The Peacemaker

A Profile of Jason Watson

by Richard Green

Preface
“Two nations at peace, each chuse [sic] these protectors in the other, usually send them presents. His business is to make up all Breaches between the 2 nations, to keep the pipes of peace by which at first they contracted Freindship, [sic] to devert [sic] the Warriors from any designe [sic] against the people they protect, and Pacifie [sic] them by carrying them the Eagle pipe to smoak [sic] out of, and if after all, are unable to oppose the stream, are to send the people private intelligence to provide for their own safty [sic]. The Chicasaws [sic] call thes [sic] protectors Fane Mingo or Squirrell [sic] king.”
— Thomas Nairne, April 12, 1708

One
Jason Watson is proud to call himself a Chickasaw, Texan, and American. But he identifies with any group that’s being discriminated against or abused because of who they are.

He yearns to work in settings where the persecutors and persecuted, or other contentious or warring parties, need light, not heat, to find their way to peaceful accommodations. In a word, he hopes to become a peacemaker.

If you’re picturing a bright-eyed do-gooder or a sanctimonious, cheerless soul, that’s not Jason. He has an engaging personality, a wry sense of humor and loves to tease, joke, and laugh. His interpersonal skills are exceptionally well-honed by native ability, and through excellent educational training and rich cultural experiences, especially his two years in the Peace Corps in the former Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan.

In short, Jason takes his educational and career experiences seriously, but not himself. To illustrate that point, he quotes a diplomat who said, “blessed are the peacemakers for they will never be out of work.” Even though his garrulous personality could be a vehicle for displaying a big ego, he knows that effective peacemakers check their egos at the door. He is also mindful that it wasn’t all that long ago that his behavior default was goofing off and partying.

My idea had been to write about the experiences of a Chickasaw Peace Corps Volunteer. Jason’s cousin, the acclaimed artist and potter Joanna Underwood, gave me his name and contacted his grandmother, Madeline Brown Reed, for more information on Jason. Joanna forwarded a note from Jason’s mother, Julie Reed, which expanded on her son’s impressive experiences. I contacted Jason who told me he hoped his mother hadn’t bragged on him too much. “You know how mothers are,” he said.

After he answered a couple more questions, I knew his mother hadn’t been exaggerating; she was just getting started. To observe him at work and interview him, I accompanied this 31-year-old graduate student on a three-day retreat in South Dakota this past April. I met him in Denver, where he lives in typically modest graduate student housing, and then we drove for five-and-a-half hours to South Dakota to an innovative retreat sponsored by Seeking Common Ground (SCG).

Jason is interning with this non-profit Denver-based organization as part of his graduate education requirements at the University of Denver (DU). Later, this fall he should receive two master’s degrees from DU, one in international studies and the other in a complementary, but separate, discipline, conflict resolution.

Jason understood that SCG is a program that has been primarily (but not exclusively) of, by, and for women dealing with women’s empowerment issues between Jewish and Arab Israelis. But he interviewed and applied for admission after learning that the internship program included two attractive and challenging components. One was SCG’s partnership with interests in Jerusalem and Israel to provide leadership development and peace-building programs to young Jewish and Palestinian women and men in Israel. The second, titled the Badlands Project, arranged shared activities, experiences, and discussions between Oglala Sioux teenagers from the Pine Ridge Reservation and their peers from public schools in nearby Rapid City, South Dakota. “Seeking Common Ground seemed to meet my needs and suit my interests perfectly,” he said.

He was accepted into SCG because his background, including being Native American, “made him a good fit,” according to SCG executive director Erin Breeze. Not that he doesn’t stand out in the SCG crowd; he’s the only male, has a shaved head, and at 6 feet 2 inches, towers over the female staff.

The South Dakota retreat involved planning and coordinating a weekend of activities geared to facilitate communication and understanding among a population of teenagers that was diverse in every way except gender. The twelve females and one male represented the schools of Rapid City, South Dakota school, the Pine Ridge Reservation, and SCG’s Denver’s Peace International.

Before the retreat, I asked Erin if the Pine Ridge-Rapid City contingents could be combustible. She said they had met in a previous retreat without trouble. She did say that the Oglala and Rapid City groups had a history of taunting incidents and some violence. The town of Pine Ridge and Rapid City are 111 miles apart.

While Jason coordinated well with the other SCG staff on the trip, he sometimes had his own ideas about activities and events, but these had little, if anything, to do with gender. Sometimes at staff meetings he would offer modest proposals or just a tweak in the plans. Whether his ideas were accepted or rejected, his equilibrium never changed—never wavered. “Hey, one way or the other our goals are being achieved,” said Jason, a diplomat in the making.

Two
Jason knew little of Chickasaw history and culture growing up. One reason was that his great-grandfather moved from the Sulphur, Oklahoma, area to north Texas and his descendants grew up in Sanger or Denton. Jason told me his maternal grandparents, Paul and Madeline Reed, taught him that the Chickasaws and Choctaws once had the same ancestry. But he learned about how the two tribes split during their migration just a few years ago from a Chickasaw comic book. He took it to his maternal grandparents and asked, somewhat incredulously, “Is this true?” He figured they would know because they were both full-blood Chickasaws who grew up among Chickasaws. Furthermore, his grandmother still understands the Chickasaw language and has recently been improving her ability to speak it by tutoring one of Jason’s cousins in the language.

Despite his lack of traditional cultural knowledge, he recently realized that while growing up, he often saw things “the Chickasaw way” because his grandparents, whom he loved and trusted implicitly, interpreted and processed much of the world for him. Jason recalls: “They would say, ‘They’re not like us,’ or ‘That’s the way we do it.’”

This was particularly so when the three visited their Brown and Underwood relatives in the Sulphur area or took summer-time trips to Indian places like Mesa Verde, the pow-wows at Four Corners or the pueblos around Santa Fe, New Mexico. They also attended the annual reunion at Chilocco, where the grandparents met when they were students at the Indian boarding school near the Kansas state line. Jason recalls their strange role reversals there: “My grandpa normally is a man of few words, and I can never remember him laughing except at Chilocco. There he was ‘Mr. Popular,’ introducing me to his buddies, telling jokes, always smiling and laughing. On the other hand, my grandma is very talkative; she is one of those people who will keep talking even when I’ve left the room. But at the reunions, she would become very reserved.”

In such ways, they shared raising Jason with his parents, Steven Watson, who is white, and their daughter, Julie Reed. This shared responsibility was a traditional tribal practice (though Jason wasn’t aware of it) and the practical result of a mother who worked during the day and attended school in the evenings and a father who attended school during the day and worked in the evenings. Another factor in the shared responsibility was his parents’ divorce during his teenage years. Jason believes this estrangement damaged his relationship with both parents. Coming at a time when he was filled with normal teenage insecurities and the intermittent internal storms of adolescence, he was almost bound to experience sweeping changes in behavior. He went from being an honor student to a poor one. His priorities were to excel socially and in school sports. He did just enough schoolwork to remain eligible to play football and participate in track and field.

“I was an only child, which was relatively rare among my Chickasaw relatives and in north Texas,” Jason says. “When I was a kid staying with my grandparents in Denton, my grandma would do babysitting so I’d have contact with other kids. So it seemed like I always was around kids I didn’t know, but we had fun, and I’m sure this helped me develop social relationships.”

Jason never lacked for friends, but some of these friendships led to trouble. When he was about 15, he was drinking a beer at a party when a son of one of his teachers pulled up in his squad car and barked, “Jason Watson, put that down!” He was charged with minor-in-possession but not arrested.

The policeman gave him a stern lecture, but his behavior would only become more risky and dangerous. This culminated one night on some alcohol-fueled mission in his Honda Accord. He hit an exit ramp in Denton at nearly 100 m.p.h.—nearly crashing into a police car he never saw.

This time he was arrested, and when the police called his mother, she refused to pick him up. He sat in the drunk tank for two days until her parents could persuade her to bail out her son. He worried about his parents’ reaction to his behavior and arrest, but that was nothing compared to his anxiety over what his grandparents would think of him. Their disappointment was obvious, but unlike his mother they expressed no anger. “My grandpa said, ‘Jason, this isn’t the way to live. This isn’t how we taught you to act.’ Those words killed me.”

He says his parents individually reminded him that they had given him everything, including a car, and this was how he had repaid them. He went home with his mother, and tensions between them mounted. He had all but given up on school. A month later he got a call from his grandmother telling him to gather up his stuff, that they would be over to pick him up. She told him, “You will live with us from now on. Your mother wants you out.”

“She’s kicking me out?” he asked incredulously.

“You’ll live with grandpa and me.”

Almost immediately, Jason’s mom sold the Honda. He says he didn’t care. His friends had cars; he wouldn’t lack for transportation or parties. And he also learned that he didn’t need to play football or run track to be popular, so he quit those sports, and during his senior year dedicated himself to living up to his well-known reputation expressed by a coach: “Watson, wine, women, and song.”

At the senior prom, his name wasn’t read out with the other soon-to-be graduates because it wasn’t known if he would have enough credits to graduate. He did want to graduate, but it was obviously very late. With the help of some teachers who hadn’t given up on him, Jason passed his coursework and graduated, but finished next-to-last in class standing at Sanger High School.

What next? Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than good. And, fortunately, Jason had been going steady with probably the smartest and most popular girl in the class, Courtney Boland. For some reason she hadn’t ditched him, and unbeknown to Jason, when she filled out her admission application to attend Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU) in Shawnee, she filled one out for him too. Then, despite his low class standing and a disgracefully low SAT score, she convinced the dean to give Jason a chance when there seemed to be no reason for doing so. In league with her were his grandparents, the Reeds. They agreed to pay a portion of his college fees and persuaded their church to also contribute to Jason’s college fund and arranged for his clothing grant from the Chickasaw Nation. Courtney also insisted that they become certified as lifeguards, which turned out to be a source of income for him for five consecutive summers.

With so many people who meant so much going to bat for him, Jason did not embarrass himself or them during his freshman year at OBU. Neither did he cover himself with glory, and left there with an uninspiring 1.2 GPA. “That first semester was so tough. I would sit in class and not say a word because I was so embarrassed at how little I knew,” Jason told me. “Courtney taught me how to set a schedule and study. She was everything I wasn’t; you know, practical, a good manager. In fact, she was like my life manager.”

While he was going to class and surviving, he wasn’t really committed to being a successful student. So, it was perhaps inevitable that Jason and Courtney would break up that year of 1997-98. She continued her academic excellence at OBU…while Jason headed to California to become an actor.

“Harebrained” is the word Jason now uses to characterize his plan. He had no formal acting experience and knew absolutely no one in California. On the plus side, he figured, was the fact that he has an easy time making friends and enjoyed “hamming it up.” He attended a community college and enrolled in three courses: acting, political science, and astronomy. He laughs today when he remembers that, but at the time, no one could have convinced him that his idea was crazy. He had not learned the wisdom inherent in former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden’s aphorism: “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” (Emphasis added.)

But good fortune again smiled on Jason. He got to know several Swedish exchange students and soon was living with two of them and learning from the experiences of the larger group. The learning process greatly escalated on April 20, 1999, the date of the Columbine school massacre in Colorado when two high school students killed 12 and wounded 23 before killing themselves. As Jason and his Swedish friends watched the drama unfold on TV, he and the Swedes were shocked and distressed, but the Swedes were also appalled and incredulous: Why are you Americans always killing each other?

His first impression was that his new friends were attacking his country and it might have crossed his mind to fire back. But then it dawned on him that because they were foreigners, they probably would have a different perspective. So instead of arguing, he listened; and in the weeks ahead he often solicited their opinions and observations about American society and also Swedish society. “That year was the first time I ever interacted with a foreigner to any extent, and in the next weeks it got to where I was living almost in a Swedish world,” Jason said. “I was out of my element in California.

Maybe I would have acted directly if I had met them in Texas. Anyway, I asked a lot of questions and their answers forced me to think about the world relative to what I knew. It was an awakening. I thought, man, what am I doing with my life? [It’s fair to say that friends and relatives wondered that, too.] It’s time to get some direction. Then, I realized that my Swedish friends indirectly had given that direction to me.”


Three
When Jason had his epiphany, it didn’t occur to him that the place for him to begin studying international relations was right in his own backyard. But, in 1999 he enrolled at the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton; it was one of few universities then offering a degree in international studies. He got in on probation after he convinced the dean to give him a chance. He said he was committed to good scholarship at UNT, and unfurled his long-range plan: after graduating, he would study international law in law school, then work for the United Nations.

Within his first year he was on the Dean’s Honor Roll, a fact his grandparents reported to The Chickasaw Times. He says he was wearing an “Aloha” shirt in the accompanying picture. He earned top grades as a full-time student and was a lifeguard during the summers and worked as a volunteer tutor in an after-school program in Denton. He also had his old friends (who told him he even looked different) and new friends, and a girlfriend. He was amazed that he could balance these activities, but he thought balance was the key to his happiness. (Ancestral Chickasaws, it should be noted, knew that achieving and maintaining balance in their lives was a life-long struggle and imperative.)

For his required internship, his advisor, Stephen Poe, suggested a non-profit organization in Dallas, the Center for the Survivors of Torture. The clients mainly were people seeking asylum in the United States from countries in Africa, especially Ethiopians at the time. “I liked the people I worked with more than the job itself,” Jason told me. “Part of my job was driving the director, who was going blind, to or from work, and he was full of stories and information about the center’s clients. And he helped shape my idea of the world and the work of non-governmental organizations in Third World countries.”

Another part of his job was reading their (often translated) written narratives into a tape recorder for the director. “The description of the torture that these people suffered was tough to stomach in itself,” Jason said. “Hard to imagine that a human being could think up and perform these types of torture. And then keep in mind it’s the military or the government that’s doing this to their own citizens. I’d ask the director, why isn’t anybody doing anything about this? He told me this is just what happens. He said, ‘We deal with what these powerful people do. We can’t affect their policies. All we can do is try to make these people whole again.’”

After Jason’s semester obligation was complete, he volunteered 15 to 20 hours a week for an additional semester. And while it was an invaluable experience, the grueling nature of the job was not for him. What was for him in the summer of 2001 was a study abroad program in France. Apart from his study, Jason learned some French from the family he lived with and toured Europe every weekend via a Eurorail pass. He was five yards or less from Pope John Paul II when he snapped his picture.

He returned to Denton in early September 2001. A few days later, he was asleep on his pallet (having no bed) in his Denton apartment, when the clock radio went off and a voice said that this was a time to pray for the United States. He processed bits and pieces and soon thought the U.S. has sustained a nuclear attack. He and his roommate turned on the TV and watched in horror as the rest of 9/11 unfolded. “I thought almost immediately it had to be Al Qaeda,” Jason recalled. “I mean, we were studying Islamic extremists. I also knew that [Osama] bin Laden was in Afghanistan and that he was being harbored by the Taliban. After the Pentagon was hit, I realized this takes the attack to a new level. I figured the U.S. was going to turn Afghanistan into a parking lot.”

While stopping bin Laden and the Taliban were essential, he felt sure that untold numbers of innocent Afghanis were going to pay with their lives. He says 9/11 didn’t give him extra incentive to pursue his goal, but in the fall of 2002, he came to an unusual and unexpected detour. Although he had prepared well for the Law School Aptitude Test and felt he was doing well on the test, after the second section (of five) he got an overwhelming feeling that going to law school wasn’t what he should be doing. So he got up and gave his unfinished test booklet to the incredulous proctor, walked out, and went across the street to drink a beer and think. What next?  He says he wasn’t upset so much as relieved. And, he had time and education options; he wouldn’t graduate until the summer of 2003.

His girlfriend at the time wanted to join Peace Corps. He helped her fill out the application, and he became intrigued enough to do Internet research on the government agency with such a stellar reputation. He read a couple of books by former Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) and saw that the Peace Corps certainly had advantages for someone like him. His list included doing a meaningful job in a “hard corps place,” learning a new language and performing national service, which he thought all Americans should have the opportunity to do.

After his advisor and mentor, Stephen Poe, encouraged him to apply, he did. The girlfriend was rejected, but Jason was accepted. He graduated from UNT in August 2003, and less than a month later was meeting his new family in Uzbekistan.

But before he left the country, he felt obliged to visit Courtney in Shawnee. He announced that he was graduating from UNT and becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan. Though he says she was shocked, she probably wasn’t really because she obviously had seen his potential. She congratulated Jason, and then he thanked her. He said: “I’m here because of you. You changed my life.”

Four
When he arrived in Uzbekistan in September 2003, Jason was one of about 175 PCVs working primarily in health or education in the country that is roughly the size of California. The nation is surrounded by other republics of the former Soviet Union, but shares a portion of its southern border with Afghanistan. The government is headed by the same autocratic leader who ran the country for the Soviet Union. Jason’s assignment was to assist the small city of Kungrad in modernizing the teaching of English as a second language. But the teachers had always been subject to an authoritarian regime, a fact that Jason evidently was not sensitive to. In his first meeting with the English teachers, he rolled out an egalitarian approach. He told them that he wasn’t an English teacher—never had been. “The only advantage I have over you is that I’ve been speaking English for 25 years. You are the teachers.”

One asked: So why did they send you? The question should have been jarring, and a warning that perhaps he was getting off on the wrong foot. But he said, “I want to help you do whatever you think you should be doing. So let’s do some brainstorming.” Did their puzzled looks reflect some language problem? He might have thought so then, but when he was recounting the story for me, he acted out what they must have been thinking: What!? Brainstorming!? Who did they send us? He speaks no Russian, barely any Uzbek. Who are you!? (Pause for more deliberating.) Ah … CIA?!
In his defense, Jason says the goal of that meeting was “managing their expectations. I didn’t want them to think I was the answer.” He probably succeeded, but not in the way he wished. At any rate, Jason says his Uzbeck counterpart, a long-time English supervisor, wasted no time in asserting herself as a steadfast opponent to changes in curriculum and content that weren’t based on traditional rote memorization and repeated drills.

The class would memorize a script, for example, for going into a restaurant. That was fine, Jason says, but what if the restaurant didn’t have what you wanted? Or what if the food was unsatisfactory? And so on. Students weren’t using the language, only reciting it. To effect meaningful change, Jason decided to co-teach classes, with the intention of getting his ideas across to his colleagues. Introducing change with no hope for sustainability, he thought, was an exercise in futility. His co-teachers liked his ideas and saw students improve in understanding and speaking English. But other teachers hewed the supervisor’s straight-and-narrow approach. As a result, the faculty had two factions. But no matter how much meeting and negotiating he did with the supervisor, she was resistant to his suggestions. And yet, Jason recalled with irony, the Uzbek government told the Peace Corps, ‘We want you to help us modernize the teaching of English.’”

His relationship with the family he was assigned to live with was also problematic. They were relatively well off financially, not so much from their rug business, but from the father’s import automobile business. He would go to Russia, buy cars, and sell them in Uzbekistan for a big profit. But this depended on him avoiding a government tax of 50 percent of the value of the car. A tax exemption was granted to those selling foreign products to western non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Uzbekistan.

“So, I’d only been with the family about a month when they started bringing me little treats, favorite foods, and candies,” Jason says. “Evidently they were buttering me up for something, and then one day the father told me he was going to Russia to buy more cars. He wanted me to sign a document saying that the Peace Corps was buying the cars. That way he figured he could avoid the tax and rake in big profits. After his plan was translated again and again, I understood that he was asking me to commit fraud. But rather than risk offending him, I said that Peace Corps was a government agency, not an NGO, so his idea wouldn’t work. He got very angry because, as he saw it, I was being uncooperative, and family members in this patriarchal society know that the father’s word is law. He stopped speaking to me, as did the family. My supervisor came to speak with the family to try to iron out the problem, but the father wanted me out. For the balance of my stay in Uzbekistan, I lived in an apartment with running well water and electricity sometimes.”

Still, Jason had friends, learned enough Uzbek to be understood in most common situations, and generally was accepted by Uzbek society, at least the more modern version of it. Kungrad was divided into two parts. The portion Jason lived in was more modern—little brick houses, for instance; the other part of town was much more traditional in custom and housing—mainly mud huts. Over their two-year commitment, many PCVs develop a sort of comradely black humor that is similar to that of Army troops and doctors in training. Someone twisted the Peace Corps motto from “Peace Corps: the toughest job you’ll ever love” to “Peace Corps-Uzbekistan—the longest vacation you’ll ever hate.”

Still, Jason was reasonably content despite the relative lack of success modernizing the English program; he had no important regrets and he had learned a great deal about Uzbek society and about himself. One thing he learned is that he now did want to go to law school, where he could receive a good grounding in international law. When he returned home, he would redouble his effort to do well on the LSAT and get into a law school with an excellent reputation in international law. That was the plan, but he was determined to focus on his final two months in Uzbekistan. Then at the end-of-school party in June 2005, he got a telephone call that turned his world upside down.

It was a breathless Peace Corps official telling him to get to Tashkent, the capital city, as soon as possible: “Pack what you can, you’re not going back. And don’t tell anyone anything. Just leave.”

Jason asked if this were a family emergency.

No.

Then what’s going on?

Just leave! Okay?

He returned to the party and told his best friend, Bahkram, what he knew. Bahkram, a fellow teacher, volunteered to go in a taxi with Jason to the airport, two to three hours distant. Since they didn’t know what had happened, they rode largely in silence. Jason was aware that relations between Uzbekistan and the U.S. had been deteriorating. The lease on a U.S. Air Force base probably wasn’t going to be renewed, and the Uzbek government was becoming agitated with the activities of western NGOs operating in the nation. Revolutions in Georgia and the Ukraine had been facilitated by wealthy capitalist George Soros, and Jason believed that the Uzbek government thought it might be the next target.

When Bahkram and Jason arrived at the airport, several other PCVs had assembled for the two-hour flight to Tashkent. They knew no more than Jason, but as they compared stories of being wrenched away from their assignments and host-country families, some grew angry; some teared up. They stayed in a compound in Tashkent for two days before a flight could be arranged to fly them out of Uzbekistan. At the compound, Peace Corps officials still would reveal no details of what happened. The assistant director of the country’s Peace Corps program cited safety and security concerns.

“Finally,” Jason says, “some of the PCVs angrily demanded to know what had happened and the assistant director just broke down crying and could not continue. Others, realizing that she was only the messenger, shouted to leave her alone, and the meeting broke up.

The Uzbek PCVs didn’t learn details until they were back in the U.S. Even now, details are somewhat sketchy, but in May 2005, many political prisoners staged a prison escape in eastern Uzbekistan, a base for Islamic extremists. A mob protest scene developed in Andijan and the Uzbek army surrounded the protesters and with little or no provocation began firing their guns into the crowd. Somewhere between 150 and 500 Uzbek men, women, and children were killed, and the entire country was shut down for a week. The PCVs in the area were evacuated immediately and the remainder, like Jason, were evacuated within two or three days en masse to the United States. They were offered a choice of another Peace Corps assignment, but had to commit to another full, two-year term. Since Jason had been within two months of completing his commitment, he said no thanks.

Another reason was that he had a plan. He would prepare for the LSAT and then finally enter law school to study international law. For a time, he called and wrote to Bahkram, but it seemed that his friend was becoming more reticent to discuss the political situation. Finally, Bahkram told Jason it would be better for him if he wouldn’t call any more.

Five
Jason had days in late 2005 and early 2006 when he must have thought he was endlessly reliving Groundhog Day. That was the Bill Murray movie in which his character woke up every morning to celebrate Groundhog Day all over again. After the incredible Peace Corps experience, Jason was back living with his grandparents, preparing for the LSAT, and volunteering again for the Center for the Survivors of Torture. He also was teaching full-time in a Dallas public high school, a job he came to dislike.

Jason took the LSAT and was disappointed because his score hadn’t drawn much interest from law schools. After a decent interval, he took it again and did far better. This time he would be able to select from better schools. He wanted a law school at a university that also had an excellent graduate program in international studies. The idea was to have a firm foundation in international law and human rights.

The University of Denver seemed to meet his needs: DU had a fine law school and its international studies program was rated one of the ten best in the country. Furthermore, DU had a teaching affiliation with the Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. DU and Minerva offered three-month graduate internships in Jerusalem, a city divided between the Israeli Jewish majority and Palestinian Muslims. Achieving a settlement there made Jerusalem the “Olympics of diplomacy” because the entire world would benefit. He says the opportunity to live and work there was a major factor in why he enrolled at DU in the fall of 2007.

His enthusiasm for law school waned during the third quarter of the first year--not so much because of the coursework, but because of what he had learned from those involved in the field of international law. “I was disappointed to find that just about everything they did was litigation,” he told me.

“They were lawyers, after all. I was also coming to understand that more was being done for peace outside the system than in. I felt like my strengths and interests were as a field guy; one who was out trying to resolve conflicts through negotiation and mediation. At that point, I realized I could do what I wanted with a master’s degree. I didn’t need to spend two more years and $100,000 to get a law degree. As soon as I got that through my head, I dropped out of law school and turned my full interest to international studies.”

Jason was accepted to DU as a Peace Corps Fellow, giving him a nice price break on tuition. In return, he was expected to complete a 150-hour practicum, using Peace Corps acquired experience and skills in the community. Selecting the practicum from the options offered turned out to be an easy choice. Given his Chickasaw roots, he chose the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs. The executive secretary, Ernest House, Jr., lacked a college degree and was even younger than Jason, but he was also the son of the influential chief of one of the few tribes headquartered in the state, the Ute Mountain Utes. The first thing Ernest did for Jason was take him to see an exhibit of Ute displays and artifacts.

This would come in handy later after they began working on issues associated with or the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). With a map of Colorado, and the help of the Colorado Historical Society and others, they plotted the locations of tribes at various points in history. So when Native American artifacts turned up in specific areas of the state, it was easier to identify which tribes might have valid claims on the artifacts. Ernest and Jason also spent considerable time during the legislative session calling on lawmakers to educate them and ask for their political and funding support.

He enjoyed his broad but not deep experience at Indian Affairs. He learned much from the skillful young executive secretary and would have volunteered more than 150 hours, except he learned that the three-month internship at Hebrew University would commence in January 2009. He applied and was accepted. He finally seemed to be on a roll.

Of the nine international studies’ students who participated, Jason and one other law-school dropout were the only ones selected for legal internships.

“The others received really cool field positions,” Jason said. “I worked in a windowless building doing legal research, mainly trying to find ways to translate legal briefs and laws into English from Hebrew,” Jason recalls ruefully. 

I needed background, so Jason explained that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and its population is about 740,000, of which some 60 percent is Jewish and 40 percent is Arab. The city is basically divided into east and west Jerusalem. The Jews mainly live in the modern west, but some heavily fortified Orthodox Jewish enclaves dot the east surrounded by Palestinians (Arabs). The east is Third World, small, crowded, with narrow roads. Each side believes the other has no business being there. Some believe this so passionately that Jerusalem has been and remains a target and haven to terrorists and suicide bombers. That is why remarkably tight security is maintained throughout the city; everyone goes through detection devices, even to go into a coffee house or a retail store. Repeatedly throughout his stay, Jason heard discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict end abruptly with the refrain, “it’s complicated.”

Indeed it is, and far more complex than anything that can be dealt with here. So what I’m describing are Jason’s activities, observations, and insights based on his study and what he saw first-hand in Jerusalem and other parts of Israel.

While he was conscientious about showing up to do his legal research five days a week, all students were encouraged to branch out to see what others were doing. Two of these field trips left him with indelible images, microcosms of life in Jerusalem, especially for Palestinians. The first indelible image involved a Palestinian family standing expressionless, amid their belongings next to the smoldering concrete house that had just been demolished by Israeli tanks. The Palestinian family had been warned in writing that this would happen because they didn’t have a permit to live in that location. No excuse would be tolerated, not even the fact the family had lived there for many years. A sizeable crowd of Palestinians gathered. They were shaking their heads, and a man said to no one in particular: “What gives them the right to do this?”

Jason asked the father, what will you do?

“Well, we’re going to clean this up and rebuild right here,” he said.

Jason scanned the crowd standing around and saw no tears, only resignation or defiance.

Red Cross trucks arrived and gave the family a tent, blankets, food, and a generator. It looked like SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) and indeed it was. Before he left, Jason saw the family moving mattresses into the tent. Coincidentally, a meeting between an assistant to the Jerusalem city attorney had been arranged previously with the DU participants for the very next day. Not surprisingly, the first question involved the house demolition.

“You could see on the attorney’s face it was the last thing he wanted to talk about,” Jason said. “He cited Jerusalem city law mandating everyone, Jewish or Arab, had to secure a permit to build. We asked if the Palestinians could realistically get a permit and we wanted to know if an Israeli’s home had ever been demolished. He ducked the questions.”

 The second indelible image was the Qalandia checkpoint, located between Jerusalem and Ramallah, the capital of the Palestinian Authority. It’s sort of a Soviet-style complex and busy, especially in the morning when the checkpoint adds sometimes two hours to a Palestinian’s work  commute into Jerusalem. It consists of massive guard towers connected by an equally massive reinforced wall, metal detectors, scanners, plenty of heavily armed soldiers, and bomb-sniffing dogs. It’s a very dangerous place for everyone who goes through the checkpoint five days a week to get to work because it’s an obvious target of Palestinian terrorists.

 When a light changed to green, everyone went crowding into cattle-like chutes the width of a man’s shoulders with overhead bars, giving the contraptions a claustrophobic feel. They were also dangerous, because as Jason experienced, everyone crowded into the chutes and pushed forward. If anyone fell, he or she could be trampled in the rush to get through the checkpoint. At the end of the chutes was a revolving door leading to a room constructed with blast-proof glass panels, behind which a man examined papers and interrogated persons if necessary, or if he felt like it. When his turn came, Jason said he was “questioned by a gum-chewing, 17- or 18-year old who was simultaneously texting someone. “Why did you write [on the form] that you might be going to Arab countries?” the functionary asked.

“Because I’m an American student interested in those countries,” Jason replied.

“Why are you interested in Arab countries?”

After a few minutes of this, Jason said you get the circular drift that you are being hassled. He thinks going through the checkpoint on a daily basis must be akin to being imprisoned, in that it’s humiliating and dehumanizing. No wonder, he says, people are protesting by blowing themselves up. Still, he added, no one should minimize the danger to Israel from being surrounded by Arab countries that since 1948 (when Israel was created) have refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

It’s complicated.

Six
Back home at DU, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was much on his mind. He talked about what he’d seen and done and thought with his old law school friends until their eyes glazed over. Implicit in all this was the question of how to deal with this ancient conflict that according to the discipline of conflict resolution is “intractable,” but not “irresolvable.” Perhaps this is why he revived his original idea of graduating with two degrees. If he ever seriously wanted to be involved in international diplomacy, he could now see he needed more than a master’s degree in international studies.

But instead of law with the emphasis on litigating and negotiating, he decided that a perfect complement to international studies would be to earn another master’s degree in conflict resolution. Conveniently for him, one was offered by DU’s Institute of Conflict Resolution. Aside from the coursework (a minimum of 12 courses required), the institute offered a number of opportunities for the required practicum and internship. Two caught his eye. One was a Denver company that specializes in mediation services. Most of its work results when conflicting parties agree to mediation to avoid going to court.

The other was a Denver-based non-profit, Seeking Common Ground (SCG).

Jason applied to the institute and was accepted in 2009. At its orientation, he attended a presentation on SCG by its executive director, Erin Breeze. He thought the non-profit had almost  been developed with him in mind. Not only did SCG work in leadership development and peacemaking programs in Jerusalem, but Breeze also had mentioned a new offering—the Badlands program in South Dakota. It paired teens from the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation and teens from nearby Rapid City. Somehow Jason restrained himself for a day before calling Breeze and asking for an interview.

Breeze recalls that Jason was very articulate about his interest in Native American issues. And the fact he is a Chickasaw, had been in the Peace Corps, and spent three months in Jerusalem with DU were big pluses. We agreed that day that he would do his practicum with us. We were thrilled to have him.”

If that last “big plus”—having been in Jerusalem—seems out of place, it’s not, because the Badlands participants spend 10 days or so in Jerusalem as a cross-cultural experience that should have special meaning to parties with a history of bad relationships. Just during the past year, Breeze told me, some Rapid City teens had been shooting BB guns at Native American people they perceived to be homeless in Rapid City. She told me she was aware of other clashes between white and Native American kids thereabouts. That’s why Page Baker, the former superintendent of the Badlands National Park in South Dakota approached SCG for help in designing a program fostering cross-community positive relationships.

Participants were chosen and met together initially in 2009. The retreat I observed was this past April. The high school students of Rapid City and the Denver PEACE contingent all attended, but only one of the three participants from Pine Ridge showed up. Jason was disappointed about the two no-shows but he didn’t say so to the group. Of them, 12 were female and one was male. At 31, Jason was older than any of the Badlands staff. They had hoped to stay on the Pine Ridge reservation, but the group was too large to be accommodated in any one place there. So we stayed at a motel in the nearby town of Hot Springs.

There were activities designed to facilitate communication and promote ideas. There were field trips to the Crazy Horse Monument and Mount Rushmore, where a question was raised about the appropriateness of essentially defacing the Black Hills to honor great men. And was there a moral distinction between Mount Rushmore, a federally funded project featuring the likenesses of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt and the Crazy Horse monument which was privately funded and had the blessing of some long-ago Oglala Sioux leaders?

Jason worried that the participants lacked adequate background and perspective to process the matter, except as a feeling of right or wrong. But as the Badlands intern, he knew his place and held his tongue. Jason had the same worry again when the group visited the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre. On December 29, 1890, approximately 300 Sioux men, women, and children were slain in practically execution fashion by members of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment. At the site was only a weathered sign with an account of the massacre in about 150 words and no interpretive information.

Jason and I were disappointed, but thought the Sioux figured they didn’t owe tourists anything more.

On a bluff overlooking the site was the Wounded Knee Cemetery where some 150 Sioux had been buried in a mass grave by the soldiers who killed them. Other Sioux had been buried there since; I took a picture of a grave from November 1975 marked by a simple white wooden cross reading, “Ann T. Respects Nothing.” At the bottom of the hill was a tribal museum, but it was closed, even though some tribal members had told Badlands staff that it would be open for them.

That night, two SCG Interns, Amani an Israeli, and Or, a Palestinian, told the group how it was growing up in their respective parts of Jerusalem. Until Amani and Or met through Seeking Common Ground, they would have been enemies, as their ancestors had feared, hated, and perhaps killed one another. But here, it was obvious that they were friends. Both were articulate young women and because the experiences they related were almost inconceivable to most Americans teens, Jason noted that this group of teens paid rapt attention. They asked a number of questions that usually resulted in elaboration or clarification, sometimes eloquently though English was not their first language. Both young women were articulate and even eloquent though English was not their first language. Later, Jason told me how impressed he had been with the young women. “When I was the age of Or and Amani [about 20], none of the subjects they had been grappling with had ever crossed my mind.”  

It had been an excellent session that showed Seeking Common Ground in the best light. It also was good preparation for the group’s trip to Jerusalem, which they took in June. Jason accompanied them on the 11-day trip. Now, as he finishes his final coursework, he will also be preparing for the State Department’s Foreign Service Examination. He took it last year and walked out of the room thinking he had aced it. It’s either pass or fail, period, and he was shocked to learn that he was not a “P” but an “F.” He immediately resolved to take it again, although applicants can take it only once a year.

“Joining the Foreign Service may be the best way to achieving a career in diplomacy, but it’s not the only way to assist nations or people in conflict,” he said. “My primary interest now is finding ways to keep people from killing each other by keeping conflict at a minimum and to keep violent conflict from escalating into war.”

I got another look at his skills at DU one night. Jason was taking a course in mediation and he and a classmate were required to co-mediate a mock session of confrontational parties. Further, it had to be video recorded so his professor could see how he and his co-mediator did. Two of Jason’s former DU law school classmates played the role of a rug merchant and buyer who felt he had been swindled. The parties were contentious but they had agreed to try mediation.

“Our role as mediators is to facilitate communication and resolve the dispute,” he tells them. “We’re impartial, we’re not your therapists, and we keep everything you say in here confidential. Our goal is to craft a solution that’s win-win.”

Easier said than done. Jason and his co-mediator wound their way through a thicket of confusing issues and contradictions between the parties. Early on, passions flared periodically and both parties sometimes used inflammatory words, such as “extortion.” Jason’s friends were into their roles but not over the top.  Staying perfectly in character, Jason gently but firmly reminded them again and again that they had to be respectful for the process to work. He suggested they work through the issues one by one. There was a periodic recapping by one mediator or the other, followed by a request to both parties to confirm their understanding. It seemed to me this circling back to make sure that everyone agreed was the key to the step-wise progress.

About 90 minutes later, they reached a tentative settlement, which would be drafted and signed. That way neither party could truthfully say he had not understood or been hoodwinked.

While mediating between nations that have been warring for generations or more is obviously much more complicated, I felt like I had gotten a glimpse that night of how progress might be achieved. I mentioned that to Jason. He said, “If diplomacy is the key and outside channels are the only acceptable way to solve the issues, these [mediation] skills can be critically important.

“One of the biggest obstacles to making progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the emotional component. It will clear or divide a room in a second. There are things you have to look at, and things you have to put aside for the sake of accomplishing something. When the rug salesman and customer stopped lying to each other and exaggerating claims, they went away, if not happy, at least satisfied.”

The End