This is the logo for the 2010 Vancouver-Whistler winter Olympics. It was unveiled on Saturday in Vancouver.

Now I’ve nothing against inukshuks, and I have plenty of Inuit friends and colleagues, but this is just plain wrong. These Olympics are being held in the territories of the Squamish and Lil’wat peoples, of whom there are many excellent artists. This is a huge opportunity to show the world an image from the rich tradition of west coast art, and instead the Olympic committee chose a figure from a culture that lives thousands of miles away.

Using an Inukshuk to signify winter games in Vancouver is like using the Egyptian pyramids for selling the London bid for the summer games. The two have nothing to do with one another and Vancouver and Iqaluit are separated by about the same amount of distance as London and Cairo.

Given the significant presence of Squamish and Lil’wat and Tsleil-Waututh people in the Olympic promotions, and the fact that there is a big partnership on several of the facilities with these Nations, it strikes me as just plain dumb to use another indigenous symbol to represent the games. For a committee that has been trying to go out of its way to court First Nations, choosing this design says to me that they haven’t a clue what they are doing.

To think that this thing, a smiling inukshuk, is going to be on EVERYTHING including the medals makes me feel sick for the local First Nations artists and designers who have been denied this once in a lifetime opportunity to showcase the 9000 year old legacy of their work. The committee has dropped the ball badly on this one. I’m hugely disappointed.

Prince Rupert, BC

Here is a powerful idea from Australian Aboriginal playwright Jack Davis about how to reconnect kids with nature:

Imagine doing this. A kid has responsibility for a fern species, a tree, an insect, a bird. You identify closely with this thing and do everything you can to steward it’s survival. In an interconnected world, giving someone responsibility for a small part will quickly lead them to an appreciation and engagement with the whole. You can’t protect something in isolation – you need to also care for it’s context.

Now imagine if we did that in organizations too? And communities. And families. Imagine what we would learn as we worked to protect our totem in a living system.

Prince Rupert, BC

My friend Crystal Sutherland, my partner in doing a whole bunch of work with Aboriginal youth, has legally changed her name. She is now using two hereditary names from her Ahousaht ancestors: Pawaskwachitl Haiyupis. We just call her Pawa for short!

These are Nuu-Chah-Nulth names. Pawaskwachitl was a name of one of her grandmothers, and it has a powerful translation “she gives in the feast like bees coming out a hive.” That’s an outstanding description of the kind of leader she is becoming.

When I was in New Zealand last year, I was amazed and awed at how many Maori people use their traditional names. Reclaiming names is a powerful statement of identity and I extend my congratulations to Pawa for the courage to stand up and do it.

Prince Rupert, BC

The sun goes down at 9:00 up here, in the TRUE Pacific Northwest (of Canada, anyway). It’s a beautiful day here on the north coast of British Columbia.

I’m here meeting with the group that is planning the appreciative summit on Aboriginal youth suicide prevention, and we are making great progress. We are two weeks away now, the agenda is largely complete and I am starting in on the workbook for the summit and the design for a policy roundtable the following day which will involve World Cafe process with policy makers and leaders to act on the recommendations from the summit. It’s getting exciting.

This week I was in Nanaimo as part of another initiative I am running, a community engagement process on child welfare. I had the great privlege of working again with Dr. Martin Brokenleg, who went over his circle of courage model again, and this time I took copious notes. We are applying the Circle’s principles – Belonging, Mastery, Independence and Generosity – to redesigning the child welfare system on Vancouver Island. If you want to know more about Dr. Brokenleg’s thinking, which arises from traditional Lakota teachings on raising children and youth, you can download this .rtf document of the notes I made of Martin’s full morning session.

When the Government of British Columbia announced that it would look at election reform after the last election in 2001, I have to admit that I was skeptical. Lots of political parties promise this kind of thing, but once they get elected, they discover that the system as it is suits them fine and the promise is forgotten.

But not this time. To the credit of the government, they launched a comprehensive project to look at electoral options which became one of the most interesting processes in the world. They randomly selected a man and a woman from each riding in the province and put them to work on an electoral body called the Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform. After a year of meetings and deliberation, the Assembly recommended that BC consider changing from the traditional “first past the post” Westminister Parliamentary system to a Single Transferable Vote (.pdf) system like the one used in Ireland and New Zealand. The next step in the process is for people to get educated about this and cast a vote for or against it during our provincial election on May 17th.

And so the process of educating and advocating for and against the proposal kicks in. Of course you might think that weblogs might play a role in all of this, but it turns out that that isn’t the case. Elections BC has ruled that as of March 1, blogs set up for the purposes of advancing one side or the other must register and become part of the official election advertising. Failure to do so could net you a $5000 fine. Now there is nothing on the Elections BC website yet about this, but I’ll keep looking for it.

In the meantime I can tell you that I’m voting for the STV option, both because it will change the ridiculously polarized nature of politics in this province and because I have deep respect for the process and the way the proposal was developed. It would be a shame if Elections BC were to see it differently. After nearly two years of open dialogue and conversation, I would hate to see it all grind to a halt now that an actual decision is in the offing.