Reading and interesting speech from the UK-Canada Colloquium by Okalik Eegeesiak who is the head of the Qikiqtani Inuit Association. The QIA recently obtained a court injunction against the federal government in Lancaster Sound, preventing scientists from conducting siesmic research on the composition of the seabed. Eegeesiak talks about what this means for Inuit:
Unfortunately, Inuit in Nunavut have taken more frequently to the courts. This move is in protest at not being included or consulted properly. For example, we have a major case before the courts right now to address the federal government’s reluctance to live up to its obligations under the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. More recently, my organization, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, was successful in getting a temporary injunction on the federal government’s plans to carry out seismic testing in Lancaster Sound. This injunction is based on our assertion that the air-gun array proposed for parts of the testing will cause irreparable damage to marine wildlife and impair our ability to hunt in the area. The concept that pushes us into these lawsuits is the idea of the right to say no, which can be described as the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent. Meaningful consultation, participation in decision making and the right to say no to development when it does not suit our needs is what we strive for when we participate in the many forums we attend with the federal and territorial governments.
This concept of Free, Prior and Informed Consent goes far beyond information sessions or community meetings. Meaningful consultation should reflect an inclusive and respectful process like the consultation you would have with your spouse when you are buying a new home, rather than the “consultation” you have with your teenager about cleaning up their room.
I want to make it clear that we understand that meaningful consultation is not the same as controlling or having a veto over the actions of governments. However, it is our belief that our voice should be heard at a minimum and most of all respected and not ignored, across a wide range of issues that affect us, including education, housing, lands and wildlife management, sovereignty, and economic development. And our voices are worth hearing – we have a valuable contribution to make for our land and ultimately to our country and the world.
Today, as eyes turn north yet again, with dreams of oil, gas, minerals and ice-free ocean travel, we remind everyone to consider the advantages of Free, Prior and Informed Consent and respect the way in which, we as Inuit, choose to engage with our governments, organizations, and industry
In Canada, the law provides powerful protection for First Nations, Inuit and Metis groups who have Aboriginal rights to their territories. In practice, this protection means that governments and industry must consult with Aboriginal groups prior to undertaking any activities that would infringe on Aboriginal rights. Eegeesiak points to what such consultation means for Aboriginal communities. The kinds of conversations that need to take place at this legal, cultural and political interface are complex and weighted with issues of power.
For me one of the most difficult questions to address in these kinds of consultations is the massive power imbalance between the federal government and communities. Ine the example above, Eegeesiak struggles with this power in his characterization of what consultation means: it means the ability to say “no” but also not to veto government action.
For me the power issues might be better characterized by looking at both parties in a formal consultation process and asking who has the power to say yes or no and mean it? And, perhaps more importantly, who has the power to benefit from yes or no?
In other words, it’s one thing to simply say no in a consultative process, as the QIA did (or later in a court case, when they were treated unfairly at the consultation table) but quite another to have the power to benefit from a no. With limited capacity, inuit communities have a limited ability to deal with their own stand against exploitation. For example, most of the economic, social and political infrastructure in the Arctic is directly funded by the federal government. If the Inuit block oil and gas exploration in parts of Nunavut, the federal government has the option of waiting until conditions change, in which case, the Inuit may be in a position where the traditional whale and seal hunt might be sacrificed for the economic benefits of oil and gas exploration and development.
Many indigenous groups around the world face this dilemma. In most cases, resisting resource extraction is simply a temporary reprieve on the demise of culture, land and the lives of the people. In Canada at least, we have Constitutional protection for Aboriginal rights but that so far has not levelled the playing field with respect to power and capacity.
The question for governments then becomes, what is the moral obligation here with respect to decisions and activities that could threaten the future of an entire people, even if such actions bring local and national economic prosperity? the question for indigenous groups is terrifying at every turn: will this decision terminate our people? will this happen on my watch, and will I be the one who let it happen?
We need a new way of consulting and collaborating on resource development and indigenous communities. That these questions are never raised at the tables or in the process says something about the unwillingness of society to engage in the shadowy sides of power and exploitation. If it is not the job of the folks actually in the process, then whose job is it?
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Olelo i ke aka
Ka hele ho’okahi e
Mamina ka leo
He leo wale no e
Speaking to the shadow Is what one does when travelling alone Treasure the voice For it gives sound to the thoughts otherwise dormant.
Speaking to the shadow Is what one does when travelling alone Treasure the voice For it gives sound to the thoughts otherwise dormant.
— from Lele Kawa: The rituals of Pele by Taupouri Tangaro
This is the beginning of my effort to bring some sense to what has happened to me since I stood on the rim of Kiluea in June shortly after the summer solstice in a week during which a large part of myself was opened up. In the six months since then, the northern season’s long crawl to darkness, I have changed in my outlook, I have been transformed by working with women, I have become sensitive to the dynamics and faint echoes that lurk in many layers of context that hold us. As we move in the next seven days towards the full moon of the winter solstice I want to explore a few of these changes and insights here in public.
This transformative journey for me reached its pinnacle in June but it was a couple of years in the making when I was introduced to Luana Busby-Neff, a friend and colleague from Hawai’i who is a beautiful singer and practitioner of hula and a stunning guardian of her lineage and world view. Luana and I were brought together to work on the Beyond Sustainability gathering in Hawai’i in June and, joined by Tim Merry, we co-hosted a gathering of 50 powerful, pregressive and conscious people from around the United States. We were seeking to answer the question, what would it take to create a community of leadership built on a platform of reverence? What can the world learn from the pure and deep application of indigenous wisdom as a form and mode of profound systems thinking that can propose new views with respect to humanity’s relationship to the earth and which can underlie the search for what lies beyond the notion of “sustainability?” Our gathering was founded on a few simple principles: that ceremony was the methodology, that without deep personal transformation, collective transformation was not possible, that such transformation was facilitated by fostering a powerful connection to the world itself and that cultivating a state of reverence from which action – the building of community and the wise decisions that put power to use – can happen for the benefit of all was crucial to the future of our species. These were audacious places from which to work, but we tackled the challenge, brought some very impressive thought leaders together and created some effect. You can read more about the gathering at the Beyond Sustainability website.
What I want to share is my personal experience of that gathering. It is a story I have told several times now but I have yet to write it down anywhere. I think I’m finally able to put it in writing and see where it takes me.
For me, this gathering was the most challenging facilitation of my life. The moment I agreed to take on the initiative every bone in my body screamed in protest. I met deamons right away – issues of self-esteem, confusion, confidence in my own abilities to deliver, fragility in the face of massive expectations – you name it. For two years I went in and out of a love/hate relationship with this project. There were times when I felt that I wasn’t “indigenous” enough to host the gathering, and other times when I felt that I wasn’t plugged into the mainstream culture enough. There were other times when I felt like I was the only one who knew what was possible and times when I felt that I was the only one who had lost the plot. I chose early on to work closely with Luana and Tim, two people in whose hands I would trust my own beating heart. But even with these two in a triangle, I could never cure myself of the weight of this project.
In retrospect I think I knew that there was no way I was going to carry off this work without a profound shift moving within me. That was scary because everything I was was called upon to host this gathering and yet I knew that if a large part of me fell away during the gathering, I had no idea what would be left.
Basically I was scared. My body, my spirit perhaps, knew that I was heading into waters that were going to change me, loosen up things and frighten me.
It was not my job to be frightened. It was my job to assure the people who had put a lot of money into this gathering that it would be the best thing that ever happened to them. And I was being called on to be all kinds of things that I was and was not…to be myself but also to be a projection for others, a person of mixed ancestry that was so comfortable in his skin that he could lead us through the process of negotiating the spaces between worldviews. That somehow I would understand where everyone in the room was coming from, that I would have fluency with them all. Most of the time I felt very lonely, and very incompetent, with momentary flashes of knowing what I was doing.
We were gathered at an old military camp on the rim of the Kilauea volcano on the big island of Hawai’i. We were hosted there by first of all Pele herself, the goddess of pure unbounded creative spirit, and by her through the keepers of the hula lineage that honours her. Pualani Kanaka’ole Kanahele, Luana Busby-Neff and a group of women called the Hi’iaka Wahine who were holding the physical and spiritual and ceremonial field for us. A gathering of indigenous wisdom keepers happened in teh days before our gathering, during which time Elders spoke to one another about what they could share with the Americans gathering on top of the volcano. Some of the Elders from that gathering attended ours, arriving at the end of the first day of our own time together.
Until the third day of four the gathering proceeded pleasantly. We were engaged in good conversation about the challenge facing us, but much of it was in the realm of the mind and head and ran the risk of becoming redundant to many similar conversations going on all over the world. We had some powerful teachings from Hawai’ian teachers like Auntie Pua and Ramsey Taum which introduced us cognatively to the Hawai’ian worldview that was in play – Malama Ola: taking care of life. The third day of the gathering featured time on the land, picking seeds and pulling invasive species invited to be in conscious collaboration with the land, the sky, the volcano, the plants, the birds and the sea far below us. It was while I was picking seeds that I began to open. Working on a lava bed far above my colleagues, I began to hum a tune, a seed picking chant that came to me from a single note. It arose in my voice, and by speaking it I was able to help it come into being, a little wordless song that accompanied my work, expressed my gratitude for all that was around me, and focused my mind on the task of picking seeds and walking across sharp and treacherous ground. I returned that afternoon calm and grounded and extremely sensitive. I was able to notice little things in myself and in the group, was aware of the subtle energies in the room, of things people were enjoying or not liking, of the way the rain and fierce cold wind kept washing over us even as higher up on the mountain, the sun blazed hot. All of the elements of life were presenting themselves to us and inviting us to be in deep and reverential relationship with them, to work with them, to work with the tools of life itself.
On the morning of the fourth day I rose early and went with my friends and colleagues to the lookout over the crater where we held a morning sunrise every day. About 30 of us huddled in the sharp wind and rain and awaited the rising sun. As the time approached, Luana began her chanting in her beautiful sonorous voice, wavering in the cold morning air, as if calling the sun to it’s place in the sky. It strikes me that everyday, somewhere in the world, every sunrise is welcomed in ceremony by people. Doing it in Hawai’i we were the last people on earth to welcome June 25. A nearly full moon set, and the sun rose, and my world cracked open.
As Luana chanted, something came up in me. It was a strong and powerful feeling that rose inside my body, from my belly to my throat, where it got stuck. I started crying a little at first and then completely broke down in sobs. I was shaking in whole body sobs, out of my mind with grief. I had two powerful thoughts: one was of people in Aboriginal communities committing suicide and the other was the thought of shame. The image was haunting: it was as if everything we had tried to do was a failure and we were out of options. It was my biggest fear that this work, with good-hearted conscious people was not enough. It was not enough for any of us and it was not doing anything to change the fate of Aboriginal communities. We were none of playing at the level of real need, real fear, real darkness. We were rich and privileged people pushing around the discretionary bits of our lives. So from that place I felt tremendous shame. Shame that I couldn’t do this, that I was an impostor, that I was not who I or anyone else needed me to be. Shame that my indulgence was costing something.
At the same time as I was feeling this, a young Samoan man, Tuvalu, who was with us uncovered his body in front of Pele in a powerful coming of age ceremony for himself that was witnessed by all who were there, except me who was blinded by tears and sobs that were so powerful, my core muscles were beginning to ache. To this day I have the strong sense that my shame and his lack of it were connected.
I stood for a long time at the edge of the crater as the ceremony ended accompanied by two friends, Tim and Belvie Rooks, who just held me and witnessed. I began to walk back with them, unable to talk with a huge lump in my throat and a deep pain in my heart. I had a strong sense that fear had penetrated some wall I had erected over my heart and I felt as if it was going to burst. We headed back to the camp for breakfast and our pre-gathering meeting with our team.
By the time we met it was 7:30am and I was still sobbing, an hour an a half after it began. In our meeting there was some tension and one of the Hi’iaka Wahine exploded in anger over a small request I made of the group to help round up the people so we could begin in good time. Our schedule for the day was to have breakfast on the land with some teaching from the hula practitioner Taupouri Tangaro and then have everyone stay out there in a solo retreat before coming back to the meeting space for an Open Space about where our will would carry us to next. It was still raining and some of the non-Hawai’ians were grumbling a bit about the weather. The Hawai’ians were getting frustrated with the lack of appreciation for what it meant to be working in the rain. After three days of teaching about the powerful place of water in Hawai’ian culture, there was a sense that folks couldn’t get it, that we should abandon the ceremony and simply have a hula performance.
When I made my request my colleague snapped. She said it was not her place to do my bidding and that her role had been completely misinterpreted from the beginning. She asked me what happened to me in the morning ceremony and I started to tell her about the images that came to mind. She stopped me. “I don’t understand that” she snapped. “Don’t give me all this bullshit. What left you out there?”
I was so taken aback by the question that all I could say was “defense.” I felt as if something I had been carrying around with me my whole life, some protection around my heart, had dropped away. My friend scoffed at me and spat out some massively disapproving comment about being in my head. She gave up on me and then the rest of us with a tirade against the greed that men, and white men in particular exhibited. She railed against the hoarding of wealth of all kinds and she burst into tears as she pleaded with people to understand the place of giving. She said that no one in the history of humankind has the opportunity to experience giving like rich white men and she sobbed as she described the missed opportunity that that vast concentration of wealth represented.
After ten minutes or so of this, I finally looked up at her and said “I don’t know what to do, and I am afraid.” I meant it on every level. She looked at me tenderly and said “Thank you.”
I had no idea how the day was going to go, I had no idea how to deal with the tremendous schism on our team, with the nervous response of our white male benefactor who had received the tirade with grace but not without a wounding. I had no idea how anything was going to end, of what to do next, of whether we were doing anything important or just frittering around while the world died. I felt the truth of “I don’t know” through my whole being and at every scale, all the way thorough to the biggest questions of my life. I felt my expertise slipping away – what was being taken from me was my ground, my confidence and all of the false foundations for my privileged walk through life.
It seemed to take forver for anything to happen next. Finally the Hawai’ians drove out to the site where breakfast was scheduled and back again – a full hour round trip to check the weather. It was sunny up there so we all loaded into buses, well behind schedule and travelled to the forest.
When we got there Taupouri welcomed us with seven hula chants and dances and then an hour long teaching on accessing the feminine, authentic action, and the journey of a cultural practitioner. At the end of his talk one of the men from our group said “I think that in theis group we have trouble accessing the feminine, and I wonder if you have practices we can use to do that.” Taupouri was short with him: “Who is we? Why don’t you talk about yourself?” The man rephrased his question “I have trouble accessing the feminine. What practices can I use?” He seemed surprised by this authentic and more truthful rephrasing. Taupouri replied “Hum. Build a fire. Listen to a story.”
This response was as profound as it was simple. What struck me most was the call to take personal responsibility, to speak for oneself, to not use the word “we” to hide from the “I.” For the rest of the day when someone said “we” should do this or that, I asked them to rephrase it to claim it for themselves.
From this point on, my mind and heart returned to each other and we finished our gathering well, and with a number of commitments and actions to carry forward. All those seeking ooutcomes were somewhat satisfied, and I was left with an ache.
These events seem unremarkable on their own. What I can’t seem to capture in writing is the utter depth at which I felt them. With an unguarded heart each of these events took on a deep significance. I could feel a deep connection with context and a coherence between my actions and everything that was going on around me. For the first time in my life I had a felt sense of what it was going to take to recalibrate my relationship to the earth and to life itself. And it was going to take several months of discovering shadow, confronting the feminine, repositioning myself in my home place and extending this learning conversation in order to set my new path to rights.
So more on that this week. But at least now you know what hit me so deeply in June.
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Johnnie Moore had an interesting thought this morning:
Jeff Jarvis talks about the Gutenberg Parenthesis. Those who bemoan the supposed short attention spans of the networked generation, typically measure this by the capacity or willingness to read a book cover-to-cover. This assumes that reading books is normal; but what about the vast span of human history before books? Perhaps we’re seeing a reversion to ways of knowing that were diminished by the printed word… to a more oral culture in which remixing is natural.
This reminds me of the book, The Alphabet and the Goddess which also suggests that reading had a powerful and not always positive effect on how we think and behave.
I left him my own thoughts…and I say this as a guy that loves books.
I think the issue is not attention spans so much as it is a breadth of attention. Before there was text humans needed to be incredibly aware of context, of everything that surrounded them of how things worked and what initial conditions led to certain kinds of results. This is important in agrarian societies, hunting societies, transoceanic travelling cultures and other kinds of indigenous land based ways of being.
What we have lost during the Gutenberg parenthesis I think is the ability to think systemically. Book reading has taught us to be linear and to expect a beginning a middle and an end. That is not the way the world works and I think we ignore it at our peril.
This is a little bit I think of what we will taste in our module at the ALIA Summer Institute this year.
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I’ve recently been introduced to the work of Al Nygard, a Native consultant working out of South Dakota primarily in Tribal communities. Al’s approach and values are very similar to my own, and it’s cool to see familiar ideas in another person’s hands. Al works with traditionally based models of leadership and calls his community development work “community empowerment.”
My colleague Jerry Nagel sent me a link to a video of Al answering the question of why it is so hard to get things done in Tribal communities. Essentially he identifies seven factors that make community empowerment unique. These seven factors bear out my own experience too. He calls these The Art of the Native View. If you understand this view, the work you do will take. If not, and if your work is built on mental models that don’t take these into consideration, you’re in trouble. In my own success and failures working in communities I can relate to how important it is to build your work on appropriate mental models, appropriate views. Even though Al identifies these seven factors as basically universal, each community has unique circumstances, cultures and histories that also inform the work of community empowerment. This stuff is interesting to me as I am about to embark on a project to work on community engagement and empowerment with my mates in the Berkananetwork, tailoring some of our resources to work in Tribal communities in North America
Starting around 5 minutes into the video, Al gets to the nub of his approach in building empowerment in Native communities. It centres around seven things that all Native communities share which make the work of empowerment unique. I’m summarizing and editorializing a little on his words here.
Trust. This is about building relationships of mutual reliance. It’s about building trust between people, between families and between people and institutions.
Communication systems. The default communication system in Indian country is the moccasin telegraph. Works fast but not always reliable. So we need a variety of ways to communicate – audio, visual, kinesthetic. Reliable commonly shared information is important and doing it in a multi-modal way is important.
Leadership systems. Who are the leaders in the community? Elected leaders, heads of entities and institutions yes, but what about moms, students, Elders, veterans? Leadership is everywhere. The system that develops and directs leadership in all these ways is important. Elections are clear but how are we developing leaders in other areas and how do we get information to leaders so they can act? Leadership in Native communities comes from invitation: you are asked to be a leader. Also, there is an end time. When it’s over, it’s over. In Anglo cultures we seek out leadership and then we hang on to it as long as possible. To me this is one of the reasons why Open Space is such an interesting fit for traditional leadership forums, as these are the same dynamics that underlie that process.
Governance. What are the rules that tell us what we can depend on? Not the same as government. Do your rules help you or hold you back? That is the essence of governance
Lateral oppression. Sometimes called the Indian crab syndrome (in a bucket of crabs, when one tries to escape the others will pull it back down). Lateral oppression is the way that power shows up in shadow in a community. When you are working with empowerment, the shadow work of paying attention to lateral oppression is very important.
Racism and Inequality. A common experience of all Native people living in community is the disparity of experience on the rez vs. off the rez. Over time, experiences of oppression, racism and inequality eat away at self-esteem and colour how we relate to the outside world. Just this evening in a cafe I was running this dynamic showed up as a difference between how a First Nations forest company and non-First Nations forest companies dealt with the stress of uncertainty about the future.
Hurt and Balance. The lingering effects of trauma from issues like residential school abuse, language and culture decline, and the subsequent multi-generational issues create a myriad complex of dynamics that often confuse and confound outsiders.
Al’s framework is a useful lens to view work in Tribal communities. Mental models and world views matter.
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In the middle of a four day gathering of indigenous child and family services organizations here in British Columbia. I’m back in my room even though it’s after lunch and our meeting was supposed to have restarted because history just got made.
To understand what this means, you have to have an appreciation of how the state has related to indigenous communities in this country since colonization began. The essence is that tools of law and legislation have been used repeatedly to deny the jurisdiction, rights and responsibilities of First Nations from nearly the moment European governments set eyes on this continent. Nowhere has that become more of a hot point than with the issue of children.
For more than 100 years the stated policy of the federal governments was to place First Nations children into the care of the state and the churches by sending them to residential school. The residential school system was designed originally to educate the “Indian out of the child” and to assimilate people by breaking up communities, punishing kids for speaking their language and subjecting them to slavery, by forcing them to work to keep the schools running. This one policy alone has left a legacy of unhealthy family structures, weakened cultures and multiple generations of vulnerable children. When the provincial government stepped into to take responsibility for children in the 1960s the infamous “sixties scoop” happened whereby kids were removed from their families to be raised by non-native familes. By the 1980s the sixties scoop had ended and the residential school system was shut down. From that time onwards, Aboriginal kids were at the mercy of the non-Aboriginal child welfare system. In BC alone, the percentage of kids in care who were Aboriginal skyrocketed to today where it is now more than 50%.
In the last 20 years, First Nations have become more proactive in creating their own child and family services agencies and taking back responsibility and later control over the system. Starting at a historic meeting in 2002 in Tsawassen, BC, the provincial government began the process of recognizing the authority of First Nations communities to look after their kids. A process that began in 2002 (which I was involved in primarily on Vancouver Island) saw the creation of regional authorities around the province to oversee the establishment of First Nations child welfare systems. These authorities, had they been passed into law, would have taken all responsibility short of law making authority and placed it in the hand of communities through regional authorities.
The problem with the regional authority model was that it didn’t work well with the inherenet jurisdiction of the First Nations governments in BC. Problems began to appear in 2007 between the provincial political leadership and the leaders of the regional authorities. At the last minute, literally as the enabling legislation was to hit to the floor of the Provincial legislature, the provincial political leadership – against the wishes of many First nations cheifs – shut the process down. For a couple of years we were back to the status quo, and things looked grim.
But behind the scenes, the provincial ministry of child and family development was working to transform the child and family services syste. Led by a deputy minister, Leslie Du Toit, the ministry worked to help nations develop their own systems and did it from a position of recognizing the authority and jurisdiction of First Nations to care for their kids. As a result the 15 and more projects that are gathered here got off the ground, reestablishing a child and familiy services system that is deeply ingrained in the cultural, spiritual and political power of the Nations themselves. It has been a hugely decolonizing experience (the children of the Haida Nation even wrote their own declaration of their rights which is to be passed into law).
So things are ticking along and this has brought us to today where we have gathered 120 people to share their experiences and accelerate their work together. It has been a good meeting so far, conducted in ceremony and working productively and positively. Today the deputy minister made an announcement though that has rocked us all. She announced today that provincial government was now opening the door for First Nations and Metis groups in BC to create their own legislation to replace the Child and Family Services Act and to enbale indigenous child and family services systems to be established and supported designed and delivered by the Nations themselves. It is the first time anyone can remember the colonial government ever stepping out of the power they have and giving over the legislative jurisdiction to First Nations.
Suddenly our meeting has got a lot more interesting. Accompanied by the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn A-in-shut Atleo, she stood for the principle that only a system created by the people for whom is it intended will be the right system. Everything we have been working towards suddenly is a reality. The chiefs are excited, the people who have been developing and delivering the indigenous systems are elated that their work will be made the formal system for their people in the province and everyone is buoyed by the right thing happening at the right time.
Suddenly we are all on the same side. My long time mate David Stevenson who is an Art of Hosting steward is right at the centre of the work in his job as the Executive Director of Aboriginal Services for the Ministry. Many other people who were with us through the regionalization process on Vancouver Island including Marion Wright, Kyra Mason, Pearl Hunt, Bruce Parisian and others are here celebrating and preparing for the hard work ahead. We are taking a break now while we get ready to go to the Sts’ailes longhouse for an evening of singing and speaking in ceremony. Tomorrow when we come back to work, we’ve thrown out our agenda and will just spend a half day in Open Space to articulate the opportunities that we have among us, all of us hosting together the very first steps on what will become the next chapter in a historic journey.