A Brief History of Where I've Been for the last 8 years, Part Two...

The job was located on tribal land which isn't that unusual in my home state, but I never really worked that directly on tribal land before. This tribe was a small-to-medium sized tribe. They had a section of land on the edge of the small town named after them. It was a mix of new and old buildings, the old ones obviously going back to the late 19th century. Many of them were boarded up but some were still in use. There was one that was more like a house that had been boarded up. I was told that had been a boarding school. Often wondered how much bad energy was in those buildings.

The tribe was always building something, new bridges, a senior center, a new gathering place for their pow wows, which were always the major events for their community. They had a police station which was one of the newer buildings. There was a dog who had the run of the place. The tribal employees paid for her food and shelter. She had a fancy dog house behind the police station. When the weather turned cold, the dispatcher at the police station would put a sweater on her, though this was a long gradual process that started in the fall. The dog occasionally was allowed inside the police station, though I was walking by once when I saw her being shooed out the door by the dispatcher, who was giving her a dirty look. Her name was Ju-da-ke, which was "girl" in the tribal language.

The people were probably the friendliest of anywhere I've worked. I'm still in touch and friends with many there, and they helped me with references at this most recent job. I often wish I hadn't left, though it was not really my idea to leave. I have many happy memories of walking outside, past the old buildings and wondering about how they might have looked 100 years before.

My office roommate was Osage, and always kept me informed on the latest goings on with their tribe. I learned a lot about their traditions as well...yearly dances for each of their three districts. She often complained about the Osage from out of state having too much sway in tribal elections. "They vote these people in but we're the ones who have to live with them." This is a common complaint with many of the larger tribes, including mine. Their chief was removed from office while I was there, and that was the talk of the clinic that day.

Many of the employees wore military uniforms to work each day. They were part of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. This was a quasi-military branch that held positions in many of the healthcare facilities operated by the federal government. You've heard of the Surgeon General. These are the other people in the army. In that particular region of the agency, the commissioned officers more or less ran the entire organization. I've since learned that this greatly varies by region, though at the headquarters level it is also like that. Generally, the officers were in the healthcare professions, though they also were in I.T. and engineering. My coworker did not like the Commissioned Corps. Her husband and son were combat veterans and she disliked how many of the corps members thought they were equivalent to the military. They also were much more expensive to employ than the regular "civilian" employees. When we had a government shutdown in 2013, most of us had to work unpaid--except for the Commissioned Corps because they were technically considered military and exempt from the shutdown.

My wife finally joined me just over a year later. We bought a house in Tulsa, which was probably a mistake. I had to commute a long way to work each day, about 75 minutes each way. The job didn't pay as well as I'd hoped, and we were struggling financially. The job market in OKlahoma was not that great for public health jobs, and my wife struggled to find anything above minimum wage. That's the thing about a lot of these states that claim low unemployment---most of the jobs are in the low wage sector. She was offered a position with her previous employer, a promotion, but it would be in the Bay Area. We had to prepare to leave and move back--just a few months after we'd moved all our possession out of our multiple storage units from California.

To Be Continued, eventually....