Cross Cultural Facilitation

[Joan Smith]

Brendan I have had an Open Space experience - nearly two years ago -  
with indigenous people,  This included male/female indigenous people  
and a few white people.  I met with small groups of Indigenous people  
beforehand.  There were several groups involved and many people  
coming had never lived away from home in an "institutional" setting.   
It was at Riverton.  Although it wasn't "live-in" some people came  
from the country or a fair way out of town.  There was a little bit  
of fear about this both from the "live-ins" themselves and the people  
who not living in.
The organisers seemed to be everyone who was coming so I decided to  
catch up with as many as I could.  This was an eye opener.  Probably  
99.5% of the women wanted it to be a woman's only experience.   
Generally they felt the male leaders had had enough to say about  
their life!!!  The males didn't even get into the question of  
participation.  I was "supposed" to be the facilitator, however I  
felt that the opening circle was very important and took on board the  
suggestions from the participants (with whom I'd met) about what  
might be helpful.  Well the two days seemed to be a great sharing  
time - some who were not going to come on the second day turned up  
again - - - -and listening to the participants at the closing circle  
they were very positive about what they wanted and where they thought  
they might go.
And I felt sometimes they didn't know I was around - they took the  
process in their hands and ran with it.
I also learnt a lot.  It was when preparing for this event I learned  
that not all Aboriginal Tribes have smoking ceremonies and that the  
didgeridoo is  not common to all tribes and that the  
boomerang.......and the type of storytelling.......the clap  
sticks........  and so on.
Maybe this is of some help.  Joan


*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20051001/74f5e189/attachment-0015.htm>