The Public Professor

Sarah defines community this way: When I think of a community, I think of shared context. People who engage in activities over a period of time that relate to some specific site (on the web or in the world or located in a

Jane relates: Downtown stores are locally owned. Book stores, coffee shops, hubs where folks gather and exchange information. (Starbucks moved into a space downtown last year.  Missoula did not support it and so, at the end of this month, they were forced to close their doors.) The majority of citizens care about keeping the ‘local flavor’ in tact. Why? Because we are family. There is a bike trail system throughout, and a place called “free bikes” if you don’t have one. People who are just moving to Missoula learn very quickly that a bicycle is the preferred form of transportation.  Less dependence on fuel. Less pollution. Less stress. Easy pace. In Missoula people care about quality of life, about creating a place where children learn the

Q: You are an expert on Native American history and culture, particularly the Lakotas of the Northern Plains.  Are there any correlations between the disintegration of Indigenous American communities and community at large? Reinhardt: Many of the Europeans who came to, conquered, and settled the Americas in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries brought with them some very heavy cultural baggage. as in they believed Indian religions to be the work of the Devil Himself.  And on more secular issues, they simply considered anything that Indians did differently to be a sign of savagery and inferiority.  No matter that in certain areas, such as agronomy and astronomy, Native Americans were light years ahead of Europeans.  For example, when Europeans were still arguing about whether the Sun circled the Earth or the Earth circled the Sun, Indians of Central America were intricately charting the movements of heavenly bodies, and they had developed a combination lunar/solar calendar that was more accurate than the Gregorian calendar that Europeans developed and the rest of the world now uses.  For many Europeans, the ethnocentric bias was so strong that it was blinding. As Europeans and their descendants competed with Indians for control of the Western hemisphere, that competition reinforced such biases.  And so in many cases, and always in what was to become the United States, it wasn’t enough to take Indians’ lands and destroy their governments.  Beyond that, cultural genocide had also become a goal by the mid- to late-19th century, and it remained a central part of federal Indian policies until the 1930s. 

Molly writes: