• APRIL 2005 TRIBUTARYAPRIL 2005 TRIBUTARY •

Guardians Over Bozeman

Manaia’s three-day Youth Empowerment and Leadership Program (Y.E.L.P) is a personal development program for youths and adults.

by Holly Zadra

Photos by Jaye Smith

 

In a crowded downtown café, two old friends see one another. She spontaneously sneaks up behind him to tell him she thinks he is the most gorgeous man she’s ever laid eyes on. He tells her she always knows exactly what to say. In a moment of transparency, the two see one another and capture one joyous instant of the real. In that instant, it is obvious they are delighted to see one another, but just as suddenly, they are wholly awkward. The woman begins pilfering through her purse to find her card and a pen; he asks about a mutual friend he heard had moved back to town. She seems to fill the space too fully that was, just minutes before, his and his alone. She keeps her eyes down, looking into her purse. He introduces her to his associate, making a joke in some time-honored way that resonates, but just only. She can’t wait to leave, and he can’t wait for her to leave, not because that’s what each wants, but because the two are stuck in the horse latitudes of inauthentic-ity. They make plans to have a drink. She tries to express eagerness; he tries to sound facetious and cynical. Wayne Mortimer ventures that there are only two times when a person is truly authentic: when extremely happy or extremely sad; when laughing your head off or when in total break-down with snot coming out your nose and tears running down your face. Only then do you forget about what you look like, or what you’re wearing, or what your stockpile of successes or failures may be. Because you are in an authentic place. Through Manaia Youth Programs, Wayne Mortimer facilitates the planting and re-planting of that seed of authenticity.

Mortimer speaks with a mellifluous and refined Australian accent. I hadn’t imagined his voice would be accompanied by what I saw when I first met him: faded black jeans, a snug, well-worn t-shirt and heavy black leather biker boots. He drinks from a plastic thermal go-cup and has warm clear eyes, swarthy skin, and salt and pep-per, curly, short hair. Around his neck, he wears a Maori bone carving — it is an iwi guardian — a protector of evil spirits, a supernatural guardian angel, and the name of the non-profit founded by Mortimer this past June. Having consulted for other non-profits for years and worked intensively with high-risk youth around the country and the world, he decided to create his own organization.

We live in a society where we don’t feel anymore. We even think our feelings. When I ask someone how he or she feels, they usually tell me what they’re thinking or what they would like to do. When I’m speaking with someone who is angry, he or she says, “I feel like just running outside into the street and screaming.” Or they’ll say “I feel like just hitting someone.” I say, “I get that’s what you want to do, but how do you feel?” That question can go back and forth six or seven times before the recognition occurs that emotional language is being circumnavigated and avoided. Once a person finally identifies a feeling, that feeling can be heard and validated. If no one says those feelings are OK, then young adults bury their feelings. By the time we’re adults, we forget how to feel. Anyone can argue with circumstances, opinions, or perspectives, but we can’t argue with feelings. Feelings give us something to move forward with; they move us out of the doldrums into recognition of something other than our own selves and our own arguments. Feelings are the connecting force within any community.

“The feeling of isolation and disconnection is the same feeling whether a person is alienated because he has dark skin or whether it’s someone whose father abuses him.” Mortimer remarks how very few people can understand another person’s circumstances, but most of us know what it’s like to be lonely, what it’s like to lie alone in bed and wish that someone understood what we were feeling. “When we can come together knowing we all share the same feelings, we can truly connect and begin to understand each other.” That’s movement. Manaia’s three-day Youth Empowerment and Leader-ship Program (Y.E.L.P) is a personal development program for youth, and interestingly, adults. The program is designed so that youths and adults experience the process simultaneously without the social division of age. Bridging the age gap breaks down the false representation that adulthood is about having everything all worked out. We know, but are loathe to admit, that truly seeing others for who they are and what they feel — stripped of their fine educations or lack thereof, their cars, their intellectual banter, manic-depression, nose ring, pink hair, or fat bottom — that this is an ongoing process for the rest of our lives. Y.E.L.P. allows young adults and adults to relate to each other very quickly and to build trust through seeing one another, instead of looking. Community is an amazing thing that you see all over the third world, and yet in the world, it’s very much this you-me dichotomy: don’t invade my personal space, don’t touch me, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t! But if you go to a third world country, or even to the “rez,” over and over again there’s this feeling of connection that’s very difficult to describe. Where is our sense of community and connection? Wayne remarked that on the rez, like in third world villages, kids aren’t having tantrums, crying, com-plaining or looking around. Here we see two very different cultures: one where young children know that if they have a need or want, an adult will be there. That’s Mortimer’s definition of community. Western society has lost the village that it takes to raise a child. These days, parents, and often single parents, have to be a whole village to their children, an impossible task.

Manaia is about trying to recreate the multi-layered family that Mortimer calls community. The biggest obstacle for creating community, however, may be the people itself, or at least those in “control.”

Heather is a Bozeman High School student who just turned 18. She is quirky and striking with fading maroon hair that is cut short in some places and left to pin back in others. She wrinkles the space between her eyes when asked a question as if she’s either surprised or defending herself. She’s precocious and creative, spontaneous yet deliberate. She wears men’s trousers and old baseball shirts, a paint-stained sweatshirt. She has never heard of Manaia. When asked why adults fear her age group, Heather responded, “Adults get into a place where they are not able to accept change. That age is when most changes happen, when kids mature into their final consciousness. You get older and you can’t handle change. Adults get afraid.” Perhaps adults are afraid of being, as Heather says, “permanent alone.” Adults, just like young adults, want, more than anything, to belong. According to Mortimer, recent studies show the largest reason for high school dropout is the feeling of not belonging. Wayne says that is the same reason for joining gangs; everyone looks for something to belong to, to be connected with. In the 90s, when gangs be-came prevalent, the average gang fulfilled more of the basic human needs of a child than the average family provided. Adult fear commonly remains unspoken and then mutates into excessive control. Control over our feelings, control over our environments, and control over young adults and children. According to 17-year-old Victoria Lynn of Bridger Alter-native School, “There can be a really intense power trip in adults to keep a mass of young adults under control. They use their power in unnecessary ways like ‘Stop chewing gum.’ ‘Take your hat off.’” Don’t do drugs. Don’t have sex. Don’t slouch at the table. Adults are constantly telling younger people what to do.

Sarah, 15, of Bozeman High, and Victoria are both graduates of Y.E.L.P. Victoria is confident and pretty. She dresses in new, modish clothes and has very smooth, clear skin and long straight strawberry blond hair. Sarah wears all black with tattered and untied Vans. There are holes in the sleeves of her sweatshirt through which her thumbs poke. Her bleached hair is hidden underneath a stocking cap. Sarah has kind eyes and a timid smile. Together, Victoria and Sarah articulate a beautiful metaphor of the “emotional cup,” one girl filling in where the other leaves off like long-time friends do. “If it is full, there is nothing you can do with the next emotion that comes along except spill it... Talking about your feelings allows you to empty your emotional cup so you have room within it for the next feeling that comes along.” This is not rote memorization; it is something that makes sense at a very deep level for the two of them as they look one another in the eyes, searching for the words to explain their mutual experience.

Manaia is about empowerment, not simply talking about feelings. “We live in a society where we don’t feel anymore. We even think our feelings.”

Wayne Mortimer, also a certified ropes course facilitator, tells a story about a coworker who was raising an 18-month-old son. The two, father and son, were sitting at a fireplace in the middle of winter, son in dad’s lap. There was a candle burning beside the two of them. Dad watched his son take his finger and shove it straight into the candle flame. He said it took every fiber in his body to not mess with what was going on. The boy held his finger in the flame, and then all of a sudden, he said, “Ow.” All dad said was, “Hot.” The boy licked his finger and put it straight back in the flame. The father was dying to pull his son’s finger away from the flame as he watched his son hold it in the flame for a second time, and again, the boy said, “Ow.” All dad said again was, “Hot.” Father and son are still sitting there, and the son gets the finger ready to plunge back into the flame, and dad thinks, “Oh, my God. My boy is a slow learner.” The boy raises his finger to the flame, and then stops right before the flame, pulls his finger away, and says, “Hot.” They have never put a fire screen around their fireplace. In just a few short seconds, the lesson was learned.

Young adults are trying to figure out just who they are, Mortimer says, and so we must let them go through that experience instead of telling them what to do. “You can’t give someone else your experience. The average child falls 300 times before they learn to walk. If they never fall, they never learn to walk because they have to experience the process of learning to walk, which means falling.” Young adults have to experience pain to understand it. They have to experience pain in order to avoid doing what is painful. Through Y.E.L.P., participants get to see for themselves what doesn’t work for them. One Y.E.L.P. “experience” occurs in the first evening of the pro-gram when participants begin to investigate the physical and emotional judgments with which we label one another. Participants begin to feel the significance of first identifying the label they’ve given someone. Then they are asked to question how they use that label: Do you act in a way that brings you closer to or further away from that human being?

Victoria described the experience. “Not only did I figure out how I distanced myself from others by labeling, but I figured out how I was being labeled. For every one [label] I put on somebody else, there were six on my back.”

Over coffee, Mortimer brings up Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and a brilliant phrase that comes from America’s scapegoat Marilyn Manson. Mortimer notes that all the “youth experts” interviewed for the documentary wanted to tell young adults what to do. Do this, do that. Tell them this; tell them that. When asked What would you say to the kids, Marilyn Manson said, “I wouldn’t. I’d listen.” At Y.E.L.P., students learn to listen to one another. They experience being ignored in order to experience again that which almost every young adult contends with on a daily basis. Participants learn to see one another without saying anything at all. For what is little more than a few minutes, adults and young adults are told to turn their seats to face one another and to give eye contact. Victoria articulated how substantial, real and respectful that simple exercise was for her: At first, you are really self-conscious, you feel like you have boogers on your nose. But after a few minutes, you realize that you are making an intense connection with someone simply by looking into their eyes and seeing that person, not their face or their label. It feels like you can see every emotion that person has felt in their entire lives. Before, I thought eye contact was about showing your confidence, or how unintimidated or sincere you are. The process de-conditioned us. Now, eye contact is about seeing, not showing or being seen. It is seeing the person you are looking at and being willing to respect the person you see. Gabe, 15, also attends Bridger Alternative School and graduated from the first program offered in Bozeman as a mandatory engagement during his first of five months at a group home. “I tried the eye contact thing with my best friend. I couldn’t really do it. It was really hard. Like we’ve all been conditioned to do the exact opposite. I tried to do it the day after the program was over, and he was like, ‘Dude, what the hell are you looking at?’ I was like, ‘Never mind, man.’”

In three days, Manaia sets the kids up to experience, to talk about those experiences, to be validated and guided so they don’t get off track. At the end of the day, they’ll tell you that they learned more about others and about themselves than ever before. Manaia brings together a bunch of strangers, and in 17 hours makes them best friends. Mortimer says sincerely, “I don’t do anything. They do all the work. I just create the circumstances. It’s their win, not mine, and it’s beautiful to watch.”