In the midst of this federal election, I’ve weighed my choices fairly carefully, and I’m voting Green. Locally we have an excellent candidate running in Andrea Goldsmith who is currently a councilor at the Town of Gibsons, on the Sunshine Coast, just the other side of the inlet I live in.

For me, Aboriginal issues are a key part of the campaign, even if they seem to be off most people’s radar screens. But in this riding we have two First Nations who are well advanced in the BC Treaty Process. Both Sliammon and Sechelt have concluded or signed Agreements-in-Principle with the federal and provincial governments. In canvassing the parties on Aboriginal issues, this is what I found:

The Greens have a vague policy statement, but when I wrote to them with a few ideas on how to create sustainable First Nations communities through a combination of fiscal arrangements and green resource economics, I got a personalized email back from their policy chair and an invitation to continue to engage with the party after the election. I have never belonged to a political party, but I’d be happy to work with Greens in developing ideas that can be taken to Parliament and/or stolen by other parties.

The Liberals have the most extensive Aboriginal infrastructure in the country. They have a Commission within the party which features several friends of mine on the Executive. Their Aboriginal platform is small but vague. I have found in the past that when the rubber hits the road, the Liberals have stood back on Aboriginal issues. This includes:

• failing to comprehensively implement the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples recommendations (a watered down response was called Gathering Strength, and it has largely fallen by the wayside)
• an inability to embrace creative solutions to finalize treaties, especially in the fiscal relations area, leading to deadlocks at many treaty tables
• a refusal to follow up from the legal implications of the Delgamuukw decision on Aboriginal titles and an inability to discuss meaningful reconciliation initiatives.
• a disastrous Governance Act which almost became law over the objections of nearly everybody in the Aboriginal community. It was such a debacle that even the First Nations-led governance initiatives had a hard time getting started in response.

There have been a few Liberal successes, notably the Nisga’a Treaty here in British Columbia, the Urban Aboriginal Strategy and the Liberals did keep the Treaty process going while the provincial government was dithering, but in general, the Liberals seems shy to pull the trigger on real innovation.

The New Democrats offer platitudes in their platform (.pdf), but the most intriguing idea is guaranteeing Aboriginal seats in Parliament, much as the Maori seats are structured in New Zealand. I personally think that a better idea would be a push for proportional representation that would allow for an Aboriginal party to gain a meaningful voice in Parliament, much like New Zealand (see this interview with co-leader Pita Sharples). I’m also amused that the NDP will train 10,000 Aboriginal people in health, education and social services. In general a vague platform and other than the Parliamentary reform idea, one that is not long on creativity.

The Conservatives may be the strangest bunch of all. There is no reference to Aboriginal issues in their platform that I could find. So I called my current MP, John Reynolds, who is a senior member of the Party and asked him his opinion. He said that the platform does contain two ideas, one involving converting reserve land to private land so it can be used as security for equity. No mention of how to protect community assets though. Also his party supports the rights of Aboriginal with respect to matrimonial assets.

When I asked him about the treaty process, he said all he wants to do is see it get moving. When I asked him how he asked me for some ideas, and I shared the same ideas on fiscal and tax reform with him as I did with the Greens but he didn’t seem interested. I asked about his relationships with local First Nations and he said that Maynard Harry, the chief at Sliammon is an NDP member and slags him all the time, complaining that Reynolds never meeting with the community when in fact he said he meets with people in the community who have been opposed to the chief.

Reynolds also told me that a Conservative government would have strong leadership on Aboriginal issues from John Duncan “who’s wife is a Native.” Duncan is well known for his opposition to the Nisga’a treaty, calling the “Nisga’a Disagreement.” He is not widely regarded as an ally of First Nations interests in his riding or nationally.

So why am I voting Green? If you look at the Green platform in it’s totality and apply it to First Nations communities it provides for a very comprehensive set of ideas for creating small sustainable resource communities which is exactly what First Nations need: culturally sustainable communities and viable economies. Increasing integration with industrial economies has only heightened tensions between First Nations and non-Aboriginal communities while depleting resources within traditional territories before agreements can be signed. For small isolated communities, Green ideas point the way to sustainable futures culturally, socially and economicially.

Storytelling Practices

As an addendum to the series on storytelling, here are some specific facilitation practices I use in working with stories with groups.

• In order to learn about the organization I am working with I ask for stories from people one on one using appreciative questions designed to draw forth the best of the organization or community. Often I ask people to tell me stories that reflect the spirit of the organization or describe moments of flow, compassion, and collective or individual excellence. You can find some of the questions I use here and here. This helps set the stage for process that “grow more of what works.”


• To work with organizations experiencing grief, I often hold a storytelling circle. Depending on the organization this usually takes the form of a talking circle whereby we use an object like a stone or an eagle feather as a talking piece. This is either circulated or placed in the middle of the circle, and people are invited to retrieve it and speak, telling a story about themselves or the organization, or whatever is relevant to the situation at hand. Often, working in Aboriginal organizations and communities, I work with local Elders who can hold space for grief in a deeper way while I hold space for the process.


• In scenario planning and future-oriented strategic planning, I ask people to create the stories of their futures. For scenario planning, this process can be very intensive and occur over a long period of time as we consider possible scenarios facing the group. In other formats, especially where we are working with appreciative processes this can be as simple as asking people to put themselves 10 years in the future and telling the story of how they got there.


• When facilitating Open Space Technology meetings and depending on the context I invite people to record stories in their notes from the sessions. I often refer to these stories at the opening and closing points of the gathering, in order to point to some of the key things that are holding the group’s attention as a way of focusing the event.


• When working with diverse stakeholder groups, I invite the non-technical participants to share stories and ask the technical participants to reflect these stories back in terms they can understand. This real-time translation process helps people to come to a meeting from equal positions of power (you have the technical expertise, I have the story) and it encourages people to see the world through different eyes. It also ensures that technical people capture the spirit of the information in a way that makes sense for the non-technical participants. Storytelling in this context moves people into a human space where they are jointly making meaning of the world rather than one group using its own language and jargon to dominate the other.


• Of course by keeping a weblog, I engage in personal storytelling almost every day.

Feel free to add your own storytelling practices in the comments, or at the storytelling page on my Open Space Wiki.

And for more storytelling resources for group process work check out the resources at StoryAtWork.com

36 by Justin O’Neill

Eighteen years ago today I turned eighteen.

Two whole lives spent coming of age.

Interestingly, it actually feels like something is different this time around. Is it possible that we divide our lives into 18 year periods? What happens at age 54?

My final installment on working with stories in my facilitation practice.

Stories to Remember who we are

The best teachers tell stories. They will sit you down and tell you a story about someone or something that was facing the very situation in which you find yourself. All the great religious leaders told stories. Many of their stories focused on the fact that the wisdom we need is available to us right now. That wisdom may be ancient, but there is nothing new under the sun.

I am a keen collector of teachings from Aborginal Elders. By teachings I don’t mean stories commonly thought of as “the myths of Indians.” Rather, I covet and value the wisdom that is shared by my Elders who aim to make it directly applicable to my present situation. Whether it is Herb Joe’s teaching about “poor weak human beings” or Sonny Diabo’s lessons about the life path, Elders show us that the stories that are ancient and deeply embedded in our cultures have applicability to the present day.

First Nations communities suffer from a couple of centuries of objectification. Our stories and teachings have been collected like museum pieces and stored on shelves and in books where they seem to atrophy and become more and more distant from daily life. It is not uncommon to hear people questioning the value of these old teachings and their relevance to contemporary situations. This has created a very disempowered situation. Without our own stories, we go to the stories of others, and those who have the most powerful story telling technologies (TV stations, media outlets, films) have also had a fairly consistent agenda of colonizing indigenous peoples. Mass media continues the colonization of indigenous peoples by giving us stories that are not our own, filling the vacuum left by the loss of our traditional technologies.

You might well be forgiven for thinking that the traditional modes of passing on stories have disappeared if you have never heard an Elder teaching. But once you discover that these teachings are very much alive, and what’s more, they are OURS, something shifts. You begin to look for more and more knowledge that is actually borne from life in this place, stories from our own families and territories. Stories about the land and the people and the situations that haven’t changed even if the cultures have. It becomes clear that the stories and teachings are still current, that they are relevant and more powerful than imported stories because they are from the land beneath your feet.

Indigenous peoples are indigenous through the connection to land. For centuries the land has been interpreted through stories. So to reconnect people to their lands, the stories must be told and the cultural understanding set in the enduring context of who we are, where we have come from and where we are right now. Traditionally, stories were not mere curiosities served up to pass the time and entertain. They were the fundamental clues to living a healthy life in a very particular place. And they remain current.

I once listened as Nuu-Chah-Nulth Elder Julia Lucas told stories of son of Raven and son of Mink and how they tried to have their way with the young women of the community. Terrible and painful fates befell both of them as a result of their sexual improprieties. They were funny stories, but they were offered as earnest teachings about sexual health for young people. And they are just as current in an age of AIDS and other STDs as they were in the old days, when the punishment for sexual misconduct could be pain and death from other means. For the youth who were listening to Julia, these stories really sank in. They were their stories, their teachings, stories about their ancestors and directly relevant to their lives.

Having these stories and the realization that the stories are yours is a tremendously empowering thing. It can be truly transformative to realize that all the cultural baggage you seem to have been saddled with is actually important, relevant and exclusively yours. If you have this knowledge available to you, then you don’t need to go outside for your stories. You can remain true about who you are, secure in your identity and gifted with your teachings. From this place of power you can go out into the world and hear the stories of others with open ears, seeing them for what they are rather than attaching to them to fill a gap in your life.

I think this lesson applies to any group with a shared culture. This is why Open Space Technology meetings work well in organizations. People create their own agendas around the stories of the organization and over the course of a day or two, folks realize that what they have in the room right now, in this moment, is far more precious than they ever thought. By telling stories, recapitulating history, interpreting each other’s inner lives and sharing lessons learned, people come to realize that their own experience has immeasurable value to the group.

This is not a prescription for group-think or navel-gazing. It is rather a call to understand how important the tacit knowledge inherent in any group is to that group’s destiny. Stories are the DNA of culture. They reflect where you have come from and they determine where you will go. You can augment your DNA with other genes, but the stories you have right now are the ones that have brought you to this point. They are responsible for every piece of success and every taste of failure. Learning from these stories, seeing the successes as things to replicate and taking medicine from the failures is what propels you forward without dependence on outsiders. It gives you strength to move in the outside world secure in who you are and what you are doing. It allows you to be focused on your purpose while you interact with a learn from your environment.

Stories mediate our inner and outer worlds. They are the glue that joins the two together and brings us fully into the present in a holistic and healthy way. Knowing our stories gives us tremendous power: we are clear about who we are, how we make meaning of the world around us and we know how that world has been interpreted through our real or metaphorical ancestors. We are able to benefit from our unique inheritance and work to create an even better one for our descendants.

Our job is to take all of this and be in the world in such a way that the stories that are told about us give hope and power to those who inherit our legacy. It is no small challenge, but it is within each of us. All we need to do is to remember what we are doing right now, so that when the time comes we can say “once it was like this…” We will all be Elders at some point and we will be called upon to share our life’s lessons with others. How will we benefit those people?

What will our story be?

Stories to move us through grief

Any time people have to accept loss, the grief cycle is triggered. To various degrees people experience shock and anger, denial, acceptance, letting go and reframing. This process is subtle for small things like having a trusted colleague moved to a different project but it can be full blown if people experience a trauma such as a death or a similar emotional upheaval.

Change brings loss, and because change is constant, so is the emotional response to what is being lost. In other words, as my colleague Birgitt Williams is fond of saying, “there is always grief in the room.” Working with grief is a key skill for facilitators and storytelling turns out to be an important way people move through loss and get to a reframing stage in their lives, with an ability to see possibility in the future.

Sudden change triggers a defensive mechanism. We get our backs up, express shock and experience anger at the way our world has been shaken. And then, as if to stem the tide, we engage in denial strategies to try to stave off the reality of the situation. To move through this and accept the fact of change, it helps to be able to remember and honour what has been lost. And so stories become a very important part of the grieving process. This is why we create space for stories at funerals. In Maori culture, friends and family gather in the whara nui (big house) with the body of the deceased to tell the unvarnished truth of the life which has ended. Relatives get to hear the full story, the good and bad (and sometimes the ugly) as people come to remember the dead.

This process helps the whole community to remember the person and to accept the death. It also serves as a catharsis to enable people to move on. Likewise, in organizational life, telling stories is a very important way to deal with large scale changes.

I was recently working with an organization that was experiencing a lot of staff dissension and management turnover. People seemed to be fighting over everything and there seemed to be no one cause for all the trouble. After talking with people for a while it became clear that the organization was facing a fundamental shift in its mandate and direction. This shift had come from the Board of Directors and had been refused by the Executive Director, a founder of the organization. He left angrily and the staff morale broke down after that. Over the course of a year, a once thriving and important regional organization became impotent and toxic.

This shift in direction was a very difficult thing to accept for the people who had worked for a long time in the organization. Many of them weren’t prepared to accept the change and it became clear that they were trying to hold on to the status quo as much as possible. Letting go was hard.

So, in preparation for a strategic planning retreat, we held a day of story telling, where the employees and the Board together could tell stories about the organization and the founder and the great work that had been accomplished. People honoured one another and the mood of the gathering was solemn but, like the aftermath of a storm, seemed to be clearing. The storytelling session gave the staff a chance to remember what had been and tangibly let it go, sometimes with humour, sometimes with tears. After several hours of storytelling, people became clearer, more able to envision an uncertain future. It made the subsequent work a little easier because people were more open to new things.

Story telling like this creates openness in a situation that feels like the walls are closing in. When people are under stress and in conflict it is usually a sign that the emotional space they share has become too small. Storytelling sessions, in the truly natural, round-the-campfire, natural mode can have the effect of both releasing emotional energy and building a new shared emotional space. And sometimes to move forward, that is the kind of ground you need to have sown.

Next, how remembering stories from the past help us to move forward secure in the knowledge of who we are.