Changing public meetings

[Christy Lee-Engel]

Dear Chris,
To read this story cracks further open something in each of us too. Thank
you, it's breathtaking, and from such beautifully ordinary human
ingredients. And I am also awed that you basically text messaged the whole
thing to us, typing it by thumb! You are a harvest artist of great devotion,
and insight, and it is much appreciated.

love, Christy

Christy Lee-Engel, ND, LAc
cell: 206.399.0868
http://oneskywellness.com

"The opposite of life is not death. The opposite of life is time." Morris
Graves


On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Chris Corrigan
<chris.corrigan at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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