How we view the world affects our decision-making

PEOPLE WHO SEE THE WORLD AS BLACK AND WHITE TEND TO…

• Speak their mind or make quick decisions.
• Be more predictable in making decisions (e.g., who they vote for).
• Be less anxious about making wrong choices.
• Have relationship conflicts that are less drawn out.
• Be less likely to consider others’ points of view.

PEOPLE WHO SEE THE WORLD IN SHADES OF GRAY TEND TO….

• Procrastinate or avoid making decisions if possible.
• Feel more regret after making decisions.
• Be thoughtful about making the right choice.
• Stay longer in unhappy relationships.
• Appreciate multiple points of view.

excerpted from the following story: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703694204575518200704692936.html

4 Steps towards Decolonization

Colonization impacts all areas of our lives as First Nations people. Physically, we are more sedentary and suffer from newer diseases, many of which are completely preventable. Emotionally, the legacy of pain that is colonization has greatly impacted the family unit, with the majority of First Nations children being raised by single mothers, grandparents, and other relatives. Also, there are more First Nations children in protective care in 2010 than in the 1960′s during the infamous ’60s scoop’. Mentally, the vast majority of us don’t know our Indigenous languages, stories and ancestral knowledge. Spiritually, only 3% of us in Canada practice our traditional spirituality.

But, now is the time to be accountable for these deficits and quit blaming. It’s a matter of being whole over being right. We can focus our attention on the injustices of the past or we can focus on what we can do right now, today to make things better. It’s up to us. It’s not in any colonial government’s mandate to indigenize the Indigenous and decolonize the colonized. Only we can lift ourselves up.

Here are 4 things we can do today:

1) Learn a word in your language everyday. It may not seem like much, but over forty years a word a day adds up to 14560 words. If you already know your language, speak it and share it with the young ones. Model the behaviour you wish to see. Language embeds thought patterns and values. It is no coincidence that there are many more verbs in most Indigenous languages than nouns. This prominence of verbs over nouns speaks to our high value placed on processes over things.

2) Decolonize your tastebuds. By avoiding foods that are high in sugar and saturated fat, we are preventing diabetes, obesity, heart disease, among other slow killers. While you’re at it, take a walk on the land. You’ll be freeing four birds with one latch: exercise is good for the body, mind, heart and spirit.

3) Let’s place an emphasis on healthy families. The best way to do this is to keep the lines of communication open. Get in touch today with a close relative who’s drifted and reconnect right now. No matter where we are, with this new technology we can stay connected to our families, however we conceive them. This is an important first step in keeping our families strong.

4) Plan to attend a ceremony. It doesn’t have to be a Sun Dance, but can be. It can be something as accessible as a pow-wow or potlatch, depending on where you are. By honoring our ceremonies, we are modelling this same attitude for the generations to follow.

By taking these initial four steps, we are renewing the journey towards wholeness. What are your suggestions?

Are First Nations better or worse off after 500 years of colonization?

The obvious answer is we are worse off, but let’s dig a little deeper to see if the obvious answer is the correct one.

Factor 1: Disease

Conservative estimates of 80% of First Nations people across the Americas were killed by diseases, such as smallpox, influenza, measles, bubonic plague, pneumonia, among others. The deadly effect of these infectious diseases is without question. However, the exact magnitude of the effect is debated by historians, anthropologists and other experts. Some Nations were affected more than others, but all were hit in some way by these infectious diseases, which First Nations peoples had no natural immunity to fight against their deadly effect. Although most of these diseases have been eradicated, their legacy remains. This cataclysmic loss of life is without question one of the worst human tragedies ever recorded by historians in terms of sheer scale and widespread deadly effect.

Today, many of our people suffer from diseases we didn’t have prior to colonization. Diabetes, heart disease, addiction and various forms of cancer plague many of our people. Colonization brought with it changes in lifestyle for the vast majority of us, resulting in an overall movement towards more sedentary ways of living and increased carbohydrate intake. Instead of being on the land, many of us spend too much time indoors. Also, increased pollution of the water, land and air that we call home has brought with it increased rates of disease. As a result, we cannot eat some of the foods that we once did.

However you measure it, there is a lot of suffering in our communities that wasn’t here over 500 years ago. In saying this, I also want to be clear that I am not romanticizing the past. I’m sure there was pain and suffering. It’s okay to acknowledge our past was not utopian. After all, the word utopia was created by Sir Thomas More in 1516, and was largely based on Plato’s Republic, so the whole concept is not Indigenous in origin.

Based on the factor of disease alone, I don’t how anyone can claim that our lives as First Nations people have gotten better. When roughly 4 out of 5 of our ancestors were killed in one way or another by disease, then I find it nearly impossible to go even further into this question. Instead, let us take some time to honor our ancestors that did perish.

I will write more about this in the weeks to come. In the meantime, what do you think?

Great Facilitation depends on this one Attitude

Give up your desire to be right.

Great facilitation is not about coming up with the cleverest lines or the wittiest speeches.

It’s about giving the participants all of those opportunities to be witty, clever and inspiring. It’s about allowing people to realize that they already possess the necessary knowledge to make a real breakthrough, whatever that may be.

Your task is to show them that the box they’re metaphorically sitting on is already filled with the diamonds of wisdom.

Please note that in order for people to be daring and take healthy risks in any workshop, they need to feel safe  and secure right from the start. As a facilitator, you need to be explicit about respecting all truths that enter the circle. You also need to allow the group to generate their own ground rules for any session.

A workshop only comes alive when you make it genuinely about those people you’re serving.

This also requires you to listen with tremendous intensity, not only to the voice inside your head, but to each participant and the group as a whole to gauge any apprehension or confusion. Being acutely aware of these three levels of listening will create a shift in consciousness, which, if done well, will be mirrored in the participants you are serving.

Spend more time crafting dynamic questions than exhaustive explanations and you will demonstrate your trust in the circle to develop their own answers. That way, participants will walk away feeling empowered.

A great side effect of facilitating an effective workshop is that your ego is held firmly in check.

David Suzuki and Al Gore

I admire the work of David Suzuki and Al Gore. They reach millions of people all over the world with the much needed message of saving our planet. How can their timely messages get even greater traction?

If we consider the Medicine Wheel that represents many processes, including the balance of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects of being, then the answer to this question becomes apparent.

The vast majority of green rhetoric revolves around the physical (things we can buy and avoid) and mental (thinking) quadrants of the wheel. This bias towards the physical and mental, even by these two giants of the green pulpit, follows the obsessions and distractions of Western capitalist societies.

The emotional aspect of most of their work revolves around instilling old-fashioned fear. David Suzuki’s work does instill some awe and wonder in organic processes, whereas Al Gore’s work is more about scaring us into some type of action.

The problem with fear as a motivational tool is that it does not work well long-term for emotionally-balanced and mature adults. Fear works well with children, but not for long.

How can the green movement inspire prolonged action by appealing to our higher frequencies? Uncolonized Indigenous Elders hold these answers and have for generations. What is preventing the rest of the world from listening?

People I Admire: series

My Wife, for her beauty and passion, in mind, body, heart and spirit. She is strong and free, especially when she’s creating. Everything about her is energy and love.

My Son, for his pure joy in life, for his smile and laughter, for the love that glows, and for teaching me countless lessons in what it means to be alive.

My Dad, for his love. He embodies the right balance of strength and sensitivity, which is all the more amazing considering he went through slaughter at residential school and remained giving, defiant and whole.

My Mom, for her work ethic that never relents and humor that sometimes stings. As an adult, I am just now beginning to appreciate her humble complexity. I always felt her fierce love.

Sidebar story: in the mid-1950s, fresh out of nursing college, my Mother boarded a train on her way to a nursing job in Moose Factory, ON. She bought a first-class ticket, but was told by the conductor to get to the back of the train because that’s where the Indians sat. She refused to budge and the conductor couldn’t do a thing. Unlike Rosa Parks, her action did not spark civil disobedience. It was just another day.

When I ponder this story, it reminds me of The Fall of Icarus poem by William Carlos Williams:

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

How I lost 20 lbs in 30 days without dieting or exercising

Ever since my wife and I adopted our baby boy one year ago, he’s brought so much more love and joy into our home, more than we ever could imagine.

Since becoming a dad, lots of sleep-deprived nights have led me to put on some weight–20 lbs to be exact.

In exactly a month, I have since dropped that weight without diet or exercise.

How?

In one word: potassium!

I got a prescription from a doctor. I drop these nice-tasting. orange effervescent tablets into water four times a day and drink. They taste great and they work.

How I found out about this potassium power was through my wife who went on an expensive Dr. Bernstein diet for her TV show and got the results she wanted. They did a bunch of things to support her weight reduction, but the one that stuck to me was the potassium.

Why you need a prescription for it, I don’t know.

All I know is that I now fit jeans that I was getting ready to throw away. All thanks to potassium.

Thanks potassium!

Visionaries Required

Indigenous Peoples are hard workers . . . when we have a common vision.

Preparation for ceremonies and gatherings brings us together for a common goal. When a Sun Dance, wedding, or funeral are about to happen, there are no slackers.

There is just cooperative commitment and disciplined diligence.

The people in our communities who work the hardest are those who consider work to be sacred.

When we treat work as a ceremony, it transforms into something more than a simple exchange of time for money.

It becomes the greatest expression of our deepest values and highest vision.

The Orthodoxy of Eagle Feathers

eagle feathers: insatiable appetite

eagle feathers: bigger is better

eagle feathers: fashion symbol

eagle feathers: as currency

eagle feathers: a prized commodity

eagle feathers: a sacred item

eagle feathers: hold no more power than a seagull’s

eagle feathers: the power of belief and tradition

blinds us into our collection

eagle feathers: how do we get more?

Irony: the further we stray from the wisdom of seven generations ago when all creatures were sacred, the tighter our grip on eagle feathers becomes.

Solution: cherish a robin, a blue jay, a loon, a chickadee and even a seagull. We don’t need a feather collection to show our connection to the Great Spirit.

That being said, the intention by those feather collections is admirable in some cases. It’s just that colonization, in most cases, has tried to erase our collective’s sacred connection to all processes, beings, and things.

Some of my most prized possessions are eagle feathers, mostly because of the very respectful people who honored me with them. The crux of my concern lies in the hierarchical rank of eagle down to pine beetle. That’s not traditional, not in the way I was taught.

Here’s the point of all this: let’s re-learn to appreciate and respect the less glamorous animals. It will strengthen and renew our sacred connection to Mother Earth, Father Sky and beyond.

Run Away from this Buzzword in the Native Community

Change–a popular buzzword in mainstream politics.

You would think that any people living largely below the poverty line  and facing a litany of social problems caused by colonization would embrace this concept.

The reality, on the other hand, does not support this level-headed assumption.

The People generally don’t want it.

First Nations people on and off reserves are scared of change. We are a People that derive our identity from the past. Ask any First Nations person to describe a great achievement of the community and eight times out of ten they will point to some great leader from the past.

Our ancestors did not think or act in this way. They looked ahead, much further ahead than any one of us does these days. That being said, I still wish to avoid the slippery slope of romanticizing our past.

Eighty years from now, I am sure our great-grandchildren will somehow romanticize our current lives. What will they romanticize about life on a reserve in 2010? They might say we had it easy. They might be right.

It seems like every year, our health care and education funding guaranteed to us under the treaties is slowly being eroded. Many of us don’t even notice and if we do notice we don’t do anything about it because this erosion process is slow and gradual.

This is the new colonization–subtle, slippery. Colonization in the 21st century is whispered, not shouted.

With colonization, comes trauma and trauma is a difficult experience to overcome, especially when many of us face it to this day. Trauma is what keeps many of our people trapped in the past, focused on their own pain. And when it keeps on happening, trauma is created.

Indian Affairs should be renamed to Trauma Creation.

The status quo, as tattered and stinky as it is, is comfortable. Let’s do more to embrace that awful buzzword called change. It’s the one thing in life we can’t stop.

Fortunately, bright lights in the First Nations community are making their presence known. We are working for change, embracing our values.