I’ve written before about the Aboriginal youth I’m lucky to be working with. One of them, Ginger Gosnell, is involved with the Assembly of First Nations and she shares some thoughts on the recent annual general assembly:
That is one of the differences between the current generation and the future generation of leaders. Young people don’t have the mind set that certain personalities will make in the end all the difference to an initiative’s successs…..As Nelson Mandela says, ‘it is what you make out of what you have, not what you are given that seperates one person from the next’….Overall, some things are worth fighting for, others are not. If it further divides the people, than maybe it’s not worth it….and if what you say isn’t registering with other people, than maybe you need to think about what you’re saying and then come back with a better solution or way of communicating.
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Gerry made a comment a couple of days ago about sharing books:
If we put our personal libraries into a database that we could share with our network of friends, they could sign up to get the physical book sent. Maybe I should write a blog entry with more detail, but the database would be more like a blogging network where we could annotate and post reviews or which books most profoundly affected us. It would also track where the books travel and get them back to their origin at the end of a sojourn.
I like the idea, especially the boomerang function, where the books come back. But I have to say, I’m far more taken by the unconditional anarchy of BookCrossing! It makes it hard to coordinate something, but Bookcrossing has the gift theory thing DOWN in practice!
And here’s another example, courtesy of my friend Terry McGee in Australia who is an Irish flute maker. He has what he calls a Roving Ambassador flute, which travels the world from one potential customer to the next. It’s a brilliant marketing tool (because he makes great flutes and you have to actually play them to believe how good they are) but beyond that, it shows remarkable trust in both the goodwill of complete strangers and the power of self-organization. Is this a small peek into the merged worlds of commodity and gift?
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At the Giving Conference Ruthann Prange convened a session which looked at creating a gather of facilitators for the common good. Her inspiratino for this was the tremendous offers of help from professional facilitators who showed up to facilitate the Listening to the City project in New York after 9/11.
Now a nice synopsis of this has been published at the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation newsblog.
I’ve had it in the back of my mind to perhaps undertake a conference in the Vancouver area of facilitators for the common good. Anyone out there intersted in getting something going? I’m thinking of an Open Space gathering perhaps at the Canadian Memorial Cetre for Peace. The Open Space I’m envisioning would be a project-based gathering where we come together to share ideas and opportunities for us as facilitators to contribute to the common good in the world around us. It would be about designing and implementing projects together. Thoughts?
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Aung San Suu Kyiback in 1999:
“We cannot drift along in any imaginary world. There will have to be great sacrifices, tremendous hard work and effort . We will have to wrestle with all our might to catch up with those countries that are ahead of us. Look at the two countries that lost the war – Germany and Japan. How they suffered and sacrificed the war. We have read about the hardship they went through. Because they made those sacrifices, they are the two leading countries in the world today. Similarly we will have to go through the same process. If you can suffer, you can gain. What is valuable can not be obtained without effort. Don’t depend on assistance (without strings attached) from here to there. There is no such thing as ‘without strings attached’. Strings get attached automatically. We, believers in Buddhism, know well all about this. Every circumstance has a reason and an effect and one’s deed predetermines one’s future.
Don’t take everything that you can get or everything that is given to you. Benefit will only be derived if you use everything you get honestly. Our country will suffer if we spend easily what is easily got. The giving will not continue.”
This is a very explicit acknowledgement of the bonds that gifts produce, and why RECEIVING is not always the best thing to do. Freedom comes from the ability to give, not the ability to receive.
At the end of chapter five in “The Gift” Hyde warns against this in using the example of a university unwilling to receive a donation from a dictator. To receive is to establish the bond, to attach strings. In Chapter six of “The Gift,” called “The Gift Community” Hyde buries a gem of a quote in a note to a discussion on the polarity of the individual and the community:
A gift economy allows its own form of individualism: to be able to say “I gave that.”…Individualism in a gift economy inheres the right to decide when and how to give the gift. The individual controls the flow of property away from him (rather than toward him, a different individualism).”
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Last month I was blogging about stories and I mentioned sitting in on a teaching with Nuu-Chah-Nulth Elder Julia Lucas who was using traditional stories to talk about contemporary sexual awareness with First Nations youth. This happened at an Open Space meeting I facilitated last year.
My friend Crystal Sutherland, who was in that session, just phoned me to talk about an idea coming out of that gathering. She is musing about finding someone to produce these stories on video and use them to reach street kids and other kids at risk. We kicked around the idea of animating these stories and showing at the end how the Son of Raven story applies at this day and age to real life sexuality issues for First Nations kids.
So imagine this: a collection of five minute vignettes all done with world class computer animation of stories narrated by Elders and told with a contemporary moral. These stories would be beautiful to look at and listen to, engaging all of the senses that storytellers play with. They could run on TV, on networks like the Aboriginal People’s Television Network or Maori TV in New Zealand. They would find a home on the web of course.
Street Kids International does this kind of stuff, working with animation. Aboriginal kids would love to see their stories up there, not as a cultural artifact, and not as a preachy lecture, but offered to them in the way in which teachings have always been offered: as a gift.
So anyone know some world class Aboriginal animators and production companies who might want to be involved? I can think of Ian Taylor in New Zealand. Who is closer to home? Who can we mentor in this project? And who might be interested in underwriting something like this?
We start to put out the tendrils, and I have people in my network who can actually get the project off the ground in terms of working with Elders, framing the stories and getting them to air. If you’re reading this, can you think of some way of contributing?
Link to posting about Julia fixed