Creating an Ethical Action Plan

Knowledge only changes the world if it is used. Now that you have learned about ethics, identified ethical problems on the reservations and around the country, what can you do about it? What will you do about it? Or will you continue to be a 'not-so-innocent bystander?'

At the tribal level, you can work with others to create a Citizen's Watch Committee. As we have repeatedly identified in this course, one of the problems that allows ethical issues to persist is there is very little oversight. What does exist is random. Abuse of travel funds, for example, will go on for months or years, then someone gets angry because their family member was fired from a position and the travel funds are used as an excuse for mounting a recall. A Citizen's Watch Committee could review tribal council, program and administrative acts and expenses on a regular basis and publish reports to the community on-line, in the newspapers and discussed on the radio. If employees and elected officials knew that their acts would be made public knowledge on a regular basis that in itself might reduce some ethical violations.

At the personal level, continue taking the time, as you have in this course, to develop principles of positive ethics. While most people think of ethics in negative terms - don't steal, don't lie, etc. there is also a positive aspect to ethics. Compassion is one such example. We need ethics to create the rules for our system - everyone gets the same number of days off, because that is only fair. Yet, when someone has a family member who is seriously ill, we bend the rules for that person. We don't give checks early because it increases the chances of people stealing from the organization by not working the hours for which they were paid - but when someone has a family crisis - divorce, death, a child leaving for college - we may make an exception.