The importance of learning to distinguish anger from violence

Anger makes me uncomfortable, I must admit. And last month, I finally realized exactly why that is. It is because for me anger has often seemed indistinguishable from violence, whether it is direct or indirect. Anger seems dangerous, uncontrolled, and frightening, and so I have often had difficulty expressing anger or hearing others express anger to me.

I have discovered I am not alone in that. I attended the Anger, Boundaries and Safety workshop at The Haven, on the west coast of Canada. The Haven is a place where I have gone several times over the past 15 years to learn about myself – why I think and behave the way I do, how it affects my relationships with those around me, and how I can change what I don’t like and celebrate what I do like.

This workshop is based on the pioneering work on anger done by the late Dr. Joann Peterson, a world authority on this topic. She ran these workshops at Haven for many years, based on her book of the same name, and is featured in a video called The Anger Toolbox – A Blueprint for Responsible Anger, Boundaries and Safety, to which I have just been listening.

A courageous choice?

One profound realization for me is how few of us learn, as children or as adults, to feel and express anger responsibly and safely. We don’t often think of anger as being a courageous choice or a constructive choice, because too often in our own experience, anger and rage may have been intertwined. Unexpressed anger doesn’t go away, however, Joann said. We carry it in our body, which has health consequences for us and thus costs for society as a whole; or we express it in socially sanctioned ways, from violent video games through addictions through sporting riots, that often can be damaging to ourselves and our relationships with others.

There are ways to express anger responsibly and safely, and the workshop helps participants understand how to do this. It involves being clear about our own intentions, getting permission from the other person, being determined to express anger in a way that is ‘personal, relational and constructive’, and doing it in a way that is boundaried and safe. There are tools, and strategies, that we can learn and apply.

Violence, whether it is socially sanctioned or indirect or direct attacks on others, sees others as objects, not as people; does not care about what they think or what their personal boundaries may be; and is impulsive and reactive. It is about exercising control, about getting one’s own way no matter what others may think or wish. It harms others emotionally and often physically as well, and it damages our relationships with each other. Put simply, violence is crossing a person’s boundaries with intent to hurt that person or to exercise power over that person.

Lessons for peacebuilding?

While I went to the workshop because I wanted to learn about anger and boundaries for myself, I cannot help but reflect on how sharing such knowledge widely could affect peacebuilding and governance around the world.

How many of us as peacebuilders understand and are comfortable with expressing anger responsibly and are able to walk with others as they do the same thing? How many of us might be more likely to shut down, rather than to facilitate, responsible expressions of anger within a group or community that is recovering from conflict? How many of us are able to clearly distinguish anger and violence?

Fear of anger, or internalization of anger because it cannot be expressed outwardly, can cause great harm, I think. I remember meeting some young boys in Africa who had joined armed groups because they feared their parents would be angry because they had lost the family cow while herding. I remember hearing people in various parts of Eastern Europe apologize in case they had said something incorrectly, if they had said something that could be construed as being mildly critical of others.

Then there are the examples of how governments and police forces have chosen to respond to citizens’ honest anger (individual protests against injustice and inequality which effectively say “I matter; listen to me”, like the one that set off the Arab Spring) by preparing to meet anticipated violence with violence, thus setting off an escalating cycle of violence that causes injuries and death and damages property.

How different might the outcomes be, both individually and societally, if we distinguished clearly between anger and violence; learned, and taught others, how to express anger responsibly and safely; and were absolutely clear about the nature, characteristics and impacts of violence in all its forms, both indirect and direct.

Using local knowledge to plan coherent post-conflict rebuilding

‘The village is like a basket that has been broken and the pieces scattered. The pieces are still there but not everyone can see them. What has been broken can be rewoven slowly and gradually, but only by those who will take the time to stay close to the village people and build trust with them.’ Meas Nee, Towards restoring life in Cambodian villages

This wonderful image captures for me the essence of rebuilding after conflict. It is a slow, gradual process of rebuilding the local structures and governance that has been destroyed or damaged by war. It reflects the idea that rebuilding depends on working with local people to restore and enhance their capacities and abilities, even as they are recovering from the trauma of what they have experienced. And it starts at the bottom of the system, and not the top.

I was thinking about this image as I read about the pleas of people in northern Mali for government officials to return, so that services can return to normality. IRIN News reported on Monday that people living in Gao and Timbukti, in northern Mali, are “calling for the rapid return of officials to re-start basic services and help run their towns, which they say are in a state of ‘complete chaos’. “ While the insurgent groups are mostly gone, thanks to the French, Chadian and Malian armies, only a few administrators have returned.

While they are waiting for the government officials to return, IRIN reported, “town residents – including village elders, chiefs, women and youths – are working to operate basic services and clean up the damage as best they can.” But while some key officials in Gao and Timbuktu have come back, officials responsible for health, energy, education, planning and other programmes have yet to return. Clearly, that limits the amount and extent of rebuilding that can take place.

However, those exiled officials represent an extremely useful resource of local knowledge that could aid military and government in ensuring that the transition from relief to rebuilding is a smooth continuum. Often in such situations, longer term planning (if it is done) is done from a distance by people who don’t know the area well, if at all. Regarding those officials as a ‘think tank’ full of local expertise could allow government and the military to create rebuilding plans that are meaningful and useful for local communities. Quick impact projects thus could be planned so they help form part of the foundation for long-term recovery that can begin once government officials return.

The situation points out, once again, the need for military interventions to be thinking beyond the shorter term aims of restoring law and order in places where conflict has occurred or is occurring.

Even as soldiers are sent in, someone should be planning for the time when peace will return and people will want services to return as well. That is a lesson that has been drawn from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places which have experienced military interventions in the past decade or more. Such an approach is respectful of both local people and of the soldiers who intervene, ensuring that their efforts can have maximum locally-appropriate impact and thus make the best use of any available local resources, diaspora funding, and donor funding.

Reading:

Plea for return of officials to northern Mali, IRIN News, April 22, 2013
Towards restoring life in Cambodian villages, Meas Nee, 1999 – chapter 5.

The power of acting powerfully from the bottom or the top of any system

As a facilitator, I am always interested in how people relate to each other, and how those relationships affect what they are able to accomplish. I spent years working in various capacities in community groups and sometimes in elected office, and it always surprised me how much feelings affected the group’s work.
Once a neighbor persuaded me to get involved in a local sports club, saying it needed my particular skills. My daughters were part of the club, and so I eventually did get involved. But then my neighbor, and several of his friends within the club, didn’t like what I was doing and set out to disrupt it. The result, of course, was to disrupt the work of the organization as a whole, even though their attacks focused on me. So I never underestimate how much a person’s perceptions of others affect what happens when a group is trying to carry out a particular goal, and especially how much peoples’ perceptions of other people’s power – real or imagined – affect the relationships that are so vital in making a group’s accomplishments possible.
What surprised me immensely, in reading reviews of Robert Caro’s latest volume in his biography of Lyndon Johnson, was to learn that this same phenomenon happens at the top of systems, affecting matters far more weighty than the yearly program of a sports club in a small and remote community.

Left out of power
Johnson came from the southern US, at a time when southern politicians were not in positions of power nationally within his party. He had years of experience in working within the legislative system in Washington; he knew how to get things done. But the politics of the time meant he could never hope to become his party’s presidential nominee, and so he agreed to become the vice presidential running mate to the younger and seemingly more charismatic John F. Kennedy.
He was not, however, trusted by the presidential inner circle. He was left out of meetings, and took to walking by the Oval Office just to show he was still there. His advice was not sought. When JFK was shot in Dallas, he waited alone at the hospital for an hour or so before he was given information. Given his knowledge of the political system, however, he quickly took on the responsibility of making decisions as he flew back to Washington. And as quickly, he began introducing some of the most innovative legislative changes made in decades, despite working with a reluctant Congress and against the advice of many advisors who feared it would cost him ‘political capital’ – the 1964 Civil Rights Act, action on poverty, voting rights, Head Start and Medicare and Medicaid.
In a review of the book, Bill Clinton notes the political genius that Johnson demonstrated – his ability to persuade almost anyone to go along with what he was proposing. But he also notes the difficult years when Johnson was left outside the trusted presidential circle, without power or influence, and that is particularly the part that intrigued me.

Making good decisions
One likes to think that powerful people, like the presidents and prime ministers of countries, have the ability to work with people from a variety of backgrounds and ways of thinking, in order to make the best decisions possible. Facilitators know that, difficult as this may be to do, the best decisions result when one takes into account a variety of points of view, including the ones that don’t agree with your own. Forming a closed circle, and leaving out others you don’t agree with, is not a recipe for good decision-making, even if it may seem easier.
So I began to wonder what might have happened had Kennedy treated Johnson as a partner in the presidency. What could they have accomplished together for their country, had they found a way to work past the mutual distrust, given their individual capacities and skills and knowledge?
Building this kind of trust at the top of systems is very challenging, of course. When Barry Oshry studied systems, he found that in every group, there are people at different levels – the top, the middle, and the bottom. Each has different challenges to face, but they don’t see that clearly from their place in the system. The people at the top tend to think of themselves primarily as individuals, rather than as members of a group, and they tend to react to and against what their peers – the other elite – think and say. As a result, they may tend to draw less on the knowledge of the whole group and more on their own knowledge, which – however great it may be – is always limited in some way or the other.

Learning each other’s stories
Oshry learned that one way to work within such systems, within organizations, is to make it possible for people at each level to hear each other. Without such an opportunity, people tend to make up stories about others based on how they interpret other people’s actions. They might think, for example, that people at the top are uncaring, people at the bottom lack initiative, and people in the middle are indecisive. When they are able to share their stories and perceptions, however, it becomes possible to find a way forward that draws on the abilities of people at all levels in the system.
People at the top of any system face many challenges. People expect them to make decisions; expect them to take responsibility for the whole system; and expect them to be knowledgeable about the whole system. Because they are seen as so powerful, it can be hard for them to find people they trust to give them good advice. Because people expect them to act powerfully, it can be hard for them to admit that they don’t know what to do about a particular problem. Being seen as vulnerable can make them vulnerable to others who want their power, especially if their country seems fragile.
And yet, it is those people at the top of systems who make so many of the decisions that affect everyone else within the system. When powerful people, who have been opponents, find a way to work together at the top of any system, powerful legislation can be passed and wars can end and peacebuilding begin.
This is what made it possible to develop and implement a peace agreement in Northern Ireland. Yesterday I read that Joyce Banda, in Malawi, has brought together a cabinet made of up key leaders including some former opponents, and explained that they all needed to work together for the good of the country. This takes courage, and vision, and possibly the insight that comes from having been – like Lyndon Johnson – in a position that may have seemed powerful but was actually not so.
Let us encourage this kind of emotional intelligence when it is demonstrated by our country’s leaders and by those of other countries, by honouring their courage and vision and insight. If we do that, even if we think we are at the bottom of the system, we will ourselves be acting powerfully.

When the women bang their pots and pans in the street, it is time for a different conversation about ‘governance’

This morning a friend posted a link to a blog about the Quebec protests, and it sent shivers up my spine. When women begin to march banging their kitchen pots and pans, something has truly shifted – just as it did in Belgrade in the late 1990s, when women leaned out the apartment windows also banging pots and pans, or in recent times in Greece.

The post about Quebec was posted on an English-language site set up by several people who didn’t think the media were reporting the situation fairly. Within hours, they say, people were getting in touch to volunteer their support, help with translation, and share stories. “This is what Quebec looks like right now,” they say. “Every night is teargas and riot cops, but it is also joy, laughter, kindness, togetherness, and beautiful music. Our hearts are bursting. We are so proud of each other; of the spirit of Quebec and its people; of our ability to resist, and our ability to collaborate.”

They ask the media why this spirit is not being reported, along with the riots. “Why aren’t you writing about this? Does joy not sell as well as violence? Does collaboration not sell as well as confrontation? You can have your cynicism; our revolution is sincere.” I have heard a similar question being asked about the protests in Greece.

Media need a clear story

The media would probably answer that “it’s complicated”, and I feel considerable sympathy for their predicament. The picture has shifted at a level below the one they are used to reporting, where the narrative may seem more orderly, with clear viewpoints and spokespeople for each point of view. Reporting on spontaneous action by ordinary people who want to have their say, where there are no spokespeople providing easily recorded sound bites, is like trying to report on thousands of atoms swirling around in what seem like random patterns – how does one turn that into ‘news’ that can be reported in a minute or two on a television newscast?

The ‘news’ acknowledges such individual activity when it becomes a large nucleus, a huge crowd of people with a united demand or demands whose presence and demand often brings a response from government,  usually exerted through the police or army. In this drama, the crowd and the government are scripted as actors, and the stories of individual people become sidebars to the main story. Only at that point, it seems, does the media become interested in understanding how the drama started – the ‘prequel’ or the ‘back story’, so to speak. But a play has a beginning and an ending, and once the drama ends, the news moves on.

It doesn’t really matter whether it is the Tea Party movement, the Occupy movement, or Tahrir Square. The media needs to make it a story that can be clearly delineated, and the easiest story to delineate is one of opposition to established order, and the response of the established order to that opposition. It is, after all, the story that shaped the ‘nation state’ as we have known it in recent history.

A profound shift

As I have been watching events, in Greece, in Egypt, and now in Quebec, it seems to me that increasingly, something very profound is shifting in our world but the media hasn’t found a way to express it well because it isn’t a clearly delineated drama. These shifts are happening at the individual and local level, all around the world, and social networking and social media is allowing people to build a new sense of community that is not tied to a particular place.

This is happening at the same time that governments are having increasing difficulty addressing complex problems, at almost all levels. At times it seems just like Dorothy’s discovery, in the Wizard of Oz, that the seemingly all-powerful wizard was actually just a small man hidden behind a curtain. In an interconnected world, whose interconnected problems are beyond the power of any one government to solve despite endless meetings, laws, statements and announcements of action, governments often seem akin to that small man behind a curtain.

Governments have always been structures that exercised control, that shaped societies and brought order from the top of the society downwards. Their response, to the challenges of an interconnected world, often is to increase that control because the alternative seems to be chaos and anarchy and that is far too frightening a prospect to contemplate. Often the police or the legal system become the mechanism through which this control is ‘restored’, even though many times, the police – who also are frightened – react with violence that increases the fear and tension. That is the picture the media report, because it seems clear to them.

But is the alternative to ‘control’ really ‘chaos’? We have learned from the scientists that what seems like ‘chaos’ is really a form of order that we cannot perceive. The smallest of structures holographically echo the organization of the larger structures. The best known formulation of this is the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in one place may cause a tornado somewhere else. The only possible response to this, however, is to understand the system sufficiently that one understands why this occurs and then work with the patterns that exist within that system – not to legislate against butterflies flapping their wings.

The power of self-organization

Facilitators know that people want structure and order, even if they don’t want ‘control’. Increasingly, facilitators are working with larger and larger groups. Some facilitated events have brought together citizens from a variety of countries, aided by scientific knowledge, to make recommendations about how to address the challenge of global warming, for example. And one of the truly heartening things is that, when given such an opportunity, ordinary people take on the challenge and make recommendations that in some cases are far stronger than the actions taken by their governments.

Ordinary people world wide are gathering in groups to take action on local concerns and issues, using their own resources and their own capacities. Sometimes that takes the form of protests against government actions, when they feel that their governments are not listening to them. Sometimes it seems that energetically, people are withdrawing their consent to be governed, as when they don’t turn out to vote in elections.

Governments need to make constructive responses to these kinds of activities. They need to find ways to act more in partnership with local action, so that the focus is bottom up rather than top down. They need to find ways to diversify their structure so that it reflects regions and cultures meaningfully, rather than trying to be a homogeneous blend. They need to find ways to demonstrate that they are really listening and that the concerns of ordinary people matter. They need a structure that recognizes that ‘governance’ is ‘nodal’ and that ‘governments’ are not at the top of a hierarchy. ‘Governance’, thus, is not an activity uniquely privileged to governments.

Our world is a self-organizing world. People too are self-organizing, as they demonstrate every day at the family and community level. When they learn and exercise the skills of self-organization in groups, they create change all around them. ‘Nodes’ and ‘connectors’ – people whose networks, and ideas, influence the thinking of everyone around them – link people together on issues or activities or ideas. The internet, and social media, have extended this capacity far beyond the place they live; ‘nodes’ or ‘connectors’ may end up influencing hundreds, thousands and maybe millions of people they will never meet in person. This global stream of conversation is reflecting and shaping ideas world-wide that are then implemented locally, in ways that make sense locally.

‘Differentiation’ vs ‘empowerment’

Yet increasingly, even as people locally exercise self-organization, governments seem less and less capable of acting effectively on problems. It often seems they are working with a simplified map of their territory that doesn’t reflect its diversity and complexity. For many people, it must seem that people in government are talking only to themselves.

Barry Oshry, who has studied systems for decades, might call this the challenge of ‘differentiation’ that happens at the top of any system – meaning that its ‘elite’ respond primarily to the perceptions and ideas of others within that same group. At the bottom of any system, he says, the challenge is ‘empowerment’ – for people to act as if they have power to influence systems and to create change. The people in the middle, he says, face the challenge of being ‘torn’ between the top and the bottom, trying to convey the concerns of the people at the bottom while carrying out the edicts of the top.

One of the most intriguing things about watching the media report on the “Occupy” movement was their struggle to turn it into a coherent story, which eventually coalesced into a narrative of protestors, the established order, and the police. They seemed not to understand that the Occupy movement, like the Tea Party movement, was about creating a local capacity to create change – even if the core beliefs of the two movements were different. During the Occupy encampments, people were learning the skills of self-managing participatory processes so that they could facilitate change locally when they returned home. We have not yet fully seen the impact of this, but we can get some sense of what that impact is likely to be from watching how the Tea Party movement has developed.

To explain this new form of organization, one recent book proffered the model of the spider and the starfish. A spider dies if one of its legs is cut off from the body; a starfish grows another leg in place of the one that was lost. The starfish is a model of distributed and shared leadership. There are no ‘leaders’ or even ‘spokespeople’. People who follow the starfish model are focused on building individual capacity locally, believing that this is what will eventually change any system.

The challenge for governments is to work with that capacity rather than against it. The challenge for Tahrir Square and its many manifestations around the world is to give that capacity a shape by helping people learn to build on assets, rather than deficits, and to appreciate and strengthen what works and leave behind what doesn’t work. Re-energizing community thus also offers the possibility of re-energizing governance that has lost touch with the kitchen and the garden.

When women begin banging their pots and frying pans as they walk through the streets, they are saying it is time for this different kind of conversation to take place. Governments should listen.

Solutions to a ‘wicked’ problem – dealing with Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army

Our Canadian human security and peacebuilding class visited Gulu in 2005, just after the International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant for Joseph Kony. The community’s leaders were not happy, feeling this would disrupt their efforts to deal with the Lord’s Resistance Army. In fact, they had travelled to the Hague to ask the ICC not to proceed with the warrant.

During our visit, we heard from Betty Bigombe, a former cabinet minister in the Ugandan government, who had been involved in supporting the local peacebuilding process and had met with LRA forces in the bush – difficult and dangerous work. I remember she mentioned that Kony and the LRA kept a close watch on the community, and that this offered possibilities of influencing their activities, but at the time, I didn’t fully realize the significance of this comment.

I have since learned that in many conflict areas, communication channels often remain open between fighters in the bush and their family and friends in the community. Sometimes these channels encourage those in the bush to return home by sharing stories of ex-combatants and how the community is treating them. Armed groups in the bush, in fact, sometimes send small groups back to the community to test the veracity of these stories, offering one potential way to reduce or end the impact of such groups locally.

In the case of Joseph Kony, however, given his appalling brutality and apparent ability to move around the region unchecked, the only solution external eyes can see seems to be a military one. You can see this sense of revulsion about Kony and the LRA in the reaction to the Kony2012 video that went viral, understandably prompting many people to ask why this has been allowed to continue for so long.

The problem is that effectively, the LRA problem is much more complicated than just ‘taking out Kony’ – it could be called a ‘wicked’ problem in more ways than one. And in terms of answers, the voices that have been heard most loudly have not been the voices of the local people who know the most about the problem and who have worked hard to address it over many years.

Military campaigns have actually broadened the scope of the LRA’s depredations, into the remote borderlands areas of Southern Sudan, Central African Republic, and Democratic Republic of Congo where governments are effectively absent. You can see this clearly in a map in Conciliation Resources’ excellent 2011 report, When will this end and what will it take?

Moving into these areas from northern Uganda, where Kony began several decades ago, has changed the LRA’s ethnic makeup (more than 3,400 people, mostly children, have been abducted since 2008) but not the fact that the LRA is mostly made up of children who fear being beaten or killed if they resist or try to escape. Each military attack leads to more LRA attacks on civilians and more kidnapping of children, thus widening the scale of the problem. As the LRA has moved into these new regions, it has collaborated with some local groups, which in turn disrupts the normal communal conflict resolution strategies that maintain order in the absence of government in such remote regions, and its attacks have caused massive displacements of people.

LRA activities in the borderlands regions of Central African Republic, Southern Sudan and northern Democratic Republic of Congo have severely disrupted livelihoods in the entire region. People stay in towns rather than cultivate their fields and so local prices for staples rise, and land use conflicts increase within the small area where it is safe to cultivate. As displaced people come to towns, humanitarian agencies draw in staff from elsewhere, compounding the pressure on local resources. Local self-defence groups, created to protect local communities, can end up themselves becoming a community problem – although not always.

Communities who aid those who escape from the LRA often are attacked as a result, and the report notes that the LRA has been known to carry out fake surrenders which target both potential escapers and receiving communities. In much of the region, even if they do manage to escape, former LRA members – male and female – often have a difficult time being accepted back into their communities.

What is needed to deal with such a difficult problem, the report concludes, is a multi-pronged and long-term strategy. Dealing with the LRA alone does not recognize that it is a part of a “complex web of violent conflicts and regional political and security rivalries.” Such a comprehensive approach needs to combine political, mediation, security, humanitarian and developmental efforts and should have three main strands, the report suggests.

• Strand one: address the regional military and political rivalries through political dialogue that focuses on Khartoum, Kampala and Juba and involves other regional actors. Military actions should focus primarily on protecting civilians rather than pursuing the LRA
• Strand two: develop a regional approach to demobilization, disarmament and reintegration of former LRA combatants that is set within a context of seriously addressing “governance, social and developmental challenges in these neglected areas.”
• Strand three: put the option of dialogue with the LRA back on the table and create space for informal engagement to happen.

A key part of the strategy involves seeing local people as partners, rather than ‘passive beneficiaries”, and investing in their role and their capacity. Local people understand the conflict’s local dynamics and consequences; they can go into affected areas; and they have a long-term commitment to address the effects of the violence. Thus they can “play peacebuilding roles across borders that governments and intergovernmental bodies cannot”. The report provides a list of specific recommendations in this area.

In a blog post entitled What will it take to end the conflict with the LRA?, Kennedy Tumutegyereize puts it this way:

Despite enormous odds, support for a strategy based on protection and engagement is widespread among those who bear the brunt of the conflict, civil society and communities across the region. They recognise that building a just and lasting peace takes time. This is a job that requires support for local approaches and peacebuilding initiatives rather than imposing more external firepower.

In 2005, when we asked people in Gulu what we could do to help, they said: “tell people about us.” Over the years, many of us have done that – but our voices did not have the impact of that one viral video, Kony2012. I am grateful to Invisible Children for making the problem known worldwide. Now I hope that everyone who has seen the video and wondered “what can we do” will listen to the voices of the local people who have lived with this terrible problem all these years.

More reading:

For more information about local perspectives, see #StopKony: efforts to end the LRA conflict must listen to local people (Conciliation Resources)

When will this end and what will it take? Peoples perspectives on addressing the Lord’s Resistance Army conflict. Conciliation Resources, November 2011 report.

** “Wicked problem” is a phrase originally used in social planning to describe a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems. (Wikipedia)

The peacebuilding power of learning where we come from

Family history or genealogical research may seem a long way from peacebuilding, at first glance. But anyone who has been watching the television programs, Who do you think you are?, which helps famous people trace their ancestry, may have noticed that often the result is to link people in different parts of the world.

Many families, especially in North America, came from somewhere else – voluntarily or involuntarily. And there is an increasing interest on the part of many people to trace their family history. I know this, because family history is one of my interests. Such research, however, can go beyond just helping a particular person find their roots.

In the 1990s, as a result of my electoral knowledge, I was appointed by the Government of Canada to join the body that was running the voting process on the Gwich’in comprehensive claim settlement, between the Gwich’in people of the Mackenzie Delta in Canada’s Northwest Territories, and the Canadian government. The claim was approved by the Gwich’in voters, and then an enrolment commission was created. I was appointed to that body as well.

Our task was to enroll all eligible Gwich’in people in the claim. To be enrolled, people had to be able to trace their ancestry back to 1921, when Treaty 8 was signed. But over the years, there had been many changes in how the Gwich’in lived. Children had been sent to residential schools far from home and consequently, many of them did not know who their grandparents were. And the Mackenzie River Valley had lost many of its elders during the terrible flu epidemic of 1918.

Researching family history
When we began asking people to complete the application forms, we found that people often could not list their grandparents or great-grandparents, which would take them back to 1921. So the enrollment board began a project to carry out research that would help people identify their ancestors. This project traced the Gwich’in families and used the knowledge of elders, like the late Sarah Simon, who was always known as Jijuu or grandmother, to put together a picture of Gwich’in genealogy. This was a complicated process as in the early days, the Gwich’in did not use surnames. People were known by individual names, that often were derived from a particular characteristic or a particular event.

I served on the enrollment board but I also got involved in this project because the person who had begun writing up the history could not finish that work. As I also was a writer, the board asked if I would complete the writing project. I was quite nervous about doing this as I did not feel I knew enough. But I agreed, as it was such an important project.

Once the writing was complete, the board organized a workshop with the Gwich’in elders to review the text. I still remember it vividly. I sat and listened as Elizabeth Crawford, a Gwich’in-born adult educator, read the text in Gwich’in. Periodically, the elders sitting around the table would laugh. I was so focused on my fear that I had not done a good job on my part of the writing that this laughter at first made me nervous. So during a break, I asked Elizabeth – why are they laughing? Did I make mistakes in the writing?

She smiled at me. They were laughing because it is so funny, the stories of how people got their names, she said. And so I relaxed, and was able to listen fully to the rest of the workshop.

Learning who she was
While there were elders around the table who were knowledgeable about the history and could add information or correct mistakes, one of the biggest impacts was on the younger people who were present. I remember one young woman saying that at last, she understood who her people were. She knew where she fitted into her peoples’ history now. It was something she had never learned.

And that was when I learned that one impact of many of the residential schools run by churches with funding from the Canadian government was to cut young people off from their family history. If they had been at home in their communities and continued to speak their language, their grandparents could have told them their history. But during their school years, many of them were far away from home and being taught in English. One result was that they did not know their own ancestry.

It was not just the enrolment process that helped reconnect people with their history. The Gwich’in people lived in the Yukon territory and in Alaska as well, but over time, these families had grown away from each other. One year, however, there was a major forest fire in the Yukon and many Gwich’in people were brought into Inuvik for safety. That gave people an opportunity to reconnect at the community level.

I saw a similar instance of this power of community connection on one episode of Who do you think you are?, when American actor Blair Underwood was tracing his roots. His ancestors came from Africa, but he had – like so many others – no idea of where in Africa they had come from. Genealogical research and DNA testing linked him with a cousin in a small village in Cameroon, and he and his father then visited that village, reconnecting family that had been separated so long before.

The creation of states, and boundaries, and borders, has often divided people in artificial ways. One of the great impacts of genealogical research, I think, is to show how interconnected our world is. And that changes how we see our world, and creates links that go beyond the states in which we live.

Growing up – freedom or obligation?

Reading the many stories of locally-led development shared through the blog event Day Without Dignity 2012 – Local Champions was fascinating. Some of the posts told stories of local champions; others talked of how their perspectives had been changed when they sought out local knowledge or learned from local people.

Many times, it seems, the deepest differences in our thinking are not talked about because we each assume that others see the world the same way we do. These are, in effect, our ‘built-in’ lenses, the ones we don’t realize we have. One of those differences, I believe, is the idea about obligations to family when we reach adulthood – about the extent to which we have ‘free will’ to pursue our own destinies as adults.

I remember exactly when this difference became clear to me. I was doing research in Brčko District in northern Bosnia, where local people have created a governance structure that reflects and respects all ethnicities. I was trying to understand how the district’s financing worked initially, and I was talking with a distinguished gentleman who had been involved in that process.

Trying to indicate that I had understood what he had said, I said ‘so it is like what happens when a person becomes an adult and thus independent from their family because they are earning their own money’. I remember the look of profound shock on his face as he explained to me that on reaching adulthood, a person becomes able to contribute to their family’s welfare through their earnings.

A cultural divide
Thus did I encounter what seems to be a fairly large cultural divide between North America and much of the rest of the world. I grew up in North America with the idea that when I became an adult, I might go somewhere else and work and eventually create my own family far away from my original family home. My parents’ obligations to me, in many ways, ended when I became an adult. Similarly, I did not expect my children to support me in old age.

In many other parts of the world, however, reaching adulthood means one is now able to contribute materially to one’s family’s wellbeing. In fact, reaching adulthood means taking on a whole set of responsibilities for one’s family – sometimes in effect becoming, at least economically, a parent to one’s own parents. ‘Free will’ for the individual, in that sense, is a foreign concept.

In many cultures, a young man cannot marry until he is able to support his parents and siblings as well as a wife. In many cultures, a young man’s earnings go into a family ‘pot’ that is allocated by the senior male in the family. But in North America, the idea of getting a job is so that you have your ‘own money’ that you can spend as you wish.

A brilliant book by Patrick Chabal, called Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling, explores some of these differences in cultural understandings and their implications as they apply to Africa. He suggests that one of the western challenges in analyzing African politics is that we see through a filter that is created by our own assumptions about how societies, economies and political systems work – that we see individuals as ‘free agents’ and in fact, that we think such ‘free agency’ is a key part of being modern. His book explores what the ‘politics of being’ means in an African context, and as I read it, that picture is much closer to the one held by the aboriginal peoples of North America than to the rest of the continent’s inhabitants. It is a picture that is rooted in place, in family, and in obligation.

Polycropping vs monocropping
Another equally fascinating book, entitled Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott, looks at how the western idea of a state has developed and why so many projects intended to better the human condition have failed. He argues, in essence, that we create a ‘map’ that reduces the complexity of societies and then develop projects and approaches that rely on that artificially simple understanding. He provides a diverse variety of examples.

One involves the story of what happened when colonial agricultural specialists first encountered indigenous farming in West Africa. Local people were planting different crops in the same field simultaneously (now known as ‘polycropping’), which in that environment is exceptionally efficient. But those fields seemed sloppy and disorderly to the specialists, who considered ‘monocropping’  to be ‘modern’ – with often disastrous effects on crop yields and soil conservation. Polyculture, on the other hand, was perfectly suited to the local climate and local cultural and family practices.

This story illustrates why these kinds of assumptions matter so much. Projects often are designed from within our view of how the world works. The story about monocropping and polycropping is not that far removed from what many see when looking at ‘traditional’ societies in conflict. We assume that conflict has wiped the slate clean so that there is no local governance left in villages, and we start out to rebuild governance. In doing so, we are often more focused on the individual as a free agent than we are on the family as the unit around which society is organized.

‘Traditional’ societies may seem as messy and disorderly to western eyes as those West African gardens looked to colonial Britons, Obligation to others, and commitment to one’s family or other social unit, may be seen as inviting corruption, rather than being the normal way in which society works. Better to spend some time in those gardens first, asking people to explain why specific crops are grown and why they are planted together in specific ways, before trying to redesign their farming practices.

More reading:
Chabal, Patrick (2009). Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling. Zed Books: London and New York.

Scott, James C. (1998). Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press: New Haven and London.