TO: Washington State University Faculty Status Committee
Co-Chairs Robert Rosenman,
Economic Sciences Greg Matthews Libraries
RE: Complaint of Academic Freedom Violations
DATE: April 27, 2017
This complaint is submitted by Dr. Robert Wielgus, Professor and Director of the Large Carnivore Conservation Laboratory (“Lab”), through his undersigned counsel against the Washington State University (“WSU” or “University”) and President Kirk Schulz, as well as Dean Ron Mittelhammer and Associate Dean James Moyer of the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences (“College of Agriculture”).
Dr. Wielgus alleges that WSU has engaged in conduct that has restricted his academic freedom and freedom of speech in contravention of the University’s own Faculty Manual. This complaint urges the Faculty Status Committee to investigate the wrongful retaliatory actions against Dr. Wielgus in violation of WSU’s academic freedom guarantees by the University and the College of Agriculture and to recommend disciplinary and other ameliorative action. Due to a pattern and practice of University suppression, condemnation, discipline, and reprisal concerning the presentation of his wolf/livestock research, the academic career of Dr. Wielgus has been seriously damaged and he has suffered physical, social, emotional, and financial hardships. Dr. Wielgus has previously attempted to resolve this matter internally with the College of Agriculture, however, these efforts were to no avail. Ultimately, Dr. Wielgus would prefer to resolve this matter amicably and expeditiously rather than through litigation.
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Comments
I’d wondered why Dr. Wielgus and Peebles did not respond to recent scientific statistical criticisms of their findings. The primary source of protections for wolves in this post-recovery climate has been through the publication of research from various university predator science labs.
The obvious fact of administrative interference with researchers isn’t well known to the public, and administrators appointed to and hired by Universities tend to be associated with some special interests not favoring necessary large relatively unexploited native natural ecosystems. This occurs due to the heavy and unethical mixing of financial wealth and status with political position and within educational institutions.
Science has in the recent century too involved with engineering for human control of environments. It is no longer learning to understand in the euxberance of life.
I would like to remind all involved that a wolf is not a symbol. Having enough intimacy with the subject including individuals, I would hope that those involved would pause to recognize that each individual wolf possesses a highly intentional and evaluative mind, that each experiences emotions and preferences, makes choices, including prospective lifelong choices, in part using surer senses that those social signals used among and by humans.
Due to past mistakes of indigenous inhabitants of North America in overvaluing the technologies and attributions of dissociated selfish religions used by those Euroamericans, even the symbolic thought processes and words used have become less accurate than the untold centuries of experience that shaped their own forebears.
Here I want to just use a couple words to show how thought and language can suffer the deadly infections brought by the emissaries of selfishness to this continent.
As one who has some indigenous blood and upbringing, but not enough to be accepted by the present hierarchical disputers, my only mutual relationships have been born of relationship with the living of other kinds since early childhood. Although taught a few skills by older relatives, I ran into their promotion of the imported religion dissociated from actual life. The words I’ll tansliterate are from the people of the seven council fires:
Wakan Tanka, is erroneously translated as “great spirit.”
wa in actuality means “something, a thing.” Kan is a short word meaning unknowable, mysterious. Tanka, means big, huge, unsurpassable in power. So the real meaning is more like one of the 16 or 17 things to which it was originally applied by the “allies” the Brother People, the people of the seven rituals:
great unknowable thing, powerful incomprehensible. a great unknowable.
It is not the property of another.
Here’s another little series of words:
Shungkmanitu tanka:
Shunka = younger brother, dog (the dog family the canidae, have been known to all the humans, and some wolves and close relatives had been taken from their dens for countless years in Asia, with evidence of this possibly happening even in Africa. While the people of this language used dogs with two lodgepoles for transport, and many others down into centroamerica had commensal or symbiotic relationships, those down that way were horribly surprised by the Spanish war dogs, whose presence and use are largely ignored by biased historians. So, not only words can be warped, but also other lives, other integrities.)
Manitu is a word taken from the Ojibwe, a different language (just as you might use the word naive). To the Ojibwe, Cree, and other Algonkians, Manitou is the word for wind. You know that spirit, sprite, and related words come from Latin and earlier; breath and wind are taken as similar by wordspeakers across the earth. Great wind, Gitchi Manitou, thus was this power, bringing storm, cloud, able to break even trees. It has direction, and direction allows us to impute meaning – this wind means coming storm, another fair weather. We shout when aroused, ourselves making stronger wind.
Tanka, Ive already tried to convey.
The Wolf is Sungkmanitu Tanka, Younger Brother of the Great Wind, the dog or youngbrother with the great lifeforce.; the great dog who is the wind, who is like the wind, undomesticate, free.
This wolf is not less than whatever power or intelligence we impute to other, sometimes imagined, forces that humans seek to petition for favor, to pray to for strength or protection.
Yet, it is like those who pray, vulnerable, able to live in joy and in suffering. It is subject to death, although false ideas of reincarnation have been applied to both.
A wolf has, as you yourself feel, one identity, never to be repeated upon the earth. It is mortality that confers ideas of variable power, just as it is mortality that gave us the capacity to love and treasure any other than our own self.
A wolf is born, is loved well by its elders in its Tiyospaye, its family, until it finds itself through testing its place, uniqueness, significance.
In some lightning way, it gains its birthright, an intelligence that senses and knows perhaps more than most or any human, – as you have seen from reports, it can spend a great part of its lifetime alone, gathering. I knew a wolf who taught me how to see whether a dog or a wolf was male or female, young or old, at the limits of my ability to see it. That Wolf could tell when I was in pain, ill, tired; acting to keep me within my bounds, as he was able to choose among prey or friend for his purposes.
On a night walking with this Wolf who had necessarily sought shelter from and among humans with me, two kids from the Red Lake rez said:’Hey! That’s a Wolf!.” They did not presume him to be other than completely himself. In his time, i used to introduce him to indigenous as “My Elder Brother”, for everything I learned even during his youth, has been clearer than anything ever said to me in words.
Others, of the culture in which you are immersed, which has so infected minds that they cannot understand the sole desire to learn, or to walk bonded with companion through darkest night, minds acquisitve to a tragic fault, would ask me, “what is his name?”
I responded, “”como se llama?” This is Spanish for “how are you called”, I would answer; “The wolf is not called. He is not property, never yours. He comes and goes as he chooses, mostly for greater reason than any you can understand.”
Those reasons are not yours, unless yours are to seek only what can become known for a moment.
The wolf is, like some others not prized, a being of integrity. His life embodies and exposes change. When the Dakota say Tunkashila to the ancient stone, this word, meaning ancient grandfather, arises from the understanding that we are all related, that all things change into others. THIS is what was seen , this exchange of breath, of exudation you barely smell a few yards away from others, that the wolf smells and through which he so surely knows (as the bear smells and knows).
I do not like that the word “sacred” is bandied about. To the Polynesians tabu/kapu means keep away, or unknown to you it must remain.
The wolf is intimate to some peoples, always a teacher and a sharer. To others, it is mere material to keep them alive in extreme cold. Those last, who came to the north of this continent far later than others, believe erroneously that every animal walking into the sights of their Eurasian gunsight technology is a “gift”, that it has “gifted” its life to them.
The wolf is not a possession to be so killed or owned, but a life as important as your own or your offspring’s. By right, its own children have equality to yours. Have you heard the Oneida tale of the equality, the equal need, of the wolf? The wolf was recorded by Lewis and Clark, as acting as separate equals. Thos eintolerant and psychopathic gunfreaks shot the wolves who mistook them for amicable hunting companions; the wolves had only known the buffalo peoples – Shoshone, Absaroka, Tsissitsa, whose leavings were good for the wolf, the coyote, the vulture, raven, fox, even the small birds, who cleaned the land, changing it.
Indeed, because the wolf balances life, taking away the excess of single kinds, allowing others to live, because it cleans the dead away, changing their last exudations into forms fit for the life and health of the future community of life, it is superior to humans who take and eradicate, pave over fro centuries even the seeds and plants.
I have seen the wolf translate bone, give his downy hair to the yet-cold spring. Birds gather it, weaving it to warm nesting chicks. The wolf does not symbolize, but takes part in constant change. All things you believe are sacred, and all those you do not, are made of all who have ever walked, or flown or swam, or sprouted from earth.
Tomorrow, all whom you see or sense, become something else.
Now alive only in my neurons, in my memory and use of senses, That Wolf, now dispersed, became part of all others who breathe and live, and, even if the humans of them lock their bodies in boxes within the earth, still even they have breathed structure into trees, who fall and are eaten, by those who are eaten, and some young wolf will inhale, detecting what lives even while growing from what is brought by the wind.
Some speak of seven generations of their own kind. I have spoken of other kinds unborn yet for hundreds of thousands and millions of years, to prevent their poisoning by those of my kind. Parts of you will disperse again, much even into life-giving air. There are others, forever unknowable to you, who will not understand your words, your buildings, your faces, your plastic trash.
They are equally worthy, sacred, or equally demeaned. How will you perceive, interpret, when you turn your eyes ?
Thank you for the Amazing Comment. I would like to turn it into an article with your permission.