I first saw Van Jones speak at the Pegasus conference last year, and I know of his work through some of the people I have been working with in the Food and Society network. Here is an article summing up his thoughts on a New Green Deal, which brings social and economic justice together. Having done some work this past week setting up a national network of urban Aboriginal economic development practiitoners and thinkers, I think what Van is pointing to here has immediate relevence for Canada as well:
To change our laws and culture, the green movement must attract and include the majority of all people, not just the majority of affluent people. The time has come to move beyond eco-elitism to eco-populism. Eco-populism would always foreground those green solutions that can improve ordinary people’s standard of living–and decrease their cost of living.
But bringing people of different races and classes and backgrounds together under a single banner is tougher than it sounds. I have been trying to bridge this divide for nearly a decade. And I learned a few things along the way.
What I found is that leaders from impoverished areas like Oakland, California, tended to focus on three areas: social justice, political solutions and social change. They cared primarily about “the people.” They focused their efforts on fixing schools, improving healthcare, defending civil rights and reducing the prison population. Their “social change” work involved lobbying, campaigning and protesting. They were wary of businesses; instead, they turned to the political system and government to help solve the problems of the community.
The leaders I met from affluent places like Marin County (just north of San Francisco), San Francisco and Silicon Valley had what seemed to be the opposite approach. Their three focus areas were ecology, business solutions and “inner change.” They were champions of “the planet”–rainforests and important species like whales and polar bears. Many were dedicated to inner-change work, including meditation and yoga. And they put a great deal of stress on making wise, earth-honoring consumer choices. In fact, many were either green entrepreneurs or investors in eco-friendly businesses.
Every effort I made to get the two groups together initially was a disaster–sometimes ending in tears, anger and slammed doors. Trying to make sense of the differences, I wrote out three binaries on a napkin:
1. Ecology vs. Social Justice
2. Business Solutions (Entrepreneurship) vs. Political Solutions (Activism)
3. Spiritual/Inner Change vs. Social/Outer Change
People on both sides of the equation tended to think that their preferences precluded any serious consideration of the options presented on the opposite side.
Increasingly, I saw the value and importance of both approaches. I thought, What would we have if we replaced those “versus” symbols with “plus” signs? What if we built a movement at the intersection of the ecology and social justice movements, of entrepreneurship and activism, of inner change and social change? What if we didn’t just have hybrid cars–what if we had a hybrid movement?
I wouldn`t be surprised to see Van Jones in the new administration in the US when Obama wins next week.
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission launches today (hooray that my friend Jane Morley was named as one of the commissioners last week!) and I’m here at Queen’s University in Kingston to run an Open Space as part of a conference of academics, policy makers and public servants from First Nations and non-Aboriginal governments and institutions on the topic.
In Canada, the process that is being embarked upon today is spurred by the residential school experience. The main brief of the TRC will be to write the history of that 150 year period in Canadian history when residential school did huge amounts of personal and collective damage to Aboriginal children, families and communities.
But as I’ve been thinking about this topic in preparation for tomorrow’s Open Space, I’ve been thinking about reconciliation from a broader perspective, and I’ve been thinking about it specifically in relation to the way reconciliation helps us to create generative relationships that can be the basis for paradigm shifts. Today I was in a conversation with the Mohawk artist and teacher Rick Hill who filled me in on his experience of the Haudenosaunee worldview about relationships. Rick said that for Mohawks, the primary form of relationship is the family. So in the thanksgiving address used by Haudenosaunee Elders for opening gatherings, the natural world is referred to by family relations: mother earth, grandmother moon, our brothers and sisters in the plant and animal kingdom. Likewise, for important relationships, the Haudenosaunee government gives names to politicians and senior public servants because by doing so the confederacy “extends the rafters” of the longhouse to include strangers. Once you are named, you are family and once you are family, you are able to be in relationship.
When I asked Rick the question “What are the purpose of relationships?” he answered me by saying that relationships are the places in which we find peace. It is most important in all indigenous cultures I know of that this search for peace be a communal experience. In contrast to the Buddhist path of individual enlightenment, the Haudenosaunee worldview holds that collective peace cannot be served by an individual seeking their own path. In fact, such an act is dangerous and hubristic and leads to a reprimand from the clan mothers. The purpose of relationships, Rick said, is to find ourselves in a peaceful place together.
So this had me thinking about my opening tomorrow and so I called my partner Caitlin to get her thoughts and she said similar things. Her take on reconciliation is that it is actually a means to an end. Only when we are reconciled to what is real, can we find new things to do and new ways to be. As long as we live with the energy of unresolved historical stories, we cannot be in a place of generative shift. So Caitlin suggested an appreciative exercise, which I intend to begin with tomorrow. She suggested that each person take a moment to notice for themselves what reconciliation feels like, and what it allows us to do. From there we can ask the question of what might then be possible in the public sector in Canadian society if we achieved the kind of peace and resourcefulness that comes with having reconciled with each other. If what is needed is a fundamentally different way of being with one another, reconciliation represents not an end state in itself, but rather a pre-condition to moving to the generative space of co-creating new paradigms.
I’m curious to see how this all plays out.
Update: Opened space this morning and had a lively agenda setting session. My favourite ones so far included a Kingston City police officer who convened a session called “Why do we support and adversarial justice system?” and a new federal public servant who asked how non-Aboriginal people cna become allies of Aboriginal peoples.
The Westin Hotel in Atlanta, which lost windows in last week’s tornado.
A strange week indeed. I left home yesterday morning bound for Toronto and then on to Atlanta where I am doing some work with Public Radio Capital and Native Public Media, looking at how Native community radio stations make an impact. Yesterday I made it as far as Toronto, but a flight delay meant I was cutting my connection close, and I still had to apply for a work visa at US Customs and Border Protection. I arrived in secondary screening at 10 to eight, with an 830 flight pending. There was no one else in the room, save a distraught Hispanic woman who was being denied entry and a tired Chinese man, waiting for his visa too. I have applied for four of these TN visas and it’s not an onerous process. All three officers however remarked on my short time, and I patiently explained to them that my flight was delayed, I was doing my best and could they try and get me on the 830 flight to Atlanta.
But alas, US Customs and Border Patrol is not about customer service. It is very much about creating an environment that seeks to put you off your game, get you to tip your hand, spill the beans. Officers stay out of rapport, breaking eye contact should you try to engage, and in secondary screening, they move very slowly, laughing and talking loudly about clearly non-related stuff. It seems designed to put you on the defensive. They’re cool…what’s bugging you? So alas at 830, after sitting alone in the customs hall with five officers trading stories, an officer finally called me forward, asked a few questions and gave me my visa. By then the plane had gone and I was bound for a night in Toronto. There was no apology to be had. But I don’t complain – that is their job: to screen anyone entering the United States and ensure that no immigration laws are broken. That is how things are with Homeland Security. For me it’s just good practice in patience.
As for Air Canada, they were good enough to recognize their part in the timing delay and they nicely put me up at the Sheraton right at the airport. So props to them.
Luckily my connection was non-essential, and so I rebooked for this morning, and shot down here on a quick CRJ flight, arriving at noon, which was too early for this Shearton, so, stranded again, I set out around downtown Atlanta searching for life. It was long before I discovered that life, even on this lovely cool spring day, was all underground, in the Peachtree Center mall, where long lines of office workers were queued up at fast food outlets for lunch. I found some decent pad thai (Atlanta is a very multicultural city, despite your prejudices about what Georgia must be like) and settled into read the Globe and Mail. In the Life section I read this quote by the poet James Richardson, which sums up my week:
The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.
Sweet. And so with that, I headed back out into the downtown core and shot some photos of the buildings, and especially the Westin Hotel which lost a whole lot of windows in a tornado last week. Tomorrow I run a two hour world cafe on measuring the impact of Native community radio stations, then I hop an afternoon flight to Toronto and on to Vancouver so that I can arise bright and early Thursday for the first day of two with the Department of Fisheries and Ocieans. I finish that job on Friday at noon, debrief, hit a 5pm flight to Nanaimo and head up to Parksville to run a weekend retreat for the Vancouver Aboriginal Transformative Justice Service until Sunday at noon. Then I’m home, and staying there for about two weeks. That will be the longest stint at home this year, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to play with my kids and tend our new garden.
If I didn’t have flow, and if I didn’t see travel and work like this as one long extended meditation, I don’t know how I’d survive it.
I ran a workshop last week for the Indigenous Adult and Higher Learning Association of British Columbia. The taske was to to spend a day and a half reviewing the high level vision and direction of the organization and to come up with some streams forward to present to the organization’s membership at the AGM. In thinking about the design of the gathering, I chose to consciously use Theory U to help structure a series of exercises. I proposed a five phase process for the day:
- Sensing needs and purposes and reviewing the world outside
- Appreciative Evaluation of the organization’s path over the past five years
- Presencing the vision for the near future
- Crystallizing the intention of the emerging visions
- Harvesting forward to present to the AGM
For the first three phases I created a series of reflective exercises, based in part by some of the exercises Otto Scharmer has been using in his work. The list of questions went as follows:
Sensing
- What are the voices tapping us on the shoulder? What are the forces competing for our attention?
- What are our sources of frustration in the world?
- What are our sources of joy?
- Think of the diversity of IAHLA membership. What are they facing that is coming through you in this moment?
Each person journalled individually on these questions and then we went around the circle of six and harvested what was in the field. At the end of the exercise we had a harvest that represented an environmental scan that was presenced through the minds and hearts of each Board member.
Appreciative evaluation
- Thinking of IAHLA’s journey as a canoe trip on a river, five years ago, when IAHLA began, what caused the founders to put the canoe in the river?
- What landmarks have we passed on our journey over the past five years?
- Who has been there with us, in the boat or on the shore?
- If we imagine the journey extending through where we are now, what does our past and present say about where we are going?
- If you received news this afternoon that IAHLA’s funding were to disappear what would your initial reaction be? What would you fear for first?
In the same fashion I led the group through these questions, with each person journalling individually. The result was a harvest, drawn on the frame of a canoe journey that recorded the founder’s vision as we have inherited it, the work that we have done, a sense of where we are going, a list of people and organizations that have been instrumental in getting us there and, most interestingly from the last question, a list of what is essential. Many of the board members remarked that this exercise was powerful in that it connected the current board to the legacy of the founders and those that came before, who started the entire movement of offering this type of learning centre in Aboriginal communities. This exercise resulted in a powerful sense of stewardship for the movement.
Presencing vision
For this exercise we used a framework document that describes the work of IAHLA and captures the overall intention and purpose of the organization. Participants were invited to spend nearly an hour on a learning journey with this document, using the following questions as a guide:
- Inspired by the framework, what are three shifts in the world you can see IAHLA spearheading?
- For each of these shifts, imagine being in that changed future and note down how we might have arrived there.
- Find and circle parts of the framework that will have contributed to that shift.
The harvest from this was a fantastic conversation in which we identified eight areas of shift and some of the major strategic landmarks that would appear on those paths. In the subsequent conversation as we crystallized the intent of these directions we talked extensively about some of the priority areas, the work that might have the most impact, and that which the organization’s members might be most excited in.
We will capture these results in a large graphic harvest for the AGM, at which time we will be inviting the membership in a cafe to reflect on these eight shifts and contribute another level of collective strategic thinking to the work.
I was listening to The Current on CBC Radio this morning and I caught an interview with Marlene Brant-Castellano on the newly announced Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools (hear the interview here). Back in the mid 1980s when I was at Trent University, Marlene was a professor in the Native Studies Department. She was a beautiful teacher – quiet and inviting and embodying tremendous dignity and powerful conviction all at the same time. I connected with her quite deeply as I began to explore questions of culture and community. It was in her classes that I was introduced to systems theory, feedback loops and dynamic living communities and cultures. She intriduced me to indigenous philosophy and showed me that there was an incredibly deep a valid intrepretation of the world that had been born and nurtured in North America. Not every way of thinking about things needed to come from elsewhere.
In large part due to her unwavering commitment to this way of thinking, I wrote some amazing papers under her guidance and my learning opened up and expanded. Three major papers stand out: I wrote a paper on the dynamics of culture change in communities, I wrote one with my friend Gary Heuval on hunting as a negotiating strategy for the James Bay Cree in the 1970s and I wrote one looking at themes of connection and interdependence in Native American and First Nations poetry. That last one included a meditation on Duan BigEagle’s poem “My Grandfather was a Quantum Physicist“, interestingly enough. All of this led up to my developing a particular worldview that culminated in my honours thesis, a piece of original research under David Newhouse that developed a multi-disciplinary process for understanding organizational culture in Native organizations. That was what was possible at the undergraduate level at Trent in the 1980s – I think things have changed now. Marlene was an incredibly influential person on my life.
And so it was delightful to hear her this morning, even if it was only out of the side of one ear. What I did catch though was a short story she told about the phycisist David Bohm meeting with indigenous scientists in Banff in the early 1990s, shortly before his death. I had no idea that Bohm had done this. I knew of course of his meetings with Krishnamurti and his cross-cultural examinations of consciousness and dialogue, but I had no idea he had extended that inquiry into indigenous America.
So I Googled the event and came across a report from Dan Moonhawk Alford, a linguist who was at one of the meetings, and who subsequently participated in two other Bohmian dialogues. He did some interviews with some of the partiicpants, including Sakej Henderson, who I have since worked with. Here is a long quote from the report on the eight things everyone agreed on:
1. Everything that exists vibrates
This point of agreement is important because it moves beyond our usual ‘thingy’ or particle notion of existence based on raw sensory impressions, which is favored in the indo-european language family, and allows a justification on the part of Native Americans for the existence of spirits.
2. Everything is in flux
(Sa’ke’j:) The only constant is change–constant change, transformations; everything naturally friendly, trying to reach a more stable state instead of bullying each other around. That kind of process the English language doesn’t allow you to talk about too much, but most Native American languages are based on capturing the motions of nature, the rhythms, the vibrations, the relationships, that you can form with all these elements, just like a periodic table in a different way: relationships rather than a game of billiards, where you only count the ones that go in–all of their motion doesn’t count.
3. The Part Enfolds the Whole:
(not just whole is more than the sum of its parts)(Sa’ke’j:) When we wear leathers and beads and eagle thongs and things like that, it’s not seen as totally ludicrous, as decoration – it’s seen as containing something you want to have a relationship with.
4. There is an implicate order to the universe
(Sa’ke’j:) This implicate order holds everything together whether we want it to or not, and exists independently of our beliefs, our perceptions, or our linguistic categories. It exists totally independently of the methods or rules that people use to arrive at what it is, and David Bohm’s captured that with the great phrase the implicate order, versus the explicate order of things that they can explain quite concretely, such as a rock falling out of a window. This also agrees with the lakhota phrase ‘skan skan,’ which points to the motion behind the motion.
5. This ecosphere is basically friendly
Sa’ke’j maintains that the planet, and especially the Americas as well as the physical universe, are basically gentle and friendly: You don’t have an electron jumping and bullying into other(s) unless it knows it’s missing a stable state and knows it can reach that stable state and increase its own stability.
6. Nature can be taught new tricks
(Sa’ke’j:) We also agreed that that world out there that exists–that reality, not imaginality–can be taught new tricks with the cyclotron; and what was raised in the meeting was, are these new tricks beneficial, or will they create a hostile universe on their own, independent of scientists, once they teach electrons how to jump and how to amass the energy to jump, and it becomes a bullying, hostile biological world.Reminds me of Alan Watts talking about how the universe has had to learn how to get ever smaller and ever larger as we probe it with microscopes and telescopes, receding ever further in the distance as self observes itself.
7. Quantum Potential and Spirit
After listening to the physicists and American Indians talk for a few days, it struck me that the way physicists use the term potential, or quantum potential, is nearly identical to the way Native Americans use the term spirit. They all agreed there was something similar going on.
8. The principle of complementarity
Physicists for all this century have realized that our usual notion of bipolar or black & white opposites was insufficient when working with nature. The first clue came when they asked incoming light, ‘Are you particle?’ and it answered Yes; ‘Are you wave?’ and it answered Yes. This is equivalent to asking whether something is a noun or a verb and getting a yes answer to both–which is exactly how Native American language nouns are made up: as verbs with suffixes that make them temporarily into nouns for discussion sake. this yes-yes complementarity is foreign to Indo-European languages, but quite common in other language families (such as the Chinese notion of Yin-Yang), and represents a higher level of formal operations, in Piaget’s terms, referred to by some as post-formal operations–that which lies beyond normal Western Indo-European development.
There is much more at Alford’s archive of papers and notes. This is really a rather remarkable find for me – all the more so in that it came to me from the mouth of my first academic teacher 22 years after I first met her. I would love to be in touch with others who were at that meeting or who have more substantial artifacts of the gathering.