Cross-Cultural Issues in

Alaskan Education Vol. II

DECISION MAKING IN A RURAL ALASKA COMMUNITY

Eric Madsen
Center for Cross-Cultural Studies
University of Alaska, Fairbanks

Introduction

During 1977-78 I lived in “Coastal Village”1 and listened to the numerous opinions of parents, students, teachers, and community members regarding the new high school which was then in its second year of operation. Many of those comments touched on an undefined but evident difference between the local perspective of the school’s operation and the Regional Educational Attendance Areas’ (REAA) perspective.

The recurrence of comments made by the villagers led me to consider the way village residents communicated and moved toward decisions among themselves, and how very different this seemed to be from the communicating and decision-making process which occurred between village residents and representatives of the REAA. This paper discusses that difference and suggests that it is pertinent to the perception of problems on the part of many of the participants in rural Alaskan schooling. Throughout the paper I refer to “communication structures,” by which I mean the attitudes, strategies, and situations perceived to be appropriately associated with the giving and receiving of information. Central to the discussion are the notions of the influence of context upon communication, and also of context as communication (cf. Philips, 1972; Erickson and Schultz, 1981).

In talking about schooling in rural Alaska, school district personnel and community members frequently indicate that certain curricula are offered and certain procedures observed because “these are what the community wants.” Understanding what a community actually wants, however, may be exceedingly difficult under any circumstances, and especially so for persons or agencies from outside a rural village setting. However, questions about “community wishes,” whether they exist, and how they are assessed may be one of the more important issues education agencies could be addressing because so many agency decisions are determined or justified on those bases.

Part of the difficulty in addressing such questions resides in the difference between what I will refer to as “external communications structures,” commonly used by the REAA and other outside agencies, and the local or “indigenous communications structures” encountered in rural Alaskan communities. If the REAA sympathetically addressed itself to understanding and utilizing Coastal Village’s indigenous communication structures, and by this means discovered that the community wanted to become assimilated into western society, it would then have some justification for the exclusive use of its external structures for conducting formal meetings and gathering information for the formulation of district policy and curriculum. To impose such structures without a clear understanding of their implications for all participants, however, is to exert unwarranted influence on the community’s decision-making processes. Obtaining reliable community input means -- above all else -- abandoning insistence on external communications structures and seeking to understand the ways in which the people of a village prefer to communicate their opinions. My contention is that communications structures, by themselves, largely pre-determine the type and quality of information that is communicated.

There are at least two major areas of difficulty: (1) The very methods by which outside agencies most frequently solicit information from rural communities may be the methods least likely to yield valid information; and (2) We need to ask to what extent persons identified by outside agencies as “community spokespersons” actually speak for the community. This question has an institutional corollary in the tenuous status accorded many rural community advisory boards.

Inappropriate Methods

It simply cannot be assumed that speakers of two different languages who share an ability to communicate in one of them necessarily share also the same notions about the structures of communication, that is, the attitudes, strategies, and situations perceived to be appropriately associated with the giving and receiving of information. The dilemma has two prongs.

The dominant society has imposed communication and decision-making structures upon Coastal Village that have been accepted in form but may well remain foreign in effect. Such structures have been imposed by demands that the village, in order to have any legal identity or role in decisionmaking, must establish specified governmental bodies according to specified processes. For example, to be eligible for various grants or to participate in certain programs, boards must be formed and operated under predetermined structures. To be kept apprised of regulatory measures, community representatives must be identified and must make themselves available as spokespersons for meetings. Many villages have been required to form two separate forms of government because the state will not recognize the village government established under federal regulations, and federal agencies will not negotiate with the village governing body recognized by the state. Ironically, perhaps the most demanding external structure is that created by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), for it requires that Alaskan Natives quickly become export in the whole corporate order if they are to retain any degree of control over their future. Thus, to participate in decisions about government, schools, community services, subsistence regulations, ANCSA, and other aspects of life, the village has no option but to comply with numerous external demands regarding communication processes. At the same time, outside agencies often fail to identify and utilize local communication structures that could yield the information the community would like to convey and that the agencies need to have. The foreign nature of the external communication structures which underly educational policy in Coastal Village can best be highlighted by considering for a moment the foremost indigenous structure, that of “visiting.”

Coastal Village people do not knock on one another’s doors as they enter, nor are there elaborate greeting or leave-taking ceremonies. Rather, people’s lives flow among one another’s in an unfragmented continuum. People share tools, food, family responsibilities and subsistence tasks. More importantly, people share time. When the weather is bad, there is little to do, and if someone is tired of staying at home, she or he may choose to visit a friend or relative. This does not imply that there is anything new to discuss since these people last met, but only that visiting is an agreeable and sociable way to pass time.

Because of this orientation toward time and appropriate ways of spending it, one person may visit another with a specific concern, drink tea for several hours, and leave again without ever having mentioned the concern, simply because the discussion “never got around to it.” Visiting presents a natural and undemanding opportunity to discuss, plan, and consider. Some of the people in Coastal Village say that this is exactly the process by which community decisions have long been made. I will refer to this as the “concensus mode” of operation. In contrast, Coastal Villagers often ask non-Natives who enter their homes, “What’s on your mind?” Non-Natives, they assume, usually visit with a purpose. The assumption is not unwarranted.

“Visiting” can, however, also be an important component in formal decision-making processes. One man, an articulate City Council member concerned about his community, mentioned that another older member for whom he has great respect often says little during council meetings. However, this same older member will frequently stop by the younger man’s home to discuss the very issues the council dealt with the evening before. Moreover, the younger man explained that, should something have to be accomplished, it was highly unlikely that he would raise the issue in a council meeting either. This is not a question of status. The man was elected to the City Council from the community at large and was highly regarded by community members. He was, in fact, asked to become mayor shortly after his election, and he was relied upon to carry out many assignments on behalf of the council. The question instead was one of procedure. He believed that “visiting around” would simultaneously spread an idea and modify his original conception of it. This is the concensus method, by which Coastal Village has long governed itself, adapted to the realities of a City Council form of government.

The Concensus Method

In the manner described above, a community such as Coastal Village slowly and carefully develops widely based decisions. Why consider in haste, within the artificially imposed temporal confines of a meeting, only to arrive at a static and maybe inappropriate conclusion? In Coastal Village, the pace of life, the attitudes toward time, and the environment itself all lend themselves to a dynamic process through which an original idea evolves and improves. And precisely as it evolves and improves, and as more community members begin to talk about it and espouse it, just so does it become concensus or community norm.

This is not to say that the idea of meeting to discuss an issue and arrive at a decision immediately has not been in some measure adopted in Coastal Village: it has. But adoption is not necessarily acceptance, and the widespread dissatisfaction with this structure ought to be reason to view with caution the limited results which issue from it.

I have suggested that important problems exist at two levels: first, certain communications structures themselves may be inimical to local decision-deriving processes; second, even when Coastal Village residents utilize formalized structures imposed from outside, there are important conceptual differences as to how events should proceed intrastructurally. This difference can be exemplified by describing a meeting that was conducted entirely in the local language and that blended what I have referred to as the local and the external communications structures in regard to decisionmaking.

Late one spring afternoon, the regional radio station relayed a message to Coastal Village: “The public meeting will be held at 7:00 in the schoolhouse.” In spite of the radio medium utilized, note the unspecified purpose of the meeting, the lack of identification of which schoolhouse (there were two in the village) and the short time lead. Local processes were already at work since most Coastal Village residents already knew what was going to be discussed and where, or if they didn’t, could easily find out from someone who did.

At the beginning of the meeting that evening, the mayor read in English a letter that had been received by the City Council from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) in regard to the number of sea mammals remaining in the Coastal Village quota. From that point on, no English was spoken. Of more importance, none of the indicators that dominant society members customarily expect, i.e., physical location, body positioning, speech deference, turn-taking, and tone of voice, distinguished between chairpersons, leaders, participants, or spectators (myself excluded). No one person could have been described as directing or dominating the meeting. Comments were offered from around the room: No one called on speakers, yet no one interrupted a preceding speaker. There was no time limit. The discussion, I learned later, centered around the best way of dividing up the remaining number of animals allowed to be harvested.

One person made a suggestion and another person wrote it on the chalkboard. There was some discussion. A third person approached the board and changed the spelling. At this point, an entirely different way of dividing the number was offered by two supporters, both of whom spoke about the suggestion. A third suggestion was offered and, while several people were locating and distributing papers and pencils, the discussion continued. Several people wrote down their choices, and still the discussion continued. In fact, the discussion proceeded for approximately forty minutes after it appeared that everyone present had written down his choice. Several men put on their coats, as if to leave, but then took them off and reentered the discussion. Apparently, no one called for closure. Finally, as the discussion began to subside, several men collected the papers which were then read aloud and tabulated on the board for all to see. Still the discussion continued. One man, who had started to leave earlier and returned, again put on his coat. This seemed to serve as a catalyst through which the meeting, as a formal entity, began to disband, although the discussion in no way abated as everyone left the building. The important point is that the purpose of the meeting appeared to have been discussion. Decision was possible, but not necessary.

Disillusionment with Meetings

A friend who surprised me by not showing up for another meeting on subsistence regulations, a topic on which he had strong views, said, “I almost never go to public meetings. They’re just a bunch of nonsense anyway.” Musing about the same subject, an older man commented, “I don’ t know why the apathy. When I was a boy, when the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) Council was just being formed, public meetings were packed and spilling out the doors. What happened? I don’t know.”

Outside agencies relying on this particular mechanism might also be asking, “What happened? Why the disillusionment with a form that at one time had begun to be accepted?” It is possible that the novelty of the public meeting accounted for some of its early popularity. Since then, however, several things seem to have occurred.

First, Coastal villagers have attended many meetings in which they were promised many things that did not eventuate. There are several possible explanations: (1) Some of these appear to have been broken promises. I do not suggest that the REAA or the educational agencies of State or Federal governments have intentionally misled people. Nevertheless, numerous agencies have used the public meeting as a communication structure to make promises that are locally perceived to have been broken. (2) Another possibility is that many of the meetings which led to the current strain of disillusionment were held to guage the response to proposed programs. That these were only proposals may not have been completely clear. (3) A third possibility is that because many programs have been created elsewhere, no amount of initial enthusiasm on the part of those promoting them has been able to overcome the fact that they were inappropriate or ill-suited to local conditions -- in short, doomed to failure from the outset.

In addition to the perception of unfulfilled promises, a second possible source of disenchantment is more direct. Too frequently, agencies have utilized the public meeting format for the expressed purpose of “soliciting input” when, in fact, it was actually being utilized as a soft-blow announcement of an accomplished fact. This is particularly true with regard to the interaction between Coastal Village residents and the regulatory agencies that are increasingly exerting control over their lives. Although such regulation is commonplace in the dominant culture, it emphatically is not in Coastal Village, where many of the current parent generation spent their youth and young adult years living in small camps away from the present village. It is a tremendous departure from this unrestricted lifestyle to one of regulated subsistence resources and the consequent implications for a cash economy, employment, and so forth.

Third, there are related instances in which public meetings have not been called for the stated purposes. One brief example is the program representative who calls a meeting, not because information needs to be gathered or disseminated, but rather because the structures of the program demand that such a meeting be held. To believe that people would repeatedly participate in such meetings without understanding their real import is absurd.

Other Stylistic Differences

Other characteristics of the way Coastal Village people gather for group events are sufficiently different from external communications structures that the latter are neither adaptable nor effective. For example, informal home visits, community gatherings, and formal meetings are all characterized by a lack of commitment to be present. Friends rarely promise or pre-plan “stopping by,” and local boards and committees frequently find it necessary to schedule the same meeting several times before a quorum is attained.

I learned of an interesting mechanism for avoiding frustration with this tendency when a Village Corporation President happened to mention that “there might be a Corporation meeting tonight.” I assumed that his use of the conditional reflected his uncertainty as to how many members would show up. That evening, however, following the conclusion of a T.V. show he had been watching, he suddenly got up and said that he was off to see if he could “round up” enough members for the meeting. It had been scheduled, it turned out, only in his mind.

Another characteristic of many village gatherings is that individuals determine their own degree of participation. This was obvious in the subsistence resource quota meeting described earlier, and is equally pronounced in larger village gatherings such as Eskimo dances. During one mid-winter evening of dancing, there were long periods when most of the dancers were younger people; equally long periods when most were older; frequent periods when young and old, male and female danced simultaneously; and occasional periods when the drummers drummed and sang and no one danced. In such settings, “spectator” and “performer” become an artificial distinction because all who are present play constantly shifting roles which contribute to the group entertainment.

None of this implies a lack of community leaders. Much as the opinions of the group emerges from discussion, so do leaders emerge as they express opinions or demonstrate proficiency. This is another aspect of the concensus mode of governance, and is important to note because it runs counter to the notion of formally electing leaders in the manner that outside agencies frequently demand. Prior to demonstrating ability, who is to know which individual is worthy of a vote? Once that ability is recognized, why vote when the individual is already being sought for guidance?

Furthermore, such leaders characteristically disavow expert status. In conversation, they are apt to tell stories of serious mistakes they once made, or perhaps were saved from making by a “truly wise” person. A sharp and interesting contrast is presented between this attitude and the dominant society’s electoral system of leadership.

This contrast does not suggest that the election system is useless in the village context. However, it does point out that it is a foreign structure imposed from outside that may not serve Coastal Village as well as the indigenous system it is replacing.

Speak Up

Several people in the village commented that those with worthwhile ideas are sometimes reluctant to voice them. There are several reasons why this might be.

In the earlier example of the Coastal Village friend who mentioned that Council members sometimes choose not to speak during formal meetings, part of the reason may be that the traditional concensus mode of governance tends to operate against the voicing of a new Idea until it has gained some informal acceptance in the community. In the political arena, those who are highly regarded in the community are looked to because they frequently have valid ideas. However, these individuals do not consider their ideas to be automatically valid. On the contrary, discovering whether or not an idea has value is accomplished by discussing it with others in the community. If meritorious, the idea will be discussed by many, will gain popular support, and may become an accepted practice or attitude.

Another reason that might explain some of the reluctance to voice opinions is that even among leaders there is an expressed tack of confidence in English language mastery. During visits with Coastal Village people, it often surprised me to hear comments such as, “I’m sorry my English isn’t better so I could express these ideas more clearly.” From my perspective, the ideas were being expressed perfectly well.

A further contribution to such reluctance might be some agency’s inclination to communicate the attitude that, “This is an area for professionals. We’ll handle the decisions and let you know the conclusions.” Perhaps Coastal Villagers are simply reflecting this attitude, whether in the belief that it is actually true, or that “speaking up” wouldn’t really matter anyway. Surely, one of the critical factors affecting a willingness to express personal opinions must be the belief that the appropriate people are actually listening.

To What Extent Do Spokespersons Speak for the Community?

In addition to communication structures as an issue in obtaining reliable information about what a community wants, we must also ask to what extent persons identified by outside agencies as “community spokespersons” actually speak for the community.

Remembering that in Coastal Village many individuals prefer not to voice their opinions before exploring them in private discussions with others, the even greater reluctance to speak for others should not be surprising. Whereas visiting privately and “wondering out loud” about some question will sometimes elicit opinions from individuals, the question, “Do many others think the same way?” is not likely to receive a direct response. It may be implied that there are others who share the opinion, but even so the statement is apt to take the form, “Maybe somebody else could tell you about that,” or, “I don’t know. You could ask around.” This seems to reveal an unwillingness to speculate, a conviction that the best way to find out what other people think is to visit with other people.

In trying to learn about something specific, as in general discussion, there is also the matter of question format. For example, when a group of high school students visited my home one day and commented about a song on the radio, I asked, “Who is the best music group nowadays?” No one answered. Later, I mused aloud and to no one in particular, “I wonder which group you like best?” This elicited a flood of responses. As in the case of asking about what others think, the first question asked for speculation. Moreover, it asked for conclusive information no one individual possesses. To this group, the second “question” apparently tapped specific information about which they felt comfortable speaking.

One locally appropriate way to inquire about an individual’s opinion, and an essential way to inquire about more general information, is to allow individuals to return specific or non-specific responses. This frees people to speculate about conclusive information they may not feel they possess, but about which they may have an interest or opinion. Similarly, the utterance, “Someone told me the mail plane is coming,” is a cue that the information is hearsay and unreliable. It may be as much question as statement: “Someone told me the mail plane is coming,” and implicitly, “did you hear anything about that?” In contrast, “Peter told me the mail plane is coming,” implies that you should grab your bags if you are expecting to travel: use of the name implies that the speaker believes the information is reliable.

The discussion above indicates that when a question seems clear but does not resolve a clear answer, one should not conclude that the person or group of whom it was asked does not know or “refuses” to respond. It may simply signify the need to be a little less insistent on our own communication structures and a little more willing to learn those familiar to the person or group we are seeking to communicate with.

There are other concerns regarding persons who have come to be identified by outside agencies as “community spokespersons.” Early in the winter, an Alaska Department of Fish and Game representative came to Coastal Village and called a meeting to “both gather and convey information.” In numerous ways he indicated that the meeting would be both structurally and procedurally “external” rather than local. The first half of the meeting, conducted in English, was essentially a dialogue between the representative and one Coastal Villager, “Alex.” To all appearances, Alex spoke for the approximately forty men present. In fact, Alex did hold several elected and appointed offices and was often consulted by outside people who visited Coastal Village. However, when the representative later withdrew briefly and the men caucused in their own language, Alex did not participate. Only then did I remember that during the local meeting mentioned earlier, conducted entirely in the local language and utilizing the local structure, Alex had spoken very little about an issue of great personal concern to him.

Before discussing this contrast, it may be useful to recall a point made elsewhere by Bill Vaudrin:

Village people have indicated their disdain for Anglo forms and structures in any number of ways, not the least of which is reflected in the Yupik word for village council member, angaayuqaruaq (pretend boss). . . . in many situations they are . . . .designated more than anything else because of their willingness to play the role of ‘pretend boss’ -- to go through the motions of setting up meetings, answering correspondence, filling out papers, and entertaining visiting agency officials (1974: p. 79)

Having coffee with another man after the meeting with the Fish and Game representative, I asked if he recognized the concept mentioned by Vaudrin. He did, although he mentioned (as Vaudrin does in an unquoted sentence) that real village leaders and elected officials may now be one and the same more often than in the past.

Certainly a part of the reason Alex was frequently called upon to speak for others in the community was his willingness to do so. When appropriate, he volunteered his name into nominations for elective office and volunteered to speak in meetings such as the one described above. This, in turn, led others to call upon Alex when a “spokesperson” was required. Indeed, Alex may have had some degree of expertise in expressing the needs and aspirations of the majority of Coastal Villagers. But it also may be the case that his expertise resided largely, or even wholly, in having confidence in his own ability to speak to non-Native agency people. We should recognize that in some cases, this sequence might lead to a paradox in which the individual most acculturated is found speaking for those fellow community members who are least like her or him. The next step in this progression is the former village resident who has moved to the city to assume a full-time agency position but who is still regarded by agency colleagues as the village (perhaps even the rural) spokesperson.

This is not to suggest that information-seekers should stop listening to individuals like Alex who articulate the wishes of their communities. The discussion is intended to illustrate that there is a dilemma involved.

Such apparently small distinctions are important. For example, having lived in Coastal Village only a short while, I am nevertheless convinced that I would be able to conduct an “educational needs assessment” and deliver to an administrator almost any set of pre-selected responses desired by him or her. The project would be conducted more or less “honestly”: questions would not be “loaded,” nor answers misrepresented. Rather, the desired outcome would be programmed in by the very manner in which the information would be sought. The quality and type of responses would be reasonably predictable according to whether they were elicited in home visits, with the recognized possibility of not getting to the issue in one visit, or in an announced public meeting.

Furthermore, within each of these approaches, the information would again vary predictably according to the listening/questioning strategies utilized. Additionally, the location, be it the school, the store entry-way, the shore ice, or the homes of those rarely seen outside would influence the information likely to be received.

The influence of context is magnified in such situations and can easily disrupt communication. Misinformation resulting from the use of inappropriate communication structures can happen to unwitting outsiders who simply use the communication tools familiar to them without realizing what they are building in or leaving out of their information-gathering strategies. This misinformation can happen to program people simply by virtue of the locations where they tend to spend much of their brief village visits. They are likely to communicate with individuals already involved or interested in their program area who are thus attuned to that particular way of thinking. This can happen to well-intentioned educators who may be told, “You know better, because I myself didn’t go to school,” an authority attribute school people sometimes come to believe of themselves. Unfortunately, it is possible for the factors that can lead to unwitting misinformation also to be used consciously by administrators who need to be able to say they asked, while simultaneously controlling what they hear when they ask, “What does this community want?”

Boards: Institutionalized Spokespersons?

In recent years advisory boards have sometimes become the institutionalized form of community representation. There is, however, reason to be cautious in concluding that positions taken by advisory boards truly reflect the “will of the community.” Consider an example from notes during one Community School Committee (CSC) meeting in Coastal Village:

Administrator:
We need to have a rule about no damage in the building.

Member:
Rule? There doesn’t need to be a rule. This is a building owned by the state and much appreciated by the village. It goes without saying there should be no damage.

Administrator:
Good! I’ll write that down. “There shall be no damaging of school property.” Now, we need a rule about . . . .

This administrator also assumed the responsibility for taking the notes which were submitted to the District as Minutes of the Meetings.

In Coastal Village, the CSC was perceived by non-members as a support structure for the administrator who had selected the slate of nominees from which the village elected three. The day after one of the few Board meetings at which non-members were present, one community leader who had as much experience with various governing structures as anyone else in the village remarked, “I guess I really didn’t belong there.”

More generally, there are a variety of reasons why advisory board members express frustration. First, such boards are essentially external structures. They are elected bodies, which I have shown may run counter to indigenous practices. The board structure often requires that members express themselves in a second language. Further, this may also set a tone which inhibits, beyond language considerations, full expression of thoughts and concerns. In advisory board meetings, members are asked to speak for the entire community, even though that may not be considered appropriate by community members. Additionally, board members are often asked to express opinions and formulate new positions when the raw material for these opinions is neither a part of their prior experience nor available via present channels. Finally, members of advisory boards are well aware that their advice may or may not affect policy and practice. Even their right to exist is tenuous, as the REAA Community School Committees discovered when their legal authority was removed by the legislature less than three years into the state’s “experiment in local control.”

The examples above are not necessarily unique to rural Alaska. But they do point to an important question: “When state or regional agencies receive minutes from local advisory boards, to what extent can they be confident that those minutes reflect what the community wants?” It is interesting that many of us who would certainly not accept the notion of “community will,” nor of one person or board speaking for an entire community in the dominant society, do accept unquestioningly both conditions when the communities are distant and unfamiliar. Perhaps boards and spokespersons can be truly representative. However, we cannot rely on that being the case without careful consideration.

Conclusion

The forgoing is not intended to suggest that the public meeting structure should be abandoned in villages, that those identified as community spokespersons should be ignored, or that to be effective, REAA administrators must visit with every parent in every village. Nor am I suggesting that the examples above are necessarily descriptive of communication structures in other villages. It is exactly the point that while communication structures vary widely in Alaskan villages, many agencies delivering programs to those villages rely almost exclusively on one dominant society communication structure that may not be comfortable or effective for their clients.

I am suggesting that there exist important communications concerns which may be compromising the quality of schooling available to Native village students today. Coastal Village, like other rural Alaskan communities, has been subject to rapid and radical change. The fact that many of us who come into the village from outside can function on the basis of communication structures that are familiar to us is certainly a credit to village residents’ ability to adapt to this change. But the same fact also tends to obscure -- and slow our learning about -- the possibility that many other communication patterns are more familiar and quite probably more effective for village students and their parents. I believe that those of us who are involved in rural education but are not village residents would do well to consider some of these alternative communication structures.

ENDNOTE

1. My role in the community was that of a University graduate research assistant, tutoring local undergraduate students and assisting in a statewide study of the program needs of new village high schools. The paper results not from an intentional research design, but from the willingness of a large number of people in Coastal Village who shared their ideas.

The village, the individuals mentioned, and the quotations ascribed to them in this paper are authentic. I have used the fictitious name, “Coastal Village,” however, to protect others from the effects of errors of interpretation and misunderstandings that are mine alone.

REFERENCES

Erickson, Fred, and J. Shultz. “When is a Context? Some Issues and methods in the analysis of social competence,” in J. Green and C. Wallat, eds. Ethnography and Language in Educational Settings. Norward, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1981.

Philips, Susan. “Participant Structures and Communicative Competence: Warm Springs Children in Community and Classroom,” in Courtney Cazden, V. John and D. Hymes, eds. Functions of Language in the Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press, 1972.

Vaudrin, Bill. “Native/non-Native Communication: Creating a Two-Way Flow,” in James Orvik and Ray Barnhardt, eds. Cultural Influences in Alaskan Native Education. Fairbanks: University of Alaska, Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, 1974.