The Gap

Yesterday I drove down to Eugene in order to give a presentation at the Osher Lifelong Learning Center, which appears to be somehow linked to the University of Oregon. This presentation had been a year in the making, as they contacted me last October, but due to some miscommunication and inability to concur on dates, it never materialized until yesterday though even then I was booked months in advance.
Most of those who attended were retirees and, I assume, older alumni. When they contacted me I tried to press them for more specifics as to what sort of topic to lecture on. Gaming? Enrollment? Sovereignty? There weren't any. They just wanted to know about the tribe, period. Evidently one of the center's volunteers had read about me in the UO Alumni magazine and that was good enough.
The lack of specifics meant a certain amount of flexibility in developing a powerpoint, and in the end I just provided a rough guide of...everything. Because we were scheduled to have a Q & A session afterwards my assumption was that something would spur interest and thus spawn questions. There were plenty of questions.
Steve Bobb joined me, which helped. I've gotten used to speaking publicly, just not for an hour. In the end I went past that, even with Steve stepping in to speak about life in Grand Ronde during termination.
We were scheduled for two hours, and after that many of the attendees came up and told me they had learned a lot. I learned quite a bit too, namely that if this crowd, many of them well-read, know so little about Grand Ronde and tribes in general, what must the general public know? I got asked questions like whether our benefits were taxed, or if we were also US citizens as well. What is basic knowledge as a Tribal member is news to many outside. There is a noticeable gap.
To this day I still wonder why many members are so paranoid about letting tribal information slip to the outside. I can think of some worst-case scenarios that justify the thinking. But when people can live for so long in Oregon, especially in our ceded lands, yet know so little about who we are, there has to be some sort of halfway point. It's like not knowing your neighbors' first names.