Links that made me think this week.
In Thunder Bay on the Fort William reserve there is a distinct volcanic remanant called Mount McKay in English but Animikii-wajiw in Anishnaabemowin. Animikii-wajiw means “thunder mountain” so named because a thunderbird once landed there, ampong other things.
My mood has changed markedly after the work we did today working with Ojibway leaders and Elders from around the north shore of Lake Superior and parts further north and west of here on traditional governance and the assertion of Aboriginal rights and title. This is timely stuff given the historic proposed legislation that will be coming before the BC Legislature soon. There is good news on the Aboriginal title front and it can all lead to good things for First Nations – not without challenge and much effort mind you – but things are looking optimistic on the legal front in a way that is truly unprecedented.
At any rate, our work here is about exploring the meaning and practical implications of all of this stuff, introducing people to a powerful political and legal strategy that has been developed by the National Centre for First Nations Governance, and thinking about what it takes to do this hard work. Today there were three great little teachings that came my way as a result of discussing traditional leadership.
Teaching one came from Nancy Jones one of the Elders who gave us small blankets with a medicine wheel design based on a vision that she had about unity, leadership and healing. One of the great teachings in this medicine wheel was about the north, the direction from which winter weather and wind comes. We laboured here through a blizzard today, waiting for an hour until whoever was coming was going to show up, and working small processes with diminished numbers. But the Elder gave the teaching that essentially the weather teaches us that “whatever happens is the only thing that could have” and that the chaordic path is an inherent part of leadership: you can never really be in control.
The second teaching was from Ralph Johnson. I asked him about the Ojibway word “ogiimaw” which is often translated as “chief” or “boss.” I asked Ralph what he thought the word must have meant before contact, when the concept of “chief” was basically unknown. He said that word relates to the word ogiimatik which is the poplar tree, the tree that is considered the kindest of trees. Poplars are gentle, flexible, quiet and kind and are also good medicine. He said this idea of kindness is what is under the word “ogiimaw” and that influencing people through kindness is the kind of leadership that the word implies. This is very different from the kinds of leadership implied by the word “chief” which is a title now won by competition in a band election, a process that seems to engineer kindness right out of the equation. This is a great legacy of colonization – the lowering of kindness from a high leadership art to a naive sentimentality.
Ralph also gave me one more little teaching that rocked me. He told me that the word I had always understood as “all my relations” – dineamaaganik – actually means “belonging to everything.” Seems like a small change in translation, until another Elder, Marie Allen chimed in and said that the problem with leadership these days was the way ideas like “all my relations” activated the ego. The difference between “all my relations” and “belonging to everything” is the difference between the ego and the egoless I think. This is what Ralph was trying to tell me. That the centre of the universe is not me, and things are not all related to me, rather I belong to everything. Marie and I took a moment to express amazement at the way the earth used us to channel life in a particular shape for a short period of time. We come from her, we return to her, and in the interim we do our work upon her.
So tomorrow, with this platform of reverance firmly established, we return to work with young and emerging leaders in Open Space.
Not so lonely here after all is it?
A cold day to be on the outskirts of a cold city in a cold part of the world. When you travel midweek into Canada’s hinterlands and northern small cities, you share a plane with mostly hard and tired men who work for government or various companies doing business in the far flung nether regions of this nation. Whether it’s travel to Prince George, Thunder Bay, Prince Albert or Yellowknife, it seems like the same guys are on the flight – steak eating, overworked, tired, introverted, hard men. Once in a while, if they are coming home from a job well done, and travelling in groups, they are more garrulous, raucously celebrating and teasing one another across the rows of the small regional jets and Dash-8s that seem to be bulging at the seams to contain them.
On a late winter Tuesday afternoon the flight from Ottawa to Thunder Bay isn’t at all out of the ordinary. Mostly public servants on this trip, a couple of guys wearing jackets with CAT logos on them, two or three professional women, and a young couple who have seen better days, and who seem to be holding out for better days to come. The flight is quiet, descending through an oncoming blizzard to land on a snowy runway. When we disembark, the jetway doesn’t fit the fuselage very snugly and a blast of cold Northern Ontario air stings the face.
Here at the Valhalla Inn – a nod to the nordic history of this part of the world – wood trim and gas fireplaces in the lobby distract the eye from the cinder block hallways, and new carpets in the room offset the aging wood and vinyl topped room furniture. It seems like the meeting rooms are full of Aboriginal women and non-Aboriginal men. Almost every space has a sign that says that people are planning, and being the end of the fiscal year, everyone is turning their thoughts to next year, which starts on April 1.
There is something about the bleakness of being out here, far from downtown Thunder Bay, that brings loneliness on. I have two days of work here, but already I can’t wait to get home to my little house on an island in Howe Sound, where my family are.
It has been a long winter in many ways, and I’m ready for a rest and for spring to come on. Here, it feels a million miles away from that – not even the geese have dared venture this far notth yet, and the storm coming in deepens the mood.
Hunker down , do some good work with local First Nations leaders and youth and then get home. That’s the work of this week. Looking forward to ten days with the kids, writing some reports and getting my hands into the soil of the spring garden.
For the second time in two weeks, I’m back in Ottawa, one of my former residences, and a part of Canada that I love very much. I arrived yesterday afternoon and spent the evening walking around my old haunts on Elgin Street, going to see Milk and then finishing with a late dinner at The Manx Pub, a place located four doors down from the first place Caitlin and I lived after we moved to Ottawa in 1991. The Manx opened three weeks after we got there and it’s still going strong.
Today a day of teaching hosting, cricle practice and Theory U with a group of people involved in our Urban Aboriginal Economic Development Network of learning circles. Many of the people with us today are involved in setting up learning circles BC and Ontario on Aboriginal women’s social entreprenuership inspired by the work of Penny Irons and the Aboriginal Mother’s Centre in Vancouver.
Tonight its off to supper at Canada’s second Aboriginal restaruant, Sweetgrass Bistro in the Byward Market, another former stomping ground. Good to be back here, good to be working with friends, good to be doing good work.
To some it may seem that we are simply cast about like so much cosmic flotsam and jetsam – and on a day when the partner of the moment is dark chaos that is surely the experience. But partners change and the dance moves on – light creative order enters our experience. How wonderful it might be to hold that moment for ever. . .
The ecstacy is not in the moment,
But in its passage.
To hold the moment is to destroy it –
The ending of the dance.
I think we are all dancers who live fully when we dance. There is no abstract right, wrong or perfect way to dance, for each dance is perfectly what it is. It is not about “shoulds,” “musts,” or “oughts,” but only the dance in this, and every, present moment. We are called to the dance and in the dance we experience ourselves as a loving whole – at one with ourselves and all that surrounds us.
