Changing public meetings

Sono Hashisaki sono at springwood-usa.com
Sun Sep 13 11:44:45 PDT 2009


Thanks Chris for the great story.  So good to hear from you.
Sono
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Corrigan <chris.corrigan at gmail.com>

Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:16:56 
To: <OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU>
Subject: [OSLIST] Changing public meetings


A story from some work I did last week:

“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.”

-----
CHRIS CORRIGAN
http://www.chriscorrigan.com

Sent from an iPod, typed with thumbs...

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