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Monthly Archives "May 2007"

Excellent facilitation training opportunity

May 22, 2007 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized One Comment

A couple of mates of mine, Brenda Chaddock and Myriam LaBerge are hosting a practice retreat July 9-11, 2007 at Rivendell, here on Bowen Island called “Wise Action That Lasts: How to host, convene, design and facilitate meaningful conversations around complex issues.”   If you have been looking for great facilitation training, or an Art of Hosting type course around the west coast of North America, this one is for you.   Both Brenda and Myriam are smart and experienced women, great facilitators and fun teachers.   And Bowen in July is just pure heaven.

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Notes

May 21, 2007 By Chris Corrigan CoHo, Conversation, Links, Music, World Cafe 4 Comments

Starting a new regular type of posting. These are a series of short notes and thoughts, too small to warrant a post, but looking for a home nonetheless, and possibly becoming more. I invite your curiosity on any of this…queries may set me to growing these little guys into something more substantial.

  • Conversations that matter is the home for the world cafe Europe blog. Good reading there.
  • Dave Pollard on the distinctions between dialogue and debate. Dave wrestles with his conscience on this one and comes up with a finer grain analysis as a result. Interesting as usual, and deeply in tune with some stuff I’ve been thinking about lately regarding politics and conversation.
  • Sitting outside by the fire last night, I realized why the human eye can preserve its night vision when it is exposed to red light. The dying embers of the fire that were keeping me warm did not in the least affect my ability to peer into the forest at the passing deer, or to scan the heavens for globular clusters. That seems like a useful survival tactic. I wonder what the 21st century eye is able to see that will preserve our species?
  • You have to read this to believe it. The Sock-A-Month knitting club gets shut down by a bank after the gnomes suspect a scam.   You see?   If I didn’t have a little notes category, where would I have blogged this?
  • Music at the moment:   One-named Canadian singers Feist and Issa (formerly Jane Sibbery, new album forthcoming).   My ten year old daughter is listening to Avril on her iPod.   My goodness, they grow up quickly.   (Psst, Alex, I snuck some Zero 7 on there as well.   She loves The Pageant of the Bizarre!)

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links for 2007-05-21

May 21, 2007 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized

  • Barry Lopez – “Eden Is a Conversation”
    Eden, we should be at pains to point out, is not a place. Eden is a conversation. It is the conversation of the human with the Divine. And it is the reverberations of that conversation that create a sense of place. It is not a thing, Eden, but a pattern o
    (tags: conversation dialogue)
  • Toronto Arts Council – THe Creative City
    Every person in Toronto has the right to enjoy the rich cultural life that is the hallmark and pride of Toronto. Through partnerships and initiatives, TACF’s Block by Block program seeks to connect even the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods with the tra
    (tags: art community culture canada toronto)
  • Being on the Land | Orion magazine
    An article and photos by my neighbour Robert Semeniuk. Some nice recollections of his time hunting and living with Inuit in Nunavut in the 1970s
    (tags: inuit)
  • Housing, Sailing Vessels, Survival” | Orion magazine
    Scroll down…the future is in sail boats.

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Inspiration from Vaclav Havel

May 20, 2007 By Chris Corrigan Being, First Nations, Leadership One Comment

Vaclav-Havel.jpg

Readers who have been with me for a while will know that I have taken great inspration from Vaclav Havel over the years.   An artist, playwright, dissident and peaceful democrat, his writing on totalitarianism and post-totalitarian ways of being have influenced much of my work and thinking on working towards post-colonial First Nations communities and organizations.

Yesterday in the Globe and Mail there was a great interview with Havel and it was rich with quotes about what it takes to move from the idealistic state of a dissident to the hard work of institutionalizing large scale social change.   Because the Globe suffers from link rot, I’ll print the best ones here:

“We had no precedent for this experience,” he says in a slow Czech monotone. “There was nowhere to learn, nowhere to take lessons from, in a situation where everything was state-owned and in state hands.”

His dissident movement is often caricatured as a group of hard-partying slackers who suddenly found themselves with the keys to the palace. He isn’t entirely eager to demolish this image.

“We were a group of friends from various branches of the arts who had suddenly found ourselves in a world we had known only from a distance, and which up till then had been merely a target of our criticism and ridicule, and who had to decide very quickly what we were going to do with this world.”

It soon became apparent that a revolution, however bloodless, quickly turns into horrendous work.

“We had a clear idea about our ideas, about our visions, but the technicalities of the actual execution, that was a different matter. I mean, there was a lot of improvisation involved. And that’s my advice that I give to foreign dissidents; it is a lesson that they can learn from us so that they can avoid our mistakes, ” The ideas are important, but it is equally important how you implement these ideas, and to make sure that they correspond to reality.”

This was a hard lesson for anyone who had spent a lifetime in the idealistic world of resistance, and he is certainly not the last to experience it. The authoritarian governments of Europe disappeared almost overnight, but after a year of shocked celebration, what was left was hardly a paradise. Here was the question that the world has still not been able to answer: How do you move from a regime-controlled society and economy to a free, liberal democracy without damaging lives, casting millions of people into peril, giving birth to vast private-sector tyrannies of mafia capitalism? In Iraq, Afghanistan, China and Russia, this remains the central question. Even in Prague Castle, it wasn’t quite answered.

“The most unpleasant experience was how difficult and what a long time it took for the political culture to renew itself, to regenerate itself, to get rid of all the deformations coming from the totalitarian regime, how long a time it takes for a society to change, not externally but from within, because of course not everybody can be an entrepreneur.”

All of what he is saying here applies to First Nations communities as well, from the point that it is impossible to have a grand plan for how it will all work out to the need for internal decolonizationas well.   He elaborates on the idea that all of the change can be known:

“Somebody who is completely prepared for the course of history is a little bit suspicious,” he says slowly, raising his eyebrow in a faint smile. “Sure, you can ask yourself, ‘Why didn’t you have the whole democratic constitution written in advance.’ Or, ‘Why didn’t we have a complete set of laws ready in our hands?’ “You can’t just outline history in advance – I mean, this is something that the Communists and the Marxists always wanted to do. That was, of course, wrong, and it then ended up creating a prison situation, a gulag-type scenario, because they thought that the world could be designed in advance, and then whatever doesn’t fit into the framework they’ve designed should be chopped off.”

In the end though, the kind of change Havel began – and the kind many of us are engaged in across Canada – will be completed in generations.

“I don’t think that one generation is better than another generation – the ratio of good and bad character features are much the same in any generation,” he says. “But the specific type of damage that was caused by communism, the damage to human souls, of course it is something that this new generation of young people won’t be tainted with.

In our case, it seems to me that there is a need to create momentum that will undo the damages wrought especially by residential school, and I think this means one or two more generations during which it is important that First Nations communities retain their essence, build forward from their deep strengths and survive a couple of more economic cycles that may well result in more focus on local economies.   If we can do that without succumbing to the toxic forms of authoritarian leadership that sometimes arise as the shadows of this kind of change, then I think we are well placed for First Nations communities to survive and thrive in place.   It may be a dream, but so was Havel’s and this is why he stands in a central place in my pantheon of inspiration as the artist who clung to a vision that translated into a bloodless transition.   There is much to learn from his path.

[tags]vaclav havel[/tags]

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links for 2007-05-20

May 20, 2007 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized

  • Northern Soul – This England
    Granada TV documentary about Wigan Casino, a famous Northern Soul club in Wigan. The doc combines footage of historical industry in Wigan with footage shot for the 1977 show. It’s a strange but oddly engaging trip.
    (tags: music)
  • Stellarium
    A free open source plaetarium program. Now that the nights are warmer, and clearer around my place, this ought to come in handy.
    (tags: astronomy learning kids space)

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