From time to time as I travel around the country working on First Nations issues, I sometimes hear from non-Aboriginal people how First Nations were immigrants too, as if this somehow undermines the notion of Aboriginal title. While no one population group ever seems to stay put for very long, First Nations have had a very long history of occupation of the coast. Here in the Vancouver area settlements dating back 9000 have been discovered in a number of places along the Fraser River and in parts of Burrard inlet. These settlements would have been established not long after the ice melted 10,000 years ago.
But today comes news that even older settlements have been discovered on the coast. According to this story (read quickly; the link will rot), there has been occupation of Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) for up to 12,000 years:
“Pieces of two spear points discovered in a remote limestone cave on B.C.’s Queen Charlotte Islands represent the oldest evidence of human occupation on the Pacific coast of North America north of California.
Animal bones found in sediment layers next to the spear points on the west side of Moresby Island outside Gwaii Haanas National Park are confirmed to date back 11,800-12,100 years (a figure calculated from 10,500-10,800 radiocarbon years).”
If you compare that against what was happening in the rest of the world at that time you can see just how old First Nations occupation in British Columbia really is. For example, 8,000 years ago, most of these non-Aboriginal folks ancestors were just discovering how to grow cereals and domesticate sheep in Mesopotamia and Persia. It was only 5,000 years ago that Egyptian civilization got going. First Nations folks have been in this province for more than twice that amount of time.
Kind of funny to be involved in “land claims” with that kind of pedigree eh?
Starting a list of weekly linkage to interesting places I have seen but not dwelled much in this week:
- Carnegie Mellon’s Journal of Social Structure publishaed a paper called Visualizing Social Networks. Amazing, with lots of visuals. Via Abstract Dynamics
- A collection of atmospheric items of interest at Apothacary’s Drawer
- Co-creating value with customers at Beyond Branding
- January edition of Top Canadian Blogs from BlogsCanada
- New Google features from Google Weblog via boing boing
- Addictive fish feeding game
- Jim Moore on Why Blogs Matter
- In Praise of Individuation by Sen McGlinn: What I am beginning to question is a view shared by Marxists, many Liberation theologians, and some Baha’is, who see the individuation of society which accelerated so sharply at the enlightenment as a disintegrative, negative, movement.
- Cricket as pie-eating from Coudal
- The Future of Business by Dave Pollard: The company no longer needs centralized infrastructure or content management, or full-time information professionals. KM & IT really have become �everyone’s job�,
- The adventures of Ranger Tim in Limerick
I’ve been looking at flow states and transformative moments lately especially with relation to how these states lead to various forms of freedom. Today I find on Bernie DeKoven’s DeepFUN some words about what he calls “Coliberation.” It’s long but worh quoting in full:
CoLiberation: what happens when we work extraordinarily well together. Like on a basketball team or in an orchestra, when we actually experience ourselves sharing in something bigger than any one present. This is what I call the experience of the Big WE. It’s a corollary to the Big ME experience of self-transcendence. If the Big ME is the ‘peak experience,’ CoLiberation, the Big WE, is like becoming a whole mountain range.
I know I’ve experienced it in games and sports and the performing arts. And, what makes me especially hopeful, I’ve also experienced it in business meetings.
The central experience that led me to write my book The Well-Played Game was, in fact, a game of ping pong between my friend Bill and myself. Let me describe it to you, thereby exemplifying the selfsame example of the kind of experience I hope you will share with us:
‘My good friend Bill was and is so much better of a player than I that there was actually no reason for us to try to play a ‘real’ game. Playing for points was clearly pointless. So, we decided to just see how long we could keep a volley going. It was a perfect challenge for each of us. For Bill, just getting the ball to hit my paddle was an exercise worthy of his years of pongish mastery. After half the night of this, we managed to sustain an almost infinite volley. We actually lost count.’
That’s all that I ask. Some description of a shared transcendence that made you feel just about as big, ME-wise and WE-wise, as you can get. Larger than life. Enlarged by each other’s largesse. Beyond time.
And, corollarily speaking, those exceptional experiences of working together, when we’re really working and really together. As deliciously distracting as the technologies of collaboration may be, when collaboration is it’s at its best, so are we.
I’ve been calling these kinds of meetings ‘coliberating.’ It’s cute, because it almost sounds like something beyond ‘collaborating.’ But ‘liberating’ is only part of the truth. Yes, in deed, those moments in which we have actually managed to free each other from whatever constraints we usually impose on each other, these are truly and actually what you would call coliberating. But there is something beyond CoLiberation, beyond the meeting itself. Some coincidence of selves that undefines the limits of our capabilities. A coincidence having almost nothing to do with the meeting, and everything to do with the human spirit. Shared moments of unusual clarity, vivid communication. Spontaneous combustions of understanding.
I certainly see that in meetings I run, especially Open Space Technology meetings. And so, not coincidentally, it is interesting to note that Open Space folks like Jack Ricchuto and Ashley Cooper have been asking questions about this state recently too.
This is going to sound funny, but I startled myself with the thought today that I am a small-business owner and an entrepreneur.
It sounds funny because I was asked if I would like to compete on a request for proposals. I said “I don’t compete” which is true, because I am a one-man show and I CAN’T compete against firms with offices and slick marketing materials and secretarial support (all of which it seems is designed to make the firm look credible enough to win the bids it needs to support the infrastructure it has…I believe Buddhists call this samsara)
I have found that trying to assemble a team of my associates to compete in bidding processes takes up too much unpaid time, and I have been burned once by having ideas in a proposal stolen by the client and used by the winning bidder. That in itself was funny, because if they had asked me if they could use my process design ideas, I would have let them.
That’s because, I discovered today, my business model is one of service. Truly being in service. It is important to me to provide services to clients who are doing good things. Sometimes I even donate these services. Very often I give away knowledge about Open Space Technology (after all, Harrison Owen set the trend by refusing to copyright the process). If you want to shadow me on an Open Space gig to learn more about the process, all you have to do is ask. I run training programs, for which I charge, but if you are really interested, and you want to ride shotgun with me, you are more than welcome to come along.
Likewise there are a few clients for whom I work for free. This has included in the past my home community of Bowen Island, for whom I have facilitated Open Space meetings and participated in citizen engagement initiatives. I kind of see this as my civic duty. I have also worked for free for some First Nations simply because I believe strongly in what they are trying to do.
When I first left university and entered the workforce, I had a strong sense of my role in the world as modeled on a somewhat traditional role of Elder’s Helper, common to many Aboriginal societies. Basically the Elder’s helper acts as a companion for an Elder, running errands, cooking food, taking care of the person’s needs so that the Elder can deliver his or her teachings and contribute wisdom to the community. The helper gains a great deal in this role, including an opportunity to be exposed to teachings and wisdom in an intensive way.
That has always been my business model. The people and organizations I work for have inherent wisdom and much to teach the world. My interactions with them as a facilitator are intended to make it easier for them to do that work. In return I get paid, but more importantly, I get exposed to a huge range of teachings and learnings, many of which find themselves back to this blog.
Now I don’t mean to say that this business model makes me morally superior to those for whom competition is the the key. But it just occurred to me today, that after four years of being in business, that it is possible to run a successful business in a capitalist economy without competing. My business is based on offerings. I offer something to the market, I try to do a good job and if people like it, they hire me again. I am not perfect, and I make mistakes. I always vow to learn from my mistakes and my clients, like the good Elders they are, are generous in forgiving me.
So it sounds funny to say that I am a successful small-business owner and entrepreneur. But I am going to reclaim those words anyway, because today I learned that it is possible to be that while staying away from the samasara of competition.
Card from the Osho Zen Tarot
This thread on circles is getting some legs. It has generated a flood of responses at the Open Space email list, Dave Pollard picked it up and today Fast Company magazine’s blog quotes Dave. Wonderful!
And yet, my favourite response so far comes from my friend Ashley Cooper who emailed the OSLIST with this gem from the poet Osho:
“Your inner being, when it opens, first experiences two directions: the height, the depth. And then slowly, slowly, as this becomes your established situation, you start looking around, spreading into all other eight directions. And once you have attained to the point where your height and your depth meet, then you can look around to the very circumference of the universe. Then your consciousness starts unfolding in all ten directions, but the road has been one.”
it makes me think of looking around the circle, everyone in front of you and yet the road is just one. it also brings the sphere that someone mentioned (sorry i don’t know who) to mind. so is this what open space is trying to do… unfold people’s consciousness, offer an opportunity to look around the circumference of the universe?
Thanks, Ashley.