Montreal, Quebec
Lucky me, blogging from downton Montreal, where I have been working with a joint working group of First Nations and Inuit organizations and government.
I love this city, which is not something you hear every native born Torontonian say. This place is a treasure, a unique incubator of culture and difference that adds heaps of energy to this otherwise homogenous continent. It allows North America to hang around with Europe and African and Asia at all the parties for the cool continents. Without Montreal (and Quebec), NA is the neighbourhood geek with too much money and too much time on its hands.
As I type I am listening to the afternoon CBC show, and someone is talking about a major art event and assuring people that all Montreal Canadiens goals will be announced so people don’t miss all the action of tonight’s important playoff game. When the Habs are in the playoffs, everything seems to revolve around them.
In fact it is a work hazard, being a facilitator in Canada during the hockey playoffs. One year, back home in BC, I was working with a group in deep conflict, and they decided to go for dinner together and watch the Vancouver Canucks playoff game. Luckily, the Canucks won, putting everyone in a good mood the next day. I shudder to think what would have happened if there had been a loss that night. It kind of puts one’s role in a humbling perspective – to think that a bunch of hard process work can be undone by an overtime goal!
And that’s the mood here right now as the Habs lost an important game in overtime on Tuesday night, in a most bizarre fashion. Tonight, they must win to stay alive in the playoffs.
Luckily my meeting is done, and my flight home leaves early in the morning.
Reading about Leon Fleischer in the New Yorker:
“There are so few notes,� the pianist Leon Fleisher said, �but so many implications.� The setting was a recent master class at Carnegie Hall. Fleisher, the master in question, was leading four young musicians through the mystical landscapes of the late sonatas of Schubert. He was speaking about the Andante movement of Schubert�s B-Flat-Major Sonata, but he might as well have been describing Bach�s �Well-Tempered Clavier,� or Brahms�s Intermezzos, or any other music in which a smattering of notes conveys a world of feeling. �There are so few notes, but the implications go back billions of years,� Fleisher went on. �You have to be like the Hubble Space Telescope, which sees stars as old as the universe. The stars are dead, but their light is reaching us just now.�
Open Space is like that. Facilitating in general is like that. With Open Space, there are so few rules, the ritual is so similar every time we open space, but the implications are infinite, the possibilities stretching back into the dimmest recesses of possibility. When we get it right, tapping every so gently on the field of process, the light explodes forth, invited into a warm space full of hope.
That becomes a memorable moment of transformation with a group. It doesn’t happen every time, but every gathering is pregnant at the outset with the potential. It’s marvelous when it happens – contrivance falls away, passion envelopes the people and something hard inside suddenly dissolves. Have you felt that flow? The billions of implications that unfold from a moment’s sounding of a simple invitation?
Kennetch Charlette
I’m nearly moved to tears after reading Ceremonial Healing Theater by Ae Ran Jeong and published at if… (to whom I am hugely grateful). It was offered up as a response to my posting on decolonization as an opening and it contains a bunch of really powerful quotes that support this notion as well as look at how this opening is supported by healing.
The article is an interview with Kennetch Charlette, a fine actor and the artistic director of the Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company. In the article, Charlette explains his work as an extension of the work pioneered in Aboriginal theatre by Thomson Highway. Highway’s writing in both novel form and for the stage is incredibly cathartic and contains hooks for us all to hang our stories on. He writes about the process of decolonization starting from a process of healing:
To heal the “internally directed hatred, internally directed violence” (Highway 158) is a process. A process to break the silence and detach oneself from the vicious cycle. To be free and free in spirit one must face the place of pain and liberate oneself from the sore spot. Highway suggests first to unlock and release the anguish pouring out the poisons in a form of autobiographical or autoportrayal theater.
Charlette learned from Highway and developed his own approach to theatre as ceremony as a response to the transformation he underwent working on Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing, a powerful Thomson Highway play about gender relations, colonization and healing:
Charlette knew the healing power of his tool theater. He believed that this lack of cultural identity was at the center of the native youth crisis. For Charlette, culture was the aim and at the same time the push to draw people forward. He knew to respect the ceremonies and the pedagogical force that was at the heart of all ceremonies to point to the question of who we are. He knew that the essence of the ceremonial healing theater must follow this path of traditional rituals and ceremony leaving entertainment behind. When asked what is the difference between theater and ceremony and ritual he answers without hesitation “None!” (Charlette).
The term ceremony/ritual, used by Charlette, is a loose philosophical term. In our materialistic, money centred world we search for a place to belong. According to Charlette each person is a spirit entity. It is ridiculous to be spiritual on this earth because we already are a spirit. What is important is to know that one is a spirit and to learn how to be a human being. Since as a human we are mortal we can never answer all the mysteries that surround us. In this limited time one can learn about oneself: Who one is? Why one is here? What is ones specific gift? To exist as a human is itself about ritual. Ritual is life itself. Free from the idea that ritual is religious, the actor working on the body, the mind and voice is an incredible ritual. A ritual journey towards an understanding of this precious life.
From this premise, Charlette has developed a process for developing scripts, really creating stories, that come out of traditional healing processes:
There are three types of circles; the talking circle, the sharing circle and the healing circle. All circles start with a prayer and the ritual smudging. There is a feather to be held by the one talking and the rest listen. The feather goes around the circle with its own time. No one talks without the feather. They listen. If it is a talking circle the participants talk openly on any kind of subject or issue. Each person will share and voice out. The circle values just speaking the truth from the heart. If it is a sharing circle one person becomes the focus and is allowed to speak on something that has specifically happened. The subject is limitless. One allows oneself to share while the rest listen. When finished the others will speak as a response.
The healing circle is formed when one is ill either physically, mentally or emotionally. A person is placed at the center of the circle and the circle prays for the person. The person asks for healing. Poundmaker and Charlette both believe the grandmothers and grandfathers are present in circles to guide and help the participants. Nobody controls the circle. Charlette asserts that “the circle controls the circle. You get that many people and that many spirits sitting in a circle, depending on the prayers and where everybody is at, they can be incredibly powerful” (Charlette).
From the talking circles Circle Of Voices has developed a working process to create a script. The personal stories are transformed into a theatrical story. After the talking circles are established the professional writer comes in and becomes a part of the circle. The playwright and youth participants get to know each other and slowly open to each other. Then an interview process takes place between them one and one. Taking down all information, they discuss the play, the structure, plot, storyline, characters, and everything. Meantime permission is asked from the story owners to use their story in the final script. Then the playwright goes away for three or four weeks to write and comes back with a working draft. They spend another week in talking circles. Once a final script is drafted, COV has a permission to change it during rehearsals. The rehearsal process, directed by Charlette, breathes life into the script.
Harrison was asking about ways of opening space in our lives. Kennetch Charlette, Thomson Highway and others are great examples of how this notion of opening is the essence of decolonizing ourselves.
More great and inspiring news from the Aboriginal youth world. On April 17-18 on the Musqueam First Nation right beside Vancouver, the First Nations Youth At Risk organization will be sponsoring a best practices conference. There is a lot I like about this group, staring with the fact that it is entirely supported by private sector grants, and that the President is Harvey McCue, Waubegeshig, the man who started the Native Studies program at Trent University, of which I am a graduate.
And most importantly, these folks are doing some amazing work. For example, here is the description of a project at Cape Mudge, a First Nation about 60 miles up the coast from me:
�If you build it, they will come� was the project theme of this First Nation of 800 people in two remote Quathiaski Cove communities near Campbell River. The �it� was a 40-foot long cedar canoe unique to the band. The goal was to involve the youth in its design and construction and use the project as a catalyst for promoting culture, good health and self-esteem. The need for such a project – fun and culturally based – was made pressing by increases in youth crime, suicides, high school dropouts, substance abuse, alcohol consumption and smoking brought about by the devastating collapse of the local fishing industry, and also by the rapid passing of community elders and their knowledge of language and culture. The canoe – named �Lekwiltok� after the legendary �unkillable� seaworm of Cape Mudge We Wei Ka legend – is scheduled for an official launch May 1. The community hopes to take the canoe on a journey to a First Nations regatta this summer in Cowichan. �It really has brought the whole community together and become a source of excitement and pride,� says Cape Mudge Community Health Representative Patricia Wilson.
I like that: “unkillable.” It describes the spirit of these kinds of endeavours perfectly.
Reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow and soul and I came across this great quote which speaks to all this philanthropy I’ve been running across lately:
When you look at the pre-Christian version of “soul,” you see that what they meant wasn’t so much a soul that was a different substance infused or injected into the body. It referred to a quality in a person who was able to use surplus energy for the benefit of others, not needing to get it all for himself. I came to the conclusion that “soul” is really our way of thinking about not devoting all of one’s psychic energy to maximize oneself in any form, whether it’s getting comfortable, rich, famous, or wealthy. Some of that energy is also devoted to somebody else’s or something else’s well-being, or advantage, or goal. So that kind of thing is “soul” as far as I’m concerned. That’s the leading edge of evolution, where you don’t need to consume all your energy for your own purposes, but you can devote some of that energy for something that will benefit others, including the planet.
Working with Aboriginal youth, and with the Giving for Civil Society Open Space Conference in Chicago has me thinking along these lines too. Ginger Gosnell, one of the youth who was working with us in Open Space over the weekend pointed me to the project site for the Urban Native Youth Centre in Vancouver. That centre is being built be the Urban Native Youth Association, which is a group soaked in soul and passion and smarts. And they’ve just attracted a $1.2 million corporate donation to get things going.
These are the people I get to hang out with. Lucky me.