living in the Bush in a different culture, although I am reminded now and then that I am an outsider when I’m the only one in the room not joyously awaiting the arrival of a pot of boiled whale tongue. Presenting the Iñupiat voice to outsiders who may be ignorant, impatient or prejudiced is the most difficult aspect of my work. In learning to better act like a real person, I’ve studied local history and learned painful truths about Native American efforts to be heard.

In the dominant society, the wrong suit or tie can be disastrous. On the North Slope, minds matter more than wardrobe. People dress practically here. It is cold in Barrow much of the time. If the temperature isn’t cold, the roads are muddy. If they aren’t muddy, they are dusty. Visiting business people stand out like beacons in the night in their shiny Wingtips. Many in the dominant culture in our country view people who laugh or smile too much in the boardroom as people not to be taken seriously. Here in the arctic, laughing, smiling and having extra long coffee breaks with people before getting down to business is polite. If you rush to the point of the meeting, you are showing a lack of interest in the person you’ve come to see and that you care only for the information he or she might be able to provide.

In any American city, if an executive from a country like Sweden is a guest speaker at a meeting, his accent will be forgiven. After all, he probably speaks several languages and can’t be expected to use perfect English. On the other hand, if the speaker is Native American, he may be considered less intelligent. Though he might speak several native languages or dialects, his less-than-perfect English causes listeners to roll their eyes and tune him out. I didn’t know that before I came here, but it is true.

A couple of years ago, as I watched a meeting between White House officials and Native American representatives on C-Span, I could not help noticing what looked to me like pained expressions on the faces of the officials as they waited for the event to be over. When a Native spokesperson made a joke or laughed at himself for making a grammatical mistake, the government officials didn’t laugh along with him. Instead, they averted their eyes or looked at their notes and tried to appear interested in what the man had to say. Perhaps they were indeed, paying attention, but it didn’t seem that way to me.

When I produce a video program for the North Slope Borough, my job is to get the target audience’s interest and present the Borough’s message in a way they can accept. The target audience may be North Slope Borough Employees, hospital patients, elementary-school students, international environmental watchdog groups or federal government officials. When the target audience lives in the Lower 48 states, I use mainstream words and communication methods to deliver political, economic, historical and cultural ideas of the Iñupiat. Many times I’ll decide to use a quick, MTV-style to convey my point. It seems that the dominant culture in America wants information like it wants fast food -- right now.

Until decision makers in the outside world become more like real people by taking more time to ponder all the angles of an issue and listen carefully, the Iñupiat are content to use “non-native” words and ways when necessary to accomplish their goals.

For example, to cover the thorny issue of oil development in the 1002 Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as ANWR, my advisers and I approached writing the script in a documentary style. I felt strongly that taping the mayor in his office as he called on Congress to recognize his administration’s position on the issue of whether or not to drill for oil on the coastal plain would be entirely ineffective. People all over the nation are polarized on this issue. I felt that a traditional village gathering atmosphere world be more likely to grab the attention of anyone who might have an opinion somewhere in the middle of yes, drill or no, don’t drill.

So, we traveled to the area and talked with the villagers who would be most affected by any decision. The 1002 Area is the coastal plain of ANWR, which in terms of Alaska distances is right next to the declining Prudhoe Bay oil fields that have provided, at the height of their output, up to 25% of our nation’s domestic oil production. The land belongs, has always belonged, to the Iñupiat, but it is controlled by the U.S. Congress. The Iñupiat want to expand drilling operations in the vast, open space of the plain near current oil production operations, where they feel cleanup of any spilled oil can be achieved. The economy of the North Slope Borough is based on the property taxes collected from the oil industry. However, the Iñupiat do not want to drill anywhere near the mountains of the Brooks Range and are continually frustrated by claims that this is the case. Offshore oil production is another matter. With the ocean pushing around icebergs the size of houses, the Iñupiat wonder how cleanup of a spill could possibly be successful. Subsistence hunting of sea life is too important, they say, to take the risk. The North Slope Borough has fought hard to prevent offshore oil development, but politics, technology and time will tell.

To portray the Iñupiat point of view on the ANWR debate, we taped the dance and potluck activities pre-arranged by the village mayor with the enthusiasm of the whole community. We also interviewed Jeslie Kaleak, then mayor of the North Slope Borough, but not in his office. A NSB Search and Rescue crew flew us by helicopter to a glacier bed where we could interview the mayor in an environment difficult for our target audience to casually ignore -- the arctic. The mayor stood on his land and made his points.

I chose a middle-aged, white narrator and tried to mold the production into something that came across more like a Discovery Channel educational program than a public relations tool. The North Slope Borough Public Information Office sent a copy of the video to every member of the House and Senate. I moved on to something else.

During the past four and a half years I’ve produced programs on cultural activities, archaeological erosion, subsistence issues, international Inuit (the name for the worldwide Eskimo community,) concerns, health and employee-assistance programs and disaster response training. Some of the productions are in English. Some are in Iñupiaq. For historical programs, I have found it is important to take the time to study local lore. If I do not seek out this information, I may be, or be seen as, callous and too quick to get my project done. If I was working on a project and didn’t include an elder who had been instrumental in the Land Claims issues of the 1970’s, for example, many people in the community would not take what I did seriously. I would slip a few rungs and would have to work toward regaining respect. Reporters and television crews coming up to get a taste of the Arctic are treated respectfully unless they are seen as only wanting to take from the community. If this is the case, they often go away with only half the information they could have used, half the story. The result is that many times stories are seen locally as skewed or just plain inaccurate and locals might say, “See, I told you she didn’t care about finding the real story.” I don’t know how to resolve this problem since journalists have to work with deadlines, but being flexible and inviting people to coffee is a good start. Realizing that subsistence hunting activities will always take priority over any attempts to schedule an interview is another.

I believe the most effective and professionally fulfilling way to work in a multicultural environment, with people anywhere for that matter, is to take a little extra time to listen carefully to what someone has to say about their community -- a close second is never assuming you know enough.

I live at the top of the world in isolated Barrow, 330 miles above the Arctic Circle and 400 miles away from the nearest road, but I learn new lessons every day. For each new project I am called to work on, depending on the message and the target audience, I do my best to make films that speak in the voice of the Iñupiat or in the voice of the outsider. To speak in either voice I must be connected to both ways of thinking. To be connected I must slow down, listen -- and leave my stopwatch at home.