[Working today and yesterday with a group of indigenous political leaders on reducing Aboriginal child poverty in British Columbia. In a little strategy session today we were talking about the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, the fact that Canada has refused to ratify it, and how, with the world coming to play here next month during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, that this is a good opportunity to let the world know that a global agenda item remains unratified in this country. So here is is my letter to global visitors joining us for the Games…]
A message to all global travellers visiting British Columbia during the upcoming Winter Olympic Games:
Welcome to British Columbia and Canada! While you are here for the 2010 Winter Olympics and other events you will notice the incredible land and sea, the deep multicultural integration that Canada is famous for and the presence of First Nations and indigenous arts and culture.
While you are here you might notice some noise about indigenous rights. You see, in British Columbia, unlike most of the rest of North America, most of the land and sea has never been subjected to a treaty between the colonizing powers and the indigenous Nations that have dwelt here for at least 9000 years. That’s before the time of the pyramids, to give you a sense of scale.
You might here messages about the unresolved grievances of indigenous communities and you might wonder if any of this is your business. After all, isn’t getting involved in a country’s internal political disputes a little rude and presumptuous?
Well, I’m hear to tell you that it is not. One of the great things that happened in the last decade was the creation and ratification of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. After more than 500 years of colonization of the Americas and elsewhere, the world finally declared that indigenous people have human rights that are distinct and important to preserve.
So thank you for that citizens of the world. And know this: Canada has refused to ratify this. So in addition to being climate change pariahs we are also pariahs on the recognition of indigensou rights, such as the right to consent to public policy that affects our communities. That sort of thing.
So, world, welcome to Canada and BC, where some of the fundamentally decent things that are being done by the global human family fail to garner respect or support of our federal government. While you’re here, I think many of us would be happy if you mentioned this to federal government representatives and, if you an athlete and have influence with your own government, perhaps remind them that Canada needs help getting its priorities straight, as a member of the UN’s family of nations. As a member of the global family of peoples who have declared that it is desirable that these rights are recognized, it is your business and I for one welcome your thoughts and support.
Enjoy your time in our indigenous territories!
Today, the new moon rises, a time of aupicious beginnings, especially coming so close to the winter solstice. These are important moments in Nuu-Cha-Nulth culture, and the times are important in Nuu-Chah-Nulth history. Last month, five Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribes won a landmark court case that gave them the right to sell the fish that they catch. Not on an industrial scale mind you, but on a scale big enough to create small local commercially viable fisheries for communities that desperately need both the work and the reconnection to the sea. Moreover, the courta case declared this as an Aboriginal right, a significant ruling for coastal First Nations in general but for the Nuu-Chah-Nulth in particular.
All of this leads to a time when participatory leadership is needed to seize the opportunity of building culture and community back and doing real, powerful and grounded marine use planning. So today was a good day to get to work.
We begun with 20 minutes of Warrior of the Heart practice, introducing the concept of irime, entering in, joining energies with an attacker and helping them lead a situation to peace. This check in this morning was a powerful reminder to some about the way their work as hosts needs to change, to be able to stand in the fire of aggressive energy and work with it. Fisheries and marine use planning is full of passion and the work these folks will be doing will not be easy. But the passion that drives the aggressive fight for rights and allocations can be used also to build and heal community, and if we enter into that space well, grounded and ready and knowing a little bit, we can do something with that energy.
So today we heard a little about the court case and then we spent some time learning about the seven helpers with this harvest as a result:
From this morning’s sessionshort piece on designing meetings: Four groups of questions to ask before conducting any meeting, to help you choose a good way to get what you need:
BE PRESENT* How will we bring people together in a way that invites them to be present? * How do we make people comfortable to share from their heart and listen together for wisdom and learning?
KNOW YOUR HARVEST * What do we want to take away from this meeting? In what form? (notes? graphics? photos? video? audio?) * How will we use what we gather from the meeting?
HAVE A GOOD QUESTION * What question(s) could we ask that would invite contributions from everyone?
LISTENING PIECE * What is a listening tool that helps us have enough time for people to make their contributions and hear each other? * What kinds of activities and exercises can we use for people to explore content together and provide their own thoughts on our question?
If you use this checklist as a way of organizing your thoughts before a meeting, it will help you to stay focused and to ensure that everything you do is tied to the purpose of the meeting.
Nice…a basic set of planning guidelines for any conversation that keeps us focused on the harvest, and keeps us conscious about process.
After lunch we took the advice of our Elder Levi and the participants went out on the land to think about their work going into the community. This was the time to do a little oosumich, connecting with themselves and presencing the future that starts next week when they return to their communities. When they returned, we went into a really beautiful World Cafe around two questions that Laura and Norinne cracked. The first question was an appreciative question about a time when community was truly engaged. The second question, which we did two rounds on, was on question we could ask to bring community together around marine use planning.
The harvest from this was great, a real set of tools and ideas for them to use when they go home to start the conversation.
And sweet practice this evening. Bruce Lucas put on a potlatch DVD and some of us played Scrabble while Nuu-chah-Nulth tunes echoed through our dining space. Two or three kids played while we feasted on chicken, salmon and some great vegetable dishes prepared by our local caterer. This groups is really gelling, and becoming fast friends. They are tooling up on facebook and Skype to stay together as they move into this work seperately.
Tonight I can hear some geese flying overhead, moving south on the warm winds that have come in. The rain has stopped and the surf still pounds, the ever present sound of sae and land meeting, creating one another out of their shared conversation.
Tsawalk indeed.
It’s 11:30 and I’m about ready to tuck into bed. Through my open window I can hear the roar of the surf rolling on the beaches a mile away. The surf report says that the swells are coming in at 9 feet but are going to rise to 17.5 feet by tomorrow. The roar is deafening, but it is a sound that has been heard on these beaches from time immemorial. The Nuu-Chah-Nulth, upon whose territory I am working, have lived here as long as the sound of the waves has been heard, and they’ll be here until those waves stop.
And that’s the reason for this Art of Hosting – to introduce participatory leadership to people who are working in Nuu-Cha-Nulth communities up and down the coast ostensibly on marine use planning. We are using the framework of a set of traditional values based in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth prime directive: heshook ish tsawalk or “everything is one.” This principle of interdependence acknowledges that everything has a common origin and that our work in the world is to live according to several principles – basics you might call them – to be in accord with this natural law. We have chosen three of these principles to explore these days: he-xwa (balance), isaak (respect) and aphey (kindness). Today’s activities explored balance and looked at:
- The principle of tsawalk and the methodology for knowing the interior life of the world, called oosumich.
- Connecting oosumich as a way of knowing, to participatory meeting design, using a new take on Ken Wilber’s qnuadrants and my model of sustainability in communities of practice.
- Visiting the carving shed of Joe Martin, a well known Tla-o-qui-aht carver who dropped some good teachings on us about making canoes. The one that stood out for me was “we know the tree this canoe came from” which is to say that in an structure you have to know the source. Joe will not make a canoe out of a tree he has not seen standing, because he needs to know how it grew, where it’s weak points might be, which side faced the sun, how it lived with other trees and slopes and rocks. Only once he has understood the tree in its context can he cut it down and make a canoe out of it. The lesson here, is knowing source is everything.
- Doing a little Warrior of the Heart practice to discover something about balance and what it means to move from ground.
- Appreciative inquiry to connect to ground work and purpose in stories of health and abundance in communities and marine environments. We did a good long deep dive interview process, surfaced some powerful values and then entered into a dream phase but asking “If our work was to make the difference we wanted it to, what would our communities look like?” People drew systems diagrams, connecting the human and natural environments, the state of health of people, communities, ecosystems and economies. By the end of the day we closed with a breathing exercise, full to the brim with the almost sacred nature of this work.
Tomorrow we will dive into meeting and process design based on the principles of isaak meaning respect. The waves will get stronger, the new moon is coming, and something is feeling like it wants to be unleashed,
Writing from Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island which is about as far west as you can go without leaving North America. I’m here this week to run an Art of Hosting training with a number of community coordinators for 14 Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities around Clayoquot, Barkley and Kyuquot Sounds. We’re going to be learning together about methods for community engagement and participatory leadership and all of it based very deeply in the concept of Tsawalk (from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth principle of “heshook ish tsawalk” meaning “everything is one.”)
Last night I drove out here across the spine of Vancouver Island, from Departure Bay on the east side, through Port Alberni and along the shore of Sproat Lake, through the pass and down to the west coast. It’s a landscape of high mountains, big trees, big clearcuts and huge beaches. Everything is scaled so big that you can’t help feel small and humbled in this landscape. And to beat it all, last night I chased the sun across the island and it beat me to the open Pacific. By the time I made the turn for Tofino it was pitch dark and the sky was ablaze with stars and the Geminid meteor showers littered the heavens with fireballs and frequent streaks of light.
The first time I ever cam to BC, in 1989, I came here, or more precisely, I stayed a week in Heshquiaht, on the north edge of Clayoquot Sound, visiting with my friend Sennen Charleson and his family. Sennen died a few years ago in a road accident in northern BC, and I can feel his presence here in land from which he spent many years in exile, but which always called him strongly. There is a riotous complexity to the rainforests of the west coast, and a presence unlike anywhere else on earth. Everything is quiet, knowing that you cannot make more noise than a storm from the ocean or the clatter of rain through the canopy. Human noises disappear here, like a the ripples from a pebble tossed into surf.
I’m excited to be designing a three day learning experience here with some apprenticing mates, Norinne Messer and Laura Loucks. We are using the framework of tsawalk for our work together, a concept that is deeply rooted in the Nuu-Cha-Nulth worldview and that influences everything from resource management to spiritual ceremony to the role of community. It is forming the basis of a unique partnership that will produce a marine use plan for Clayoquot and Barkley Sounds, and over the next few days, we will look at how tsawalk informs our work with communities, influences design choices for community engagement and self-development.
One of the processes we will be using is based on the Nuu-Cha-Nulth spiritual practice of “oosumich” which is a form of prayer and self-knowledge that helps us to access knowledge from the interior worlds of spiritual source, individual persoanlity and community. It is a form of investigative methodology that is complimentary to science, which examines and makes sense of the external world. Working together with these methods, we can come to a holistic understanding of the world, a practical expression of tsawalk. Oosumich is a spiritual practice, intended to connect with the spiritual aspects of the world that we can also understand materially. Oosumich itself is a secret and a scared practice, but what we know of it can be used to work in leadership learning and process design.
Some of the basic values that are involved in the expression of tsawalk are aphey (kindness), isaak (respect) and he-xwa (balance). As I sit here designing today, I am thinking very carefully about how these three basic show up in hosting work. Some of my preliminary thoughts are:
aphey
- being helpful for the common good (“hupee-ee-aulth”)
- paying attention to good relations and increasing more of them (an appreciative approach to growing community)
- ask for what you need, offer what you can (PeerSpirit Circle principles that apply to Nuu-Chah-Nulth life from the way in which people help each other with work, food gathering and preparation and ceremony)
isaak
- every voice has it’s place. When we hear a voice of dissent or confusion, it is not out place to judge it, but rather to figure out how it is related to the whole. If tsawalk is the principles, there can be nothing outside of that, and so all voices have a place.
- all creation has common origin and we pay respect to that common origin by acknowledging the relationships that are present in the world.
he-xwa
- balance comes from having a core, which can be a purpose or a solid centre or a ground
- the world is a constant balance between energies that create and those that destroy. Balance is not a static point in time, but a dynamic practice. We have to learn to be sensitive to imbalances both in the external world and in the internal world. Where there is too much red tide, people notice, and they know it means something is out of balance with the marine environment. When there is too much chaos in a meeting, it means that people are confused and more order and clarity has to be found.
All of these ideas form the basis for some teaching, for some play and learning. I’m thrilled to be here.
I’m off to Estonia on Saturday to run an Art of Hosting workshop with Toke Moeller and Piret Jeedas. To say I’m excited is an understatement.
First, this is only the second trip to Europe I have made since I left the UK in 1981 after living there for three years. It’s interesting to see how things have changed in Europe over 30 years. On this trip I am intending to connect in London, during a brief stopover at Heathrow, with one of my school buddies from those days, who I last saw when I was just 13 years old.
But the real highlight of the trip will be the time spent in Estonia, a nation that has one of the largest traditional repertoires of folk songs. Only a million people live there but there are tens of thousands of songs that are shared and sung by everyone. So important are these songs that it was through music that a cultural movement was born in the 1980s that led to Estonian independence from the Soviet Union without a single drop of blood being shed. There is a terrific new eponymous movie about The Singing Revolution which we watched last night as a family. The essence of the film was that Estonian culture, language and tradition formed the basis for a slow and patient awakening of cultural sovereignty and pride that led to mass meetings and gatherings, and the singing of traditional songs of affection for the nation. From that current flowed the courage and will to establish political sovereignty that resulted in the self-liberation of Estonia from more that 50 years of occupation by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
To offer a workshop on the Art of Hosting powerful conversations in a nation that has done that seems a trifle hubristic. But the Estonian story is one that lauds the power of vision, courageous commitment and self-government and it provides both a tremendous ground for our work and inspiring lessons for those of us whose nations are still labouring under colonial administrations. With so many First Nations in Canada clinging to language, culture and music, what I am about to learn in Estonia can provide me with some important lessons about how cultural expression, skillful dialogue and courageous participatory leadership can result in profound social and community transformation.