How Bruce Elijah taught me about facilitation

My first facilitation teacher, Bruce Elijah.

I have told this story for decades but finally wrote it down today.

Back in 1992 I was working in Ottawa for the National Association of Friendship Centres. One of the Elders that worked closely without Board and staff was Bruce Elijah. Bruce is a wonderful Elder, brilliant leader, and teacher, raised in his traditional Oneida culture. His heart is unlimited in its goodness.

There was a day when I needed to facilitate a conversation on creating a domestic violence prevention program with a number of our member organizations from across the country and representatives of the federal government who were responsible for funding the effort. I was dreading the conversation, both because of the emotional weight of the conversation and the high stakes nature of the day. I turned to advice to Bruce. He gave me the briefest of facilitation trainings. He handed me the eagle feather that our organization used as a talking piece and he said “The Creator gave us two gifts — circle, and story.  Use them.”  And that was it.

When I arrived in the meeting room at a hotel in downtown Ottawa, it was set up with tables arranged in a hollow square, water and notepads in front of each chair and all facing one small table that I was supposed to sit at. With Bruce’s words in my ears, I did the unthinkable and had the staff reset the room with just a circle of about 24 chairs. When the participants arrived for the work, they were slightly taken aback by the room set up, but many of our members who had travelled from their communities expressed relief that the room looked different from traditional federal government consultations.

When we were ready to begin, an Elder gave us a prayer to bless our day and I introduced the day with a short speech about how we had gathered to generate ideas about a domestic violence prevention program and I knew that everyone in this room had some stories to tell about what that kind of program might mean to them and the people they served. I then invited people to share those stories and passed the feather to the person on my left.

By the time the feather got back to me, it was lunch time. Over three hours we heard stories of deep despair, of hope, of desperate need. We heard personal stories of violence and abuse, and stories of relatives and loved one who had suffered at the hands of their intimate partners.  We had humour as well, jokes and asides and situations so absurd that they were laughable. By the time lunch rolled around it was impossible to tell who were community workers and who were federal government workers; the issue was pervasive and crossed every line.  

After lunch we repeated the process although this time I asked “we heard these powerful stories this morning. What then should we do about this?” Again the feather travelled its slow journey around the circle and this time everyone shared ideas about how such a program would look in their community, what it would enable, what kind of change it might make. 

During these conversations my only job was to capture pages and pages of notes that I later turned into a report that informed the establishment of the off-reserve portion of the Aboriginal Family Violence Initiative.  It was a powerful way to make policy and also a powerful way to create commitment between people. We watched the bones of a federal government program emerge out of an empty circle and a collection of stories. Bruce was right: this indeed was the gift of creation. 

That was some years before I stumbled on Open Space Technology and more formalized processes of large scale dialogue. But it taught me that simple constraints — a circle, a feather, a question — could result in profound outcomes.  It taught me to make space for stories of the heart and deeply personal experiences. It taught me that attending to relationally was as important as attending to outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that there is hardly anything more powerful and profound than a group of human beings making meaning together in a life-giving context.