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Martin Brokenleg and the Circle of Courage

September 6, 2003 By First Nations 2 Comments


Circle of Courage, from the Reclaiming Youth Network

Port Hardy, BC

Port Hardy is near the northern most tip of Vancouver Island. The fastest way to get here is by a Pacific Coastal Airlines Short 360 which is the only plane I know of with a square fuselage. We flew up through the first rains of the late summer, a storm system that has tracked low into Southern BC as the jet stream has begun to sink southwards. in the mist and fog, two ravens were playing next to the runway as we touched down.

I�m here to open space for the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team which is a group responsible for setting out a service delivery model for Aboriginal child welfare. This is the first of three community consultations that are being held around the Island.

Tomorrow I will do my thing, which is to say I will facilitate a meeting for 60 people with thoughts and passions for the kinds of systems and services children at risk need. I’m following hot on the heels of what was apparently a tremendous day of learning facilitated by Dr. Martin Brokenleg, a Lakota professor who is well known for his teachings on reclaiming Aboriginal youth at risk. His teaching model is called the Circle of Courage, and it is a medicine wheel.

The Circle of Courage, being a medicine wheel, is made up of four quadrants: Belonging, Generosity, Mastery and Independence. Brokenleg teaches that these capacities are inherent in each of us and need to be relatively balanced for us to live balanced social lives. It’s fairly obvious that any services directed towards children need to foster all four of these areas.

As I am thinking about my opening for tomorrow, I am thinking about the posting I made earlier today about places to intervene in a system and how one creates new paradigms by, as Donella Meadows says, coming “yourself, loudly, with assurance, from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power.” So i will use Dr. Brokenleg’s framework to suggest that as we contribute ideas to this process, we do so out of the paradigm that he advocates. In short, we have an opportunity to practice that paradigm right now, in Open Space.

Open Space acknowledges the four quadrants of Dr. Brokenleg�s teachings by inviting each person to see themselves as belonging to a whole, using generosity to contribute their wisdom to the group, drawing on their inherent mastery of life to share ideas and thoughts about what works and taking the step forward as independent folks with two feet, able to make choices about how they will spend their time and energy.

It is so important to embody new paradigms. We cannot expect the new ones to arise spontaneously without fully entering them and living within them. Tomorrow we’ll try a little new living.

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September 6, 2003 By Uncategorized

Thanks to both Dave Pollard and Jim McGee, I spent some considerable time musing over Donella Meadows’ paper on “Places to Intervene in a System.”

The paper takes a systems theory approach to identifying leverage points for creating change. In her language, the ten places, in increasing order of scale are as follows:

9. Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards).
8. Material stocks and flows.
7. Regulating negative feedback loops.
6. Driving positive feedback loops.
5. Information flows.
4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishment, constraints).
3. The power of self-organization.
2. The goals of the system.
1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise.
0. The power to transcend paradigms.

These may seem somewhat cryptic, by Meadows explains them in very clear language and with numerous examples. Dave Pollard has done a top notch job on summarizing the paper in “layman’s terms” and provides some of his own examples.

For me, as someone who works in complex systems like communities, I’m especially interested in the last four, from the power of self-organization to the power to transcend paradigms. Check out her thoughts on changing the paradigm or the mindset:

So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you come yourself, loudly, with assurance, from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.

Systems folks would say one way to change a paradigm is to model a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole. We say that because our own paradigms have been changed that way.

As powerful as that thought is, Meadows saves the best for last. Her thoughts on transcending paradigms:

It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into Not Knowing.

People who cling to paradigms (just about all of us) take one look at the spacious possibility that everything we think is guaranteed to be nonsense and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. Surely there is no power, no control, not even a reason for being, much less acting, in the experience that there is no certainty in any worldview. But everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it a basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose one that will help achieve your purpose. If you have no idea where to get a purpose, you can listen to the universe (or put in the name of your favorite deity here) and do his, her, its will, which is a lot better informed than your will.

It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

I think Open Space Technology may just be the fastest way to work these leverage points in a system, but I have to do more thinking about that. So I am adding this paper to the Deeper Open Space Wiki for further discussion and consideration. Feel free to join me there.

Herb Joe on poor weak human beings

September 4, 2003 By First Nations 2 Comments

Harrison Hot Springs, BC.

Spent the day in a meeting at Seabird Island First Nation, a large community which is part of the Sto:lo Nation located in the upper Fraser Valley about 150 kms east of Vancouver. I was working with a group who was in some internal conflict, and I was very privileged to be working with Herb and Helen Joe, two respected Sto:lo Elders and traditional teachers.

Herb told a very interesting story today. It was part of the Sto:lo creation story and it had to do with the destiny of human beings.

In the story, the Creator makes the earth and then creates all the creatures of the earth, including the winged animals that fly, the four-leggeds that run on the land, the animals that crawl across the earth and the animals that swim. Each of these animals were created perfectly.

When all these animals were created, the Creator looked around and noticed that something was missing. So humans were created. To do this, the Creator took a little bit from each animal and rolled it up into what Herb called “poor, weak, human beings.” The reason we are poor and weak is that we can do lots of things, but none of it well. We can fly a little, but we fall heavily to earth. We can run, but not as fast as a deer or a cougar. We crawl, but beetles and spiders can stick to the ceiling. And we swim, but nothing like a salmon. In short we struggle.

Herb finished the story by saying that it is our destiny to struggle because by struggling we learn and that is what we are put on earth to do.

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September 3, 2003 By Uncategorized

Flattered to have been listed today as one of Dave Pollard’s favourite Canadian blogs. Thanks Dave. Now go read his stuff…it’s great.

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September 3, 2003 By Uncategorized

One of the tenets of tae kwon do is “Indomitable Spirit” The practice of a martial art makes use of that spirit to sustain survival under life threatening circumstances.

Indomitable spirit marks the small and almost forgotten community of Brainerd, Kansas on the American Great Plains. Offering an almost ethnographic example of indomitable spirit in the life of a community, Time, Place and Memory on the Prairie Plains looks at how a small settlement has sustained itself through waves of change.

Although most of the town’s landmarks have long since been abandoned or demolished, they exist as powerfully in the memories of these Brainerdites as if they had just visited them yesterday, despite the fact that few photographic records exist of these structures aside from those included in this study. The memories of a Brainerd gone by have become so strongly embedded in these residents’ present-day conceptions of the community that the current townscape exists in a sort of time/space limbo — the past is always present.

Like a community quilt, the memories of the Brainerdites I encountered patch the fragmented townscape together, keeping it alive in the face of both the elements and the forces of economic and demographic change. A Prairie Plains townscape may, indeed, be more durable than even the landscape from which it was forged.

This is one of those stories where the learning keeps coming.

Thanks to consumptive.org for the link