The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s primary “call to action” is to reduce the number of Indigenous children in out-of-home care in this country. Yet, Indigenous children continue to be apprehended into the child welfare system at rates three times higher than at the peak of the Indian Residential School period (1831-1996). Though there is increasing research on the negative impacts of child removal on Indigenous children, families, and communities there is less research that records and analyzes existing community-based and institutional strategies that prevent, resist, or refuse child welfare interventions broadly and child removal specifically. … [Which leads to the question:] In the context of ongoing and disproportionate colonial child removal, how do Indigenous peoples make and maintain kin? (emphasis added)

It was September 30th, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, established 13 years ago “to honour Residential School Survivors, their families, and those who never returned home.” The Day’s intent is to serve “as a powerful reminder of the lasting impacts of the Residential School system.” A day on which many of us don orange shirts, an emblem that “symbolizes the loss of culture, freedom, and self-esteem that many Indigenous children experienced.”¹

“To honour” … “never returned” …”experienced” … past tense words and phrases.

And yet, Erika’s thesis opens with the fact this chapter is far from closed; it is not simply the impacts of the past that last – it is the actions, persistent, still, today.

“This day reminds us that ‘Every Child Matters.‘“²

Still, today.

And, as Hiinahcit underscored that day, that mattering must be expressed as more than words. “That’s nice,” she observed with flat affect, having just acknowledged the many various Truths that have been named in the past thirteen years, “but what are you going to do about it?”

(more…)

Accepting an invitation from Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, via the introduction from her book, Outgrowing Modernity, to “[understand] that complexity resists neatness – and so should the language we use to navigate it.”

For years I’ve been influenced in my work with/in teams and organizations by US General (retired), Stanley McChrystal – in particular, his book Team of Teams. I’ve adopted the book title as a description of the goal of organizational design in this work, referring often to the intention to cultivate teams, and connected teams-of-teams.

Recently, in the midst of the uptick in visible military conflicts that have attended the current US federal administration, it came to me through channels that team members were rejecting the term, for reasons of its military provenance.

Compassionate to the concern, I was nonetheless a little surprised at the response given my sense the term was in fact generic in its origins. A little research suggested otherwise, that – at least in popular discussion – McChrystal and co. had in fact coined it. Still, it seemed to me to be a bit of over-indexing on the part of my teammates, but I didn’t have the language to respond in a thoughtful fashion. So I turned down my use of the term.

Which brings us to today, and my reading of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s book, Outgrowing Modernity, her follow-up to Hospicing Modernity, which had a significant impact on me. Combined with a continuing ed course I took, centered around the book’s content, I’ve described it as the most-substantial experience I’ve ever had in learning … or, unlearning, to adopt some of the book’s foundational content and premises.

(more…)