I’m writing about dialogic containers these days. They are tricky to describe, and in the same way that Mike asserts a sophisticated understanding of systems, it’s important to find helpful metaphor for a dialogic container. As facilitators we are used to using the world “container” to describe something that we can sense, feel or even physically see. The term does not convey the nature of an actual thing, but if you ask people what they mean by container you find yourself in a metaphorical world. And also, it feels like a finger pointing at the moon. Dialogic containers are important to dialogic organizational development. In the Dialogic Organization Development book there are several metaphors employed by several of my co-authors to describe containers. What I’m finding is that we commonly refer to containers in four distinct ways…
Lots of new stuff is bubbling up into the Art of Hosting we teach, including different ways of teaching. Read on to find out more.
The Squamish welcome figure at Sw?aywi (Ambleside Beach) in West Vancouver
Once a month I fill in to lead worship at our little Bowen Island United Church. I love the chance to do so, because I get to sit with a piece of scripture and reflect on it. Over the years here I’ve shared a few of my sermons and today, the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, I’m sharing last Sunday’s sermon. The reading was suggested by the Lectionary, without reference to the September 30. But the reading lined up incredibly well and suggested important teachings for people of faith to stay with this long and faithful journey of reconciliation work in Canada.
Exodus 17:1-7
From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people thirsted there for water, and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do for this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarrelled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
This week will see us commemorate the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. On Wednesday we will wear our orange shirts and remember the effects of residential schools and the targeted campaigns of cultural genocide that did so much harm in Canada, and which effects continue to linger. As a country that prides itself on the rule of law, we’ve made a big mess of how that law applies to Indigenous people, and while we generally come around to correcting these kinds of problems with respect to things like slavery, the right of women to vote, marriage equality and so on, Indigenous rights, including Aboriginal rights and title are a confusing mass of issues and quarrels from all sides that make it hard to sort out what’s happening.
You all know how important this issue is to me, and I’m always available to talk about it all, which we can do afterwards during coffee if you like. But this morning I’d like to talk about where we might collectively stand as a people of faith in the reconciliation journey and tie it back to this important scripture. This journey is hard and in society at the moment there is a a lot of complaint that maybe we’ve “gone too far with reconciliation.” Some are even saying that we should take active steps to erase Constitutionally protected rights like Aboriginal title once and for all.
This is not the first time in history that a people has grown tired and thirsty on the journey. In this morning’s reading from Exodus, the Israelites are in exactly this situation.
To refresh your memory, Moses received a commission from God, speaking through the burning bush to free the Israelites from the slavery in which they were held in Egypt. He led the people away from the Pharoah’s tyranny, across the Red Sea, and into the desert in Sinai, that little triangle of land in the far southern part of the modern day state of Israel. They will spend forty years there, wandering and waiting for the time when they can settle in the Promised Land.
Today, as always with me, we are going to read that as a spiritual story, a tale that charts the journey from a place of spiritual captivity to one of spiritual liberation. Such collective journeys are not easy, and they involve long periods of being in the wilderness, of enduring spiritual hardships, of losing faith in God and our leaders and each other and ourselves. They are also journeys where we become parched and starved of nourishment, and yet, every spiritual tradition encourages us to push on.
When the story begins, the people have been through all of that and a few weeks has passed and they are genuinely thirsty. They are struggling to survive in the heart and the bleached landscape, away from everything they knew. Some are even questioning whether it was the right move to leave a land of slavery to die here in this desert. So they take up a quarrel with Moses. It is not just a complaint. In the Hebrew text, the word that is used to describe a quarrel is more like “a legal dispute.” They are suing Moses for accountability.
Moses doesn’t know what to do — which is a humility I would love to see more in our leaders — and so he prays to God and God tells him to go ahead of the people and strike the rock on Mount Horeb, where God originally met him in the burning bush. God says “I will be there.” He takes some Elders with him, strikes the rock with his staff, and water flows from the land. And the people drink. And they named the place Massah and Meribah which means “quarrel”and “tested” to commemorate the event. Moses took Elders with him, because it was a legal dispute that the people had lodged, and so these Elders served as a kind of tribunal of witnesses, who could keep the events in perspective. Kind of like our modern day Courts.
So how does this story relate our own journey of reconciliation?
Canada’s legal traditions are derived from the Crown and going back to 1763, the order from the King was to reach agreements with the Nations that already existed here before settlers moved into their lands. To that end, the Crown entered into honourable treaties with First Nations. Over time the Crown made these deals and then forgot about their obligations, which is why so many Treaty Nations continue to quarrel with the Crown for the government to fulfill their obligations. First Nations cultures are almost universally relational, and when treaties of friendship and collaboration are made, they are always taken seriously to be enduring contracts that bind people’s fates together.
By the time the Crown got to British Columbia, they mostly just stopped making treaties, and started settling and taking over the lands. This is why we call these territories “unceded.” First Nations have always been here governing themselves and others on these lands and waters, they have never given them up, and they continue to exert their own jurisdiction and governance over these lands, waiting patiently for the settler governments to come to the table and make agreements. And at every turn First Nations have offered the promise of liberation for all of us if we get the relationship right.
Reconciliation means to figure out together how to live on this land, with honesty, dignity and honour, sin a way that unlocks the potential of all of us. No one is asked to leave. Instead we are asked to journey out of our comfort and enter into a process that invites us to find a new promised land together, where the land and sea can be protected, where people’s needs are looked after and where relive together as co-habitants of these beautiful territories.
So I see in us a journey towards freedom from our own small thinking and spiritual impoverishment. A possibility that we might find a new relationship with the First Nations on whose territories we live that takes us to a place where we can so far only imagine. I believe that commission of Jesus Christ obligates us to love our neighbour as ourselves and that in Canada, that is expressed by a personal commitment to deep and lasting reconciliation of the Crown’s obligations and power and Indigenous obligations and power. Reconciliation is not merely territorial acknowledgements and orange shirts. It is long lasting relationship building across our minds, hearts, laws and hands that recognize whose land we are on and builds a world that is prophetic and possible only if we work together.
Some say “we’ve gone too far with reconciliation.” Perhaps what they are really saying is that they are thirsty for something meaningful. But we have only just begun. And when the going gets hard and tiring, the people take up quarrels and complaints. It’s the oldest story of all, as evidenced by this tale. That’s fine. But friends, this has been my life’s work and I’m happy to report that I think I have visited the rock that lies ahead of us and I have witnessed the prophets striking the ground and seen the water that flows. First Nations, right here in BC, rising to their own power and jurisdiction, are doing things that feed us in ways that would have never been possible ion we had continued the policies of colonization and cultural genocide.
So where are these places of flowing water that comes from true reconciliation? Here are just four.
Just this past month the Great Bear Sea initiative was recognized for outstanding leadership where along BC’s north and central coast, 17 First Nations have worked with Canada and BC to create one of the world’s largest Indigenous-led marine conservation initiatives. More than $300 million is being invested in Indigenous stewardship, conservation and sustainable coastal economies. The people who have cared for those waters for thousands of years are exercising greater authority in caring for them now—and everyone benefits from healthier oceans, fisheries and coastal communities.
In Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is building Sen?á?w on its own reserve land near the Burrard Bridge: eventually about 6,000 homes, most available to anyone. At the same time, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations have become some of the largest land developers in the region, building thousands more homes on returned lands. In the middle of a housing crisis, Indigenous nations aren’t simply asking for a place in Vancouver, they are literally helping build the Vancouver of the future. They are answering the call for housing affordability by building it.
There are older initiatives too. On the Sunshine Coast, the shíshálh Nation has been part of regional health care for generations. In 1962, the Nation gifted more than eleven acres of their small own reserve lands for the hospital in Sechelt. Sixty years later, that hospital serves more than 30,000 Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents and the shíshálh Nation, back in 1986 became the first self-governing former Indian band in Canada. A strong Indigenous nation has helped create health infrastructure that serves everyone who shares that region.
And then there are issues that counter the panic that some are creating around private property rights and Aboriginal title. In 2024, BC formally recognized Haida Aboriginal title throughout Haida Gwaii something the Haida had fought to have recognized for generations. But recognizing Haida title didn’t mean telling everyone else to leave. The agreement protects existing private property and local government while creating a process through which the Haida Nation and BC work out how their respective jurisdictions coexist. That’s reconciliation becoming constitutional and practical: the truth about whose homeland this is can be acknowledged while everyone who lives there works out how to live there together. It is an agreement of possibility and inclusion, and everyone on Haida Gwaii is sharing in the struggle to make it all work.
The ocean. Homes. Health care. A shared homeland.
These aren’t promises about what reconciliation might someday accomplish. They are things already happening when Indigenous nations become stronger and relationships begin to change.
Here on Bowen Island, Pauline Le Bel and I are helping to mark this work with a welcome figure that will stand outside the Community Centre. It is a grandmother. And she welcomes us in, to to our place of community governance and culture as the house of what Squamish Elder Dennis Joseph called the Nexwlelexwm Uxwimixw, a village of people living in Squamish lands, on Bowen Island. The Nation has leant it’s support to this initiative and will be helping us with teh ceremony when she is installed there and the community has been donating funds, because this is the initiative of islanders, putting a tangible mark on the land, remembering that reconciliation is a long journey watch over by the grandmothers who keep their eyes on the possibilities we cannot see yet and welcome them in.
We are allowed to be thirsty and to quarrel and test this idea of reconciliation. But we are invited also to trust: to trust God, to trust each other, and to trust in the long journey of reconciliation. We need only strike the ground to find the water that flows.
Corina Enache îs fast become one of my "must read" writers. Her perspective and reflective capacity as practitioner is inspiring. Her deep understanding of story and narrative and her wealth of experience gives her lots of material from which to generate beautiful essays. And her generous engagement with commentators and connections is exemplary.
Her latest post is about "making rules you are willing to be bound by" and has a number of gems. I encourage you to read the full thing, because among other things it will probably change your mind about pirates. But if you are a person who works with groups, this story will land with you:
…the alarm rings, and the anxiety arrives on top of me before my feet are on the floor. Did I account for everything in the design? Is there enough time for all the topics? Can I do a good job?
And then we are in the conference room and it is about to start, serious men in a serious room, a tidy little chess game, and Anansi is somewhere at the back of my mind smiling, and I hear myself say, before we begin I want to draw your attention to this chair. A red plush chair at the back with a small bell on it, and it had taken me some time to find one. I want one of you to be our disrupter for the day. Your only job is to watch us, and any time you feel something is missing, that the energy has gone, that we are too boring or too structured, or you just feel we need disrupting, go and sit in that chair and ring the bell, and all of us will stop whatever we are doing and look at it and change it.
My colleague Jen Williams and I decided that we were going to try this. But it requires this of the host:
I could not free those men, dear reader, I could not make them pirates, nobody has ever freed anybody. What I could do was write one new obligation into the room and put it where I could not reach it. A chair, a bell, a named role, and a rule with teeth, which is that when it rings we stop, agreed in advance and binding on all of us including me. I could have built a hundred other things into that room. I could have kept the disruption in my own hands where it was safe and deployed it when I judged the moment right, and I did not, because smuggled freedom belongs to the smuggler, and a disruption I kept in my own hands and deployed at the clever moment would have been one more thing I was doing to them. The bell was for somebody else to ring and I put it at the back of the room in a red chair and gave it away before the day started. The agenda I had worked on for a week, the timing I was anxious about at six that morning, the whole careful structure that was the only thing standing between me and a room full of serious men deciding I was a strange woman, all of it surrendered in advance to whoever felt like walking to the back of the room. Written into the agreements, it was theirs, and I was under it with them…
Then I stopped caring whether anyone rang it, because the point was that for one day the room contained a thing a person could be, someone who stands up in front of his superiors and rings it, and that whoever saw that done would know it was survivable.
That, dear reader, is really what is asked of us.
We don’t actually “host emergence.” We host interactions and work with constraints that change what is possible. In human systems, interpretation matters too: how people, including facilitators, make sense of what is happening changes what happens next.