authentic social forms are characterized by three basic dimensions: they tend to be uncommodified, unmanaged and uncurricularized. The tools of the bereavement counselor made grief into a commodity rather than an opportunity for community. Service technologies convert conditions into commodities, and care into service. Unfortunately, the bereavement counselor is but one of the many new professionalized servicers that plow over our communities like John Deere's sodbusting settlers. The tools of the manager convert commonality into hierarchy, replacing consent with control. Wherq once there was a commons, the manager creates a corpora- hon. The tools of the pedagogue create monopolies in the place of cultures. By making a school of everyday life, community definitions and citizen action are de-graded and finally expelled. It is this hard working team—the service professional, the manager, and the pedagogue—that pull the tools of "community busting" through the modern social landscape. Therefore, if we are to recultivate community, we will need to return this team to the stable, abjuring their use. Cultivating Community How will we learn again to cultivate community? It was E.F. Schumacher who concluded that "the guidance we need ... can still be found in the traditional wisdom." Therefore, we can return to those who understand how to allow the Sauk prairie to bloom and sustain a people. One of their leaders, a Chief of the Sauk, was named Blackhawk. After his people were exiled to the land west of the Mississippi, and his resistance movement was broken at the Battle of Bad Axe, Blackhawk said of his Sauk prairie home: There, we always had plenty; our children never cried from hunger, neither were our people in want. The rapids of our riverfurnished us with an abundance of excellent fish, and the land, being fertile, never failed to produce good crops of corn, beans, pumpkins, and squashes. Here our village stood for more than a hundred years. Our village was healthy and there was no place in the country possessing such advantages, nor hunting ground better than ours. Ifa prophet had come to our village in those days and told us that the things were to take place which have since come to pass, none of our people would have believed the prophecy. But the settlers came with their new tools and the prophecy was fulfilled. One of Blackhawk's Wintu sisters described the result: The white people never cared for the land or deer or bear. When we kill meat, we eat it all. When we dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don't chop down trees. We only use dead wood. But the white people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything. The trees say "Don't. I am sore. Don't hurt me!" But they chop it down and cut it up. The spirit of the land hates them. They blast out trees and stir it up to its depths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them . .. They blast rocks and scatter them on the ground. The rock says, "Don't. You are hurting me!" But the white people pay no attention. When (we) use rocks, we take only little round ones for cooking . .. How can the spirit of the earth like the white man? Everywhere they have touched the earth, it is sore. Blackhawk and his Wintu sister tell us that the land has a Spirit. Their community on the prairie, their ecology, was a people guided by that Spirit. / When John Deere's people came to the Sauk prairie,^' they exorcised the prairie Spirit in the name of a new ' God, technology. Because it was a God of their making, they believed they were Gods. And they made a desert. There are incredible possibilities if we are willing to fail to be Gods. □ □ September/October 1985 RAIN Page 11 John McKnight is the associate director of the Centerfor Urban Affairs at Northwestern University. BARBARA GUNDLE
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz