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.