An excuse we have seen on the reservation for not taking a stand is that "We all need to get along". This is said in many ways, using our culture as an excuse, that we are family-oriented and Joe has a lot of relatives so we don't want to cross him. This is a small community. Without a fair ethical system, people may have bad feelings over injustices that will last for a long time (years, generations) and make our work ineffective. As we said at the beginning of this course, it is not a complicated problem. But, it is a difficult problem. People try to make it a complicated problem by avoiding, not facing reality.
A recent example occurred when a board met on ending the contract of an employee who had engaged in many instances of misuse of tribal funds.
The employee's supervisor asked the board to just accept his unethical behavior, "...so we can all just get along and have less conflict in our community. After all, the person only has one year left in that position." For this person's viewpoint, after all, this use of tribal funds and property for personal gain had been going on for three or four years and just been uncovered, or, at least, just now been brought to board attention. The supervisor considered another year an acceptable price to pay for maintaining peace in the community.
One board member replied,
“Regardless of what happens, the staff and community members will learn of his dishonest behavior and wonder why we let him get away with it, again. I don't want to be the one to say, ‘it is his last year and we are trying to get along with him’.”
Calling it misuse of tribal property, bringing up the conflict it would cause in the community, talking about our family and consensus orientation, all of that made it complicated. The choice was very simple. An employee had been caught stealing from the tribe and should be fired. It was simple and obvious, but not easy, which was why the supervisor wanted to make it complicated so we did not have to face the hard choice.