I learned a new word this week: teechma. It’s the Nuu-Chah-Nulth word for heart, but it conveys a deep meaning when you hear an Elder in her village talking about why she thinks something will work, why she is hopeful about changing the system solely because we spoke about it from our hearts, our words coming from teechma.
I was with my mates Wally Samuel, Kris Archie and Kyra Mason this week in three isolated villages on the north west coast of Vancouver Island, Oclucje, Ehattesaht and Ka:’yu’k’t’h’. We were travelling there on behalf of VIATT to hear what these communities, so forgotten in many ways, have to say about the work we are doing to reclaim the decision making authority over Aboriginal children and families.
These communities lie far away from the mainly populated east side of Vancouver Island. To get to the west coast, you have to drive an hour or so over a graded logging road to the little town of Zeballos, perched at the head of Zeballos Inlet. Zeballos was a gold mining town almost a hundred years ago and there is a little fishing there now and mostly logging. In the summer, there are tourists who roll into town heading out for fishing charters or kayak trips. Zeballos itself is a funny town…everything there seems to be in a state of half renovation. The Zeballos Hotel, in which you can get a great meal (french fries being a speciality) has tables that are too high and banged together out of particle board, which makes you feel like a kid when you are tucking into your burger. It forces one to have something in common with the Ehattesaht kids who mill around IMing on the two computers in the corner. They even have half finished haircuts, which was amusing for my friend Kris who found kindred spirits! Across the lobby, the bar is a great place for a bottle of beer, still smoky and also half finished. Across the street is a general store run by a cranky Bulgarian who makes you test the batteries you buy from him before you leave the store. His shop is also half finished, and a half eaten jar of pickled sausage sits on the counter next to the cash register. And the batteries fail on you anyway, the moment you put them in your camera.
This is the end of the world – most regulations don’t apply in practice. Even when the RCMP strides in from across the street, nothing really changes and no one pretends that anything is otherwise.
From Zeballos, we headed out to the communities which lay around the town. Each of the three meetings was a little, different, each held in slightly different kinds of buildings, each with different people there. At Oclucje, a small Nuchatlaht village about 30 minutes from Zeballos, we met in a building that had been condemned. The guy fixing the floor was a Heiltsuk carver who stopped his banging away at the mold and took off to go work in his shop, returning a half hour later with a moon plaque for me. During the meeting, my mates Wally and Kyra and Kris talked to the Elders and I lay on the floor with the kids drawing on some flipchart paper. We drew pumpkins and snakes and men and women and they borrowed my fine Staedler pens and coloured in a “Welcome to the Hall” sign, the hall that was falling apart under our feet. When we asked them what we could bring for the meeting, they said “donuts,” and two dozen Tim Horton’s trucked all the way from Campbell River were consumed in short order. Once the sugar rush hit the kids they all streamed outside and I rejoined the meeting, listening to the tale of a seven year struggle to have one child returned to the community. The effort involved everyone, and the goal posts have changed all the time, so the job is still unfinished. This is what our work aims to change.
That night we drove back to Zeballos and held a meeting in the half-finished youth centre at Ehattesaht, which is on the other side of the inlet from the town. About three dozen people showed up, most of them kids initially, but after supper arrived – chili and spaghetti and ham and salad – more adults and some youth showed up. The kids kept running around, in an out of a door that led to the top of an unfinished second story staircase. I had paranoid visions of them plunging off the landing onto the gravel below, but it didn’t happen. One of the kids, Margaret, took my camera and shot all kinds of great pictures of her friends and cousins. It’s sweet to see the world through her eyes.
On the way home we passed a sign that warned us to watch out for children and wildlife. In the middle of the road was a deer skull, and a bike lay tipped in the ditch. There are great signs around Zeballos.
We lodged at the Mason Lodge, where I took my half-filled room reservation, letting myself into room number four only to find it already occupied by a suddenly nervous man. This was remedied by Kris and Kyra sharing a room and I took Kris’s room. Customer service is sort of a novelty in Zeballos. Hospitality means that the guests are free to self-organize their sleeping arrangements. It worked out just fine and breakfast in the morning was quite nice.
After breakfast we headed over to Fair Harbour to catch the water taxi to Ka:’yu’k’t’h’. Fair Harbour got battered by 11 hurricanes this winter. The worst of them, which actually had an eye, topped out at winds of 159 knots, strong enough to rip the top off one of the wharves and to pick up gravel and sandblast all the trucks in town right down to the bare metal. Wednesday though, the weather was beautiful, the water glassy calm and the wind just a zephyr.
The water taxi trucked us through some beautiful little islands and inlets and we got our first glimpse of the open Pacific Ocean. Wally’s mum was born here and although she died when he was three, he spent his summers in the area and he has a name from this territory, so it’s like a second home for him. We took a little detour to visit the old village site of the Ka:’yu’k’t’h’ people. One one side is the ancient village and the present day summer village, a broad beach with a grave yard at the top, on the lee side of a little island that backs onto some reefs and the open ocean. Across the water is the old reserve village with some houses still standing. The people left this community thirty years ago, moved because of fresh water needs to the present site which is actually on Vancouver Island proper, on the very northern tip of Kyuquot Sound.
After we noodled around the old village, we headed for the present day one and sat with Elders parents and hereditary and political leadership in a circle and talked about our work of putting children at the centre of the system of child and family services. On our more optimistic days, we call this work “practical decolonization” and judging from the response we get from the Elders especially, this label is my favourite. The Elders all week have been talking about the hope that they have taken from hearing about our work and hearing how it comes from our teechma, helping communities and agencies to be able to serve children and families without the provincial government making all the policy decisions. That’s what makes this stuff worthwhile to me and what drives me and my mates to a high level of accountability.
We are planning on visiting all 52 communities across Vancouver Island this year, including a batch more on the west coast around Clayoquot Sound. I’m looking forward to it.
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Campbell River BC
Constantly on the road these days. Just did a weekend strategic planning session with the VIATT Board – a very interesting session. We are at the point in our planning where we are developing the structures that will govern this system once we begin to assume full authority next year. This is a tricky set of questions, involving money, leadership, turf and control as we try to find the best structure that will run the system in line with deep community values. And so as we confront this moment, the Board decided to have a strategic planning session to get some insight on which direction we need to go in. However, wise as they are, instead of just inviting themselves to crack the question, each Board member brought two or three guests with them: family members, friends, associates, all of whom are like eagles themselves to each Board member. As a result we had forty people here, all devoted to suported their friends and loved ones in doing this work. The circle of eagles has been called.
We began with some appreciative inquiry into organizational systems that work, following on from the story of VIATT’s emergence and development over the past five years. Then we went into a World Cafe on the subject of what VIATT should be doing, once the Authority becomes a full fledged thing, next year. Finally, we ended with a more or less full day of Open Space during which we talked about the relationships we need to build and strengthen.
It was a rich session, and there is much deep content emerging.
Today, I am back up in the north Island and heading out with mates to the wild west coast. We’re visiting three communities way off the grid tomorrow, one of which, Ka:’yu:’k’t’h, is boat access only. I’ll post photos and thoughts when I’m back near a web connection.
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I’ve been out of touch all last week, ensconced in a fascinating five day retreat with an organization that is working hard to make Open Space Technology a part of their basic operating system. We were working at a fishing lodge in Campbell River BC all week overlooking the Discovery Passage, which was filled with sea lions, eagles and a small pod of killer whales. I had very limited internet access, and it was actually a great gift to be unplugged during that whole time.
There is lots to harvest from the trip, and several bits and pieces that I’m thinking through, but here is what is on my mind this morning.
This group is using Open Space on a regular basis to take care of the work that is not in the workplans, not in the budget and not necessarily even directly a part of what their organization seems to be about. But what we learned this week is that Open Space, used in this way, takes care of the “bass notes” within an organization. There is a kind of deeper hum within every organization – call it the culture if you like – that supports the work, generates the working environement and connects to the purpose of each person. People who are highly satisfied with their jobs and organization will often feel connected to this deeper field. They resonate with the bass note, the fundamental note of the chord. When this note isn’t present, it feels like work is not connected into a deeper pattern. Understand here that I am talking not about organizational purpose – it runs below that. It is more like organizational inspiration, operating at the level of the spirit of the place. Making Open Space part of the operating system of an organization results in tuning this bass note, or perhaps sounding it again. We have a chance to open space to breathe a little, get some distance from the mundane tasks of our job and ask some of the bigger questions about who we are and where the organization is going.
The folks in this organization are lucky that the upper leadership wants to see things working this way and has provided them with the time and resources both to meet in Open Space and to carry out the small projects starting next week that keep the bass note humming. And of course, we tuned up relationships as well, brought familiarity and warmth to an organization that is spread thinly across the whole country so that people can remember how we were when we were together, something that helps them continue to work virtually.
And a few travel notes…
- There is a nice little espresso shack in Cumberland, a mining and logging town about an hour out of Nanaimo, in the Comox Valley. It’s right on the main street, less that five minutes off the Island Highway.
- The staff at National rent-a-car in Nanaimo are great. Always friendly, generous with their time, and helpful. They’ll pick you up from the ferry terminal and drop you off, but be warned that although the close at 6pm, their boss told them not to drop people off at the ferry after 5pm. It’s a bit of a pain, and I didn’t know that going in, so there was a 7$ cab fare to the terminal. Not a big deal, but it was a surprise. They were very apologetic.
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The Wayfarers
by Rupert Brooke
Is it the hour? We leave this resting-place
Made fair by one another for a while.
Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;
The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.
Ah! the long road! and you so far away!
Oh, I’ll remember! but . . . each crawling day
Will pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile
Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.
. . . Do you think there’s a far border town, somewhere,
The desert’s edge, last of the lands we know,
Some gaunt eventual limit of our light,
In which I’ll find you waiting; and we’ll go
Together, hand in hand again, out there,
Into the waste we know not, into the night?
Photo by zyber
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I was in Victoria Tuesday and Wednesday and, in addition to working, found out a few other things about my regular routine there:
- Tuesday’s there is an Irish session (with some other tunes) at the Bent Mast Pub in James Bay. It’s a very friendly session, and a nice social scene. My new friend Jonathan took a few pictures of our tijme together on Tuesday including the one above of me. we even had a dancer join us.
- The best place for lunch on the whole planet bar none is daidoco. It is a little Jaanese place tucked into Nootka Court on Courtney Street. Yesterday I had a beautiful tuna don bowl. The tuna is PERFECT. Seared for a second and then thinly sliced and served over rice dressed with teriyaki sauce. I also had the most amazing little salad with grilled slamon chunks, onion and apple served on a small patty of mashed potato. That description deosn’t do it justice.
- Mirage Cafe on Goverment Street has a great espresso, as good as Cafe Macchiato around the corner. The Blue Crab restaurant at the Coast Hotel where I stay, although much vaunted for it’s seafood menu, does not know how to make an espresso. More on Victoria and Vancouver Island cafes.
- The cherry blossoms are out, and the streets of James Bay are pungent with their scent.