If nothing else, the deep divisions and culture wars in the US, and here in Canada too, are providing us with an opportunity to engage in deep practices of listening across difference. It’s harder now that it has ever been Dan Oestrich, who knows a thing or two about this, explains why.
Process artistry also has its place. Arts and well-hosted conversation are at work in Alberta where a group of researchers have initiated the Common Ground project to address stereotypes in the province. It is providing some useful lessons.
Depolarizing conversations is an initiative of my friends and colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum. It arose in 2021 during COVID when social media had divided families and small towns and disagreements had devolved into violence, assaults and the tearing of the social fabric. They have published some really helpful tools and resources on hosting these kinds of conversations. Get them while you can (and support them in continuing their work).
Irreconcilable difference is inevitable in a complex society but not every issue is an irreconcilable difference. Some are just conflicting perspectives. As long as we conflate conflict with war, we will maintain a tendency to want to avoid conflict instead of courting and supporting difference. Conflict transformation has long been the approach used to create a resilient container for what I call conflict preservation. We need this more than ever. And so do the orcas and the salmon.
One of the tools I use for working with polarities where there is a strong both/and situation is polarity mapping. I’ve written about it before but I love the way Kai Cheng Thom weaves it into her Loving Justice framework.
For more tools and training I can recommend Lewis Deep Democracy as one deeper approach to this work. It’s based in Arnold and Amy Mindel’s processwork. In Canada, I can recommend Camille Dumond and her colleagues at the Waterline Co-op. You’ll see my testimonial on their website. It’s accessible and practical training, even for experienced practitioners, and it will take your own practice deeper.
The hairiest road in British Columbia was built by the citizens of the Bella Coola valley back in the 1950s and it isn’t much different today then it was back then. A 1200 meter descent over 18 kilometres on a gravel road with no guardrails and the occasional 1000 meter drop to the creek below. The Tyee has published a terrific oral history of the tricky end of Highway 20. It’s such a story of its time, and even evokes the age old “free enterprise vs. socialist” trope that dominated BC politics for decades before everything became privatized and financialized.
Anyone driving that road needs a pep talk and although I haven’t driven it, I know that almost everyone who has relates contemplating their mortality at least once. Here is a poem by Rosemary Trommer about letting go.
A Little Pep Talk
The swirling ash
doesn’t try
to be become
log again.
The flying leaves
don’t attempt
to return
to the tree.
The girl
can’t untwist
her genome
back into
separate strands.
The flour
in the bread
can’t return
to the sack,
can’t undo
the kneading
of hands.
In all things
lives a memory
of letting go
and the chance
to transform
into what
it can’t know.
What do you say
to that, heart?
Good self,
what do you say
to that?
My memory is not what to used to be. Leaning into my ADHD, and then noticing changes over the years associated with the experience I had last year with COVID (and possibly right at the beginning of the pandemic too). That plus the way I now connect to people, having many important and meaningful conversations on the same screens week after week, with no difference in context to delineate or anchor our insights. But I’m developing some strategies. I rely on automated transcripts to help me remember what we are talking about, and to later recall conversations. I have stopped writing elsewhere on the Web, and focused here, where I own my words and they are gathered in a searchable archive. You won’t find me writing on any social media platforms and only occasionally will I comment elsewhere. Even then I will make a note here too, where I will always have access to it. Aeon today published an essay about recording everything, and on the face of it is seems dystopian, and with respect to the poem I just posted, it seem counter-productive to my own spiritual liberation. But then again, the worst experience for me is to know that I know something but I cannot recall what it is. I go blank and feel empty when I am in a position of needing to be in service. It’s embarrassing and makes me sad. I have no answers, just strategies to try, and I’m doing my best.
Dave Snowden has been hard at work diving into the complex domain (just one of the domains in Cyenefin, remember) as he unpacks how to work with anthro-complexity around strategy, risk, and change. Yesterday he published an important blog post on a new framework called WRASSE Have a read of it.
Tottenham faced Doncaster Rovers in the third round of the EFL Cup today, and it was a decently entertaining match. Spurs had some squad rotation at play, resting our centre-halves and replacing them with Danso and Palinha. Tel, Johnson, Simon, and Gray started in the midfield, around Bentancur and Odobart on the wing. Doncaster played well, especially in the opening of both halves, but Palinha’s bicycle kick and an own goal generated by our trademark wing play set the visitors on the back foot. Johnson was great, Gray was his usual reliable self and Tel had two glorious chances but got his feet tied up. It was a set piece clinic with Danso’s long throws steaming into the box and Simon’s corners causing havoc. Johnson made a solid claim to be a regular starter in a crowded field with terrific outside play and a late goal. Late in the match Luca Williams-Barnet made his first team debut, at 16 years old. He’s a bright young talent and received a very warm ovation when he came on at 86′. He scores at a rate of a goal a game in the U21 side. 3-0 in the end.
Yesterday I was working with a client who receives a federal government grant to do its work. The grant supports the coordination of a national network of organizations who are working with vulnerable people in communities across Canada, to support the work of a number of federal government policies. Over the past few years, these local organizations have been tasked with a an increasingly hard job, in a culture that is not providing them with much support. While I have been working with them, the support from the federal government has been declining, even as need is increasing.
We are planning a gathering of the network, one which many fewer people can attend than in previous years becasue of funding cutbacks. I’m working for a much reduced fee. The gathering we are planning is an important place for the network to connect and organize and the subject of our conversations together will be how to strengthen the connections between local initiatives in an era of coming austerity.
Yesterday, as we were planning, my client told me that the government funder expects that we provide them with evidence from this gathering that the conversations between people were “meaningful.” We are somehow being asked to collect data and write a report that shows this. This is not in our budget. The extraction of this harvest is not in the conference plan, and not what anyone desires to do with their precious time together.
A million thoughts swirled in my mind and a few came out of my mouth. Meaningful to whom? By whose standards? At what level? What does this sponsor aim to do with this “meaningfulness” metric and data? And what if the conversations we are having are meaningful because they are organizing the network IN SPITE of the funder? Because actually, that’s the reality. Everyone knows that this funder, despite their helpful contributions to the cause, are actually imperilling the work of the network with funding that isn’t even enough to get every member into the same room so we can talk about what happens next.
And then I got angry at the federal government’s audacity of austerity. How dare they ask us to do MORE while also cutting back core funding for this network that provides services to support federal government policies. Who is sitting in Ottawa saying “reduce their budgets by xx% and also ask them to do more things that are just for our own edification and confidence that they are spending the money well?”
Of course I am not going to release the identity of this group of people, but I can assure you that they do excellent work across Canada on issues that very few other people or organizations are able to handle. They provide safety, security and wellbeing for people that need it. And they are largely staffed by folks with lived experience of the issues that are at play. It’s a wonderful client.
We are heading into an era of austerity. If you are a government funder, I want you to know that the funding you are now providing to organizations needs to be used by them to organize for a future in which you are not a viable partner, and in some cases, you might even be the problem that needs to be organized around (“oh, you already get government funding? Our Foundation only grants to organization that have no other funding”). Years of funding cutbacks have ceded your authority to tell people what to do. And no amount of evidence based evaluation has stemmed the funding cuts, so you’ll forgive people who don’t believe that you need data to make decisions. It is clear that this is not how most program funding decisions are made, especially in an era where flat rate percentage cuts are being applied across the board. That is not to say that organizations that do essential work will not continue to advocate for themselves. But it does mean that, as a “partner” in the work, you won’t be at the head table any more. Folks will use what they have to try to survive you, not appease you. And when, in some bright future, funding is restored, it will be to a network that survived in spite of your “support” and not because of it.
It breaks my heart that folks who are just barely holding on to their jobs and doing essential work are being asked to spend time and money to provide funders with fawning thank you notes that their funding produced “meaningful” conversations. I can assure you that every conversation that folks in this network have is meaningful. Leave it at that.
While summer rolled to an end, a truly significant ruling on Aboriginal title happened in Canada when the BC Supreme Court recognized the Constitutionally protected Aboriginal title of the Haida Nation to all of its territory. This declaration was built on previous court cases, co-management agreements and the ground breaking recognition protocol signed last year. Since 2003, and really since the Delgamuukw decision in 1997 defined the concept of Aboriginal title as a form of title within Canadian law, the province of BC and the Haida Nation have been preparing for this day. There is no First Nation in BC with a more secure grasp on its traditional and historic territory than the Haida Nation. It was only a matter of time.
When we talk about “reconciliation” in Canada we are, technically and most significantly I think, talking about the reconciliation of two different sets of laws. The Court in Delgamuukw implored the government of Canada to figure out how to reconcile Canadian law with Indigenous law. Reconciliation means this: how is power shared between two legal frameworks that may have different objectives, and different methods of governing. In 1851 when the Crown stopped making treaties in what later became BC, it inadvertently ensured that Aboriginal title remained unextinguished. Aboriginal title refers to the rights in land of First Nations that existed before contact with European law. In Delgamuukw the Court basically said that the Crown can’t just show up somewhere, plant a flag, and declare thousands of years of Indigenous rights to be extinguished. In other words, the idea of terra nulls, that the land was empty before Europeans arrived, is not a legal concept in Canadian law. The land was full. And the obligation on the colonial powers of Britain and Canada, acting in the interests of the Crown, was set out in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. That obligated colonial authorities to negotiate with the owners of these lands before doing anything else in Indigenous territories. After 1851, Canada just stopped doing that here in BC, and the consequence is that every action taken subsequently by the Crown is in doubt as to its legality under Canada’s own law.
Now it’s important to remember that it is First Nations who have been saying, for the past 175 years, that there is a need to negotiate land rights. The intention all along has been to create agreements that would be of mutual benefit to First Nations and settlers to these lands. In legal agreements and negotiations, First Nations have never said that existing private property is in doubt or that settlers should go home. It is First Nations that have led the way in inviting relationships that are sustainable and mutually beneficial.
Because Canada just stopped making agreements in BC, First Nations here retained all of their rights and title intact. Traditional and historic Indigenous land uses have continued, despite Canadian government actions which forced First Nations off their lands, created a cultural genocide, and, in the case of the 1862 smallpox epidemic, leaned into actual physical genocide as canoes full of infected people were towed up the coast from Victoria all the way to the Nisga’a and Haida territory, leaving death and destruction in their wake.
First Nations have been true to their position of land ownership since the very beginning. They are the rightful owners of their territories and they have desired mutually beneficial relationships with the Crown. In 1910 at Spences Bridge, a number of Interior chiefs made a declaration that led with an invitation to create treaties.
For all this time in British Columbia, colonial governments have just ignored these requests, trampled rights and title, ignored existing treaties and applied Canadian law as if there was no legally recognized set of governments and people already on this land. In 1973, the Nisga’a finally gained recognition of their existing rights and title, nearly 60 years after they first demanded it. Although it was a split Supreme Court of Canada that wrote the decision, the case led to a negotiation of rights and title that lasted another 25 years and culminated in the signing of the Nisga’a Final Agreement.
The treaty process in BC has churned along since 1992 and meanwhile, First Nations have also been active in the courts with a series of decisions that confirmed the existence of Aboriginal as a concept (Delgamuukw) and then found that it actually existed on the land (Tsilhqot’in). From the moment that Delgamuukw was settled it was clear that it would only be a matter of time before the Haida pushed the envelope on this.
September 30 is coming up and in Canada that is a day set aside for the commemoration of Truth and Reconciliation. Lots of folks will be wearing orange shirts and learning about residential schools or participating in other public activities. I will be on Haida Gwaii that day, for the first time in my life, working with a co-managment board who jointly steward the wildlife in parts of the Northwest Territories. That is a body that is actively engaged in reconciliation of laws, of knowledge, of ways of relating to land and animals.
In my mind, no court ruling is needed to tell me where I will be. I will be in what has always been Haida territory, visiting an island archipelago that has been governed sea stewarded from time immemorial by the Haida people. Canada is a slow learner with respect to Indigenous rights. From the very beginning First Nations have seen the opportunity to build something together with the settlers that were arriving in their lands and the governments that were exercising authority. Through centuries of being ignored, disposed, killed, re-educated and denied the means to argue for rights and title. First Nations have continued to ask Canada to be its best self, to be in active mutual relationship and see what we can do together. It sometimes takes court cases to hold Canada and Canadians to account by the terms of our own laws. I’m good with that too.
If you do nothing else on September 30, or any other day for that matter, do yourself a favour and follow some of the history of the invitation that First Nations have consistently made to Canada. Understand that, despite the protestations of some of Canada’s political “leaders” who court short-term gain from stoking racism and outrage and misinformation about land and rights issues. Remember that he work of reconciliation is fundamentally about how we will permanently live together here in ongoing mutually beneficial partnership. Canada has always been afforded the chance to do the right thing, the beautiful thing and the moral and just thing. At any time we can seize that chance. Let’s do it now.