Exclusion Series: Can Social Exclusion Benefit a Group? The Native Lands question

By Noah Truesdale* and Nils Junge

We are constantly reminded of the boundaries which divide us – men from women, young from old, white from black. The growing response to the death of George Floyd, the increased partisan divide in our communities, and even the coronavirus all seem to highlight our differences, even as a movement to overcome them gathers pace. As social justice enters the mainstream, many are fighting to for the scales of society to balance more evenly. Inclusion is the word on the street.

However, there are instances in which exclusion is the moral option. Take the recent ruling by the United States Supreme Court in the case of McGirt v. Oklahoma, which has virtually reshaped the map of Oklahoma overnight.

Predicating a decision in a criminal justice case on the legitimacy of 19th-Century treaties between Congress and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the Supreme Court ruled that the majority of land in the eastern part of Oklahoma must be restored as definitionally protected Native lands. The surprising 5-4 decision, penned by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, affirmed that over three million acres of land in Eastern Oklahoma be excluded from the state government’s jurisdiction and re-designated as a Native reservation. The opinion, which began with a blistering indictment of the United States legacy of mistreatment and violence against Native populations during the Trail of Tears  — when 60,000 Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw Native Americans were forced to leave their homelands by President Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy — is being widely celebrated by groups advocating for increased Native autonomy and power.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in McGirt is thus seen as a step in correcting a long history of forced assimilation, violence, and manipulation. The case addressed the question of the state’s power over autonomous groups.  However, more broadly, it raises interesting questions about when the exclusion of others — generally a negative stance from the liberal perspective — is morally justified.

What’s Included in Inclusion?

On the surface, inclusion seems universally preferable to exclusion. Who likes to be excluded? Studies have shown that being excluded harms one’s mental and physical health, as well as financial wellbeing. The concept of inclusion, or inclusiveness, conjures images of a society populated by diverse members, all respectfully engaging with, and supporting one another. Exclusion, on the other hand — as the recent George Floyd protests have reminded us — is associated with discrimination, social stigmatization, income disparity, poor health and education outcomes.

From a social justice perspective, inclusion should be the norm. Society is better when all its members are free and able to voice opinions, participate in democracy, and engage fully in society. Naturally, even in societies that grow more tolerant and inclusive, there will always be subgroups who enjoy greater privileges and power than others. That power may translate into normalizing the values, preferences, and cultural practices of the privileged at the expense of the marginalized. Because that normalization can have lasting and dramatic consequences on all others, there are circumstances in which ensuring marginalized groups have the ability to self-determine the limits of their inclusion and exclusion from broader society is to the benefit of all.

When talking about inclusion and exclusion in the social sphere it is important to note that the terms are context specific. For example, both geographic and temporal conditions have defined the who, how, when, and why people are in or out. The term social inclusion, coined by René Lenoir in 1974, originally referred to those on the margins of society — the physically and mentally disabled, the socially maladjusted, and the poor.

As sociology became a larger factor in policy analysis, other institutions found the term more useful than general anti-poverty language: In the 1990’s, social insurance was seen as a means of achieving social inclusion in the EU. Across the Atlantic Ocean, US policymakers used the term to frame discussions about wealth disparity. For programs and policymakers today, social inclusion is used to discuss the manner and opportunity by which marginalized and disadvantaged groups are able to meaningfully interact and take part in society. As students of inclusion and exclusion expand the concepts beyond just economic conditions, measures of social inclusion have come to incorporate access to services (utilities, health, education) and more abstract considerations like cultural, physical, and political participation. 

There are programs and policies today that are working towards a more inclusive society. The UN has dedicated task forces committed to achieving gender parity, international protections for ethnic minorities and refugees, increased political participation of disenfranchised groups, and many other boundaries of exclusion. Outside of formal institutions, many donor groups and activist organizations bring attention to disparities between privileged and excluded populations and seek to rectify them.

However, without requisite ethnographic considerations, programs and policies can be unintentionally pernicious. Even more troubling, in some instances programs which claim to foster social inclusion may actually mask sinister and insidious agendas.

A Question of Jurisdiction

On the surface, McGirt v. Oklahoma was a question of jurisdictional politics. Jimcy McGirt, a member of the Seminole Nation, was arrested, tried, and found guilty on several charges of sexual assault by the Oklahoma government. Citing the specific language of the Major Crimes Act, which dealt with jurisdiction over crimes committed on reservations, McGirt argued post-conviction that both his Native status, as well as the location of crimes, should have prevented the Oklahoma state government from trying his case. His guilt wasn’t a question for the Supreme Court to decide, but rather which criminal system was responsible for finding him guilty in the first place — Oklahoma’s or the federal government’s. Ultimately, for the Supreme Court to rule on which institution held jurisdictional power, the court needed to resolve a long-standing question of the legitimacy of Muscogee (Creek) Nation treaties with Congress.

As noted by both Gorsuch in his majority opinion and by lawyers for the state of Oklahoma, there has been a long history of attempts by the federal government to diminish both the size and nature of the Muscogee reservation. In fact, lawyers for Oklahoma went as far as to argue that since the state and federal government have rarely, if ever, acknowledged or honored the treaties and negotiations with the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, those agreements shouldn’t be enforced. The language of that argument sets the tone for a conversation about forced inclusion and benevolent exclusion — how useful or beneficial is inclusion when it comes about because of betrayal by dominant in-groups?

Treaties in America

While the original 1830 treaty between Congress and the Muscogee Nation defined the size of the reserved land and guaranteed the tribe ownership in perpetuity, by 1866 Congress had already drafted an updated treaty which forcibly purchased Muscogee protected land for cents on the dollar. In the 1880’s, a time period known as the “allotment era,”  the Muscogee, like other tribes, suffered from the Dawes Act and other legislation which sought to weaken tribal sovereignty and foster a “class of assimilated, landowning agrarian Native Americans”  by requiring reservation land to be divided among members instead of being owned by the community at large. As requirements for ownership relaxed, much of the parceled land on Muscogee land found its way into non-native hands and what land remained for tribal groups was linked to requirements for assimilation. Land ownership was often contingent on speaking English and refusing to engage in traditional practices.  

The Muscogee are not alone in suffering broken treaties by the federal government. Most famous among broken promises, the Treaty of Fort Laramie cut reservation boundaries for Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota tribes when gold was discovered within tribal lands. (A consequence of this treaty, nearly a hundred years later, was the designation of Alcatraz Island as a National Park to prevent Native groups in California from capitalizing on the language of the treaty regarding deserted federal lands). There are numerous similar examples — as Matthew Fletcher, director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University puts it, “the rule of thumb is every treaty’s been broken.”  While the violation of treaties has been catastrophic for Native groups, the implementation and design of the treaty system in the first place was equally disastrous.

Inclusion or Assimilation?

As treaties, boundaries, the establishment of reservations and politicking mitigated actual bloodshed between the United States Army and tribal groups, Native populations found themselves facing a new threat from a modernizing and spreading Euro-American society — “death by red tape.” This had enormous repercussions:  nomadic groups, newly bound to specific land, lost a sense of heritage and mobility, agricultural groups had to change both the manner and type of food grown, traditional medicinal practices had to be updated to account for changes in flora availability, and conflict between newly relocated tribes and existing ones destabilized conditions in the West which led to bloodshed and conflict. As settlers moved past the Mississippi, Native Americans faced further challenges as Euro-American society switched between extreme manners of inclusion and exclusion.

The violation of established borders and boundaries, either by new settler populations or abrogation by Congress in the interest of those settlers, cut out agriculturally and economically beneficial land from Native groups, creating a forced dependence on American institutions and societies for resources, while further eroding already threatened cultural practices.

The growing Euro-American settler group supplanted a diverse set of values regarding gender, property, discipline, etc., with the values that they saw as successful, i.e. their own —  private property, self-directed occupations, divisions between women and men. Even those settlers acting in good faith “generally believed the only acceptable future was full assimilation into Anglo-American society as sedentary agriculturalists and Christians.”  For these settlers, measures of prosperity and success were predicated on practices and traditions often in conflict with existing Native cultures, and attempts at assimilation and forced inclusion inherently meant turmoil and tension.

At the federal level, assimilation was attempted through legislation. For Native Americans living in Euro-American cities, the Indian Offenses Act punished manifestations of tribal culture, like clothing and hairstyles, the open practice of religion, and other traditional customs.

While Native populations saw their culture and practices challenged through compromising and forced interaction with Euro-American societies, many among the newer generations were denied the opportunity to experience that culture in the first place. Native children were taken, in some cases voluntarily, but often through coercion or kidnapping, to brutal assimilating schools with curricula built around Euro-American values and practices. The intent of these schools was to, in effect, “Kill the Indian and save the Man”. Children had their hair cut, were taught the norms and customs of Euro-American society, were denied access to families for years, and many died from disease, abuse, and neglect. Upon returning home, an entire generation of Native Americans found themselves socially displaced. The Euro-American society which had forcibly assimilated these children did not truly accept them as equals, and assimilated children often found little refuge and comfort in returning to the communities from which they were pulled.

Indigenous sovereignty was destroyed intentionally and intergenerationally in the interest of a homogenized society. In fact, many of the difficulties facing tribal communities today can be directly attributed to the forced social inclusion programs of the 19th and 20th century.  

Benevolent Exclusion?

In the face of that history of neglect and reneging on treaty terms (or in many cases Congress never ratifying treaties that were agreed), the Court, in deciding McGirt v. Oklahoma did something that many find remarkable — it compelled the United States government to honor its promises and enforce agreements made to tribal groups in the 19th-century. In effect, the decision instantly excluded the Muscogee (Creek) Nation from the influence of Oklahoma authority and restored some sovereign power. The decision did not confer absolute autonomy to the Muscogee Nation, as tribal spokesmen are reassuring citizens of eastern Oklahoma and critics of the decision, but it was a promising step in correcting a tragic, dehumanizing, and often deadly legacy of the United States flip-flopping on the inclusion or exclusion of Native Americans. 

The history of Native American interaction with the United States government is an example of how social exclusion can be benevolent. That is, a threatened, minority group can draw a boundary around itself to keep a threatening majority group out. The creeping and pervasive influence of Euro-American values, lifestyles, and culture both by intentionally malicious actors and passive forces has been devastating for tribes (even today, the increased urban mobilization of Native populations and consumption of Euro-American media is threatening cultural practices and language stability). But when excluded groups get to decide the terms of their inclusion and the limits of outside influences, there can be positive outcomes.

*Noah Truesdale, currently studying for a Master’s degree in political science at NYU, is a research intern with Nils Junge Consulting

Nils Junge July 26, 2020

What Makes a Good Colleague?

This blog post proposes — based on my experience in international development — the key qualities of a good colleague or team member.

People come in packages made up a vast set of qualities, attributes, skills, quirks, and what have you. The seven I present here for your consideration just seem like the essential ones to me. Quite possibly, a few will apply outside the international development field as well.

Twenty years looking back

It’s now been 20 years since I began working in this field. (Back then, when looking ahead, 20 years seemed like an almost endless expanse of time; looking back, the period seems oddly brief. Anyway…) In May 2000 I arrived in Albania for an internship that turned into my first consultant job. I hit the ground running, unleashed after an unsatisfying career stretch alternating, sometimes daily, between a dead-end finance job and pursuit of a pie-in-the-sky acting career in New York City. Enrolling in a Master’s degree program in international relations was, finally, the pivot that launched what would become a far more rewarding career.

Two decades, several dozen countries, and thousands of professional relationships later, I can say that I fully subscribe to the following received wisdom: it’s the people who make or break programs and projects.

Fair enough, you say, but what kind of people? What sort of qualities do well-rounded professionals, the kind of people you want to work with and for, embody? And…what sort of qualities will make other people want to work with me?

Seven key attributes

1)      Professionalism. I use this as a catch-all term to encompass the range of behaviors considered “normal” in the work sphere, from reliability and trustworthiness to responsiveness and collegiality. There are many unwritten codes of conduct but it isn’t necessarily difficult to act in a professional way. Observing more seasoned colleagues is not a bad place to start. Nonetheless, I’m still surprised how some people fail to follow up with a “thank you” after an interview, or fail to respond to an email request. If you’re too busy, a simple one-line response along the lines of “I wish I could help, but I’m tied up with other work at the moment,” would not seem a lot to ask. Beyond the work itself, acting in a professional manner has implications simply for maintaining good relationships.

2)      Management ability. This ability is useful for everyone, even those not in charge of teams or departments. I refer to management in the broadest sense — using the available resources, or finding additional ones, to achieve a goal. You may not be in charge of other people if you are, say, a junior staffer or work independently, outside an organization. However, even then, if you can’t manage tasks, or your time and work relationships, you are inviting unnecessary agony into your life. Plan and prioritize what needs doing, in whatever way that makes sense to you. Plenty of people still keep handwritten daily and weekly “to do” lists. I get much satisfaction out of crossing off tasks as they get done. Managing relationships may be more of an art than a science, but it is a skill no less important for all that.

3)      Technical skills. These are the specialized skills for which we are usually hired: e.g. setting up a health clinic, running data analysis software, analyzing electricity tariff structures, conducting cost-benefit analysis, and so on. Such skills are developed through a combination of education, book learning and experience. With some adjustments, they can be transferable. Knowing how a state-owned water utility operates helps in understanding how a state-owned electric utility works.  Early in my career, I conducted a fair amount of socio-economic analyses of World Bank-financed projects. That stood me in good stead when I later expanded to USAID project evaluations.

4)      Critical thinking. We can also call this common sense. I include here abilities such as seeing the big picture, connecting the dots, asking the right questions, applying logic to a problem, seeing things in a new or useful way. Data analysis software is hugely important and has greatly facilitated our ability to analyze vast amounts of information. However, even in the context of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the performance of the human mind remains formidable. It has been estimated that our brains can process anywhere from 10 to 100 terabytes of information. While supercomputers now have faster processing speeds and storage capacity, the human brain is vastly more efficient. And humans can think and imagine, while computers can still only retrieve information and run algorithms. We probably still have a few decades before we’re overtaken by machines. Use the time to your advantage. 

5)      Writing. Not very distant from — and rather dependent on — critical thinking, is writing ability. Your colleagues and managers will be very grateful for your clear, succinct, and grammatically correct prose. This applies both at a structural level and at the level of sentences and even words. The gold standard in the English-speaking world, at least, is clarity: you should be able to explain things in a way that your grandmother could understand. I once asked a World Bank manager what, for him, was the most important quality he looked for in a consultant. Without hesitation, he replied “good writing skills.” Once you’ve finished the job, the documents you produced may often be the only tangible thing attributable to your efforts. If they are made publicly available, they will last and may influence the work of others.

6)      Experience. Essentially, this is the ability to apply the past to the present, and to place the current situation, its problems and opportunities, within a broader context. By definition, experience takes time to build. However, that doesn’t mean every person with 20 years under their belt has the same amount of sagesse.  Not all experience has the same value. The more work you do in a given time period, the more experience you will collect. That’s basic math. The more attentive you are, the more you will learn as you’re doing it. If you mindlessly play a piece 100 times on the piano, you probably won’t memorize it. If you practice with intent, however, you will learn it by heart even while playing it less. Diversity of experience, across countries, clients and sectors is key. As the author Stephen Covey pointed out, “Some people say they have twenty years, when in reality, they only have one year’s experience, repeated twenty times.”

7)      Energy and enthusiasm. None of the above counts for much if your work makes you tired, cynical or lazy. This the ace that young people have up their sleeve, to compensate for their lack of experience. The term “passion” is often used in this context, but I admit being lukewarm on the concept. In my experience, the people who bring too much passion to their work tend to be less than emotionally stable. You can’t sustain passion forever, and so it’s not something that can be counted on. Or, the passionate types are also ruthlessly ambitious, elbowing their way up through the hierarchy. Generally, colleagues or counterparts that run on passion are hard to be around. (Save your passion for the bedroom or the ballpark.) However, energy and enthusiasm channeled toward a project are very welcome traits in colleagues. They can be infectious, and even enhance the quality of everyone else’s work. They also go a long way toward compensating for weaknesses in other areas. The trick is staying motivated. Having a clear, overarching goal – which could be as simple as “I want to produce the best report on this topic that’s ever been seen” – doesn’t hurt.

Some reflections on the above

  • There are, of course, other supremely useful attributes, e.g. leadership ability, diplomatic nous, negotiation skills, foreign languages, and sheer grit. They make individuals stand out in the crowd and open all kinds of doors. They are not absolutely essential however. You can have a satisfying and productive career without them.
  • If you are the type of person who has a yen for self-improvement (which, since you’re reading this blog post, I’m guessing you might) you can do a little exercise: rate yourself along the above attributes, say, on a scale of 1 to 5.
  • If you feel particularly deficient in one area, various strategies can be pursued. One is to diligently work on the areas you are weakest. That could entail reading, taking training, talking to people, as well as just being mindful. Another is to overcompensate, in a positive sense – aim to become brilliant and exceptional at one or maximum two things. A lot of senior experts, for example, may be bona fide curmudgeons, but they are valued — and tolerated! — because of their vast technical knowledge and experience.
  • Very few people will score top marks across all attributes. The good thing is it that no one is expected to, either. That’s why most work is done by teams, not individuals. Even a book with a single author is almost always a team effort. Just take a look at the acknowledgements section to remind yourself of this.  It’s not a bad policy to be honest with people about what you can and cannot do.
  • A corollary of the above is that the stronger you are in one area, the more tolerance others will have for your weaknesses in other areas.
  • Keep in mind that these attributes are relative, depending on the circumstance and who else is in the room. On one project, for example, your 15 years may make you the most experienced person on the team, whereas on another, they may pale in comparison to your senior colleague’s 30 years.

Concluding thoughts

Every now and then I find myself working with someone who seems quite brilliant in all of the above attributes, and the question arises — is this person for real? Almost always, however, after getting to know them better, their weaknesses emerge and they turn out to be human after all… The weaknesses weren’t visible at first, or were not that irksome. That’s a skill too, of course, being able to conceal one’s faults.

It’s pretty difficult to be both human and perfect. And that’s okay. Not worth the effort, really. It’s good to remember that robots and AI come with plenty of built in flaws, glitches and annoyances, too (and that includes ridiculously macro-heavy MS Word and its I-know-better-than-you-what-formatting-should-be-used-here-but–maybe-I’ll-change-the-font-and-spacing-halfway-through-the-document attitude, pervasive flaws which Microsoft has not bothered to fix for over a decade). 

Finally, possessing the seven attributes I’ve described here is not just good for sake of doing exemplary work. It will also make people want to collaborate with you again.

Nils Junge July 17, 2020

core skills / key professional qualities / professional attributes /