My friend and colleague Bronagh Gallagher and I are in the early stages of creating a learning offering around complexity, facilitation and activism, whereby we try to bring complexity and participatory tools to the work of social change. We’ve been assembling some very interesting sources for our work and she recently introduced me to the work of Micah White who has written about protest and activism from a complexity perspective. I’m working my way through some interviews he gave in support of his book, The End of Protest. Here is one juicy line:
This is fundamental. All effective forms of protest are illegal until they succeed. All revolutions are illegal until they succeed, and then they become the government and all of the sudden these people are celebrated as heroes and all that kind of stuff. What we’re talking about is very real. This is what distinguishes fake protest from real protest. Fake protest is underpinned by the idea that our actions don’t need to be illegal, that we can get permits from the government, that we can have “free speech zones” or we can do scripted arrests; it doesn’t need to be illegal or dangerous or disobedient. I think that’s completely misguided. We didn’t get a permit for Occupy Wall Street. We asked people to bring tents knowing that it was illegal for people to set up tents. We did these behaviors because the legal regime doesn’t matter when you create a protest. You operate outside of the law.
It doesn’t mean they have to be violent. There are lots of different ways to be illegal. But it does mean that you have to say, “I’m trying to change a situation that is so important that I will disobey the law. My protest stands above the law.” And you also have to accept the consequences of that. For Occupy Wall Street seven thousand people were arrested. That’s an astounding number. People had their bones broken. People lost their jobs.
Absolutely. Real protest is always illegal. For sure.
There is an interesting observation here, that the socially acceptable forms of protest, innovation and radical change are only helpful in terms of creating incremental and socially acceptable change. You may shift things but they will be shifted WITHIN the acceptable boundaries. When you start pushing on the boundaries, or fundamentally breaking the boundaries, you will be operating outside of the law. In society, this takes the form of illegal activity. In organizational life this means fundamentally violating the organization’s norms and policies, some of which are unwritten and my not even be visible until you start acting in ways that make them visible.
It is this way with colonizing mindsets embedded in the ways that social institutions, governments and businesses operate in Canada, where there is hardly ever a fundamental challenge to some of the core ideas of colonization, such as the assumption that all private land was legally obtained or that all public land is owned by the Crown. In a society based on colonial power structures, everything goes along fine until some First Nation somewhere stands up to a Canadian law and challenges it’s authority. The act needs to be law-breaking in order for the laws to be rewritten. This is how Aboriginal title has entered Canadian Constitutional law as a valid, binding and important legal concept.
Likewise as organizations and businesses are trying to fundamentally change core practices, they are largely constrained by doing by having such change championed by an approved panel of change makers. Fundamental change comes to organizational life from the outside. It is disruptive. It calls into questions sacred cows about power, management policies, core purposes and priorities. Like activists, change agents are marginalized, dismissed reassigned, and often fired. At best if you are championing fundamental change within an organization you may suddenly find yourself without access to decision makers, left out of strategic cnversations and not allowed to work with and mentor junior staff.
Fundamental change is a threat. As I grow older as a middle class white skinned man, I have found myself on the receiving end of more and more challenges from younger people who don’t look like me. They challenge my assumptions and my ideas. I am beginning to discover that, despite having lots to offer, the way the world is changing around me must necessarily overturn the assumptions I make about the world, the ones that have allowed me to work relatively close to the core of social stability. I aspire to be an ally to those making change from the far margins, but it is not my place to declare myself an ally. People are given status as allies of fundamental change makers. It is not a title you can claim for yourself, no matter how well intentioned you are.
Social change, innovation and reorganization requires a kind of leadership at every level that works at the margins to provoke and overturn and works from the centre to, in effect, not defend the status quo too much from the “threats” from outside. There is no “other side of the fence” in the work of social change. While I’m not sure that there has ever been an orderly revolution in the world,the question for all of us is which side of the revolutionary Möbius strip are you on and what can you do to help what wants to be born?
Just finished out first day of work with Navajo Area Health Promotion practitioners and 30 community wellness workers, Elders and healers from across the Navajo Nation. We are blending an Art of Hosting workshop with content and process from some recent research in neuroscience, epigenetics, and adverse childhood experiences and with wellness and leadership models from our Navajo colleagues with whom we have a ten year relationship.
One of the pieces of work we are doing is supporting these folks in launching or accelerating some community based projects using the social networks they have in place here. This will involve us spending time in Open Space tomorrow and on Friday running a ProAction Cafe in which 6-8 projects will be able to to be developed. As a way of grounding these projects in patterns that are useful for this context we spent this afternoon generating a Navajo pattern language for resiliency. We did this with a two round World Cafe in which we asked for stories of supporting resiliency and stories of leadership challenges. This is a kind both/and appreciative inquiry. At the conclusion of the Cafe, I asked people to reflect on one teaching or piece of advice that would be useful based on the discussions. I invited them to write a word or a phrase on one side of an index card and write some explication on the back.
The attached collection of 27 or so patterns include both expected patterns such as “Presence” and “Listening.” They also include some Navajo principles like “Ádáhodí?zin” meaning ‘Letting our children go, to learn and discover who they are.”
On Friday we will use these principles to help design projects. I’ll hand a few out to each project proponent and ask them to take a few minutes to brainstorm how to incorporate these pieces of ground tested advice in their project design.
This morning I’m listening to a lecture from Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, who recently gave the Lafontaine-Baldwin lecture on “Doing the Right Thing.” Nenshi shares his thoughts and stories on citizenship and on how that is changing in Canada. And he doesn’t pull punches.
The lecture is divided into two parts. The second part talks about citizen action, but the first part talks about our history of racism.
There is a deep thread of racism that runs through Canadian society. As a white skinned man, I grew up hearing racist chatter. “Privilege” in Canada – being an “Old Stock Canadian” to use Stephen Harper’s egregious phrase, accords you a special window on people’s real views about things. It’s as if you can be confided in to keep the dirty little secret that racism is rampant in this country. And I’m not merely talking about the obvious and official outbreaks of racism like the Komagata Maru or Japanese internment or the Chinese Exclusion Act or None is Too Many or Africville or residential schools or carding or any other of the historical and official policies of racism. No, I am talking about the mindset that simmers beneath it all, the permission given to an attitude of micro-aggression and othering that is constantly stoked by “wink wink nudge nudge” conversations between light skinned people when they think no one else is around. I am talking about a widespread practice of refusing to be reflective on one’s own racism and privilege, leading to misplaced outbursts of outrage that have the odd effect of white people claiming victimhood while at the same time disparaging others for their adoption of an “entitled victim mentality.”
The way Canadian society works is that this simmer mindset among the privileged stays out of sight and below the radar. Anyone who dares to state it out loud and publicly is usually disowned right away as a crazy crackpot. If much of what is said on newspaper comments sections comes out of the mouth of an ordinary citizen in a public setting, you’re supposed to call them out even as you nod along and your inner voice says “damn rights!” The mindset is always there, but you’re supposed to refer to it in code: “those people,” “offshore owners,” “I’m not racist, but…” “one law for all,” “honest, hardworking Canadians,” “Old Stock…”
But what is happening now – and this is something that Naheed Nenshi points out in the first part of his lecture – is that kind of talk is becoming normalized. Over the past ten years, what is supposed to be a secret set of conversations between privileged people is becoming shamelessly public. We are seeing candidates running in this election that have no qualms stating outright racist stuff. We are seeing public debates in which refugees as a class are slandered as potential Islamist terrorists, the 21st century version of the yellow peril scare. Call them racist and they declare you out of order for making an ad hominem attack. In the most openly racist era of my life, one is left wondering when and where we get to have this conversation about how racism informs public policy. Anyone? During the election? Calling another candidate racist is now a gift to the racist candidate. They can rally their base supporters behind the slanderous accusation that they are racist.
And while I’m all in favour of having racism out in the open where we can deal with it, it’s also clear to me that this normalization has the effect of legitimizing racism as an acceptable rationale for policy making. People seriously use terms like “cultural suicide” to discuss the effect of admitting Muslim refugees to Canada and no one seems to blink an eye. We have seen our federal government openly use racism to drive a wedge between citizens in Canada and raise the suspicions between Canadians. We have witnessed the government create two classes of citizens with two different standards of justice for Canadians who were born here or whose grandparents were born here – “the Old Stock” – and others (like my wife, or my children), who can be deported to another country and stripped of their citizenship for committing certain crimes. We have seen the passage of a Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act which outlaws things that are already outlawed, but has the effect of also making “barbaric” an official standard by which we can cast suspicion on people. Have any of you reading this pictured in your mind a white man beating his children and justifying it by saying “a man’s home is his castle and no one can tell me how to parent?” Because that is a pretty barbaric cultural practice, but I will bet not a single white man will be brought to court under this act for that offense.
Racism has become normalized. We are making actual laws again in this country on that basis. Our history tells us that what comes next will be inhumane and unjust and that we will eventually look back on it with regret and dismay. Future generations will ask us how this could be allowed to happen. And no one will say “I let it happen.” We will all declare powerlessness in the face of politicians or elites or whomever we can separate ourselves from. Especially those of us granted the privilege of being “Old Stock” Canadians. If history is any teacher, something powerful and tragic will happen, a denouement will occur, and the conversation will go back underground to simmer along as it always has. Disrupting this cycle is important. It is the critical work of citizenship.
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported out this week. It has finished its work, listening to the stories of the survivors of Indian residential schools, promoting dialogue and healing and urging Canadians to understand what is implied by reconciliation.
For many Canadians, the TRC’s work will receive a minimal passing notice in their day. They will have heard of it, they will probably know something of the history of residential schools, but they are unlikely to know how the legacy of residential schools plays out in contemporary society. Most non-indigenous people think it was “all in the past.” For most non-indigenous Canadians, residential schools was something that happened to others, who suffered injustice at the hands of people who are long dead.
So if you are a non-indigenous person, what does reconciliation mean to you? I think it’s important to understand that Canada was founded on two parallel strategies: brute force colonization and agreements meant to uphold the “honour of the Crown.” It’s kind of crazy. If you are an indigenous person you’re never quite sure if Canadian society is here to live up to its obligations or smash you in the face, because since the very beginning to the present day, one hand is offered in peace and the other is a fist.
And here’s what you need to understand if you are a non-indigenous person. If you are a Canadian, you are a treaty beneficiary, end of story. No matter if your family arrived in 1532 or last Tuesday. If you have Canadian citizenship you personally benefit from the treaty relationships that, over time, have made it possible for Canadians to own land, to develop resources, to use water, to hike in the forest, to grow things and make money. In exchange for the ability of the Crown to permanently occupy and use these lands, and therefore give you personally that same right, treaties created a relationship that is just as permanent with indigenous nations. If you are an advocate of “tearing up the treaties and starting over” then you are obligated to return your private land and all the wealth you have generated from Crown lands to the bargaining table. Because the very fact that you can live in this legal frameworks is a result of you personally being a treaty beneficiary. Yes, even in places where there are no treaties.
So the first thing you can do to advance the cause of reconciliation is to understand that you benefit from treaties, and that you personally have rights and responsibilities to First Nations that flow from this relationship. Some of these responsibilities are exercised through governments, but you pay for them personally with your taxes and that is as it should be. So remember this and remind others that Canada is a land founded on relationships and legally binding contracts and you have a duty to uphold the honour of the Crown’s end of the bargain. Not only governments. You, also.
Secondly, understand that First Nations are still to this day experiencing the brutal fist of colonization. When you see socio-economic statistics that talk about homelessness, addictions, abuse, diabetes and suicide rates that are far above the national average, understand that you are seeing colonization in action. When you see the rates of missing and murdered indigenous women and you see government’s luke warm response to this crises, understand that these girls and women are taking the full force of a society that still propagates violence against indigenous people with much impunity. When you hear of First Nations being steamrolled by global corporate interests like mines and tar sands operations and pipelines and fish farms against their consent and will, you are witnessing the same dynamics that were at play in the “dark days” of colonization and western expansion. If you think it was wrong then you must see that it is wrong now. Thankfully First Nations have more and more rights recognized in the Canadian court system and so it is harder and harder to be subjected to this kind of colonial activity. But you have to understand that this is not First Nations stopping economic growth: it is indigenous peoples using the Constitution of Canada to resist the abusive power of colonization. It deserves respect and support, because when Nations do this, they are operating within the legal framework of the country that gives you your own rights. To diminish their ability to do so would weaken the rule of law that benefits you.
Understanding that these two dynamics are at play is a practical, critical thing that all Canadians can do to make reconciliation real. And you can think about these things, see how they personally play out in your own life and address those who say that “treaties need to be redone” or “Indians get stuff for free” or “all that violence happened in the past” or “it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
We have to fundamentally restructure the relationship in Canada but it does not start with governments. it starts with you and me. Take this moment in time to take a step closer to real reconciliation and help the TRC’s process actually have a legacy. Don’t wait for other people to create that legacy for you.
Thinking of friends and especially the Elders and survivors in Alert Bay today as the residential school is torn down. I was in a meeting today where we were discussing ethics and the social contract that Canadians have with one another and here’s the thing: if you are a Canadian, whether born here or recently arrived, you are bound to an ongoing relationship with indigenous peoples. It is impossible for you to own land or to benefit from the taxes paid by those who have exploited resources without being directly connected to the original relationships that founded this country. This country was founded and made possible because of an ongoing relationship with indigenous peoples, which most times only indigenous people remember. And this is not about the past, this is current and real today. Each person living here is a contemporary beneficiary of the treaty relationships or the outright theft of land. Right now, if you are a Canadian, you are benefitting.
But if you forget that, you forget who you are and you have forgotten on what basis the accident of your birth has accorded you privilege.
May this be a day to honour those who have died and to remember and renew the relationship that makes living in this country possible for most of us, while lots of us still struggle to benefit from the original promises of respect, trust, reconciliation and mutual benefit.