Alert Bay, BC
Not a bad place to blog from eh? This is the kitchen counter I am sitting at in a wonderful house in Alert Bay overlooking the bay itself and looking up the channel towards Port McNeil. I am staying at a place called “Above the Bay,” owned by a lovely couple, Dave and Maureen who also have a spot right down on the water called “On the Beach.” This is going to turn into a shameless plug for their place, because the sun just set behind the Vancouver Island mountains and the beauty is astonishing and its not like Dave and Maureen had anything to with that, except the genius of the picture window in front of me is that they invite the whole bay to a part of the house. This place is great…two bedrooms, woodstoves, a nice open kitchen and a great deck which must rock in the summer with a big fat salmon on the barbeque after a day of whale watching. This is not the typical view in January, but if you are ever up here, this is the place to stay. And free wireless.
I left this morning on the 8:45 ferry from Port McNeil bound for the Namgis First Nation on Cormorant Island. The trip is 45 minutes down towards the mouth of the Broughton Archipelago, a massive tangle of islands that stretches from here down to Campbell River between Vancouver Island and mainland. I’m here to work with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as they talk with First Nations from this area. On the ferry ride across I had a deep sense of the pattern of this place as I watched the cormorants and grebes, auks, seals and ducks scurry around beside the ferry. The pattern of here is that there are two worlds: the world of the surface where everything comes to rest, and the world of the deep where everyone goes to get nourished. Alert Bay and Namgis share Cormorant Island, and cormorants are birds that fly both above and below water.
People here rely on the ocean for their natural food. Several times today in the meeting, Namgis leaders and Elders talked about the ocean as their garden. There is a famous saying from this part of the world – when the tide is out the table is set. Clam beds, seaweed, salmon, and other creatures and plants formed the staple diet of these people and that natural diet is important today as diabetes and other nutrition related diseases ripple through First Nations. The pattern is calm at the surface, nourishment in the depths.
And so we had a good meeting today, beginning with that acknowledgement and extending into hearing what people were saying at their depths, what pain lay behind the calm exteriors. To have access to a traditional food source at your doorstep restricted by the effects of fish farms, government policy and commercial priorities is devastating, and these people, significant cultural and political forces here on the north Island, are tired of it. Hearing that opens things up though and we had some good conversations about collaboration despite it all. We ate clam chowder and salmon salad sandwiches, the local natural foods of this place and we looked into that private voice of possiblilty that lay behind the cynicism, but that nourishes hope.
So I’m definitely ensconced in here for the night, enjoying some quiet time, a pot of tea, some leftover salmon sandwiches and watching Venus grow brighter above the mountain in the darkening western sky. Travelling is sometimes weary, but this is one of those days when I count myself a lucky guy to get to do what I do.
At WorldChanging, news of a project intended to use web technology to work with indigensous oral cultures, tying traditional knowledge to biodiversity:
While there are those who argue that technology has led to the deterioration of traditional modes of communication and expression, the very same advancements are instrumental in allowing us to keep vanishing stories, cultural practices, and entire languages alive and thriving. By facilitating access to technology for people whose heritage is being challenged by the digital revolution, tech becomes a tool for nurturing traditional ways. Living Cultural Storybases is a new non-profit that works to do just that, using ICT to share knowledge amongst cultures and peoples with strong storytelling legacies.
More information at ths LCS website.
One of the key skills in deliberative dialogue is figuring out what we are, together. This is often called “co-sensing” or “feeling into the collective field.” There are many ways to talk about but the practice is on the one hand tricky and subtle, and on the other, blazingly obvious.
In general, in North America and especially among groups of people that are actively engaged in questions about co-sening the collective field, a speech pattern I have notcied goes something like this:
- I feel that we need to…
- My thoughts are that we should…
- I just throw this out there for consideration…
- I’m not sure but I think we…
In other words, oin our efforts to discern the collective, we very often start with a non-definitive statement about our personal relation to what might be held collectively. Very often these kinds of statements serve to keep us stuck in individual perspectives. What we end up talking about is our own perspectives on things. Instead of sensing into the whole, we are negotiating with the parts. There is no emergent sense of what we have between us.
Last week, I was working with some ha’wilh (chiefs) from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth nations of the west coast of Vancouver Island. (We were in this building). Although this was a somewhat standard government consultation meeting, these ha-wiilh are quite practiced in traditional arts of deliberation. Much of the conversation during the day conformed to the above pattern, but at one point, for about a half an hour, there was a deep deliberative tone that came over the meeting. We were talking about a government policy that is aimed at protecting wild salmon, an absolutely essential animal to Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities.
When talk about the policy, the pace of the conversation slowed down and the ha’wilh entered this pattern:
- We need to support this policy. I support it.
- We have to find a way to involve the province in this. Here’s who I know on this.
- Logging in our watersheds affects these fish and our communities are affected as well. What can we do about that?
The essence of this pattern is that one waits for something to be so obvious that a dclarative statement about “we,” “us” or “our” begs to be stated. And once it is stated, it is supported with a statement about how “I” relate to that whole.
This produces a number of profound shifts in a field, and very quickly. First, it slows everything down. It is not possible to rush to conclusions about what is in the collective field. Second, it builds conidence and accountability into the speech acts. It is very, very difficult to say “we need to support this” if you are uncertain of whether we do or not. This shift takes us from random individual thoughts and speculations into a space where we need to think carefully, sense outside of our own inner voice and speak clearly what is in the middle.
This is a very abstract notion, but anyone who has driven a car or ridden a bike in traffic knows what I am talking about. When we are driving our cars together, we are actually creating traffic. Traffic is the emergent phenomenon, the thing that we can only do together. In order to create traffic that serves us, we need to be constantly sensing the field of the road. This involves figuring out what other drivers are doing, noticing the flow and engaging safely but confidently. You need to both claim space and leave space to drive safely. Anyone who offers something into the field that is too focused on the individual disturbs the field significantly. They drive like road hogs, dangerous, not fully connected to the field around them.
So the teaching of the ha’wilh is very straightforward for any form of deliberation and co-sening: quickly go to the “we.”
[tags]co-sensing, deliberation[/tags]
Photo by Wam Mosely
Kevin Harris, at Neighbourhoods has a nice rant about capacity building today:
As far as I can recall, capacity building the community sector has not been the problem anywhere I’ve worked. The problem is relationships. Too many people in positions of power are behaving in disempowering ways towards residents and towards those who experience exclusion, and then using the notion of capacity-building as a smokescreen. If there’s any capacity building to be done, it’s in terms of getting these people to behave in a civilised and grown-up manner towards those they are supposed to be supporting, or just get out of the way. If we get these people out of the way, IMHO, the capacity of the community sector will always reassert itself.
I tend to agree with him. In the world of First Nations community development, “capacity building” became a buzzword in the early nineties, around the time of the Royal Commission. I think it started out innocently enough as a term meaning to build up the ability of communities to self-govern and self-manage. It was always talked about without context however, and I have met few people working in indigenous communities here who understand capacity building in terms of asset-based community development, appreciative inquiry or other similar bodies of thought and practice.
The problem now with the term is that is has become completely degraded. When people talk about “capacity building” now I have to ask them what they mean. In its worst connotations, government uses the term to mean “Aboriginal communities taking more responsibility for their own futures” which is often code for “we want out of this.” Likewise on the community side, I hear the word “capacity” used in place of “funding” so that capacity building becomes about getting more funding to do new things. (Of course there are many examples that are counter to what I am saying, but this is a general trend).
I think we would do well to forget the term “capacity building” as Kevin suggests and just focus on what the real need is. By engaging in collaborative work around these well articulated needs, we create the relationships necessary to sustain the work over time. That creates a learning community, and only through self-organization, self-education and self-empowerment, can a community understand, harness and realize its own capacities.
[tags]capacity building[/tags]
If you are anywhere near Victoria BC on August 24th, head down to Beacon Hill Park for a free salmon barbeque to celebrate the relationship between the T’Souke, Beecher Bay and Songhees First Nations and the neighbouring municipalities. The food is hot off the grill from 11:30 to 2:00 at the Cameron Bandshell.
Having worked this past year with the City of Victoria and the local First Nations there, I can say that this event will be a great time, with good food and interesting people making a real effort at strengthening relationships.