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Category Archives "First Nations"

Using The World Cafe in a conference setting

February 28, 2007 By Chris Corrigan Facilitation, First Nations, Uncategorized, World Cafe

Delgates 2

Ottawa, Ont.

I’m here in Ottawa at the National Aboriginal Forestry Association meeting threading some World Cafe work into their annual conference. This is a real time harvest of the work we are doing.

This conference is bringing together about 130 people to dust off recommendations that were made by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples ten years ago. We are looking specifically at about a dozen recommendations relating to forestry. Certainly much has changed in the past ten years, but there are some essential things that would allow First Nations to take over much more control of their resources that simply haven’t been done. These include sorting out better access, and looking at tenure reform to allow for First Nations to log in a way that supports sustainable local economies rather than feeding the industrial forestry model.

The design for this work proceeds through a fairly straightforwad plan. We have four sessions which will take the group through divergence, a groan zone and into some convergence. The first session is aimed at getting a broad sense of what might be possible to leverage the power of the system. The two groan zone sessions deal with how these strategies might actually work in practice and our final session tomorrow afternoon will look at the good bets for supporting action that will ensure that the ideas we discuss get some legs post-conference.
The breakout sessions are dealing with the ideas for moving forward these stalled thoughts, and in the plenary we are using a really interesting blend of Cafe type conversations to think about the action part. Today we completed two parts of the Cafe and there are two more tomorrow.

We began the day asking this question:

What do we have to do if we are to leverage the entire power, potential and capacity of this whole sector to do things that we have never done before?

With delegates sitting around conference tables in groups of 4-6, we posed the question and had two rounds of conversation. Participants switched tables between rounds. At the end of the second round, we asked participants to capture their nuggets on an index card and to have those available to us. Close to 100 cards came back. The participants all departed for their first breakout sessions armed with the question of how we could leverage the power of the sector to move the ideas forward.

mp3: My opening comments to kick off the World Cafe

During that breakout session and over lunch myself and Chad, a NAFA staffer, went through the cards and looked for the main themes. I captured the essence of what was being said using FreeMind and produced a mind map with text weighted according to how much attention each theme received. I then redrew the mindmap by hand to show the emerging themes, photographed it and projected it on two big screens so people could see it while I presented these back to the group as a whole.

Summary mind map

mp3: My explanation of this mind map as a way of seeding the second round of conversation

Once they had the whirlwind tour from me, I asked them to turn to one another again for one round of focussed conversation on what they are now learning about these strategies. We heard a few voices back after this brief 25 minute conversation and people had both questions and insights that I then invited them to carry with them into the afternoon’s breakout sessions.

Tomorrow we will use the Cafe process to move through the groan zone by jamming on these leveraging strategies to get the sector to address a number of emerging crises relating to climate change, consolidation and global trade impacts on local communities and small and medium sized businesses.

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Living life away from home

February 6, 2007 By Chris Corrigan First Nations, Travel, Uncategorized One Comment

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Victoria, BC
Sitting at a window seat at Moka House in the funkyhip Cook Street village district of Victoria.   In a tourist town, little neighbourhoods like this are the ones that keep locals sane.   I’m here partly because it appears that I am turning into more and more of a local around here.
We did a good day of work today with the VIATT crew, cracking some solid communications questions and planning our Art of Hosting training for later next month.   We are getting deep into a process of community linkage that will expand and solidify the capacity of the indigenous communities of Vancouver Island to participate and run the set of child and family services that are provided in their communities.   There is some solid vision at play here and a very good team of curious, spirited and innovative people who bring a variety of perspectives to every question.   The conversations we have are amazing, and there is deep a solid commitment to the core purpose of the initiative: to keep children at the centre of our deliberations.   We have even taken to the practice of placing pictures of our kids on the table in the centre of our workspace, as you can see from the photo above.

One result of the good quality of the work here and the desire to go very deep into the fundamental work is the fact that it seems like I’ll be spending a lot more time in Victoria over the next year.   And so, I’m looking for ways to bring some normalcy to my life here.   Last night I trained with a local Taekwondo school and tonight I stopped by the house of a friend and colleague tonight to cook supper.   He has been on long term disability for more than a year battling the extreme pain of chronic arthritis and suffering the attendant demons, slings and arrows that come with it.   It was good to see him, good to stand in a kitchen and cook some curry and have a bit of a semblance of a real life, even if the family are back home on the Island that I rarely see these days.

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Alert Bay road trip day three: people, food and territory

January 31, 2007 By Chris Corrigan Collaboration, Conversation, First Nations, Travel 9 Comments

It’s really impossible to overstate the worry I heard in people’s voices today.   In our meeting an Elder named Billy Bird spoke briefly before lunch and reminded the group just what had been lost – the salmon runs, the crab and prawns, the seaweed beds, the clam gardens.   The Namgis people and their relatives on Gilford Island, Kingcombe Inlet and Oweekeno are ocean people.   Their life is on the ocean and without access to the ocean the fear is that they are no longer a people at all.

For thousands of years these people have lived in the Kwak’wak’wakw Sea, tending the resources, enhancing them where they could.   In the past 150 years the Namgis people have been herded onto a reserve, had every single one of their food sources regulated by a foreign government that denied them citizenship for the first 100 of contact, even as it was busy distributing the ocean’s resources to others.   Now the fishing industry is concentrated in very few hands, fish farms are wreacking havoc with the local wild seafood and there are less than half a dozen working boats in the community.   Those that are left fish for the community, but simply eating salmon does not make you a salmon people.   Without the experience of spending most of your waking hours on the water, handling the products of the ocean garden and tending to it, knowing in the heave and fall of the swell where your next meal is coming from, you are not an ocean people.

I heard another heartbreaking story today.   Boats are so scare that an aunt who wanted to give her nephews a chance to get out on the water had to charter a whale watching boat from nearby Telegraph Cove at huge expense to herself simply to give the youth in her family a taste of an experience that is their birthright.   And when the big day arrived, she was sick and couldn’t go and the trip was off, and the timing hasn’t worked for them to go since then.   It must be akin to living indoors for months at a time, even as the weather outside is beautiful and everyone else is enjoying it.   To say that some feel imprisoned is not overstating it.

Alert Bay is not a big community, and the Namgis people are not a people who are used to spending years at a time on land.   Without being on the water working and gathering food there is a tremendous amount of stress built up here.   When that stress combines with despondent feelings of failing one’s ancestors and the self-judgment that was taught so well at residential school, the combination sometimes leads to suicide.   And without access to traditional food and traditional ways of harvesting food, an epidemic of diabetes has arisen.   A large number of the community members are currently on a diet, similar to the low carbohydrate Atkins diet, but more built around traditional foods to see if it makes a difference in the diabetes rates.   The early research is proving that it does, and so conversely it is proving that restricting the access of these people to their traditional food sources is akin to infecting them with diabetes.

If it sounds bad it is because the truth here is deep and painful and it rises close to the surface.   But as with the upwellings in the channels of the Broughton what comes up is often nutrient rich as well.   With the same passion that they tell stories about life now, they argue for solutions that are very much in line with what we know about the way the world is going.   With the concentration of wealth in a few places, a global economy dependant on oil and the conversion of local places to branch plants for multinational corporations, the foundations of capitalist economies in the west are vulnerable to large scale and abrupt changes.   As climate change accelerates, and the price of oil climbs as the resource becomes more and more scarce, the centralized economic systems of the western world risk collapse to more local, more self-sufficient regions.   First Nations people, who have long been canaries in the coal mine with respect to control over resources, are now at the leading edge of this emergent future, calling for restoration of local control and responsibility to local communities.   Over the past two days I heard passionate calls for broad decision making powers to be returned to the local communities, even if they are exercised in collaboration with government.   I heard people describing the vast amounts of volunteer labour that local people put into sustaining ocean resources despite the fact that the exploitation of these resources are largely concentrated in the hands of a few distant owners.   Despite that, Namgis and Oweekeno and Gilford Island peoples continue to look after their oceans and their resources, and to propose ways in which others might join them to sustain what is left for the benefit of those who need it most.

It has been a good road trip.   The conversations in the gathering, framed and anticipated as hostile and angry, have instead been powerful and constructive.   Through the simple act of listening, of hearing people’s concerns and voices and truly understanding where they are coming from, we created a small crack of daylight here.   One staunch table-pounding advocate told me at the end of today that “I might be naive but I sense a little bit of hope.”   That is exactly what we were trying to do, and now it is the responsibility of both the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the local communities to make good on the nuggets of possibility now emerging in public voices which, on bad days, are laced with toxic vitriol and bitter rhetoric.

—-

I can’t let this trip go by without commenting on the food.   As we were gathered to talk about the natural food resources of the Kwa’kwak’wakw Sea, we were fed from these same resources.   Yesterday it was clam chowder and smoked salmon salad sandwiches on homemade molasses bread.   Today an incredible halibut soup topped with seaweed and flavoured with oolichan oil, one of the healthiest food products in the world.   Oolichan smells incredibly bad and tastes like you would expect rotten fish to taste like.   This because it IS rotten fish – a small oily smelt that is left to ferment and then processed into almost pure grease.   It is brutal to eat raw, and is the definitive “acquired taste.”   But it is also treated like gold here on the coast.   Traditionally trails between First Nations that live on opposite sides of a watershed are called “grease trails.”   Oolichan grease was and still is traded for west coast resources on Vancouver Island, or over the mountains on the mainland into the dry interior. Oolichan is the basis of intertribal relationships and protocols and in remembering these trails, and this little stinky fish, the relationships are also remembered.   I once sat in the bighouse in Fort Rupert and listened to Kwagiulth and Ahousaht singers from opposite ends of the grease trail give their renditions of the songs that accompanied the trade.   They were amazed that songs that hadn’t been sung in years were almost identical, leading to a great spontaneous celebration of unity and friendship during which we sang and danced and kept each other company around the fire that burned at the centre of the huge building.   This food is more than just what is for supper.   It is everything, the be all and end all.   Without traditional food there are no traditional people and no traditional practices.   If we are to retain our traditions we must retain our indigenous ways of relating to the land and using those relations to relate to one another, and then we can rediscover the hope that comes from stewarding our own lives.

[tags]namgis, alert bay, oolichan[/tags]

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Alert Bay road trip day 2: Not a bad place to blog from

January 29, 2007 By Chris Corrigan Facilitation, First Nations, Travel 4 Comments

Alert Bay, BC

Not a bad place to blog from eh? This is the kitchen counter I am sitting at in a wonderful house in Alert Bay overlooking the bay itself and looking up the channel towards Port McNeil. I am staying at a place called “Above the Bay,” owned by a lovely couple, Dave and Maureen who also have a spot right down on the water called “On the Beach.” This is going to turn into a shameless plug for their place, because the sun just set behind the Vancouver Island mountains and the beauty is astonishing and its not like Dave and Maureen had anything to with that, except the genius of the picture window in front of me is that they invite the whole bay to a part of the house. This place is great…two bedrooms, woodstoves, a nice open kitchen and a great deck which must rock in the summer with a big fat salmon on the barbeque after a day of whale watching. This is not the typical view in January, but if you are ever up here, this is the place to stay. And free wireless.

I left this morning on the 8:45 ferry from Port McNeil bound for the Namgis First Nation on Cormorant Island. The trip is 45 minutes down towards the mouth of the Broughton Archipelago, a massive tangle of islands that stretches from here down to Campbell River between Vancouver Island and mainland. I’m here to work with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as they talk with First Nations from this area. On the ferry ride across I had a deep sense of the pattern of this place as I watched the cormorants and grebes, auks, seals and ducks scurry around beside the ferry. The pattern of here is that there are two worlds: the world of the surface where everything comes to rest, and the world of the deep where everyone goes to get nourished. Alert Bay and Namgis share Cormorant Island, and cormorants are birds that fly both above and below water.

People here rely on the ocean for their natural food. Several times today in the meeting, Namgis leaders and Elders talked about the ocean as their garden. There is a famous saying from this part of the world – when the tide is out the table is set. Clam beds, seaweed, salmon, and other creatures and plants formed the staple diet of these people and that natural diet is important today as diabetes and other nutrition related diseases ripple through First Nations. The pattern is calm at the surface, nourishment in the depths.

And so we had a good meeting today, beginning with that acknowledgement and extending into hearing what people were saying at their depths, what pain lay behind the calm exteriors. To have access to a traditional food source at your doorstep restricted by the effects of fish farms, government policy and commercial priorities is devastating, and these people, significant cultural and political forces here on the north Island, are tired of it. Hearing that opens things up though and we had some good conversations about collaboration despite it all. We ate clam chowder and salmon salad sandwiches, the local natural foods of this place and we looked into that private voice of possiblilty that lay behind the cynicism, but that nourishes hope.

So I’m definitely ensconced in here for the night, enjoying some quiet time, a pot of tea, some leftover salmon sandwiches and watching Venus grow brighter above the mountain in the darkening western sky. Travelling is sometimes weary, but this is one of those days when I count myself a lucky guy to get to do what I do.

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Living cultural storybases

January 16, 2007 By Chris Corrigan First Nations, Stories

At WorldChanging, news of a project intended to use web technology to work with indigensous oral cultures, tying traditional knowledge to biodiversity:

While there are those who argue that technology has led to the deterioration of traditional modes of communication and expression, the very same advancements are instrumental in allowing us to keep vanishing stories, cultural practices, and entire languages alive and thriving. By facilitating access to technology for people whose heritage is being challenged by the digital revolution, tech becomes a tool for nurturing traditional ways. Living Cultural Storybases is a new non-profit that works to do just that, using ICT to share knowledge amongst cultures and peoples with strong storytelling legacies.

More information at ths LCS website.

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