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 immersion program at Simon Fraser University and we are now about to witness the graduation of that first cohort of 14 people who are well on their way in their fluency journey.
Yesterday Khelsilem hosted a ceremony to honour everyone who had done so much to keep the language alive, and who had brought us to this point where we can build a fluent future.
During the ceremony yesterday several speakers shared their thoughts and a few powerful images came to mind. Chief Ian Campbell talked about the return of the herring to our inlet, Atl’kitsem (Howe Sound) which has signalled a shift in the story that people have about this place. People are beginning to harvest herring eggs again using the old practice of placing cedar or hemlock bows in the water and allowing the herring to spawn on them
I reflected that alongside the return of the herring comes the return of the language. Just in the last five or six years as we have seen numbers of these fish increasing, we have also seen the use of the Skwxw7mesh language increasing as well. It is as if every herring is a word and every language learner is one more bough placed in the water upon which the language can spawn.
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 supporters and other Europeans struggling with how the world is changing and how they perceive their privileges coming apart. We talked about how there is always a thin slice of people that will never sit down with “the other.” We also spoke about the many main street Republicans who feel abandoned by their party and have done since the Tea Party took it over. It comes down to the fact that arguments on economics and policy cannot overrule the emotional aspects of identity, especially when people feel those identities are under assualt through no fault of their own.
In her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild tackles this paradox. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they’re actually voting to serve their emotional needs
The image of standing in line to get your rewards and watch people stream past you is compelling. It’s one thing to deconstruct this image with data and facts, but first it’s important to understand it and how people deeply FEEL it.
Deep story is fascinating to me. Here in my home community of Bowen Island, we experience tensions from time to time over our deep story. We all have ideas about what we think this place is and who we think we are. To some extent that story is an illusion born in our world views and our desires. In a place like Bowen Island, where most of us moved here from somewhere else, our own deep story includes the deep motivation that brought us here.
And deeper beneath the personal deep story we bring is the emergent and slowly changing story of the island’s identity. Over the last couple of years, as a member of our local Economic Development Committee, I have worked with friends and colleagues to understand our deep story. Once you can see it, it reveals the deep yes’ and deep no’s that make things happen or hold things back. People are often surprised by things that go on in our little community, but understanding the deep story helps to explain where these things come from.
When you understand the deep story, you can find deep places to connect together and important places of engagement and curiosity. Dialogue gets more interesting as we set out to learn about each other, what we care about, what we assume is true, and what is essential to our identity. Strategy that does not take the power of identity into consideration creates implementation plans that will inevitably endure oblique assaults on its efficacy. Understanding the deep story and identity of a place or a person is essential to resilience, collaboration and peacemaking across difference. A healthy community can hold different stories in all their complexity, even when those stories conflict with each other. An unhealthy community pits one story against another, and cynical leaders do the same.
We have a choice as citizens. This podcast helps us become resourceful in making that choice.
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 a bevy of damaging industrial farming practices. Aboriginal rights are constantly challenged and whittled away even as individual non-indigenous owners grow rich and the fish that are critical to healthy indigenous diets are rendered scarce.
Largely this is due to a practice of creating Individual Transferable Quotas, which is basically an amount of fish that you can transfer to someone else through a lease. You can read a detailed piece on this here. Bottom line is that the nature of the system has shifted the wealth generation in fisheries from food production to ownership. You get rich by leasing your quota to someone who barely makes a living catching your fish.
This is much like the way the financial system works too. The fastest way to get rich these days is to trade in financial instruments, whose value is propped up by management practices that make companies so efficient that they return a healthy profit on their capital investment. This means that to create a profitable financial instrument like a share or a bond, you need to suppress or eliminate your company’s costs. Obvious candidates for this include limiting wages, cutting corners on safety and environmental protection and either doing the bare minimum to comply with regulations, or investing in a lobby effort to reduce the burden of regulation that protects the public interest from your efficiency mandate. Managers and leaders in the private sector are told to return value on the investment before everything else.
The mantra of efficiency is so widely accepted now, that it appears increasingly in the public sector as well:
[British Columbia] Premier Christy Clark riled school trustees Wednesday by referring to the $54 million in administrative cuts facing districts as “low-hanging fruit.”
“…there is no reason that in the back office — the part that has nothing to do with delivering educational programs on a local level — there’s no reason we can’t find savings there.”
B.C. School Trustees’ Association president Teresa Rezansoff said Clark’s comments ignore the fact that school districts have been making cuts for years.
“It’s inaccurate to say that we haven’t already been doing this stuff and it doesn’t reflect the reality in school districts,” she said. “It also is not a fair recognition of the really tough decisions and hard choices that have already been made in school districts across the province.”
Rezansoff said districts will continue to look for efficiencies, but she questioned their ability to find $29 million this year and a further $25 million in 2016-17 as stated in the provincial budget.
“I don’t believe, and I don’t think anybody in our sector really believes, that the $29 million is going to be found in shared services,” she said.
NDP Leader John Horgan said Clark’s comments reflect her fuzzy thinking on the issue.
“Low-hanging fruit usually gets picked in year one or two or three of a mandate,” he said.
“We’re in year 14 and I think school boards appropriately are responding by saying, ‘How many times are you going to come to us saying we’re the bottom of the tree?’ ”
Management practices these days manage for efficiency which on the surface is widely accepted as a good thing. But there are things in human experience for which efficiency is devastating. Love, care, community, and attention are all made much worse by being efficient. Where those things intersect with the “efficiency” agenda is where you will find the thin edge of the wedge for social breakdown, erosion of community and poor physical and mental health. An efficient education system does not produce learners. An efficient health care system does not create wellness. And efficient economic structures don’t produce vibrant local economies.
In this sense the thing that drags upon efficiency is the commons: that which we share in common, which is owned in common and governed in common. Resources like fish and trees and pastures and water and air and minerals and energy all used to be commons, and some are still commons. Other intangible commons include human knowledge, culture and community. In order to keep these commons, you must make their exploitation inefficient. Inefficient economies are costly, and the reason is that there are many many hands through which money passes. In economic terms (and in other living systems) this is actually a good thing. The more people you have involved in something, the more the benefits are spread across a community. Efficient use of the commons enables enclosing and privatizing the commons to streamline its exploitation. An efficient pipeline of wealth is established between ownership and benefit with very little wealth going to those that add value. In other words, the those who can own things get richer and everyone else loses their common inheritance.
Efficiency is the spiritual practice of the religion of scientific management. Under its spell, we have not only privatized once abundant shared natural resources, but we have also privatized our intellectual and cultural commons. Even as we beat the drums for more and more efficiency, we lament the loss of community and local economies, the loss of personal attention and care in education, health, social work and public services. We despair at the high cost of post-secondary education (where we have privatized the costs and made banks profitable from funding the system with student loans from which students can never escape, even if they go bankrupt). We complain that the fish are gone, that our natural assets are depleted. We call for individual rights to usurp public interest, because a fallow public interest is seen as economically wasteful.
Technology has enabled a massive level of efficiency to serve the rapacious appetite of profiteers and neo-liberal policy practitioners. It has also enabled us to begin to re assert the commons, enabling networking, participation and gifting to re emerge as tools by which people can make a living. It is only a failure of imagination and will that requires us to continue down the path where everything is owned. Participatory technologies, including social technologies like dialogue and collaborative learning and leadership, enable us to reintroduce inefficiency into our world to invite participation in the commons. Slow down, participate and benefit. We don’t have to end private ownership, but we do need to get much better at imagining community, economy and stewardship.