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The fear that is a projection of colonization

July 6, 2022 By Culture, Democracy, First Nations

This is a good twitter thread from Kay Whitlock:

https://twitter.com/KayJWhitlock/status/1544403338942242817

There is an interesting set of narratives that underpins the populist project in North America. Wedge politics has always been about stoking fear in an unreal other (there is a campaign ad for a Black Republican running for Congress that shows him holding an AR-15 rifle and threatening to empty the clip at 5 “Democrats in white hoods” as Ku Klux Klan members run through his back yard. I’m obviously not linking to it, but there you go.)

The reason for this is that a wedge issue like abortion or gay rights or immigration is easy to paint with the brush of “someone is coming to get you” and it gets people out to the polls to pull a lever or vote against a policy proposal and also elect the ones who support the populist position. This is an old game, perfected in the early 2000s by Karl Rove in the US and aided by Big Data and polling analytics and now Facebook and twitter algorithms that can delivered hand crafted artisnal and bespoke fear, right to your eyes.

But any time there is a “boogy man” we know that the cipher itself is a screen for projection and what is interesting is that North American populists project a very interesting set of fears onto their boogeymen.

Consider:

  • “Immigrants are invading”
  • “Our way of life is under attack”
  • “Your children are not safe”
  • “The government will seize your property”
  • “The elites are sexual predators”
  • “They want to outlaw our religion.”
  • “Your freedom of movement is being taken away”
  • There is even talk on the extreme right of “white genocide”

Let’s be clear. These are projections and deliberately provocative statements. We see these sentiments in the populist right in both Canada and the United States and these fears are constantly stoked, providing a toxic breeding ground for draconian policy that, contrary to the calls for freedom, are beginning to issue draconian laws. I think they land with people, because they recognize that these statements mirror the realities of what colonial practice has been here. These statements are a deep and complicated truth about white supremacy culture that are used to deflect responsibility for colonization and direct them at “the other.”

Now North American culture has a very hard time coming nto terms with the broken treaties, genocide and theft of land that has enabled the countries of this hemisphere to be established and have allowed settler cultures in many places to amass tremendous wealth and prosperity. But every one of the wedge issue tropes above has been, or still is, colonial government policy in this place. In fact, just last week the Supreme Court of the United States issued a shocking decision on Tribal sovereignty.

We have to come to terms with colonization. Until we do, it will continue to infect our cultural veins with guilt fear and shame that will continue to drive a toxic mix of fascism and white supremacy in policy and in the civic sphere.

The individual and collective realties of long haul COVID

July 5, 2022 By Being, Featured

Ultrastructural morphology shown by coronavirus. Original image sourced from US Government department: Public Health Image Library, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Under US law this image is copyright free, please credit the government department whenever you can”.

Here is a powerful and honest piece of writing about living with long haul Covid. I’m curious how many of my friends and readers have also had these experiences. So far, touch wood, I haven’t had the illness yet. But even typing “yet“ worries me a little. I do however think that there is something collective in the symptoms that Maria Farrell describes in this essay. It is as if the virus doesn’t only infect us individually but also our collective consciousness and will too:

“There’s no steady state. Covid is coming for all of us and each time it’s a roll of the dice. I’ve had it twice now. The first time knocked me out for about six months, and the second time did sharply alien and unpleasant things to my brain. I’m so scared that collectively all our brains are getting fucked, and we won’t be able to sustain concentration in the immersive and demanding story-webs I believe are necessary to keep imagining our large and interlinked society into existence. I worry people like me will succumb to premature dementias as a result of the brain damage we’ve incurred, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And there are so many of us. And all of it just as our institutions are self-destructing and we need amplified and deep-form subjectivity to solve planetary-level hard problems.”

–Maria Farrell.

In this sense I don’t think it matters if we’ve contracted Covid once or twice or not at all. The virus has changed the way we live and has created a timeline we can never retreat from.

The work to be done to redeem Canada

July 1, 2022 By Featured, First Nations 3 Comments

I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally.


Óscar Romero, The Violence of Love: The Pastoral Wisdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, compiled and translated by James R. Brockman (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 200.

Canada is not irredeemable as an idea. As a country founded on nation-to-nation treaty relationships in which existing Indigenous governance exists alongside common law, it is indeed possible to create a place in the world in that transforms a colonial legacy into a relational future. Canada founded on a vision that was exclusionary at the outset, and yet, the bones are there for it to be a place that is structurally inclusive and equitable.

I don’t apologize for my idealism about what we are led to by the north star of a far off post-colonial world. It guides my view and decisions about justice and about responsibilities that we have as settlers in Canada. Canada is poised to be a leader in so many ways but it must address the deep structural roots of its violence in greed and exploitation, a root that is the basis of every colonial country in this hemisphere. We need to reconcile first with the reality that the country was founded on broken agreements, stolen lands and genocide. Beginning there illuminates the places where structural violence still finds it’s source.

These territories on which the idea of “Canada” has been founded are beautiful, rich, life giving places which colonization sees as resources to be exploited, stolen, depleted and sold with no regard for the legacy of those actions on the natural environments or the people for whom these places are deepest home. Our work, if we are to redeem Canada, s to heed to Romero’s call and dig deep into our mess to find a source of peace for the common good that flows from justice, equity and restoration of reciprocal relationships between the land and peoples that have paid the price for the benefits many are celebrating today.

Changing perspective

June 30, 2022 By Being, Learning

Sometimes you just need to get a new perspective on things. One of the comments on this thread asks “what does looking at it upside accomplish?” The answer is, who knows until you actually do it? Learning to see the world differently means that you have to exercise different muscles and ACTUALLY look at things differently in order to learn what comes from that.

(h/t to Ciaran Camman for the link)

Back to a live Art of Hosting, September 26-28, 2022 in Vancouver

June 27, 2022 By Art of Hosting, Facilitation, Featured, Leadership

Since 2004, the Art of Hosting has been offered every autumn on Bowen Island, British Columbia, where I live. I was a participant in the first one and since then have been on the hosting team every year. We love hosting people here, as the island itself is such an incredible place to be and to sink into relationship with one another as we learn and explore participatory leadership and facilitation. What I especially love about this offering is the people that we work withe on our teams and the questions we get to be in together.

In the past all of our retreats have been residential, and as we ease out of COVID restrictions we have decided that we want to offer an Art of Hosting in this region, but we’re not yet ready to make it residential. And so we are proud to announce that from September 26-28, 2022 to be held in Vancouver. You can register here.

Our team this year will consist of me, Caitlin Frost, Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and Kris Archie. All four of us have stewarded the Art of Hosting in this region for many years working with Indigenous communities, non-profits, governments, philanthropy, and businesses in a huge variety of settings. We bring a deep set of experiences with the Art of Hosting,using the four fold practice in incredibly diverse contexts, working with participatory methods and leadership development with equity and decolonization lenses and putting the tools and practices to use in contexts ranging from personal work to system change around social services, mainstream philanthropy, and governance.

These three partners are some of my closest collaborators in this work and I think it is fair to say that we are all mutually inspired by each other. I am excited to see the growing list of people coming to join us for this event. The learning and creativity in the room will be amazing.

We would love to have you join us. Click the link to learn more about the program and please come and join us in Vancouver in the fall.