My friend Jeff Aitken has been a strangely influential person in my life. He has been an interesting guide across intercultural spaces, helping me to frame and see my own journey as a person of mixed ancestry facilitating cross-cultural groups and helping to find the creative spark in the space that are created when we all claim our centres and show up whole. Jeff and I met in 2001 and have had a few conversations over the years, but I’ve always felt very close to him.
Now at his blog rio grand-i-o, he is posting his doctoral thesis which documents his journey to his complex and liquid centre, as a man of mixed ancesrty cultivating an indigenous relationship with the land upon which he lives. Worth a read, worth subscribing to and worth following if you are interested in how white people can participate in the decolonization process on this continent.
A new blog from my friend Dustin Rivers about the elder Harriet Nahanee who was aressted for protesting the destruction of Eagle Ridge Bluffs across the water from my place here on Bowen Island. These bluffs, a rare dry cliff with a huge arbutus grove, were razed for a bypass in the service of the 2010 Winter Olympics over much opposition. She was sentenced to 14 days in prison for an act of civil disobedience. In prison she contracted an illness and died a few weeks ago. There is a movement to have her death investigated, and you can follow that effort on the blog Spirit of Warrior Harriet Nahanee
Harriet Nahanee was a gentle and passionate warrior, and though I never met her, I know many people who have been touched deeply by her. Here is something she said about de-colonization that relfects something of her spirit:
What I would like to see is people with [traditional] knowledge to teach the small, little people how to grow up with pride. This generation is lost. My generation is lost–they’re assimilated. They don’t think like an Indian. What I’d like to see is our five-year-olds being taught their language, their songs, their games, their spirituality, their Indian, eh, their Indian-ness. I’d like to ask all the people out there to reclaim their culture–practice it, teach the children, and let’s reclaim our backbone, our culture and put some pride in our children.[tags]harriet nahanee, vancouver 2010[/tags]
Horseshoe Bay, BC
This has been a most interesting day. On the one hand it has been the worst day of travel I think I have ever had, trying to returnt to BC from Ottawa by way of Toronto through a terrible winter storm. Bu the way Air Canada got me home was absolutely superb. I was impressed beyond belief at the efficiency of things today. It meant that truly the only thing that wasn’t cooperating was just the weather.
So my day began early as a storm rolled into Ottawa, winds coming up the Valley from the east cold and bringing snow and, later in the morning freezing rain with it. I left early for the airport, hoping that my plane would leave at 9:00 on time. Toronth had suffered from the storm on Thursday so I knew there would be backlogs and traffic jams so I thought getting to the airport at 7:00 or so would be prudent.
I awoke to freezing rain mixed with snow and it didn’t look good. I resigned myself to the fact that I might spend the whole day in Ottawa waiting to get out so once I got to airport I went and bought a couple f books to get me through the day. Dave Bidini’s “The Best Game You Can Name” was my constant companion all day, a series of anecdotes and reflections on the gritty, human inner life of old style and amateur hockey. It kept me laughing all day.
Looking for breakfast I wandered into Nate’s grill at the airport and had the first of several interesting encounters. Canada is a huge country but we’re small town in many ways. As I settled into a booth to eat breakfast I heard a voice calling behind me “Chris Corrigan!” I turned and saw my friend Bob Turner, the mayor of Bowen Island where I live and a geologist with Natural Resources Canada. He was coming back from a meeting in Ottawa and we chatted about using dialogue practices on Bowen Island. It was kind of surreal, talking with Bob about Bowen in the airport restaurant in Ottawa half fretting that I might actually not see home for several days. He was heading home on Westjet through Winnipeg. I said I’d race him, confident that my plane would leave on time. He had been delayed to 1:30. I think he must have got the last laugh in the end.
In Ottawa there were several planes that hadn’t arrived from Toronto, so the standby lines were full and people were seething. I have never understood the immature reaction of people who shout at customer service staff when the weather conspires against their plans. From what I could tell, the staff were doing a good job getting everyone set up on alternate flights, but the fact that several people took a few extra minutes to share their frustrations with the counter staff didn’t help the lines get any shorter. I had a confirmed seat on the 9:00 flight so I was sitting happy enough, although I was wondering where my plane was.
Turns out that my plane was late leaving Toronto and the time started getting pushed back. I ran into another friend as I was waiting, Chief Shane Gustafsson, who is Chief of the Kamloops Indian Band. We chatted for a while about the economic development meeting he had been at in Ottawa. Other planes came in from Toronto and left again but mine ran into problems on approach by starting to ice up 30 miles west of Ottawa. They did a couple of circuits but then had to make the call to return to Toronto to fuel up again and try a second time. Meantime, all the folks whose seats had been shuffled around were busy leaving on the planes that were starting to arrive from Toronto, but I had to wait, because I was confirmed. Luck of the draw.
We finally got airborne around 1:00, two hours after my connection had left from Toronto to Vancouver. Nothing to do but sleep on the short flight to Toronto. I was bagged, and I awoke with a start when we were on final approach as the plane was coming down through high winds and sleet and we actually got struck by lightning on final approach. That woke me up. We landed safely, to scattered applause throughout the cabin, but I was wondering now if I was going to get home at all or whether I would have to stay overnight in Toronto. Several other people had already stayed overnight in various places as the storm battered Ontario and Eastern Canada. The ground staff in Toronto looked like hell. I’ll bet they had been shouted at for 24 hours.
I headed to Customer Service to rebook my connection and stood in a line for a few minutes until we were told to head down to a bank of phones to rebook our flights and then return to the Customer Service desk for boarding passes. This appeared not to make much sense at the time, but it turned out to be a smart move. There was a bank of eight phones and everyone patiently took turns waiting on hold and then reworking their itineraries with booking agents. I spoke to a lovely woman who was relived and appreciative of my tone of voice and patience, proving the golden rule is most important when things are going screwy: treat others the way you want to be treated. She got me a seat on the 6:00 flight from Toronto to Vancouver and I returned to the Customer Service desk which was by now moving very smoothly. A very friendly agent handed me my bo$arding pass with a smile, and I had time for lunch before heading to the gate to await boarding.
I was early there and the area was pretty empty so I pulled out my juggling balls and started playing around, trying to get my stiff and tired body moving. A young Quebecois kid came up and looked at me. I tossed him the balls and he started juggling. I stole them back and he stole them back and within a few minutes were passing and doing dimwits and making up some patterns. We hardly said two words to each other the whole time, but we passed the time together for about a half hour until his plane to Montreal boarded. It was great. Just as I packed up I ran into another colleague, Darrel McCleod, who ws coming back from yet another national meeting in Ottawa, but who left later in the afternoon after things had stablized in the capital.
As soon as I hit my seat on the A330, I conked out. I awoke as we started our approach a mere four hours later – the first officer has a heavy foot, I later learned, due to the fact that he lives in Clinton, seven hours north of Vancouver, and he wanted to get home just like everyone else. Four hours and twenty minutes is a personal record flying east to west across two-thirds of Canada. We arrived in Vancouver at 8:20 and I had some hope of making the last ferry to Bowen Island.
Alas it was not to be, as my luggage had not had as good a day as I did, and it missed all the connections. It wasn’t in Vancouver at any rate, and I had to wait until all the bags had come down before getting in line to get a tracking number. It had been a bad day for the whole Air Canada system, and there were lots of lost bags and irate people. I still might have made it out in time if I hadn’t been stuck behind people who thought it was their duty to berate the baggage staff for the fate of their luggage. When I got to the counter I looked my agent in the eye and invited him to take a breath and close his eyes for a second. He sat back in his chair sighed a big sigh, opened his eyes and smiled. He said “Thank you…now how can I help you?” I was touched by his friendliness at the end of a long day for both of us. I was on my way in three minutes, tracking number in hand and relaxed now that I didn’t have to rush to get home anymore. After supper and a leaisurely cab ride to Horseshoe Bay I pulled up here at the Troller, to write, suck back a Guinness and head home. It will be 1:00 am when I get in, 21 hours after I left my hotel in Ottawa, and I feeling pretty good.
Air Canada did a good job caring for me all day, got me home safely and promised to get my bag to my door this weekend. I have no complaints for them today at all, and that surprises me as I have had all kinds of strange experiences with them over the years. Today however, credit where credit is due. My big learning for today is when you are stuck in the winter nightmare of storm bound air travel in Canada, stay away from the other travellers whose expressions of outrage, righteous indignation and dramatic superiority complexes seem more about a tabloid TV influenced public performance rather than a resourceful response to the chaos around them. Just plug your earphones in, crank up The Tragically Hip and cuddle up with a Dave Bidini book and be thankful you live in a big small-town country where you might run into friends at any turn and where people are, at their core, decent and helpful in the end.
[tags]air canada[/tags]
Ottawa, Ont.
I’m here in Ottawa at the National Aboriginal Forestry Association meeting threading some World Cafe work into their annual conference. This is a real time harvest of the work we are doing.
This conference is bringing together about 130 people to dust off recommendations that were made by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples ten years ago. We are looking specifically at about a dozen recommendations relating to forestry. Certainly much has changed in the past ten years, but there are some essential things that would allow First Nations to take over much more control of their resources that simply haven’t been done. These include sorting out better access, and looking at tenure reform to allow for First Nations to log in a way that supports sustainable local economies rather than feeding the industrial forestry model.
The design for this work proceeds through a fairly straightforwad plan. We have four sessions which will take the group through divergence, a groan zone and into some convergence. The first session is aimed at getting a broad sense of what might be possible to leverage the power of the system. The two groan zone sessions deal with how these strategies might actually work in practice and our final session tomorrow afternoon will look at the good bets for supporting action that will ensure that the ideas we discuss get some legs post-conference.
The breakout sessions are dealing with the ideas for moving forward these stalled thoughts, and in the plenary we are using a really interesting blend of Cafe type conversations to think about the action part. Today we completed two parts of the Cafe and there are two more tomorrow.
We began the day asking this question:
What do we have to do if we are to leverage the entire power, potential and capacity of this whole sector to do things that we have never done before?
With delegates sitting around conference tables in groups of 4-6, we posed the question and had two rounds of conversation. Participants switched tables between rounds. At the end of the second round, we asked participants to capture their nuggets on an index card and to have those available to us. Close to 100 cards came back. The participants all departed for their first breakout sessions armed with the question of how we could leverage the power of the sector to move the ideas forward.
During that breakout session and over lunch myself and Chad, a NAFA staffer, went through the cards and looked for the main themes. I captured the essence of what was being said using FreeMind and produced a mind map with text weighted according to how much attention each theme received. I then redrew the mindmap by hand to show the emerging themes, photographed it and projected it on two big screens so people could see it while I presented these back to the group as a whole.
mp3: My explanation of this mind map as a way of seeding the second round of conversation
Once they had the whirlwind tour from me, I asked them to turn to one another again for one round of focussed conversation on what they are now learning about these strategies. We heard a few voices back after this brief 25 minute conversation and people had both questions and insights that I then invited them to carry with them into the afternoon’s breakout sessions.
Tomorrow we will use the Cafe process to move through the groan zone by jamming on these leveraging strategies to get the sector to address a number of emerging crises relating to climate change, consolidation and global trade impacts on local communities and small and medium sized businesses.
Back in the fall I published The Tao of Holding Space (.pdf), a small ebook I had been working on for a number of years. It seemed to get the attention of Lyn Hartley from Fieldnotes, the online journal of the Shambhala Institute. She ran a little interview with me, and this month it appeared in the most recent issue. The interview covers the origins of the book and then we get into some detail about my facilitation practice and the underlying foundation for the way I work.
Thanks to Lyn for the interest in my work.