Very few of us have our hands on the real levers of power. We lack the money and influence to write policy, create tax codes, move resources around or start and stop wars. Most of us spend almost all of our time going along with the macro trends of the world. We might hate the implications of a fossil fuel economy, but everything we do is firmly embedded within it. We might despise colonization, but we know that we are alos guilty of it in many small ways,
The reason challenges like that are difficult to resolve is that we are embedded within them. We are a part of them and the problem is not like something outside of ourselves that we apply force to. Instead it is like a virus or a mycellium, extending it’s tendrils deep into our lives. We are far more the product of the problems we wish to solve than we are the solutions we long to develop.
Social change is littered with ideas like “taking things to scale” which implies that if you just work hard enough, the things you will do will become popular and viral and will take over the world. We can have a sustainable future if “we just practice simple things and then take them to scale.” The problem with this reasoning is that the field in which we are embedded, that which enables us to practice small changes is heavily immune to change. Our economy, our energy systems, our governments are designed to be incredibly stable. They can withstand all kinds of threats and massive changes, This is a GOOD THING. I would hate to have the energy system that powers my life to be fickle enough to be transformed by every good idea that comes along about sustainable power generation. So that is the irony. In the western world, the stability that we rely on to be able to “make change” is exactly that which we desire to change.
We are embedded in the system. We ARE the system. That which we desire to change is US. You want a peaceful world, because you are not a fully peaceful person – violence has seeped into your life, and you understand the implications of it. This is also a GOOD THING. Because, as my friend Adam Kahane keeps quoting from time to time “if you are not a part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution.” Real change in stable societies like Canada comes only from catastrophic failure. That may be on our horizon, but I call you a liar if it’s something you desire. It will not be pretty. Living on the west coast of Canada, I sometimes think about it because a massive earthquake will strike here – possibly in my lifetime – and it will change everything instantly and massively and forever. So, while climate change and economic collapse are probabilities, earthquakes are certainties.
So let’s forget about prototyping new things and “taking them to scale.” But let’s not forget about prototyping new things. Because one of the big lessons from the living systems world view is that change happens in an evolutionary way. It happens deep within the system and it requires two resources we all have – creativity and time. It does not require hope. Living systems do not hope. They just change.
Years ago I was inspired by Michael Dowd’s ideas captured in “Thank God for Evolution” in which he talks about mutations as the vehicle of change in evolving systems. Of course this is a widespread thought, but it was quite liberating to me when I first discovered it because it compels us to use our own creativity to make change. Practicing something different, as some small level, is not a useless endeavour. There is no way to know what will happen when you mutate the system. And so that is a reason for practicing. That is why I love Occupy and #IdleNoMore and other social gathering practices. They are creative mutations of the status quo. And they are undertaken without any expectation of massive change. Instead they seed little openings, the vast majority of which don’t go anywhere. In an evolutionary system, mutations may introduce new levels of adaptability, but they might alos kill off the organism. But to survive and evolve, an organism needs to mutate. Remaining the same is also suicidal, because everything else is mutating and changing, and you will lose your fitness if you don’t also change.
So the second resource we all have is time. if you are beholden to making change along a strategic critical pathway, especially in a complex living system, you will suffer terrible delusions. Very few of us have that kind of time. The kind of time we do have is the time to let whatever we do work or fail. To orient yourself to this kind of time, you need to practice something with no expectation of it’s success. The moment you cling to a desired result is the moment suffering creeps into your work, and the moment you begin to lose resilience. Adaptability is reliant on creative imaginations working resourcefully.
So changing from within has something to do with all of this. Watching #IdleNoMore is to witness a celebratory mutation in the system of colonization. It is impossible to say if it will have the desired results that people project upon it. But of course it will “work.” We need to sit and watch it work as a mutation in a living system. And the bonus is that we get to round dance while we do it!
Have you been following the #IdleNoMore movement?
Well I use the word”movement” but what I really mean is “occupation” because that is what it is…indigenous people deeply occupying traditional lands and traditional languages, and being joined by settlers. It is another example of the active decolonization that has been going on largely unseen in indigenous communities for many years now. These efforts take all kinds of shapes and forms but they are almost always initiated by youth and Elders together. They are rarely led by traditional indigenous organizations or leaders.
The purpose of things like this is awakening. It is not that a few simple sounding demands need to be met (although the hunger strike of Chief Teresa Spence and the protest of federal legislation are providing a simple focus). The mainstream and the powers that be love to have a simple goal. They continually asked the Occupy movement to put out some demands. It is easier that way, both to respond to it and to fight it.
But Occupy and #IdleNoMore are not lobby efforts. They are prototypes of new ways of being. They are arenas for the practice of a new kind of conscious living. They are not fully fledged revolutionary moments in time that have a definite start and end. They are far more sophisticated than that; they wake people up.
#IdleNoMore has beautifully woken up settlers, and that is one of the things that makes it different. Most indigenous protests move along barely registering on the minds of non-indigenous Canadians. i’m willing to be that few readers of this blog (and you guys are in te know) have actually engaged with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process in Canada. It’s kind of absurd, that there is a major examination of the legacy of residential schools being worked over, that deeply important stories are being told and very few Canadians are there to hear them, let alone be a part of the compassion, forgiveness or reconciliation. Most days it feels like indigenous people in Canada are reconciling with a ghost.
That one-sided invisibility is largely why #IdleNoMore has sprung up this winter. Teresa Spence has been a target of powerful political interests for more than a year, when the housing crises in her community shed light on the appalling policies of the current federal government. And their response to her was to have her investigated and pilloried in the media for wasting money and not being a responsible leader, none of which was true. And now you have this absurd moment where a democratically elected leader is camped out near Parliament Hill, on a hunder strike to ask the Prime Minister to meet with her. And so far he won’t.
And so all across Canada people are engaging in round dances and bone games, organized flashmob style. Indigenous and settlers are celebrating the historic occupation of North America by it’s original peoples and while the dancing and the playing is going on, minds and hearts are being opened. This is the first time in my life when I have seen such broad based engagement between ordinary non-indigenous Canadians and their traditional hosts. So if you are non-indigenous, what can you do to play? A question many non-indigenous people are asking is how can I decolonize myself?
Well, beyond understanding the situation a bit, and helping to spread the word and stand as allies with Elders and youth, there are a few other things you can do. First of all, notice how you speak.
Yesterday I was having a conversation with my good friend Khelsilem, who has been involved in organizing not only some of the local #IdleNoMore activities around here, but who has alos been hosting the deeper conversation on what decolonization means. We were discussing this question of what settlers can do and we stumbled on a challenge. Khelsiliem is a language teacher and he was noting that in many indigenous languages there is really no possessive case. You can’t really say “That is my cup.” Instead you say something like “This is the cup I am using.” Also, concepts like want and desire are different too. “I want that cup” is a strange ting to say in Squamish, while “I could use that cup” is more accurate.
You see that English spends a lot of time keeping nouns and verbs seperate (English scholars hate it when people “medal” at the Olympics or “texT” a message or “groundtruth” a concept) and as a result, English has a a lot of rules about how to possess things.
So one way to begin the process of decolonization is to notice how often you use the possessive in English and what it feels like to offer a different sentence construction. This gives some insight into what it is like to live in a way where, in the words of one of my Elders “I belong to everything” rather than a world where the world is full of “all my relations.” Shifting the mindset of possession, of what we belong to and what belongs to us, is a very interesting way to think about what is happening. As indigenous youth reclaim languages across Canada this is the mind shift they are going through as well. When the richness of indigenous language is plumbed, the mindset of belonging to everything sweeps over you and that is accompanied by gratitude, humility and delight.
This is one of the quiet, powerful effects of #IdleNoMore and you won’t find anyone talking about it on the talk shows or in the newspapers or on TV, but it is happening EVERYWHERE and it could be one piece of personal practice that happens to you too. While a Chief is hunger striking and a railway is being blocked,minds are changing and hearts are opening and relationships are being formed. This is the real work that is going on.
Back in 1986 I was a young man who had grown up in an affluent neighbourhood in Toronto. I was unaware of the full story of my ancestry and although I was interested in the world, it was a pretty sheltered upbringing. I had just completed high school and had my eyes set on attending university to get a BA on my way to obtaining a Master of Divinity. I wanted to be a minister in the United Church of Canada.
As a result of my involvement with youth and social justice issues within the United Church, I was chosen to be one of several hundred Commissioners selected to attend the Church’s biannual policy and decision making gathering, the General Council. In 1986 the General Council was held in Sudbury Ont., and that year a significant and historical event took place: the Church made a formal apology to Aboriginal congregations for the role the Church played in the residential school system and in the devastating advance of colonization across the Canadian cultural landscape.
This was the first such apology in Canadian history between a non-native institution and indigenous peoples. It is perhaps not as well remembered that the indigenous representatives who were present deliberated with the Moderator of the Church for a long time before they announced that they were not accepting the apology but instead would release a ststement at a later date. That statement was two years in the making and in 1988 the response came: the Apology was still not accepted, but it was acknowledged and there was hope that it was sincere and at any rate, “We only ask of you to respect our Sacred Fire, the Creation, and to live in peaceful coexistence with us.” It was a call to alliance.
During the days of that General Council, I sat next to a Cree minister from Island Lake, Manitoba named Tom Little. At one point Tom turned to me and asked: “What will you do to make the apology real?” I made him a promise that, as I was going to Trent University a month later, I would supplement my history degree with courses from Trent’s highly acclaimed Native Studies program. Within months of arriving at Trent I knew my path had opened up. I dropped history and became a full Native Studies major. My life, work and spiritual path completely changed. If not for that decision, my great aunt would never have revealed to me my own indigenous ancestry (which is non-obvious in a genetic sense!). From 1989 I began living a real life of reconciliation, as what one of my teachers called “a living treaty.”
Canadians live in a space in between. We live within indigenous territories. We take pride in our connection to land, but suffer a terrible blind spot when it comes to knowing and understanding the deepest history, language and culture of the land. The zeal to recreate our lives – the zeal that all immigrants share – obscures what is already here. It deprives us of a rich world of thought and meaning that can only make us better humans if we open ourselves to it. If reconciliation is to be a real thing, it must be transformative for people and for the relationships that we share.
If you are a Canadian, now is the time to open yourself to what the invitation to reconcile really means. Who could we become as communities and as a country if we allow ourselves to be changed together rather than simply expecting one group of people to change and heal on their own? What can you do to be an ally?
It doesn’t have to be as life transforming for you as it was for me. But it could be.
UPDATE: Check out this booklet from Jennifer Ellis that documents a gathering around residential schools called UyidYnji Tl’äku: I Let it Go Now.
SItting here with Geoff Brown and Steven Wright at the World Indigenous Housing Conference here in Vancouver. We are on the back end of what has been a terrific gig.
We were hired by the Aboriginal Housing Management Association of BC to facilitate dialogue at this 800 person international gathering. The sponsor made dialogue a clear priority and after talking about intentions, we arrived on the design of three World Cafes: one in the plenary with everyone present and two in more focused breakout sessions. The first cafe would look at stories of success, the second would think about how to build capacity to support success and the third was focused on institutional development. each one built on the last.
The theme of the conference was “Sharing our Stories, Sharing our Successes.” With that theme to play with, we knew the cafes needed to be about connecting people and ensuring that stories were central to the work. Our first challenge was to think about how to harvest stories and connections quickly from 800 people. We looked at several tech solutions and realized that we needed something simple, unobtrusive and accessible. The ubiquitous tool at hand was the text equipped smart phone. Almost everyone has one, and almost everyone can text. Our basic problem was first how to gather text messages and second how to make meaning from them quickly. Geoff, Steven and I were familiar with Wordle.net which makes a word cloud out of blocks of text, and which I have used in the past to get a visual and intuitive sense of what concepts and words are weighted highly.
So our question became, how can we combine smart phones, text messages and wordle?
Through our networks we found Luke Closs, a local developer/hackerwho put together a simple solution that he called “Text to Cloud.” At the back end he connected Twillio to world using an interface that we could control with commands sent by text message. groups of texts that come in can be tagged and sorted and then sent straight to Wordle for processing. We also enabled the software to produce a CSV output that we can use for other purposes. Luke was great, developing the tool right up to the moment that his daughter was born on Tuesday. Of course, the tool is open source and you can find it on Github, download and install it and use it for yourself.
Armed with Text to Cloud, we began our first cafe by inviting people to text in the name of their tribe of origin. We created an instant wordle that showed who was in the room. That immediately connected people together (and showed we were blessed with Crees!)./ Following that we had people enter into the cafe to start telling stories of successes with listeners paying attention to the factors that made those successes possible. People gathered information on tablecloths and texted in wisdom and insights and by the end of the cafe we had 438 text messages to make meaning from. We had a half hour to do something with all this.
So we sent it all to Wordle and discovered a theme: Building Homes, Building Communities and Building Nations. There were six key areas we needed to think about for capacity building: governance, building, partnerships, community, education and ownership. Steven whipped up a digital mind map which we projected on our screens. We invited people at each table to choose one of the topics and dive into stories of capacity building. In our third cafe, we thought about how institutions can support sustained capacity building.
By the end of the day we were soaking in flip chart paper, but we had some great high level meaning through the Text to Cloud output, the wordles and the developmental nature of the conversation. We retreated to Steven’s room and started trying to figure out how to share what we had learned. We realized early on that there was absolute gold on the flip charts, so we decided to create a presentation that combined what Geoff calls “vox pops” – short pithy and insightful comments – along with longer stories. While Steven created a map to chart the highlights, Geoff and I prepared a slideshow that touches on the headlines. Our plan this afternoon is to call the storytellers up to the stage to share their stories with the audience. They are the true key notes.
This gig has been fun. Our client has been fantastic, we’ve created new tools, connected people doing important work, pushed our own edges and done stuff we’ve never done before, and that we could never have done alone. It was a superb co-creative experience and a great way to spend time with good friends.
I was up north on the weekend, working with a small community that has been driven apart by a large and contentious decision. It doesn’t matter what it was, or what either side wanted – the result is the same result that happens in many small communities: people who are friends and neighbours shouting and fighting with each other.
The team I was working with are trying to reinvent the way this community is engaged. We used a lovely redux of Peter Block’s work to help frame our conversation about design and implementation. A few things stood out for this group with respect to Peter’s work.
Changing the room changes the conversation. We talked a lot about the fact that changing engagement starts in this room and in this moment because this room IS the community. When we dove in about what was missing from the way the community engages it was clear that the ownership piece was the biggest one. As in many community meetings the way people traditionally engage is with passion that is directed outward. There is an expectation that someone else needs to change. We joked about the sentiment that says “I’ll heal only after every else has healed!” It was a joke but the laughter was nervous, because that statement cuts close to the bone. So we DID change the room and decided to hold a World Cafe. gathered around smaller tables, paper in the middle, markers available for everyone to write with…
So how do you begin a meeting with people who are invited to take up the ownership of the outcome? I am not a fan of giving people groundrules, because as a facilitator it puts me in the position of enforcer, and gives people an out for how the behave towards one another. So instead we considered the question of what it looks like when people are engaged. What stood out is how people “lean in” to the centre of the conversation. So the question became, how do we get people to lean in right away and take ownership of the centre?
The solution was simple but was later revealed to have tons of power. At the outset of the cafe as I was introducing the process I gave the following instructions:
“That paper in the middle is for all of you to use, as are the markers. We want you each to record thoughts and insights that other need to hear about. So before we begin I invite you to pick up a marker and write your name in front of you. <people write their names>. Now I want to invite you to answer this question: what is one thing you can do to make sure that this meeting is different? Write your answer beneath your name.”
People took a moment to write their names and their commitments. And they shared them with each other at the table. That is how we began.
The first round of conversation proceeded as usual, but I noticed something very powerful in the second round. When everyone got up and moved around they took a seat in someone else’s place, and often the first thing they did was to read the name and the commitment that was in front of them. Can you imagine coming across the name of someone who you have a disagreement with only to see that they have written “I won’t fight anymore” beneath their name? The core team is now going through all of the tablecloths and making a list of the commitments that people made. Taken on their own, they form a powerful declaration of willingness.
People reported that this was the best meeting the community had in a long time. And it had a lot to do with this tiny intervention of public ownership for the outcomes.