
It’s a beautiful day on the south coast of British Columbia. A strong northwesterly breeze is pushing wind driven swell down the Strait of Georgia onto the southwestern shore of Bowen Island. There is snow on the mountain tops, but down here at sea level, it’s 7 degrees. The sun is shining and everything points to a clear evening to watch the lunar eclipse.
The rest of North America is locked into a cold freeze, and next week I’ll be tasting a bit of it with a two week trip to New Brunswick, Ohio and Ontario. This is the time of year people on the west coast write to their friends and relatives in the east and show pictures of the daffodils coming up. It doesn’t feel like winter here anymore, and that’s not unusual for late January. Saying it’s winter until March 21 really has no bearing to what teh rest of the continent is going through. I’ve lived on this island for more than 17 years and I long ago decided that there needs to be a different way to talk about seasons here.
For various reason I identify much more with the Celtic calendar, which marks the year into six week blocks, like this:
- February 1 – Imbolc (“In the belly of the ewes”) which is the first day of spring and the new year.
- March 21 – Spring equinox
- May 1 – Bealtaine (“bright May Day”) marking the beginning of summer and the flourishing of life
- June 21 – Summer solstice and mid-summer day
- August 1 – Lughnasadh (“assembly to honour Lugh, the god of light”) which is the beginning of the fall harvest season
- September 21 – Fall equinox
- November 1 – Samhain (“the end of summer harvest”) which is really the beginning of winter and marked by commemorating ancestors and death.
- December 21 – Winter solstice and mid-winter day.
These markers line up much more with the feeling of seasons on Bowen Island. We mark some of these days locally, with a May Day festival, and a huge community celebration on Hallowe’en as well as its solstice celebrations. And it usually feels very much like winter is over by February 1.
Of course there is an ancient calendar in this part of the world, which from time immemorial has been known as Skwxwú7mesh temíxw. Today I spent time going through the amazing Squamish-English dictionary, reading and thinking about the seasons. The Squamish traditional calendar is focused on activities related to ceremonial and food gathering rhythms. It makes sense that the word for season is “tem” which means “the time of.” Instead of experiencing disconnection (like “it doesn’t feel like winter”), in Squamish the name of the season is based on what is happening on the land and sea, bound up in activities upon which the lives of human beings and communities depend. The season changes when life says it changes.
Traditionally Squamish seasonal names therefore aren’t generally tied to moons or the length of days. Looking at the names for seasons gives you an idea of where the attention of people is in any given time of year. The Squamish version of the European calendar uses names from seasons that roughly correspond to each month. Squamish new year begins in February, when the frogs start singing again, which signifies the end of winter. Of course this happens much earlier in the year on Bowen Island than it does up in the Cheakamus, Elaho and Squamish River valleys. Here on Bowen Island (Nexwlélexwm in Squamish), the frogs will usually start singing during late February.
The calendar is such a clumsy way of describing the rhythms in this territory. It creates arbitrary names and times for what is happening. That clumsiness is the result of the colonization that separated people from the rhythms of the lands and waters and, if you know the way things happen in the territory, you can tell reading through these names how clumsy the fit is between the Squamish times and the calendar months:
- February – tem welhxs (time of the last snow, or when the frogs come to life)
- March – tem slhawt’ (herring time)
- April – tem tsá7tskay (time when the salmonberry shoots are collected)
- May – tem yetwán (time when the salmonberries ripen)
- June – tem kw’eskw’ás (warm time, also used as a word for “summer”)
- July – tem ?w’élemexw (when the blackberries are ripe)
- August – tem t’aka7 (time when the salad berries are ripe)
- September – tem cháyilhen (salmon run time)
- October – tem p’i7tway (time when the deer mate)
- November – tem ekwáyanexw (fall time)
- December – etl’im lhkaych’ (short days month)
- January – mina lhkaych’ (small or child month)
So it makes sense to talk about seasons, especially on the south coast where lunar calendars are hard to use given how cloudy it is during much of the year. There are may other seasons that didn’t make the cut for translation to the calendar, during which the primary activity of the people is described:
- Tem mílha7 – “Winter dancing season,” when ceremonies take place in the longhouse.
- Tem t’ixw – “Winter,” meaning the time to go down, possibly from the idea that people would go down into pit houses in this time of year, or come down into the low parts of the land.
- Tem s7áynixw – “Time of the eulachon”, a small oily smelt that arrives in rivers in April, although these fish are almost completely extirpated from Squamish rivers now. This happens for a short time right after herring season in late March and early April.
- Tem kwu7s – “Spring salmon harvest time” which begins in early summer.
- Tem achcháwem – “Salmon spawning time,” from late August through to late November during which all the focus is on harvesting fish for the winter and spring. This is when the biggest runs of salmon come back to the territory, mainly chum and coho. This is also the time of the heaviest rains and storms on the coast, which fill the rivers, enabling the fish to find there way back to their home streams.
- Tem p’í7tway ta sxwi7shen – “Time when the deer are mating.”
- Tem kwáxnis – “Time when the chum salmon run.”
So living on Bowen Island in a community of settlers anchored in the rhythms of the land and sea, and the cultural traditions of newcomers, I’d say we could develop a calendar of sorts that relates to the way the we live here. We aren’t a big time ocean people, and are without a fishing fleet so our rhythms are much more dictated by what is happening in the forests around us. Inspired by the Squamish tradition of letting the frogs mark the new year, my first draft of such a calendar might look like this:
- Forest music time – in which the frogs wake up and the dawn chorus of songbirds starts to sing.
- New shoots time – when the skunk cabbage and salmon berry shoots begin to appear.
- Blossoms time – first flowers on the berry bushes and the cherry and plum trees around the island.
- Salmonberry time – Late May and into June, when the salmon berries ripen. Time to order firewood.
- Huckleberry time – Following the salmon berries, time of the first swims in the sea
- Salal berry time – the heart of summer when the salal berries are at their ripest.
- Blackberry time – August, when the blackberries are weighing down their bushes.
- Storm season – lasts about two and a half months, from the end of September to the middle of December and begins after the tourists have left and during which we hunker down and celebrate Hallowe’en, Remembrance Day, Light up the Cove and the traditional Christmas season. This time of year is dark and the predominant winds are the southeasterlies that bring rain and power outages.
- Winter – when the major wind storms are gone and we get snow at sea level and the Squamish winds are most dominant. This usually lasts from December to the end of January.
Sitting by my fire, I’m totally enchanted by the poetry of our place and time here on our little rocky island.
Note: the typeface on my blog does not render all the Skwxú7mesh characters correctly. In this post the underlined “k” and “x” characters are replaced with regular k and x’s. You can find the correct spellings for many of these words at this link.
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On the Art of Hosting email list last month, there was an inquiry posted by Monica Nissén asking about scaling the Art of Hosting as a leadership practice through levels of engagement. By “Art of Hosting” Monica means the four fold practice, which is the basic framework for leadership that gives our community a coherent centre of practice, around presence, participation, hosting others, and co-creation. Monica asked whether hoping these practices would just go viral in a networked way is enough, and I replied with the following, tracing a couple of long term projects I have been involved in that have supported systems change in child and family services in British Columbia.
It’s definitely deliberate and networked. For me, it’s about building capacity. Our biggest work the last 9 years has been providing the Leadership 2020 program to social service workers in British Columbia working with children, youth and families in agencies, indigenous communities and government.
(You can read a summary of our five year evaluation of this program here)
We continue to developmentally evaluate as we go, and as a result, each cohort is different, each curriculum is slightly changed and we find new and more relevant ways to introduce people to this practice.
The basis of that program is a leadership approach that is very similar and deeply informed by what we in the Art of Hosting community know as the four-fold practice: that great leadership is personal, practice-based, participatory and perceptive. The program is structured in cohorts made up of people that have to apply. We mix “legacy” leaders with experienced and emerging leaders to show that learning never ends. Each cohort participates in two 5 day residencies – which are basically extended Art of Hosting workshops – and a nine month program of learning in between, featuring webinars and coaching and peer support for the application of tools and methods.
Over the past eight years we have brought about 450 people through the program. While it’s about learning in participatory ways, the program has a kind of hidden agenda. We are very clear that, about every 20 years or so, the child welfare system in our province goes through a massive restructuring, often provoked by a crisis, but not always. We have always invited our participants to both practice their leadership on the issues that are immediately in front of them, but to do it in a way that builds their capacity to respond when that later transformation happens. We want them to be the first to run to the centre when the old system is dying, eager to use their capacity, relationships, and practice to create the new.
In these days, the system is now beginning that deeper transformation, and fortunately it hasn’t been preceded by a crises. Instead, the woman who founded the Leadership 2020 program, Jennifer Charlesworth, was appointed to a five-year term as the Representative for Children and Youth in British Columbia, a very powerful position that is independent of the government and that can make powerful recommendations about systems change, usually as a result of different issues or events. Jennifer is bringing a collaborative approach to her work and to be successful in that, she is partly relying on the 450 Leadership 2020 graduates that are spread all through the system. There is a built-in capacity that is being invited into its biggest calling, reaching across traditional divides of indigenous/non-indigenous and government/community. Jennifer’s appointment to the position was received with widespread enthusiasm and optimism. We are hoping to see that the system is able to evolve faster with this capacity embedded in a way that is less painful than a collapse and transformation.
Participatory practices have been used for a long time in the field of social work and child and family services. In 2003 I started working with David Stevenson to use Open Space, Cafe, Circle, and the four fold practice to begin to build an indigenous governance systems for child and family services in BC. Our colleagues Kris Archie and Kyla Mason, Pawa Hayupis and many other indigenous Art of Hosting practitioners came into and out of that work. Toke Moeller and Monica Nissen and Patricia Galaczy joined us to teach Art of Hosting to families and community members who were participating in that work: http://www.turtleisland.org/healing/healing-cousins.htm. Between 2003 and 2009 we did something important on Vancouver Island. We started something and then had to abandon it for a different form, because not every idea works. But David later took that work with him into his work in executive positions in government. Kris has now become the CEO of the Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada and Kyra has become an extraordinary executive director of Usma, a Nuu-Chah-Nulth agency on Vancouver Island. Pawa is currently doing her Masters of Arts in indigenous governance and she and David continue to offer Art of Hosting trainings locally, as do Caitlin and I. In each of these new settings capacity building for participatory leadership has been used.
Meanwhile, Jennifer and a small group of us began Leadership 2020 in 2011. It has taken 15 years of developing leadership at the grass roots level and seeing that leadership grow into positions of power that has allowed us to work with the system this way. There is capacity in BC now, hopefully enough to take the system through the changes that are now coming, the ones we have prepared for, the ones we are waiting for, the ones we are making, and the ones that will surprise us.
It takes courage, patience, time, power, stewardship, relationship, and community to do this work. It takes a common language and shared perspectives and it takes massive diversity and difference to build resourcefulness and resilience. It is costly, politically, emotionally and materially, and it is not easy work. It requires a fierce commitment to relationship and a willingness to be at the edge of safety, with one foot out into the dangerous world. You get uplifted, hurt, angry, and joyful. But it’s a long game and you cannot sacrifice the depth of the work for ease and comfort. And no one person or team can do it alone.
It is not enough to do some trainings and walk away. The viral network does not just magically appear. Beautiful workshop experiences are only useful for systems change if they are connected to power. It requires staying in.
I just realized a few weeks ago that, although I never intended to work in the field of child and family services, that this may indeed be my life’s work. It has been nearly 20 years since I first walked into Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services to take on a job organizing their negotiations to become a “delegated agency” able to make decisions for and with indigenous children and families instead of government doing it. I think in that time I’ve learned a bit about what it takes to create the capacity in a large system that gives us a chance. That’s all I can say we’ve done at the moment, but I’m an optimist, so I live with the hope and gratitude that the legacy of the work we have done will make the world better for the kids who suffer the most in it.
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I’ll be away for a couple of weeks, so here is the last set of links for the year. Happy New Year.
I am worried about democracy these days. Our electoral politics are ravaged by social media manipulation, an absence of policy discussion, and the influence of money. Governance affords very little opportunity for meaningful citizen participation. Harold Jarche is worried too, and in this pots he tackles the question of how to save democracy head on.
Our institutions are failing us. They were designed for the age of print, not an electrically connected one. We need new structures and the current wave of returns to tribalism manifested as populism will not save us. As the advent of the printing press helped usher in an age of inquiry, first in the Christian religion and later in the enlightenment and scientific revolutions, so we have to engage in creating new organizational and governance structures for a global network era.
If print enabled democracy, will the emerging electric/digital medium destroy it?
How Complex Whole Emerge From Simple Parts
Another stunner from Quanta Magazine. This is a great introductory video to emergence. I could listen to excellent basic introductions to complexity all day. Enjoy this one. This is the phenomenon that my life’s work is devoted to.
Maria Popova’s favourite books of 2018
Maria Popva runs Brain Pickings, which is an amazing blog. She shares some detailed reviews of a couple of dozen books that grabbed her attention this year from authors including Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, Audré Lourde, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Zadie Smth among others, including some terrific children’s books. She calls this list “New Year’s Resolutions in Reverse.”
Advice for Emerging Evaluators
My colleague Ciaran Camman, a developmental evaluator has recently revamped her blog and there are some brilliant pieces on there, including this one which provides advice to her future colleagues from five things you should learn how to do, and one Max Ehermann Desiderata which begins
Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Onaubinisay at the World Parliament of Religions
Onaubinisay (Jim Dumont) is an important teacher of Anisinaabe governance and spirituality. I met him first in the 1980s when I was studying Native Studies at Trent University, where he visited as a guest during our annual Elders and Traditional People’s conference. He was an influential supporter of the effort to re-establish the Midewiwin religion in southern Ontario, an effort I got to be a small part of along with Paul Bourgeois and a little army of his students from Trent at the time.
Here is is speaking earlier this year at the World Parliament of Religions.
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I was happy to be able to spend a short time this week at a gathering of Art of Hosting practitioners in Columbus, Ohio. People had gathered from across North America and further afield to discuss issues of racial equity in hosting and harvesting practices. I’ve been called back home early to deal with a broken pipe and a small flood in my house, but before I left I was beginning to think about how to apply what I was learning with respect to strategy and evaluation practices. I was going to host a conversation about this, but instead, I have a 12 hour journey to think with my fingers.
My own thinking on this topic has largely been informed by the work I’ve done over thirty years at the intersection between indigenous and non-indigenous communities and people in Canada. Recently this work has been influenced by the national conversation on reconciliation. That conversation, which started promisingly, has been treated with more and more cynicism by indigenous people, who are watching non-indigenous Canadians pat themselves on the back for small efforts while large issues of social, economic and political justice have gone begging for attention. Reconciliation is gradually losing its ability to inspire transformative action. And people are forgetting the very important work of truth coming before reconciliation. Truth is hard to hear. Reconciliation is easy to intend.
As a result, I’m beginning to suggest to some non-indigenous groups that they should not think of their work as attempting to get to reconciliation, but instead to focus on work with indigenous communities that has a real and tangible and material impact on indigenous people. Reconciliation can then a by-product and a way of evaluating the work while we work together to achieve positive effects.
So my question now is, what if reconciliation was one of the ways we evaluated work done with indigenous communities, and not as an end in itself?
x x x
“Every action happens within a frame and the frame is very important.”
— Maurice Stevens, on Sunday prefacing a story he told about race.
Evaluation is a very powerful tool because it is often a hidden frame that guides strategic work. Ethical evaluators work hard to prevent their work from becoming an intervention that determines the direction of a project. In work that involves social change, poorly designed evaluation can narrow the work to a few isolated outcomes, and leave people with the impression that complex problems can only be addressed by linear and predictable planning practices.
Wielded unconsciously, evaluation can be a colonizing tool introducing ways of knowing that are alien to the cultures of the communities that are doing the work. Sometimes called “epistemic violence” this kind of intervention devalues and erases the ways participants themselves make sense of their world, know about their work and the standards by which they value an action as good.
Complexity demands of us that we work towards an unknowable and unpredictable future in a direction that we agree is good, useful, and desirable. Agreeing together what is good and desirable for a project should be the work of the people upon whom the project will have a direct affect. The principle of “Nothing about us without us” captures this ethical imperative. In complex adaptive systems and problems, outcomes are impossible to predict and the ways forward need to be discovered. Imposing a direction or a destination can have a substantial negative impact on the ability of a community to address its issues in a way that is meaningful to the community. Many projects fail because they became about achieving a good evaluation score. It is a powerful attractor in a system.
Evaluation frameworks are based on stories about how we believe change happens. I have seen many examples of these stories over the years:
- An orderly sequence of steps will get you to your goal.
- The people need to be changed in order for a new world to arise.
- Leadership must go tot the mountain of enlightenment and bring down a new set of brilliant teachings to lead the people in a different direction.
- We are feeling our way through the woods, discovering the truth as we go.
- Life is like navigating on a storm tossed sea and our ability to get where we are going relies on our ability to understand how the ship and the weather and the ocean works.
- If only we can put the parts together in a greater whole, then the collective impact we desire will be made.
You can probably name dozens of the archetypal stories that underlie the way you’ve made sense of projects you are involved in. But how often are these stories questioned? And what if the stories we use to frame our evaluation and ways of knowing about what’s good are based on stories that are not relevant or, worse, dangerous, in the context in which we are working?
I once sat with Jake Swamp, a well known Mohawk elder who told me a story of the numerous times that he met with the Dalai Lama. Jake said that he and the Dalai Lama often discussed peace as that was a key focus of their work, and their approaches to peace differed quite substantially. To paraphrase Jake, for the Dalai Lama, peace was attainable through individual practice and enlightenment, mainly through personal meditation. Jake offered a different view, based on the Great Law of Peace, which is the set of organizing principles for the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. In this context, individuals achieving a state of peace separate from their family and clan are dangerous to the whole. For Jake, peace is an endeavour to be worked on collectively and and in relationship and the difference for him was critical.
Imagine an evaluator then, working with the Dalai Lama’s ideas of peace and applying them to the workings of the Haudensaunee Confederacy. A de-emphasis on personal practice would get a failing grade. The story of how to achieve peace determines what the evaluator looks for and, if the evaluator was a practicing Tibetan Buddhist for example, they might not even be able to see how Haudenosaunee chiefs clan mothers, families, and communities were working on maintaining peace.
This happens all the time with evaluation practice. The stories and lenses that evaluators use determine what they see, and their intervention in the project often determines the direction of the work..
x x x
Recently several colleagues and I attended a workshop with Michael Quinn Patton who was introducing the new field of principles-focused evaluation. I got excited at this workshop, not only because Quinn Patton is an important theorist who has brought complexity thinking into the evaluation world, but also because this new approach offers some promise for how we might evaluate the principles that actively shape the way we plan, work and evaluate action.
Interventions in complex systems rely on the skillful use of constraints. If you constrain action too tightly – through rules and regulations and accountability for unknowable outcomes – you get people gaming the system, taking reductionist approaches to problems by breaking them into easily achievable chunks and generally avoiding the difficult and uncomfortable work in favour of doing what needs to be done to pass the test. It doesnot result in systemic change, but a lot of work gets done. However, if you apply constraints too loosely and offer no guideposts at all, work goes many different ways, money and energy gets stretched and the impact is diffuse, if even noticeable at all.
The answer is to guide work with principles that are flexible and yet strong enough to keep everyone moving in a desirable direction. You need a malleable riverbank, not a canal wall or a flooded field. Choose principles that will help keep you together and do good work, and evaluate the effectiveness of those principles to achieve effective means and not simply desired ends.
Quinn Patton gives a useful heuristic for developing effective principles for complexity work. These principles are remembered by the acronym GUIDE (explanations are mine):
- GUIDING: Principles should give you a sense of direction
- INSPIRATIONAL: Principles should inspire new action
- USEFUL: Principles should help you make a decision when you find yourself in a new context
- DEVELOPMENTAL: Principles should be able to evolve with time and practice to meet new contexts
- EVALUABLE: You should be able to know whether you are following a principles or not.
Because principles focused evaluation – and I would say principles-based planning – are context dependant, one has a choice about what principles to use. If I was evaluating the Dalai Lama’s approach to peace making I might use a principle like:
The development of individual mindfulness practice twice a day is essential to peace.
If I was working with Jake perhaps we might use a principle like:
A chief must be in good relation with his clan mothers in order to deliberate in the longhouse to maintain peace.
Principles are then used to structure action so that it happens in a certain way and evaluation questions are designed to discover how well people are able to use these principles and whether they had the desired effect. Using monitoring processes, rapid feedback, story telling and reflection means that the principles themselves become the thing that is also evaluated, in addition to outcomes and other learning that goes on in a project.
The source of those principles are deeply rooted in stories and teaching from the culture that is pursuing peace and peacefulness. It is very useful for those principles to be applied within their context, but very ineffective for those principles to be applied in the other context.
And so perhaps you can see what this has to do now with reconciliation – and racial justice – as a evaluation framework and not necessarily a stated outcome. If reconciliation and racial justice is a consequence of the WAY we work together instead of an outcome we know how to get to, then we must place our focus on evaluating the principles that guide our work together, no matter what it is, so that in doing it, we increase racial equity.
It is entirely possible for settler-colonial governments to do work that benefits indigenous communities without that work contributing towards reconciliation. The federal government could choose to fund the installation and maintenance of safe running water systems in all indigenous communities, and impose that on First Nations governments, sending in their own construction crews and holding maintenance contracts without involvement of First Nations communities. The outcome of the project might be judged to be good, but doing it that way would be against several principles of reconciliation, including the principle of working in relationship. Everyone would have running water – which is desperately needed – but the cause of reconciliation might be set back. Ends and means both matter.
x x x
So this brings me to practicalities. How can we embed racial justice, equity or reconciliation in our work using the evaluation of principles?
Part of the work of racial justice and reconciliation is to work from stories and ways of knowing of groups that have been marginalized by privilege and colonization. We often work hard – but often not hard enough – to include people in the design of the participatory strategic and process work that affects their communities but it is rare in my experience that those same voices and ways of knowing are included in the evaluation of that work. If reconciliation and justice is to ALSO be an outcome of development work, then the way to create evaluation frameworks is to work with the stories of community and question the implicit narrative and value structures of the evaluators.
This can be done by, for example, having Elders and traditional storytellers share important traditional stories of justice or relationship with project participants and then convening participants in a workshop to identify the values and principles that come through the teachings in these stories. Making these principles the core around which the evaluation takes place, and including the storytellers and Elders in the evaluation of the effectiveness of those principles within the project over time, seems to me to a simple and direct way to embed the practice of racial justice and reconciliation in the work of funding and resourcing projects in indigenous communities.
I am not a professional evaluator but my interest in the field is central to the work that I do, and I have seen for years the impact that evaluation has had on the projects I have been involved in. Anything that disrupts traditional evaluation to open up frameworks to different ways of knowing holds tremendous value for undermining the hidden effects of whiteness and privilege that threads through typical social change work supported by large foundations and governments.
But from this reflection, perhaps I can offer my own cursory principles of disrupting evaluation to build more racial equity into the work I do. How about these:
- Work with stories about justice and relationship from the communities that are most affected by the work.
- Have members of those communities tell the stories, distill the teachings and create the principles that can be used to evaluate the means of social change work.
- Include storytellers and wisdom keepers on the evaluation team to guide the work according to teh principles.
- Create containers and spaces for people of privilege to be stretched and challenged to stay in the work despite discomfort, unfamiliarity and uncertainty. As my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart says, “relationship is the result.”
I’ll stop there for now and invite you to digest this thinking. If you are willing to offer feedback on this, I’m willing to hear it.
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