Raising teepees isn’t the type of engineering
one usually expects from the Army Corps of Engineers. But thanks to
a novel training program, more than 150 federal employees have
learned firsthand how to build the traditional native dwellings.
Participants in the Corps’ tribal training course, which is
designed to increase cultural and environmental awareness, spend
several days living in the wilderness on tribal lands in Oregon or
South Dakota, learning about the host tribe’s culture, making
native crafts, visiting sweat lodges and – most importantly
– listening.
Jim Waddell, now the director of the
Corps’ military integration division in Atlanta, launched the
program in 2002, while he was working in the Corps’ Walla
Walla District. Waddell felt that the agency was struggling to
respond to the needs of local tribes, especially when managing
culturally important resources such as salmon. “We were
having a hard time with the tribes,” he says. “We were
not communicating with them well, and many of our decisions lacked
values related to their cultural and environmental
resources.”
The program, which is listed in the
Corps’ training directory alongside more traditional
engineering courses on concrete fundamentals and welding, is an
anomaly for a quasi-military agency known more for massive dams and
building projects than for promoting cultural understanding. But in
2002, the Corps laid out seven environmental operating principles,
which emphasize practicing sustainability and respecting
stakeholders’ opinions in all Corps projects.
Many
Corps employees found it difficult to integrate the new principles
into their daily work, says Waddell, so he designed the tribal
training program with two main goals: improving relationships with
the tribes and helping participants understand the principles from
a Native American perspective. “It’s a new way of
listening,” he says. “It takes a while to build a
relationship with a tribe and build trust, so they believe you will
actually come to listen and not to preach to them.”
To date, the Corps has run eight training
sessions in partnership with the Confederated Tribes of the
Umatilla in Oregon and the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota. The
courses are open to any government employee, and personnel from
other agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration and the
Environmental Protection Agency, have attended them. Tribal leaders
working with the Corps set the agenda, which typically includes
hand-on activities, such as making fishing nets and flint-knapping,
as well as discussions of native traditions and culturally
important resources.
“They had us making a fishing
net from scratch,” says Susan James, a park ranger for the
Corps at the Bonneville Lock and Dam, who attended the October
session on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian
Reservation. “While we’re doing this hands-on task, the
instructor is talking about how he and his grandfather used to fish
on the rock platforms along the river.”
So far, the
program has received good reviews. James says she can now give dam
visitors in-depth explanations of why salmon are important to the
tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and explain how the dams have
affected their lives. Hearing a native fisherman recount how his
livelihood was harmed by changes to the river hit home for her.
“We can all relate to that,” she says, “because
we all have to provide for our families.”
Waddell,
who hopes that the program will soon expand to New Mexico, believes
it has helped ease tensions in the districts where it has been
conducted. In particular, he points to the Walla Walla River
Feasibility Study, a highly contentious issue between the tribes
and the Corps that cooled off after people on both sides connected
through the trainings.
“It’s hard to
blatantly disagree with someone with whom you’ve established
a relationship,” one participant wrote in her evaluation at
the end of the course. “You can still disagree, but not be
disagreeable.”
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