Sayt K’uulm Goot
It’s a Tsimshian expression that means “of one heart.” It was also the name of a very powerful appreciative summit I facilitated last year on youth suicide in northwestern British Columbia.
Today Jane Morley, the Child and Youth Officer for British Columbia, and the convener of that gathering released her special report on the summit and its results. The report is available as a .pdf from her site.
The gathering was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. On May 4th 2005 I saw nearly 200 Aboriginal youth step into a gathering rife with fear and trepidation and emerge engaged and powerful. They achieved this by simply turning to one another with a set of powerful questions about what might be in their communities and after some conversation, they delivered an inspired set of messages to policy makers and politicians.
In her report, Jane summaraizes the transformation of the day this way:
By the end of the inter-nation forum, it seemed that a shift had taken place – from the overwhelming sense of loss, alienation and fear people had felt in the face of youth suicide, to youth beginning to take the lead in finding a solution. THe energy and power of the youth were palpable, as was the willingness among the others present to hear and accepttheir views, the mutual respect and the support for the emergence of youth voices and youth leadership.
The inter-nation forum, the work that preceeded it and the subsequent results were the fruit of hard work by many people, but first among these were the youth themselves. It was such an honour to work with them. I hope the governments involved heed Jane’s report.
Congratulations. I’ve had a recent experience, in a different context, of this kind of meeting where one feels part of something much more powerful than an exchange of ideas. Where you don’t need a checklist of action points to make things happen and where you sense the change is taking place in the room, in the present. Here’s hoping for more such experiences!
Thanks…indeed, I love the way these experiences feed my heart.
[…] I learned a huge amount in this Art of Hosting. I learned that in fact k’e,like the Nuu-Chah-Nulth concepts of heshook ish tsawalk (everything is one) and teechma (the heart path) or the Nisga’a and Tsimshian idea of sayt k’uulum goot (of one heart) is the essential element that produces all things. It is what illuminates the social spaces between us, what allows us to produce quality work together. In fact, if you think of all human endeavour, there is nothing you can think of that was not produced by k’e. We sometimes think it is great people or great teams that produce great results, but more and more I am seeing that it is great k’e that is the source. I’m willing to be that everything ”“ peace, food, shopping malls, aircraft, marketing campaigns, shoes, families, buildings, art ”“ arises from this source. It is love and power combined, to use Adam Kahane’s framing. We can choose how to work with k’e using it to produce acts of beauty or terror. Our Navajo friends warned us that k’e on it’s own is no guarantee of wellness or peace. We must work skilfully with these connections to produce what the call nizhooni ”“ beauty. K’e itself is beautiful, but only with attention can we work with it to produce more beauty. This is wazhonshay the Navajo “beauty way.” […]