Spokes is a primer for understanding Native cultures. It is not intended to show how everybody thinks - these are not cookie-cutter cultures. It is an insight as to what priorities may be and how they would effect decisions - both by the individual and the group. It was originally intended for small business owners in order for them to make better business presentations. Under advice of the many Native people that have pre-read this, the proposed audience has widened. These are vibrant and complex cultures and no book could be a 'one size fits all' but in my decades of interaction in a variety of world settings, I have found that finding the similarities between people is often a more successful gambit than focusing on differences. That knowledge, applied to some basic protocol will aid in a positive experience among the worlds oldest cultures. Yes, they are different and often those differences are wondrous.
About the Author: Born into a family that crossed the pond to America in the early 1600s, I guess Christopher would self describe as a frontiersman - neither the burly mountain man nor the gun slinging westerner but more like the oxen that just kept on moving despite the weather, terrain, rivers or mountains. He's a quiet person who has lived on geographical, mental, spiritual and philosophical frontiers of various sorts throughout a lifetime. Presently home is the semi-bush (i.e. road connected) Alaska, he has finally reached the place where he can observe, partake, and absorb multiple societies and myriad experiences in relative peace and calm. Living a life is an active sport, giving little time for retrospection over anything but the immediate while the observations of several decades is a wide canvas of multiple hues. Frontiers can be found in many places - often very close by. Separation and isolation are not physical traits alone. A very old farm in rural Maine; the only non-immigrant in a New England industrial neighborhood; life on the hard streets of the East Coast as a youth; a military person in Iceland and Scandinavia and wandering the world; organic farming in the hills of Oregon and flats of Washington; the taiga of interior Alaska. Runaway street kid, military man, Flower Child, farmer, Drug and Mental Health Counselor, State Planner, Village Administrator, and back - these are places where mental philosophies and hard realities collide Educationally, all the pieces are in place and all hard won - persistence being an old New England tradition (or is it just stubbornness?). A B.S. in Psychology and Criminology back in the 70's and a M.A. in Cross-cultural Relations 30 years later - A little here and a little there and suddenly there are no more courses to take. Alaska is nice that way. Back to the old rules of not much caring about your background and more about what you can do and do do. Outside of the few urban areas, it is as raw-boned as life in North America gets. I have tried to live a life devoted to seeing as opposed to looking and my life has often depended on my seeing accurately. Tsin' Aen,