From Councilwoman Julia Coates: Hello, everyone – Summary: In this update, I will comment on remarks made during the November Tribal Council meeting by a councilor who was defending the repeated appointments of members of the same families (many of them related to elected officials) to CN boards and commissions and into positions of trust and employment. This councilor called on Cherokee “tradition” as part of his defense, but I assert that in no way is nepotism a part of Cherokee tradition and explain why it is not. Interested? Read on… To watch/listen to this update, go to youtu.be/uQ-oerM4mJs In my comments at the Tribal Council meeting as part of the discussion of confirming a judge to the Cherokee Supreme Court (who has a brother serving on a lower court and is also related to members of two of the Cherokee Nation’s most significant boards), I stated that I was increasingly concerned about the myriad of family relationships that exist among many of the members of our boards and commission, employees, and elected officials who have been nominated by the chief and confirmed by his majority on the council. Although I went ahead and voted for the nominee (after assurances that his brother would resign and that he would abide by the rules of judicial conduct), my remarks apparently greatly irritated another councilor who, shortly after the vote, launched into a ten-minute oration on Cherokee history and tradition in defense of the repeated appointments of family members to positions of trust and employment in the Cherokee Nation. Nepotism. A dictionary definition reads “patronage bestowed or favoritism shown on the basis of family relationship, as in business and politics.” Nepotism lends itself easily to conflicts of interest and corruption, even when honest people are drawn into it. Thus it is seen as ethical and desirable to not place people into those compromising situations, both for their own good and for the good of the organization. And yet Cherokees have traditionally organized their society and government along lines of clan and family, both in government, law, and economics. So aren’t the Cherokees by definition a “nepotistic” people? As the tribal councilor who defended nepotism in the name of Cherokee tradition correctly pointed out, we have been organized as part of clans and families and have acted as corporate entities on that basis. The first obvious deconstruction of that assertion is yes, we have – in the past. But we do not do so today, and without the accompanying worldview, as well as social and governmental structures of the past that curbed any tendencies toward patronage and favoritism, corporate familial action becomes dysfunctional. It becomes nepotism. Clans are not the same thing as families. Clan is a larger grouping than family, and clans encompass many different families. Although the families within a clan are all considered to be related, they are still regarded as distinct families. Clans and families developed networks of interdependence and inter-relationships by employing complex ideas of indebtedness, obligation, and responsibility to each other. These concepts drew all the clans together into a web of relatedness that included everyone, that left out no one, and that relied on each person stepping up to play their role and do their part in order that the whole of the people would survive. For if even one person fell down in meeting their obligations or took advantages, it rippled out and caused detriment to all the people. Clans are thus a larger collective and they were self-regulating. Wrongdoers within a clan were often “punished” within the clan (although the concept employed was more about re-balancing the world than about punishment) and in the case of a killing, the perpetrator was sometimes put to death by his own clanspeople rather than waiting for the family (from another clan) of the victim to do it. Repeat offenders were usually banished by their own clan. Clearly this is different from the contemporary situation of the present Chief and his majority bloc on the council retaining leadership and influence to only a relatively small circle of family and friends. The structuring of Cherokee government around clans and families was largely abandoned about 200 years ago when the Cherokees first began to elect people to office. But even before that, it had eroded significantly as it had been based in a system of autonomous towns each of about 600 people or less, and a government by consensus in which the chiefs were truly representative and enacted only what they were sanctioned to enact by a consensus of the people of the town. It’s a highly decentralized style of government that really only works in small groups governing only themselves. This type of clan or family-oriented government hasn’t actually been seen in the Cherokee Nation since the 1700s. Clearly this differs from our present situation of centralized government in which a majority is forcing its will on a minority, rather than trying to find a consensus, and where we only hear from about 5% of the Cherokee people once every four years when they cast a vote. When my constituents have tried to express their concerns to other councilors (including the one who launched into the defense of nepotism as being Cherokee “tradition”), they have been told by several of those councilors that they are not interested in hearing from anyone except their own constituents. That attitude is not conducive to representing the will of the people – all the people. We are very, very far away from the time period when most social and governing systems were structured around Cherokee families. That was a time of decentralized government and a shared worldview that was about maintaining balances in the world and a belief that imbalances that occurred as a result of wrongdoing impacted people, even if no one saw the wrongdoing that had transpired. (Medicine people spent a good deal of their energies trying to re-balance exactly this sort of situation.) Contrary to what the councilor who defended nepotism suggests, it is impossible to take one aspect of that society (structure based in clan/family) and uphold it without all of the accompanying institutions, under which we presently do not operate. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s a system, not a bunch of isolated parts that can each stand on their own. Perhaps the real point of the definition of nepotism is not in emphasizing the family relationships, but in the “patronage or favoritism” aspects. We have a very centralized system of government now, which might be the most efficient manner of governing a large citizenry such as we are these days, although clearly it has many drawbacks. But we have had other historic moments when we were apparently a much more centralized society. One era is recounted in our oral tradition, in pre-contact times when we lived under a governing “priesthood.” This priesthood was strongly based in clans and families and it was hereditary, meaning only certain clans and families were eligible to be included in its ranks. I would submit there is more comparison of the contemporary situation to be made with this older system, rather than the later one of independent towns in which influence and leadership were open to all clans and families. Our oral tradition tells us that this old priesthood, in which influence was held by a few and passed down in hereditary fashion, became oppressive to the people and was corrupted to the point that finally, the people rose up in rebellion against it and slaughtered all of the priests. If we’re going to take lessons from Cherokee systems in which only a few families held influence and extended patronage, then this is probably the lesson to look to. I’m not advocating slaughter, but rebellion and casting out the oppressive, corrupted individuals and practices would perhaps be an entirely “traditional” thing to do! Later centralized Cherokee systems of the 1800s were also fraught with tensions. While the councilor who opined at length about Cherokee history specifically mentioned the Trail of Tears and how families helped each other through it, and presented this as evidence that our families have always been honest and we’ve always gotten along, there are lessons from the removal that indicate the opposite also existed. Families were sometimes divided in their alliances and charges of profiting off the event were thrown at both sides in leadership at the time of the removal and ever since. And of course, families were killing each other afterward in what became known as the Cherokee Civil War, hardly evidence that we were all honest and always got along. As a people, we have adopted and evolved some of the best aspects of American society, but we have also absorbed some of the worst. Many of the people who respond to me have stated, “This is just like in American politics,” something we’re all pretty disgusted with. The councilor’s remarks were an interesting effort to justify classic instances of nepotism, but the dismaying thing is that after the councilor had finished with his monologue, most of the other councilors in the majority bloc stood up and applauded enthusiastically. Some members of the audience followed suit, although some seemed confused as to what it had all been about. (But if councilors are standing and applauding, I guess we should, too, right?) As a result, I suspect this may become an “official” line of defense, and so this initial deconstruction of those arguments is an attempt to nip that in the bud. Let’s not go there; it would be a bastardization of our history and tradition. But several of us who did not stand nor applaud knew in that moment that we had just witnessed something quite cynical – a superficial rendering of Cherokee tradition and history to supply a justification and defense of what is actually just garden-variety nepotism. Julia
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 04:32:35 +0000