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Over the past three days I’ve been working with 15 Aboriginal youth from around British Columbia who gathered in Vancouver to work on a couple of projects.

What is amazing about these youth is that today we started working on a foundation that will be the basis of support for emerging Aboriginal youth leadership in perpetuity. Ranging in age from 15-29, these young people are undaunted by the minutiae of setting up a foundation. “What we don’t know we can learn; what we can do, we will do.” That pretty much describes the energy.

What gives me so much hope is the way these guys constantly work at solidifying their self-worth and understanding what it is that they are bringing to the world. There is less a sense of entitlement among them than a sense that anything is possible if we take the time to understand who we truly are, what our traditions are, what our Elders have to say to us, and what it is we were born to do. As a group they seem to me to be taking on the predominant culture in many ways, crafting a series of powerful decolonization tools and methodologies as they go. The most important of these maybe the rejection of the corporate world’s modus operandi of stripping people clean of their culture and replacing their inherent self-worth with a need to consume. Instead of consuming endlessly to mount their identity these youth are exploring the opposite of consumption: giving. They are evaluating what they have to offer and trying to find practical ways to give that to the world.

I have been writing for a long time that the process of decolonization is ultimately not and external battle with systems and behaviours, but rather an internal fight to reclaim authentic intention and culture. The battle ground for the souls of Aboriginal people in the world has been on the inside, emptying the core and replacing it with a hole designed to be filled with Western spiritual values, economic values and social norms. Reclaiming this space is a practical act of decolonization, and when you do that you discover that there is only one thing to do with that energy: spread it.

So if there is anyone out there with experience or contacts in setting up foundations for emerging youth leadership, or who can help by donating advice or contacts to these guys to get their project rolling, let me know.