Trust and respect: the foundation of collaboration
The following is an excerpt from my dissertation The Ontology of Love: A Framework for Re-Indigenizing Community ©2015
The spread of Western culture’s globalization is in direct measure with the process of de-indigenizing communities. The United States built its very existence based on its history of genocide and cultural assimilation of indigenous peoples. The same is true in every case where democracy has been established. The end result of the process of Western expansion has been the normalization of land and resource exploitation with little to no thinking about the future. We now live in a world where there is a massive water crisis, displaced people, poverty, racism, sexism, heterosexism, religious intolerance, war, inequity, and hunger on a massive scale.
We also live in a world where technological wonders, excessive wealth and individualistic freedoms are the hallmark of the experience of privilege for a very small percentage of the world population. Solving these deeply complex problems will require solutions that lead us full circle to the ways in which indigenous communities developed technological, governmental, and social innovations in ways that conserved the people and environment for the benefit of future generations. This is a process of re-indigenization of communities. This process relies heavily on our capacity to build very diverse collaborations that bring together people across cultures, races, genders, sexualities, religions, professional sectors, and academic disciplines.
Building collaborations is a central aspect of the task of building communities. In every day life, people, families, and groups must connect with others across sometimes vast and other times practically imperceptible differences. Indigenist leaders engage others like and unlike themselves in the effort to usher consensus and to address concerns. They engage others as they tell stories in order to share knowledge. They engage others in the every day implementations of the cycles of maintaining life in harmony with the rest of the natural world. They engage others also in the process of creating knowledge through observation and ceremony.
Indigenist leaders do not seek necessarily to create groups of people where there is a type of perpetual alignment of values or beliefs. Rather, they work to bring community together in the effort to address what is at hand and to conserve culture and environment for future generations. They are practical in their efforts to build consensus and although they are present-oriented by responding to the day’s concerns, they do so in a future-oriented demeanor, looking to make sure the right inheritance is left behind for those who will incorporate future generations. They are allowed to serve in this role by communities who understand the need for such connections and for a role that can serve to message to the whole group when it is time to come together and for what purposes.
This core capacity for collaboration has been documented as critical by Latin@ scholars in the field of education studies. Jill Kerper Mora writes about collaboration in her essay “Caught in a Policy Web: The Impact of Education Reform on Latino Education,” Mora poignantly observes:
Latinos must build a political power base and an electoral constituency that understands and is responsive to the particular needs of bilingual, bicultural students and their families. This constituency must be formed from a coalition of politicians, policy makers, educators, parents and community members who will persistently and patiently explain the complexities of the education policy web and its detrimental effects on Latino students. The public is not informed about the advantages of bilingual bicultural skills and perspectives in the expanding global marketplace. Policy makers, educators, parents, and communities cannot accept a single policy or web of policies that disadvantage Latino youth and that fail to fully develop their rich human potential. (41-2)
For Mora, collaboration is a necessary aspect of building a Latin@-centered education reform strategy that has implications that are important to consider for non-Latin@ communities. In the essay “Social Action and the Politics of Collaboration,” Olga A. Vázquez echoes Mora’s focus on collaboration. Vázquez brings attention to “the need for human contact in building long-term, trusting relationships, even when these relationships are conducted across cultures, systems, or geo- graphical locations...” (321) She sees these relationships as requiring “tending and nurturing.” (Ibid.) Vázquez proposes the creation of “integrative collaboration,” characterized by relying “heavily on dialogue and ‘a long process of committed activity’.” (324) She calls these “principled partnerships” and they are premised on trust and respect. She explains as follows:
Trust and respect are essential components for building productive long term relationships: trust that the known and the unknown can be shared and shaped to the participants’ mutual benefit; and respect for the knowledge and experience that all members bring to the negotiation table, regardless of how and where it was acquired. Principled partnerships also require flexibility, a willingness to take risks and an openness to self- reflective change. (325)
As many Latin@ communities still operate with an honor system, the need to build trust and respect is constant. Therefore, a call for relationships based on trust and respect in the careful tending of collaborative relationships both resonates with and invites the full engagement of Latin@ communities in the process of building such “principled partnerships.” On the other hand, this very same demand poses what can seem like intractable challenges for institutions and institutional authority figures who are most familiar with positional authority and power based on what one knows and does, not necessarily on character, Latin@ and non-Latin@. This presents a major dissonance between current ideas of collaboration (what I call collaboration for convenience) that seek to leverage inter-organizational resources to make change happen.
Trust and respect are critical aspects of building any type of collaboration. In his essay “The Logic of Collaboration in Education and the Human Services,” Hal A. Lawson states that “collaboration requires affective, cognitive, and social trust.” (235) Less has been written about respect in relation to collaborations. However, it follows that the presence of trust is premised on respect. However, in a highly individualistic culture, a discussion on respect often includes building awareness of multiple levels of relationships between not only individuals, but entire communities. Respect should be modeled as an ethic and expectation of professional inter-organizational connections.
Such connections, are far more complex than the types of connections a practitioner might make while networking or scouting potential future partners. Indeed, professional connections, and this is especially so when implementing community-wide change strategies, are imbued with a type of representational aspect. Each person in your partnership is part of a number of other existing circles of connection and therefore, their presence in your partnership has larger implications that just simply the way they show up as individuals. In organizations where power and authority are conferred based on position and role, the interconnected nature of individuals is often entirely missed. However, more awareness needs to be built around the complexity of interpersonal dynamics in collaborative settings. From an Indigenist Leadership standpoint, no meaningful relationships are possible without trust and respect, and by consequence, this is also true for the development of collaborations because without trust and respect, there can be no foundation for shared action.
For example, I once was on the board of a Latin@ political organization. The Executive Director often built her board around her personal connections. I was unaware of that dynamic when I first joined the board and was dismayed to see how she was unable to maintain her friendships, and therefore steady membership of community representatives on her board. She did not understand the difference between personal connections and professional ones and was unaware of the ways in which such lack of clarity in fact hurt the long term Latin@ mobilization efforts around the state. Instead of opening access to community power, she narrowed it. In the end, the board looked a lot like herself: light skinned, Puerto Rican, and upwardly mobile. As it turned out, individuals who had been “cast out” also paralyzed and/or mobilized their networks based on their personal relationships and experiences with the organization.
An ideal scenario locates connection as an initial aspect of the relationship-building process that then gives way to the sharing of time together and the doing of things together in order to build trust and respect. Lawson explains that connection is the beginning point of a series of what he calls “c-words” of collaboration: “Starting with the least demanding and proceeding to the most demanding, the companions for collaboration are connecting, cooperating, consulting, coordinating, co-locating, community building and contracting. These companion c-words animate collaboration.” (227-7) Leading collaborations requires the responsible actions and decisions of leaders and partners. Part of this responsibility is the initialization, nurturing, and ongoing tending of collaborative relationships in order to successfully create trust and respect.
