It’s really impossible to overstate the worry I heard in people’s voices today. In our meeting an Elder named Billy Bird spoke briefly before lunch and reminded the group just what had been lost – the salmon runs, the crab and prawns, the seaweed beds, the clam gardens. The Namgis people and their relatives on Gilford Island, Kingcombe Inlet and Oweekeno are ocean people. Their life is on the ocean and without access to the ocean the fear is that they are no longer a people at all.
For thousands of years these people have lived in the Kwak’wak’wakw Sea, tending the resources, enhancing them where they could. In the past 150 years the Namgis people have been herded onto a reserve, had every single one of their food sources regulated by a foreign government that denied them citizenship for the first 100 of contact, even as it was busy distributing the ocean’s resources to others. Now the fishing industry is concentrated in very few hands, fish farms are wreacking havoc with the local wild seafood and there are less than half a dozen working boats in the community. Those that are left fish for the community, but simply eating salmon does not make you a salmon people. Without the experience of spending most of your waking hours on the water, handling the products of the ocean garden and tending to it, knowing in the heave and fall of the swell where your next meal is coming from, you are not an ocean people.
I heard another heartbreaking story today. Boats are so scare that an aunt who wanted to give her nephews a chance to get out on the water had to charter a whale watching boat from nearby Telegraph Cove at huge expense to herself simply to give the youth in her family a taste of an experience that is their birthright. And when the big day arrived, she was sick and couldn’t go and the trip was off, and the timing hasn’t worked for them to go since then. It must be akin to living indoors for months at a time, even as the weather outside is beautiful and everyone else is enjoying it. To say that some feel imprisoned is not overstating it.
Alert Bay is not a big community, and the Namgis people are not a people who are used to spending years at a time on land. Without being on the water working and gathering food there is a tremendous amount of stress built up here. When that stress combines with despondent feelings of failing one’s ancestors and the self-judgment that was taught so well at residential school, the combination sometimes leads to suicide. And without access to traditional food and traditional ways of harvesting food, an epidemic of diabetes has arisen. A large number of the community members are currently on a diet, similar to the low carbohydrate Atkins diet, but more built around traditional foods to see if it makes a difference in the diabetes rates. The early research is proving that it does, and so conversely it is proving that restricting the access of these people to their traditional food sources is akin to infecting them with diabetes.
If it sounds bad it is because the truth here is deep and painful and it rises close to the surface. But as with the upwellings in the channels of the Broughton what comes up is often nutrient rich as well. With the same passion that they tell stories about life now, they argue for solutions that are very much in line with what we know about the way the world is going. With the concentration of wealth in a few places, a global economy dependant on oil and the conversion of local places to branch plants for multinational corporations, the foundations of capitalist economies in the west are vulnerable to large scale and abrupt changes. As climate change accelerates, and the price of oil climbs as the resource becomes more and more scarce, the centralized economic systems of the western world risk collapse to more local, more self-sufficient regions. First Nations people, who have long been canaries in the coal mine with respect to control over resources, are now at the leading edge of this emergent future, calling for restoration of local control and responsibility to local communities. Over the past two days I heard passionate calls for broad decision making powers to be returned to the local communities, even if they are exercised in collaboration with government. I heard people describing the vast amounts of volunteer labour that local people put into sustaining ocean resources despite the fact that the exploitation of these resources are largely concentrated in the hands of a few distant owners. Despite that, Namgis and Oweekeno and Gilford Island peoples continue to look after their oceans and their resources, and to propose ways in which others might join them to sustain what is left for the benefit of those who need it most.
It has been a good road trip. The conversations in the gathering, framed and anticipated as hostile and angry, have instead been powerful and constructive. Through the simple act of listening, of hearing people’s concerns and voices and truly understanding where they are coming from, we created a small crack of daylight here. One staunch table-pounding advocate told me at the end of today that “I might be naive but I sense a little bit of hope.” That is exactly what we were trying to do, and now it is the responsibility of both the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the local communities to make good on the nuggets of possibility now emerging in public voices which, on bad days, are laced with toxic vitriol and bitter rhetoric.
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I can’t let this trip go by without commenting on the food. As we were gathered to talk about the natural food resources of the Kwa’kwak’wakw Sea, we were fed from these same resources. Yesterday it was clam chowder and smoked salmon salad sandwiches on homemade molasses bread. Today an incredible halibut soup topped with seaweed and flavoured with oolichan oil, one of the healthiest food products in the world. Oolichan smells incredibly bad and tastes like you would expect rotten fish to taste like. This because it IS rotten fish – a small oily smelt that is left to ferment and then processed into almost pure grease. It is brutal to eat raw, and is the definitive “acquired taste.” But it is also treated like gold here on the coast. Traditionally trails between First Nations that live on opposite sides of a watershed are called “grease trails.” Oolichan grease was and still is traded for west coast resources on Vancouver Island, or over the mountains on the mainland into the dry interior. Oolichan is the basis of intertribal relationships and protocols and in remembering these trails, and this little stinky fish, the relationships are also remembered. I once sat in the bighouse in Fort Rupert and listened to Kwagiulth and Ahousaht singers from opposite ends of the grease trail give their renditions of the songs that accompanied the trade. They were amazed that songs that hadn’t been sung in years were almost identical, leading to a great spontaneous celebration of unity and friendship during which we sang and danced and kept each other company around the fire that burned at the centre of the huge building. This food is more than just what is for supper. It is everything, the be all and end all. Without traditional food there are no traditional people and no traditional practices. If we are to retain our traditions we must retain our indigenous ways of relating to the land and using those relations to relate to one another, and then we can rediscover the hope that comes from stewarding our own lives.
[tags]namgis, alert bay, oolichan[/tags]
Interesting report from a group I hadn’t heard of before, the Centre for Innovative and Entrepreneurial Leadership. THey have just released a publication called “Coping with Growth and Change: The state of leadership in rural BC.” I have an interest in this given that I teach and facilitate collaborative leadership and I live ina rural community in BC.
The report’s authors write:
“Many people see leadership development assisting with issues like change, economic diversification, youth attraction, innovation and collaboration, key ingredients to 21st Century success for rural communities.”
Many communities reported that youth are moving away and young families are not moving in. “Young people between the ages of 25 and 34 are the ones who typically start families and businesses, critical issues for communities,” says report co-author Mike Stolte, President-Elect of the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation (CRRF).
“The theme of youth leadership came up time and time again,” stated report co-author Stacy Barter, of CIEL. “Communities say they don’t know how to engage younger people. The established leaders are getting older and many of them are feeling burned out.”
One of the things that is exhausting community leaders, according to the study, is the increasing challenge of creating dialogue and communication between groups. “Many communities told us they want to work together, but they just don’t know how,” said Barter. “They want to learn how to practice collaborative leadership.”
The report shows that many communities are caught in a bind. “If special care is not taken to conserve the qualities fostering our community’s distinctive character, critical dimensions of its image and identity may be lost.” “These issues are dividing communities,” said Barter.
“The kind of leadership training they are asking for, collaborative leadership, involves the skills of leading a community through these differences. Without a new kind of leadership, they are telling us, the differences will continue to divide people, and the rate of growth will continue to overwhelm them.”
It seems there is an appetite everywhere for this kind of leadership. Yesterday talking with a friend involved in the biodeisal energy he was speculating that the shift in leadership models to something ore dialogic and less top down is a generational one. He was remarking that it seemed as if the current generation of 35-55 year olds were assuming th emantle of leadership and were altering by flattening structures that concentrate power. Of course my friend Jon Husband has been predicting this for a long time. He calls the idea wirearchy, informed as it is by the ways in which networked structures change power systems and leadership lenses. This report is encouraging to me, as it says that more and more people in governance systems (who tend to cling to the status quo) are finally loosening the kinds of leadership styles that characterize local government, and they are looking for some other way to deal with the stresses of the work they have to do.
[tags]local government, british columbia, rural communities, wirearchy[/tags]
One of the key skills in deliberative dialogue is figuring out what we are, together. This is often called “co-sensing” or “feeling into the collective field.” There are many ways to talk about but the practice is on the one hand tricky and subtle, and on the other, blazingly obvious.
In general, in North America and especially among groups of people that are actively engaged in questions about co-sening the collective field, a speech pattern I have notcied goes something like this:
- I feel that we need to…
- My thoughts are that we should…
- I just throw this out there for consideration…
- I’m not sure but I think we…
In other words, oin our efforts to discern the collective, we very often start with a non-definitive statement about our personal relation to what might be held collectively. Very often these kinds of statements serve to keep us stuck in individual perspectives. What we end up talking about is our own perspectives on things. Instead of sensing into the whole, we are negotiating with the parts. There is no emergent sense of what we have between us.
Last week, I was working with some ha’wilh (chiefs) from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth nations of the west coast of Vancouver Island. (We were in this building). Although this was a somewhat standard government consultation meeting, these ha-wiilh are quite practiced in traditional arts of deliberation. Much of the conversation during the day conformed to the above pattern, but at one point, for about a half an hour, there was a deep deliberative tone that came over the meeting. We were talking about a government policy that is aimed at protecting wild salmon, an absolutely essential animal to Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities.
When talk about the policy, the pace of the conversation slowed down and the ha’wilh entered this pattern:
- We need to support this policy. I support it.
- We have to find a way to involve the province in this. Here’s who I know on this.
- Logging in our watersheds affects these fish and our communities are affected as well. What can we do about that?
The essence of this pattern is that one waits for something to be so obvious that a dclarative statement about “we,” “us” or “our” begs to be stated. And once it is stated, it is supported with a statement about how “I” relate to that whole.
This produces a number of profound shifts in a field, and very quickly. First, it slows everything down. It is not possible to rush to conclusions about what is in the collective field. Second, it builds conidence and accountability into the speech acts. It is very, very difficult to say “we need to support this” if you are uncertain of whether we do or not. This shift takes us from random individual thoughts and speculations into a space where we need to think carefully, sense outside of our own inner voice and speak clearly what is in the middle.
This is a very abstract notion, but anyone who has driven a car or ridden a bike in traffic knows what I am talking about. When we are driving our cars together, we are actually creating traffic. Traffic is the emergent phenomenon, the thing that we can only do together. In order to create traffic that serves us, we need to be constantly sensing the field of the road. This involves figuring out what other drivers are doing, noticing the flow and engaging safely but confidently. You need to both claim space and leave space to drive safely. Anyone who offers something into the field that is too focused on the individual disturbs the field significantly. They drive like road hogs, dangerous, not fully connected to the field around them.
So the teaching of the ha’wilh is very straightforward for any form of deliberation and co-sening: quickly go to the “we.”
[tags]co-sensing, deliberation[/tags]
Photo by Wam Mosely
This week I was in a gathering with 16 friends about the nature of hosting new organizational structures that arise from the hosting practices that seek to move groups to new levels of consciousness and collaboration. The gathering was essentially four days long, and at the end of second last day I had an interesting conversation with my friends Peggy Holman and George Por about the art of harvesting. “Harvesting” is usually thought of as a way of telling the historical story of a gathering, and as a metaphor it has some value in terms of expanding the idea beyond the forms of minutes, notes or summaries. In the Art of Hosting community we are currently looking at how to broaden this activity.
George and Peggy and I looked at what this starting pattern said about the processes of harvesting, including teasing apart the word itself. We started by teasing apart the basic pattern of harvest and noticed that it lives in three modes: time, media and speech acts. We immediately asked the question what would harvesting looked like if we fully harvested from these modes, to wit:
- Time modes of the past present and future. We are practiced at harvesting from what has happened, but what does it mean to harvest in the moment, and to harvest from the future? The World Cafe process lights up the practice of harvesting in the present, as we capture and map nuggets of insight. The work of the Presencing community might have some insight into how we might harvest from the future, through a process of sensing and presencing.
- Media modes include the typical text modes that we use to harvest (reports and web sites, for example) but increasingly I am personally using audio and visual representations in my own harvesting work and this week I worked with Thomas Arthur who, as a performing artist and in relationship with Ashley Cooper, is harvesting from our gathering using video to capture the patterns of how we were together. Graphic facilitation is a method that combines hosting and harvest in the present, and the commission of music, dance and other movement is a mode of harvest that, although it is strange to Western cultures, is very alive in traditional cultures. Here on the west coast of North America events are harvested through song and dance and the song and dance live to “tell the story” of an event. In the Ojibway territories of Canada, they used birch bark scrolls and petroglyphs, “abstract” wampum belts and rock paintings of images and shapes to harvest. Traditional cultures know that the full story of something cannot be told simply with language and so the harvest often lives in what western cultures might call abstract art. It is precisely this abstraction that allows for the richness of the harvest to live.
- Speech act modes are all about the way the harvest is communicated. Typically harvest takes the shape of “telling the story” and so remains in the monological mode. Harvesting can also take the form of inquiry where the harvest is a question and invitation to engage. In both modes support is needed for understanding to arise, so in a telling mode, one must have a good communications infrastructure to get the story out and understood, In an inquiry mode, one also needs a way to support the harvest of an event. Harvesting through inquiry sets up a reflective learning process with the world at large and so it demands an open, inviting and deep listening infrastructure to further the work of the gathering that produced the harvest.
- Levels of what is happening which implies that there is more going on in any given gathering than simply what can be captured in a set of notes. Levels might include, the level of work, the level of process, the level of underlying patterns.
I got really excited about these, for when you combine these modes together (in the moment video making, having children in a gathering tell the story of the future, producing a series of audio recordings that ask questions) the art of harvesting becomes liberating and alive. A menu pattern emerges in which you might select harvesting strategies to both serve the purpose of the gathering and stretch it to harvest the underlying patterns of the gathering which make for learning conversations about HOW we meet as well as what is done in any given meeting.
There are many other dynamics that might emerge from this thinking on harvesting, including how we might harvest both individually and collectively or in combination, and harvesting from an inner perspective along with an objective perspective, which leads us to an integral model of harvest.
We also spoke of how technology, taxonomy and folksonomy might conspire to extract patterns of meaning from our artifacts of conversation through “knowledge gardening“, which is work that has been alive in George’s life for many decades.
As we spoke I found that our conversation became inspiring and emergent. We initially began informally in three chairs at the end of a long day of meeting, and we moved to have dinner together in the room in which we had held a World Cafe earlier in the day. The markers and paper were still on this table, like a huge “back of a napkin” which just begged scrawl. I started mind mapping our conversation which led us to explore many branches of what was possible and still keep the emerging whole in front of us. I was so excited by what we were learning together that I found myself “sparking” for many hours afterwards. There was a breathless feeling to our talk which became so strong that we actually felt it must be in the field of the after dinner conversation among others too. We called for a late night circle with others to harvest from the conversations that happened at the end of the day. What we discovered was that the pattern of inspiration was alive in the natural cafe of dinnertime and much of what was harvested by all and then understood collectively provided the fodder we needed to integrate our experiences of two days and lead us towards a place where day three could be convergent and about the implications of our work in the world together.
And so in the spirit of inquiry about harvesting, what do you think? What is alive in you about this story? Where does it lead you?
[tags]George Por, Peggy Holman[/tags]
From my friend Roq Garreau:
“Visioning means imagining. At first generally, and then, with increasing specificity, what you really want. That is what you really want. Not what someone else has taught you to want and not what you have learned to settle for. Visioning means taking off all of the constraints of assumed feasibility, of disbelief and past disappointments and letting your mind dwell upon its most noble, treasured, uplifting dreams. Some people, especially young people, engage in visioning with enthusiasm and ease. Some people find the exercise of visioning painful because a glowing picture of what could be makes what is all the more intolerable. Some people would never admit to their visions for fear of being thought impractical or unrealistic. They would find this paragraph uncomfortable to read, if they were willing to read it at all. And some people have been so crushed by their experience of the world that they can only stand to explain why any vision is impossible. That’s fine, they are needed too. Vision does need to be balanced with skepticism. We should say immediately, for the sake of the skeptics, that we do not believe that it is possible for the world to envision its way to a sustainable future. Vision without action is useless, but action without vision does not know where to go or how to go there. Vision is absolutely necessary to guide and motivate action. More than that, vision when widely shared and firmly kept in sight brings into being new systems. We mean that literally. Within the physical limits of space, time, material and energy, visionary human intentions can bring forth not only new information, new behaviour, new knowledge and new technology, but eventually new social institutions, new physical structures and new powers within human beings. A sustainable world can never come into being if it cannot be envisioned. The vision must be built up from the contribution of many people before it is complete and compelling.”
— Meadows, Donnella H., Dennis L. Meadows and Jørgen Randers
I’ve had great occaision to think about this quote this week. Roq actually sent this to me and the mayor of the island we live on. Our mayor, Bob Turner, is a guy who is pretty committed to vision, to sustainability and to participation. Yesterday Bob and I were discussing the possibility of a group of us on Bowen Island co-hosting an ongoing “vision collaboratory” which would simply be a place in which Bowen Islanders would be allowed to dream and share good ideas free from the constraints of action plans, resources and even possibility. We could harvest from these conversations using a wiki, Google Earth and other tools to create a simple but powerful ideas bank.
Why would this be important? Because many people want to participate in the life and future of their community, but they don’t want to devote large amounts of time to the formal process, or they don’t have the large amounts of money that allow them to buy and develop parts of the island. Also, there is something incredibly valuable about unfettered dreaming. A vision of 100 years has the luxury of not needing to be perfect and can often provide inspiration and solid ideas for those working on shorter timeframes with more constraints.
And so it looks like that is one project about to take shape here on Bowen Island.
But this vision quote struck me on other levels too, arising out of the experience I had last week in Denver, Colorado where I went to open space at the Placematters 06 conference. I was surrounded by visionary planners and practitioners, including people like Lyman Orton, the founder of the Orton Family Foundation, Tim Erickson from e-democracy.org and folks who run all kinds of mapping projects, visualization tools and instant sketchup kinds of things to help others envision a sustainable world.
I’m inspired to put these tools to work here in my local community, and maybe we’ll learn something about that that can be shared with other people in other communities.
Practice visioning – be sustainable and creative.
[tags]sustainability, placematters06, vision, mapping[/tags]