Many settler organizations in Canada wonder how they can make meaningful strides on reconciliation with Indigenous Nations. Let me show you perhaps the easiest and most meaningful way you can do this. (I am not a lawyer, but there is no reason why this can’t work, and I’m currently working with a couple of organizations to make this happen).
In British Columbia, the Societies Act governs the operation of non-profit societies through which many organizations are operated. The Act has a whole section on what to do when the Society is needs to fold or be dissolved. Section 124 of this Act says that when a Society is dissolved, the assets of a Society can be distributed after all the debts are settled. Societies can make a by-law, kind of like an organizational Will, that specifies who receives these assets: Here is 124.2 (b).
The stipulation is that the entity receiving the asset needs to be a qualified recipient, which means another Society, or a co-op or a charity. And guess what? Most First Nations in Canada are qualified recipients. You can check here.
So what this means is that if your Society owns land as an asset you can create a by-law that says when you are dissolved as a Society the land you own is returned to the local First Nation in whose territory you are operating. You can make that by-law right now. And THAT means that if every Society operating in BC did that, over time, a lot of land would be returned to First Nations when it was no longer used by a Society. Of course you can always give that #LandBack now, but at the very least, you could make a by-law today.
There are many options you have about directing your assets after dissolution. You could simply give everything – land, buildings, and other assets to the local First Nations. Or if you are concerned about a continuity of care or purpose, you might imagine a future where your operations and purpose continue through another operating Society, but the land is returned to the First Nations and rented back, and you could specify that. The key is to work with the local First Nation to plan for that future together and explore what that means for the present day.
So THAT means 2 things:
1. when you tell the host Nation that you are doing this, you enter into a long term relationship that is all about how you will steward this land while you are using it so that as the last settler organization to own it, you return it in a healthy state, because it’s kind to return stolen property in at least as good a shape as it was in when it was taken. And,
2: when you do your territorial acknowledgement you can truly say “we are on Indigenous land and we are in relationship with the local host Nation to return this land to them.” This is such an easy thing to do. You can do it right now.
Imagine if this happened overnight. Over the next few years, land that is currently used to provide services and care for communities would flow back into the hands of First Nations and in the meantime relationships would be strengthened and responsibilities enacted. It’s such a powerful thing to do. And it is probably the easiest way to participate in the most meaningful action you can to engage in the reconciliation agenda. Give #LandBack.
(And here is some good legal advice from lawyers who want to help you dissolve your Society well.)
Years ago I wrote a little book called the Tao of Holding Space which was an interpretation of the Tao te Ching as applied to Open Space Technology and the facilitation of other participatory practices.
Annick Corriveau is an Open Space Facilitator and she interviewed me a couple of months ago about my nearly 30 year history with Open Space Technology and the origins of this little book. She has a series of interviews with OST practitioners that are well worth checking out.
You can download the book for free from the Internet Archive in English or in Chinese or be in touch directly to purchase a copy of the published version that my friend Mark Busse championed.
There is no really easy way to write this, so perhaps its just best to be polemical about it.
I am no longer going to be supporting cishet white men who are running for office. Basically guys that look like me. We’ve had our run, we have propagated genocide, mass destruction and murder, war, criminal economic inequality and the destruction of the life support systems of the planet we live on and now I think it is time to stop. Of course folks will “not all…” me on this, but just stop. Our role now is to support different people than us. Because what happens when we feel the MEREREST slipping away of power and influence is that we do ridiculous things like driving hundreds of trucks into the middle of Ottawa and demanding that the unelected Senate assist us in the overthrow of the government. Or worse. Much worse.
We do shit like this:
Just read the replies on that thread. I’m not going to tell you how bad it is.
Policy making matters. The people who make policy matter. Our job now is to use our power, money and influence to get behind different decision makers and support their election to office, or their appointment to the judiciary. because we need different decisions and we need to change the face and experience base of those making those decisions.
Three years ago the Canadian inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluded – quite rightly – that what has happened and continues to happen to Indigenous people in Canada constitutes genocide. And what continues to happen to women, non-binary, and trans folks is a good indicator of a country’s character and perspective. In Louisiana if this law goes through, any woman who terminates a pregnancy because it is ectopic and life threatening is a murderer. A women who has an unimplanted fertilized egg that flows out with her period is technically a murderer. And a judge that seeks to stay the charges is to be automatically impeached.
Let us stop being outraged and surprised at this continued pursuit of genocidal policies and fascist radical Christian extremism, for none of this is new. Let us instead change the game by changing the people with their hands of power. Make laws not blog posts.
May Day came and went, a day to celebrate both the beginning of Celtic summer, lighting the fires of Beltaine to burn away the previous year, and a day to remember the international struggled for workers rights.
My friend and neighbour here on Nexwlélexwm (Bowen Island) Meribeth Deen wrote a beautiful and thoughtful article about the bloody labour history of Vancouver Island and the story of Ginger Goodwin. (Meribeth is a beautiful writer, by the way and you should hire her for things.). Goodwin was an organizer of coal mine workers who was killed in the bush by a police officer in 1918, prompting Canada’s first General Strike.
The coal fields of British Columbia were the sites of some of Canada most fierce union activity largely because the men who owned the coal mines were, to put not too fine a point on it, complete bastards. I admit that the story of Ginger Goodwin was not familiar to me but certainly the names of Dunsmuir and Bowser are. Dunsmuir, because his name adorns a major street in downtown Vancouver, and Bowser, because there is a town named for him on Vancouver Island. But despite Bowser’s name, I never knew that he was a xenophobic racist who mass imprisoned migrant workers from eastern Europe, include Ukraine, because he considered them a threat to Canada while the First World War was raging 8000 kms away.
Last year when statues were being toppled and things renamed (like Ryerson University) one of the intellectually lazy objections to these actions was that we would forget history if these names were removed, that these people did incredible things, and they should be honoured. But reading Meribeth’s piece reminded me that in naming streets and places and statues after these folks what we are actually doing is forgetting history, erasing it. We wash it clean, assuming that everyone with a statue or a road or a town named after them was a good person. In fact, if with people of well known names, we have to deeply research the history of these people to really know them and, unsurprisingly for a country that was founded on genocide, the exploitation of workers and the ruthless pursuit of profit and wealth, these places are often named for people who more than likely pursued one of these strategies.
A key part of colonization is erasing the knowledge of what is here in favour of a more comfortable and familiar set of names. The parts of Ontario I grew up in were named by settlers from Ireland and Scotland and named for places that were meaningful for them. It reminded them of home. And it erased the Anishinaabe and Onkwehón:we names that were already on the landscape and that encoded a much deeper story of home and belonging.
Here in Skwxwúmesh-ulh Temíxw where i now live a famous example is the naming of a pair of distinct mountain peaks called “The Lions.” Towering over Vancouver, these twin peaks got named by settlers after the totemic animal of the British empire- the lion. The lion has been a feature of British heraldry for nearly 1000 years and so it was pretty much the ultimate naming. Boom. Lions. Putting the British in British Columbia; and because you can see these peaks from everywhere, you’ll never forget it.
But 1000 years is a mere blip in time when you consider that from time immemorial those two peaks have be called Ch’ich’iyúy and Elxwí?n and are the embodiment of two sisters who brought a fierce peace to the coast. From the Squamish Atlas:
Ch’ich’iyúy is one of two names used for the mountains known as The Lions. The other name is Elxwí?n. While the meaning of the name “Elxwí?n” is not known, “Ch’ich’iyúy” means “twins”. These mountains have the name for “twins” because they are said to be two Squamish sisters. There are different stories about these two sisters, but the most famous is a story about peace: When a girl becomes a woman, the Squamish tradition is to celebrate with a big feast. A great chief had two daughters that came of age in the same spring, and he prepared to host the biggest feast the Coast had ever seen, inviting all the neighbouring peoples to come for several days of eating, dancing, and celebration! A few days before the feast, the daughters went to their father to ask a favour – they asked if he would also invite a tribe from the north which the Squamish people had been at war with since ancient times. They wanted peace for their peoples, and all the peoples of the region. Their father agreed and the northern tribe came to the feast, welcoming in a new era of peace. When the Great Spirit saw what the two sisters had done, he decided to make them immortal by turning them into the two mountains, Ch’ich’iyúy, so that they could be a symbol of peace in the region forever
Story as told to Pauline Johnson and recorded in The Two Sisters.
Almost all of the historical and Indigenous place names in this territory refer to the physical characterists of a place, it’s traditional use or to events contained in an ancient story that encodes a teaching like this. There are no place names named for people, and on the contrary many people carry the names of places.
History is not an objective set of facts. It is a whole series of contested and different stories and experiences, and is as subject to the whims and dynamics of power as branding. marketing, and narrative manipulation today. When we choose to name a place, we bring a projection on to it. Perhaps Bowser didn’t know much about the town that was named after him. But what does it say about the people that DID name that town? What were they thinking? By encoding his name on the landscape, it reveals the intentions of settlers – much in the same way that the erection of Confederate statues long after the end of the Civil War were a message that Jim Crow laws were in effect in this place. The photo on this blog post is the inscription on a Confederate soldier statue that still stands in the town square of Denton, Texas, taken in 2019.
I have no trouble removing or changing the names of places or removing the statues of racists. I’m not totally in favour of naming things after individuals anyway. But if you feel that something is being lost by changing names, consider what was intended by the naming in the first place and ask yourself if it’s time for a different story.
Yesterday we were walking an incredible cliff top trail in East Sooke Park, in Scia’new territory on Vancouver Island. The Coast Trail there is rugged along the Juan de Fuca side of the park and although it is well travelled, there are sections across bare rock cliff top when the path is all but invisible. It requires a deeper kind of seeing to discern where the path is, especially if you follow what looks to be an obvious route which can take you to some dangerous places. As an experienced trail walker, I find myself in moments like this looking for evidence that I am NOT on the path. Is there broken foliage? Is the soil compressed and eroded by boots rather than hoofs or water? Are the roots underfoot rubbed clean of bark? Are there any trail markers about? When I find myself answering “no” to these questions I move slower, until the evidence is overwhelming, and I stop and track back to find out where I went wrong.
You can see why looking for evidence to DISPROVE your belief creates a safe to fail situation. If I find a single piece of evidence that confirms my belief that I am on the right track, and I follow it unquestioningly, the results become increasingly dangerous, and failure becomes unsafe.
A lot of my life and work is about paying attention to these weak signals. Whether it is making music with others, facilitating groups, helping organizations with strategy, playing and watching sports like soccer, rugby and hockey, it all comes down to paying attention in a way that challenges your beliefs.
The other day I offered a pithy comment on facebook to the question of “what is the difference between critical thinking and buying conspiracy theories?” and it really came down to this: critical thinkers look for evidence to disprove their beliefs and conspiracy theorists look for evidence to confirm their beliefs.
I think the latter is quite the norm in our current mainstream organizational cultures, even if it doesn’t lead to conspiracy theory. The pressure for accountability and getting it right leaves very little space to see what’s going wrong in the organization. The desire to build on what is working – while being an important part of the strategic toolkit – is not served without a critical look at the fact that we might be doing it wrong.
This is why sensemaking has become a critical part of my practice. And by sensemaking I mean collecting large numbers of small anecdotes about a situation and having large numbers of people look at them together. The idea is that with a diverse set of data points and a diverse number of perspectives, you get a truer picture of the actual culture of an organization, and you can act with more capacity to find multiple ways forward, including those which both challenge your assumptions about what is right and good now and those which discover what is better and better.
Recently in Canada we have been having a little debate about whether celebrating Canada Day on July 1 is appropriate given that fact that this month – National Indigenous Peoples Month, as it turns out – has been marked by a reckoning with the visible evidence of the genocide that has been committed here. While hundreds of thousands of people here are in mourning or grief, and are reliving the trauma that has travelled through their families as a result of the genocidal policies of residential school and the non-consensual adoption of children, many others are predictably coming out with a counter reaction that goes something like this “yeah, well let’s get over it. Canada is still the best country of the world to live in.”
And that makes sense for many people – like me – who live here and have a great life. But as I have been saying elsewhere on Twitter: don’t confuse you having a great life with this being a great country. There is nothing wrong with people having a great life. That is what we should want for all people. But Canada is not a place where that happens for everyone. The story is very different for lots of people who struggle to find contentment and acceptance inside this nation-state. Canada’s very existence is owed to broken treaties, environmental destruction, relational treachery, economic injustice, and genocide.
Paying attention to the weak signals is important here. If all you can see is how great your own life is, and you think we just need to keep doing whatever it is that we are doing that assures that continuity, then we are headed for a precipice. We are headed off an environmental cliff, into a quagmire of injustice and economic inequality that destabilizes everything you have in a catastrophic way.
Listening to First Nations – really paying attention to possibilities – is mutually beneficial to everyone. If one wants all lives to matter, then one has to ensure that every life matters, which means taking the lead from those whose lives have been considered dispensable in the project called “Canada.” And it’s not like they haven’t been out here for the past 250 years calling for a better way. It’s just that the mainstream, largely led by commercial interests who have hungered for and exploited natural resources that never belonged to them, have cheered on the idea that if Canada is good for me, it must be good period.
Let seeing be disbelieving. This country is not an inherently GOOD place. But it could be. It could be great. It could be safe, healthy, prosperous, balanced, creative and monumentally amazing. But it requires us to first question the limiting beliefs we have that it could never be better than this and second to pay attention to the weak signals that help guide us onto a path that takes us there.
It is far too early to celebrate Canada Day. We haven’t yet fulfilled the promise of the treaties and the vision with which indigenous Nations entered into relationships with Europeans oh so long ago, and that vision which is continually offered up to settlers through reciprocity and relationship. If there is anything to celebrate, perhaps it is the fact that we do have the resources to make this country work for all and we have the intelligence and creativity and willingness to do it, but you won’t find that in the Board rooms and the Parliamentary lobbies and the Cabinet offices and the global markets.
It is in the weak signals, the stories and small pathways of promise out there that are born in struggle and resilience and survival and generate connection, sustainability and the promise of well-being for all.