What do we dare to choose now?

“My grandmother was the one that inspired me,” said my friend Liz over lunch at the Valley Inn in Bella Coola. “She said that the world was once all together, and then it came apart and one day it will be all together again. So I just try to bring things together.”

Liz is a pretty remarkable woman. She worked for years in family reunification in Vancouver, bringing together First Nations kids with their birth families, reconnecting them to their culture and communities. She is at home now in Bella Coola on council, working for the Ministry as a social worker, but always about bringing people together. The reason I am here, for these two days of community conversations, is simply to be a part of designing and hosting community meetings that do that.

The Nuxalk Nation reserves sit in this stunning valley, at the mouth of the Bella Coola River, where it meets the ocean at North Bentinck Arm, still nearly 150 kilometres inland from the open Pacific coast. At the Bella Coola town site is an old cannery, an icehouse and a wharf. There are a couple of hotels and restaurants, a Coop store, some repair shops and and RCMP station. Across the street from that is one of the Nuxalk communities, an old part of the reserve called “Downtown.” It mostly consists of old Department of Indian Affairs Housing, never designed for the wet climate of the Pacific coast, some trailers that house the band office and a couple of community buildings and a playground. Yards are full of mullein, plantain and blackberry bushes and the occasional carved headstone can be seen in a yard. A small creek winds through the reserve and joins the river on the north side of the community. At this time of year there are people out on the river, drift netting their food fish, gathering coho for canning and smoking. The Nuxalk fisheries personnel are trying to find some sockeye to take eggs from so they can stock some of the streams and lakes around the territory. Like everywhere the fish are dwindling. In the past, oolichans ran through here in the millions, but now only a handful return in the early spring and the once rich Nuxalk grease, one of the healthiest human produced foods in the world, is now gone.

Up the river from here is the newer community of Four Mile, a subdivision of larger lots and larger houses. Kids roam around on their bikes and young families are out walking. The houses look like any rural subdivision but there are telltale signs you are still on Nuxalk lands. Poles dote the neighbourhood, carving studios take up garage space, and the occasional lawn has a fish boat parked on it.

As the Bella Coola valley winds eastward, a few more communities dot the landscape – Hagensborg is the biggest, another 10 kilometres along highway 20. It is an old Norwegian settlement, and here the houses look bigger, more durable, and on large lots featuring manicured lawns and gardens. No one is outside, the kids get dropped off from the school bus and head right inside in contrast to the reserves, where the kids scatter in all directions after school. As highway 20 heads up towards Williams Lake, it climbs the “hill” a steep grade of narrow switch backs with no guard rail, that is said by some to be the most terrifying drive in Canada. If you don’t fly out, or leave for Vancouver Island far to the south by ferry, this is the only way to go.

This is the valley in which I have been working this week. A place of stunning natural beauty and deep social alienation. Liz and the Nuxalk elected chief, Spencer, were both fed up with the kinds of community meetings that have been going on for years, where people come and yell at one another, where anger becomes unbottled rage and questions are asked that have no answers that will ever satisfy. Both realized that how we talk to one another is important, so we agreed to try an experiment, and see what might happen if we ran meetings using participatory methodologies.

The first day was a World Cafe, which I wrote about earlier, and yesterday we tried an Open Space meeting for a general community meeting. As is not uncommon, we started very late, once people had arrived, and a pot of moose stew appeared and everyone was settled, it was 5:00 – 90 minutes past the posted opening. We had about 20 people sitting in a circle wondering what would happen, and I was wondering the same. Most folks were Band employees, present to give information and participate in conversations as best they could. A number had been reluctant to come because they had no idea what would happen, and feared community members being out of control. “How are you going to stop people from getting on their high horses?” one man had asked me. “I’m not,” I replied. “But the way we do this will lessen the chance of that happening.” He wasn’t convinced. It was as if I had just described the concept of magic to him. I clearly knew my stuff, but that didn’t make me any more in touch with reality.

After a prayer and a quiet opening welcome, I stepped into the circle, with really nothing but an invitation to talk differently. We had not been able to do very much planning, and the notices for the meeting had only gone out to the community a couple of days before. Still, the invitation was to move from some visioning that the community had been doing for an Indian Affairs mandated planning process, to something more based in what the people wanted. I walked the circle, explained the process, reminded them that they had the power to set the agenda, and waited for what might happen.

Always in Open Space meetings, there is this moment of being on the edge of the complete unknown. All of the preparation and time spent building the invitation and the theme and the question usually pay off in that moment. If we have done all of that right and produced a strong social field, the ideas flood into the centre. But there are times when the conditions don’t tap the passion of the community, when people just remain confused about why they are there and what they are supposed to do. When they haven’t seen through their cynicism far enough to even listen to the instructions. Those times only happen if there has been little preparation in the community or organization. Open Space is not a magic wand – it does not automatically generate participation. Invitation is the magic wand and Open Space is the place where the magic can happen. Yesterday, I feared that the wand had not been well used. That we would be staring at the floor between our feet for a while.

But sometimes passion trumps preparation. It turns out that in Nuxalk, there are plenty of things to talk about. Life is hard for most people. There is 90% unemployment, the fish are disappearing, huge scale land rights issues loom over the heads of 1600 people, the language and culture is hanging by a thread, youth are drinking and drugging and getting pregnant. It’s no wonder really that people shout at community meetings. It’s the last place to rail against the morass of conditions that keeps these communities poor and out of the loop. The last place where people can feel their power, even if it comes at the expense of others.

So last night, as I sat down, four people rose up and we were off. One Elder who had been a vocal critic of how bad the Council was at communicating with the people convened a session on how she wanted to see it done It felt at some level like there was some forgiveness buried in her question. Let’s move on, she seemed to be saying. Let’s figure out how to do this better.

There were similar sentiments around jobs and youth and culture and language. Ten small groups were formed, and there was lots of visiting over the next hour as we did all the sessions in one time slot. Laughter broke out all around the room. More community members, who had been hanging around the outside of the hall, joined us. Liz picked up a conversation that she had started two years ago when I had been here before working with her. She introduced people to her idea of a community house – an intergenerational space where people could gather and be with one another.

As we gathered in the circle at the end, we talked about what it felt like to be working like this. People had a good feeling towards one another. I asked when was the last time people had left a community meeting feeling good. There was hearty laughter. “Never!” said one Elder, her eyes wide with the absurdity of the question. “Feels good now though,” she said.

We have a choice. We can meet in ways that get nothing done in the name of “information sharing” and “accountability” or we can meet in ways which allow our hearts to set the agenda, and our hands and feet to see it through to action. We didn’t begin massive amounts of work last night, but we cracked open something – a possibility that it could be different. Hopefully we opened a jar out of which choice flowed. As Thomas King once said, you can’t pretend not to have heard the story If you were there last night, you would have seen and felt something different. You can spin it to say some guy came up from the south and ran this kooky meeting and we talked in small groups. But no one who was there can deny that it DID feel good at the end. We felt like something was accomplished.

What do we dare choose now?

Liz reminded me that when we worked together two years ago, a young woman uttered a phrase that is stark in it’s power and implication for communities like Nuxalk: Leadership is seeing the beauty in others. It’s to draw together the world again, as Liz’s grandmother says. To heal by making whole, which is not to say fixing everything, but rather to bring things closer together.

As we left the hall last night, Spencer, the chief, waved at a man coming across the playground. He was a “trooper” one of the small number of chronic alcoholics in the community who have the hardest time of all. “What’s happening Spence?” the trooper cried out. “Community meeting,” replied the young chief getting into his truck. “We were just talking.”

“Oh, mmmhmm,” said the trooper. “That’s good.”