November 10, 2010

Roaming Buffalo Clan
C T Terrell Unit
1300 FM 655
Rosharon, TX 77583

Dear Brothers,

I have for weeks been frustrated and perplexed in trying to see how effectively to continue to assist you in the secure establishment of your Native American religious organization at the time and distance that separate us. I have waited – not for inspiration, exactly – but for some way to open for your needs to be met, especially the need for you to be visited regularly by a teacher or spiritual advisor from within the frame of Native American spirituality. I have exercised some contacts that I have and sought the advice of Friends but no clear pathway appears to me.

As things now stand, I have no capacity to become a regular visitor to you; and I am reluctant simply to continue to write on your behalf to the Texas division of corrections or the chaplaincy offices. While they accommodated me in some measure last summer by allowing me to visit you and to speak with them at length after a number of correspondences, it is clear that they are firm in the exercise of their prerogatives and remain resistant to appeals – mine, anyway – for the ease of burdens, even when those burdens by objective measure – mine, anyway – fail to meet the prevailing legal standard. I have experience now with both the measure of their response and non-responsiveness, their accommodation and restrictions; and they hold me at the disadvantage of not being a “qualified” native practitioner. While I believe that they respect my intentions and may even have been influenced in some small measure by my persistence before now, their capacity to ignore my further appeals exceeds my ability to press them with effect. The fact that I was not even permitted to provide you, in person, with herbs for your own immediate use or to join with you in ceremonies of your own direction – restrictions that are unique in my prison visitation experience – is both depressing to me in spirit and discouraging to me in action. Brothers, I am halted. I think we must, all of us, look for another way.

If the Texas DOC will continue to ignore righteous appeals – yours and ours - for the relief of the burdens upon you, perhaps you should, in the spirit of the ancestors, ignore them, as best you can. By this I do not mean that you should act in any way contrary to the good order of the institution but rather that you should try, in a Good Way, to trust and rely upon yourselves. If your contract chaplain is no longer there to instruct, turn inward and around and learn from one another. I know that this may sound like feeble advice and that you may believe that you have already exhausted this possibility. Maybe you have from a position of dependence upon the institution but not, I venture, from a position of independence in mind and spirit from it. I encourage you to believe that each of you has within you a part of what all of you need and that if that can be illuminated it will begin to give you some sufficiency. If you will consider to do this, I will provide you with some tools with which to begin.

Attached to this letter are a series of fifty (50) questions that you can use (and re-use) to evaluate yourselves as a Native American Hoop and sixteen (16) questions about your individual experiences as isolated members. If you record your collective answers to these survey questions, it might well be used to inform and encourage someone on the outside whom you now do not know and who does not yet k now you. In any event, it will give form and structure to your meetings, however and whenever you can arrange to have them. I see no reason why, if you meet and conduct yourselves in good order, that you should be restricted from this reflection. Brothers, self-led is self-directed; and self-directed is self-reliant.

There is another phase of this process – a number of phases, actually - which I have previously exercised but the one is rather technical and would not be useful to you at this time. If you can progress with this, though, it might yet be brought to bear.

Brothers, thank you again for sharing your troubles with me and for your confidence. My regret is that I cannot offer a better service to you.

William O. Miles
INDIAN AFFAIRS
Homewood – Stony Run