Yesterday I spent most of the day honouring people who have worked for decades to preserve and grow the Skwxu7mesh language. I’m on the advisory board of an organization called Kwi Awt Stelmexw, which supports Skwxumesh language learning and fluency. Kwi Awt Stelmexw translates roughly as “everyone who is here in the present moment” meaning ancestors and descendants. It is for these people that we are all doing our work. There are only a handful of fully fluent Skwu7mesh speakers currently. When I say a handful, I mean 7. My friend Khelsilem has been ramping up fluency capacity with an …
Last weekend I took a ramble across Bowen Island, where I live, with a friend and colleague, Annemarie Travers. Annemarie and I have been teaching the Leadership 2020 program for a number of years now and we both love walking: she on the long pilgrimages of the Camino and Shikoku and me in the mountains of southern British Columbia. We are also both interested in managing in complexity.
Spent an hour in conversation with a friend in the US last night discussing the role of dialogue in connecting communities together. My friend has extensive experience working with immigrant, refugee communities and in working with inner city agencies. He’s been personally affected by Trump’s travel edict as his family members are directly targetted by the current travel ban. He’s a man I respect very much. We were talking about ways to connect and understand the “other side.” After our conversation I stumbled over this podcast on the “deep story” of what is motivating Trump supporters, and probably both Brexit …
Metro Vancouver Parks, the entity responsible for a major regional park on my home island has posted a warning about the conditions on Killarney Lake. Or perhaps it’s a commentary on global affairs.
This morning, I’m reading this article. It’s a review of two books charting the changes in fishing practices in the north eastern Pacific over the last century. I’ve been witness to some of these changes, directly involved as I’ve watch abundant fish stocks in British Columbia become concentrated in the hands of a few corporate owners, with most of the economic activity associated with those fish moving off shore. Fishing communities in British Columbia are a mere shadow of their former selves, our coastal waterways (and wild salmon migration routes) are dotted with farms that grow invasive Atlantic salmon using …