A cafe today, with littler preparation on the ground and a tricky issue in a community, but a good result today and some good learnings about harvesting. Here are my notes:
Before we began the chief invited us to stand in a circle to pray and to have some introductions. I was introduced and invited the group to find beauty in the work here, identifying what they really cared about for the education of their young people. We stayed standing in the circle for a half hour while some of the Elders talked about how hurt they had been over the past several years as the work the community had done to set up and govern the education system had gone sideways. They expressed frustration at the lack of communication and transparency and a perceived lack of respect for the community’s voice and the hard work that the community had done over the years. They talked about having more meetings, and more process to include people deep in the work of building support for the education system.
When people are stuck, you cannot move forward without acknowledging where they hurt. You cannot sweep pain and feelings of injustice under the carpet. People who are willing to stand for principles and stand for their beliefs need to be heard and acknowledged. No amount of defending or apologizing for the past will always do the trick either. In fact defending leads to more stuckness and no one ends up getting what they want. Concerns need to be heard as interests and as rooted in deeply held views about how things should work. The Elders in this gathering are talking about a process that they can be involved in and an education system that they can be involved in. It’s clear and to avoid that or design a system that does not makes space for their voice or passion does not transcend the pain and bad feelings that are the residue of the catastrophic collapse of the education board in years past.
To get through messes, simply listen, acknowledge, suspend beliefs and assumptions and make sure you hear people clearly and that they are heard clearly.
What do we want for education in this community?
We began with this question. The first two rounds of conversation focused on it. From there we asked: In a perfect world, how would our community be involved in education? We then finished in a circle again.
Part of the art of hosting is dealing with fear. I am so sure of the importance of a strong field being in place that when I work in a place where the field is weak or wobbly I fear that nothing will take root. But good questions are like weed seeds. The can thrive in some of the most depleted environments. And those first seeds that fall and sprout in depleted or barren ground make plants that make more soil. Lichens and mosses break down rock and create mineral soils that larger plants can grow in. Likewise, sometimes you just need to work with what you’ve got – design a question that assumes the best intentions of a community and drop it in and see what happens. People choose their engagement in cafe, they make decisions all the time about who to be with. In many subtle ways those decisions actually work towards optimal. During the evening, the law of two feet took over in this cafe. Many people were visiting with the Elders to hear what they have to say and the Elders were strategically visiting with others to make sure people understood their perspective. This is the field of good soil that is created by a good question and the freedom for people to engage. It’s by no means a garden of rare and wonderous plants, but with careful tending, the meager harvest from tonight could at least represent a change in the life of the community around this issue.
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Ensconced at the head of an inlet in what has to be the most beautiful valley in BC. My commute yesterday to get here was a one hour flight from Vancouver over huge icefields, 9000 foot peaks, high mountain lakes and deep forested cirques. The landscape here is forbiddingly raw, and when the morning sun catches the blue glint of glacial ice in the cracks and crevacies on the icefall you are flying PAST (not over!) your heart just sings.
In this tight little valley – now rain soaked and cloud choked – a few thousand people live cheek by jowel. At one end, where the long inlet terminates, is the Nuxalk Nation where I am doing a little work, trying to bring some hasitily organized participatory process to a couple of pressing needs in th ecommunity. Today is basically about trying to host a community conversation that sees the good and the possible in a desperate and fractious context. In most First Nations communities, hurt runs deep and the kinds of dynamics that are at play here are deep currents that carry away optimisim, creativity and possibility. And yet, everyone I talk to here wants something different, a different conversation, a different wnay of looking at things. So today and tomorrow, using Cafe and Open Space, we are going to try that.
We haven’t had much time to prepare, and there is much working against making this an ideal situation, so I truly don’t know what will happen. I am just entering today as open as I can be to what’s possible, trying to embody what others are longing for.
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On the eighth ballot in a drama filled election my friend Shawn Atleo won the position of National Cheif of the Assembly of First Nations. He neede 60% of the vote to win and he went several ballots against Perry Bellegarde from Saskatchewan even tying him on one ballot. But in the end he started pulling away and eventually won the vote.
Shawn is an amazing speaker and a very thoughtful leader. He is the first National Vhief to also be a hereditary leader and the first NOT to have gone to residential school. He represents at once a new generation and at the same time a deeply traditional integrity.
Over the years we have worked together especially around trying to understand what “dialogic governance” might look like and supporting youth leadership Jere in BC. It’s good to see him extending his influence.
So congrats to A-in-shut and all the Ahousahts who must be so proud of him, and good luck Shawn playing in the big stage!
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Back on my home island from a short trip down to the Warm Springs reservation in central Oregon visting with the staff of radio station KWSO and the community members that rely on the station. This was the second site vist for a project I am doing with Native Public Media and Public Radio Capital looking at how to measure the impact of Native community radio stations in the US.
Really struck with the role the station plays in the community. Most radio stations, at least mainstream commercial and public radio concern themselves a lot with reach – are we getting enough listeners. With Native community radio that isn’t the problem at all – in Warm Springs it seems like they reach 100% of the people quickly either directly or through word of mouth. When there is an emergency or a school closure, everyone knows about it right away. The luxurious problem these stations have is how to use that influence to actually help the community maintain wellness and health.
In Warm Springs, the KWSO do this by focusing on health, education and culture. They produce PSAs and short documentary or news programs that focus on important issues like diabetes prevention or language retention or repeating stories that help ground ceremony and history. One of the key impacts the station is having is in the area of education. The bording school experience in the States, like the residential school experience in Canada, left many Native families with intergenerational trauma and a deep distrust of institutional learning. (I share that mistrust in general, and we homeschool our own kids, but for families where that isn’t possible a decent educational experience is important). In Warm Springs, the radio station and the school work together to create a climate of positivity around learning. This has paid off in a couple of ways. First there is a culture of positivity at the school that carries over into behaviours. There have been a total of four suspensions in five years at the school. Kids get along really well there, and the radio station continues to support this positive climate by focusing on learning, by playing good music during the school bus rides that helps the kids stay relaxed on the trip into town and by encouraging parents and kids to be active in the life of the school. There are very few formal parent-teacher interviews, but all of the teachers reported that they have a hard time getting the parents OUT of the school, so involved is the community.
On the diabetes front we learned that the Warm Springs community has a diabetes rate five points lower than that national Native average in the US. There is extensive public health information broadcast all day on KWSO from announcements about classes and workshops to recipes and nutriotion tips. I have a sneaking suspicion that if we look across the country, the reservations with community radio stations will have a lower diabetes average than others.
It’s a fun project, and now with two site visits under our belts, it’s time to write up the findings and see what loacl media really means.
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I was talking to my daughter tonight on the phone. I was walking out of The Forks in Winnipeg where I had just eaten a pickerel (that I learned was from Kazakhstan…W.T.F!) and my daughter requested that I get a GPS that could beep and show where I am on this epic trip. After being on the road for eight days already, with another 12 ahead of me, I don’t even know where I am sometimes.
Yesterday I was wrapping up the 2009 Good Food Gathering in San Jose and I took a CalTrain up to SFO, hopped an Air Canada flight to Calgary, spent the night there, and flew to Winnipeg early this morning where I joined national gathering of Aboriginal youth who are meeting to thinking about how to renew a very successful federal government program. That’s a lot of travel, but it doesn’t stop there. I fly to Ottawa tomorrow and spend most of the week at an Art of Hosting in Pembroke, Ont. before flying to Kelowna for a one day Open Space and then down to California again, this time to Hoopa, to work with a small Native radio station, KIDE. I get home May 6 after 20 straight days on the road split between five different gigs.
The Kellogg gathering was a lovely experience, and I was especially tickled by how we dissolved the traditional conference model. Day one was all speakers and plenary panel presentations, with a little bit of conversation built in around the ballroom set up with six foot rounds. Day two, we got rid of the tables and held the whole day in Open Space. Day three, a day that we deliberately left free for an emergent design, featured us getting rid of the chairs. When the participants arrived, the room was empty save for a few pieces of tape on the floor. Although half the participants called it a day right there, about 250 stayed on to engage in a beautiful piece of intergenerational work. Led by our youngest team members, Norma Flores, Manny Miles and Maggie Wright, the participants self-organized into a spiral by age, with the youngest person at the centre and the oldest on the outside. Looking around that spiral was to see the journey of a person growing in the Good Food movement.
We then people gather with the ten people closest to them on the spiral and figure out a song, chant, slogan, sentence or movement, that captured what their small demographic had to say to the whole. The next 20 minutes consisted of people bot speaking to the centre and speaking from their place. A voice and story of life in the movement unfolded all the way from the energy and optimism of the youth to the stretch of middle aged people to the tired, but persistent presence of the movement’s elders. After we took a breath we moved to another room and ended it with a drum circle.
Fun.
Tomorrow, a day of Open Space with youth who are designing the future of the Urban Multipurpose Aboriginal Youth Centres Program and then it’s off to Ottawa to run this Art of Hosting with dear friends Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Kathy Jourdain and a great local team.
I’m twittering more than blogging these days. The microform works well. If you’re interested (yes Aine, YOU!) my twitter feed is here.