Creative Calgary Congress—Exploring ways that the arts and artists can play a leadership role in making Calgary a more curious, compassionate and creative place for all citizens.

Brian Calliou

Director of Indigenous Leadership and Management at The Banff Centre
I’m going to talk to you about the concept of deep listening…

Reconciliation

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has done some really great work. It was a response to so many court cases that were going on at the time. What the TRC Calls to Action are all about really is right relations — getting the relationship right that really didn’t happen.

Those who are involved in the oil and gas industry or any resource industry certainly know this. When that work is going to be done, the Supreme Court of Canada says that pursuant to Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, that industry has to consult with First Nations and other Indigenous people before they do work that has any kind of impact on Indigenous rights. Consultation is getting the treaty relationship right, having a second chance to actually build that relationship again, where the First Nations benefit from their own natural resources as well and from the economy. Whereas the original negotiators and treaty commissioners essentially viewed the treaty as a mere real estate deal, where they thought the Chiefs signed their x, then expected them to get out of the way so we can settle on the land. The duty to consult and the Calls to Action are the second chance to get this treaty relationship right.

There are stories that the TRC collected, terrible personal stories that residential school survivors experienced. And then there’s the overall story about assimilationist policies, residential schools, and the removal of children from their families. There is the other side of the story that we are all treaty people who all benefit from Indigenous peoples sharing their lands and resources. There is this longer history as well, of the fact that Indigenous peoples were here on these lands when settlers arrived and when our country was born. And in 2017, with the 150th Anniversary of Canada as a liberal democratic country, with our great diversity, I think, not only will we celebrate the history of the 150 years as a country, but also this longer history and presence of Indigenous peoples who welcomed the newcomers onto their lands. And then we must think about what kind of country we are going to be going forward into the next 150 years.

Reconciliation is a key part of getting this relationship right again. We are very diverse people in our cities and our country. We receive many people from around the world with open arms. And we must also seek a stronger, more productive relationship with our Indigenous people.

What I’m going to share today is not the stories about the harms the TRC documented or the history of the relationship with Indigenous peoples in Canada, but rather share some of the knowledge, some of the ideas, and concepts that come out of Indigenous cultures.

To build on what this entire gathering is about, it is really the time now to come up with creative, innovative ideas and solutions for social problems. We can do well in our companies and organizations with our entrepreneurial activity but we can also do good in the world. It’s time for social innovation and social entrepreneurs to step up and help make this a better world.

Relationships with our Inner Selves, with our Ancestors and with the Land

It takes good leaders—good people—to do this sort of work and a lot of understanding of who you are as a leader, changemaker and disrupter who is trying to make this a better world.

Brian speaks on Deep Listening | Photo: Calgary Arts Development

A lot of Indigenous ceremonies and knowledge are about going inward, understanding who you are — your identity, your beliefs, your values, the principles that you live by. A lot of our stories are about being a good human being, a good person who can relate respectfully and live closely with others. It’s relationships even beyond that — relationships with our spirit, our ancestors, with the land.

Like we heard earlier when Cowboy Smithx talked about working with the frequencies of the land, that’s the kind of worldview and thinking that Indigenous Elders share with us.

Science and Indigenous Perspectives

I’m going to share a concept that I’ve been involved with called Deep Listening. It’s a concept that came up in the work we did with Indigenous people from Australia in the state of Victoria right around Melbourne.

Scientists such as Fritjof Capra and David Peat have been influenced by Indigenous knowledge. Peat spent time with the Blackfoot here in Alberta as well as with other Indigenous peoples. He says: “As you sit with Native people, walk in nature, and spend time at sacred sites an actual transformation of consciousness takes place. For a time, at least, you begin to hear, see, feel, touch, and taste the world in a profoundly different way: you can think and perceive with a different mind so that your ego can, temporarily at least, blend into that of other people.”

What these physicists found is that when they were doing their predictions, the slightest little change could throw out their calculations by huge degrees. It’s kind of like that theory that the butterfly flapping its wings here can cause change elsewhere in the world — it’s that idea. So they started to look at biological models, and speaking with Indigenous peoples. It’s very much that kind of philosophy — it’s about time and cycles, it’s about spring, winter, fall, youth, adult life, an Elder, death and beyond. This idea of cycles.

And now these hard scientists are being influenced by Indigenous ways of knowing. One of our Indigenous philosophers, a Blackfoot gentleman who works closely with us at The Banff Centre, Leroy Little Bear, talks about the Blackfoot worldview. When he talks about these ideas of chaos, and order out of chaos, and that cyclical nature of life, it mirrors what these scientists are exploring and it makes a lot of sense to them as well. So the finding of the Hadron Collider, when they smash particles together trying to find the tiniest particle that makes up matter, they’ve found that it’s about fields. There isn’t necessarily a small particle, but rather, there are these fields, these things orbiting and working together in relationship to each other. While western scientists might call this energy, our Elders call this spirit. There are a lot of parallels in the way these new scientists and Indigenous peoples think.

Deep Listening

Deep Listening is a concept that I’ve had the pleasure to learn about and to have been involved with. I’m going to introduce this concept of Deep Listening with a poem by Andrea James, an Australian Indigenous woman poet, playwright and the author, who was part of the Deep Listening project carried out through RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Brian Calliou reads Andrea James’ Gulpa Ngawal at the 2016 Creative Calgary Congress.

Gulpa Ngawal by Andrea James

What’cha doing?
Gulpa Ngawal
Gulpa What?
Deep Listening
Feeling my ancestors’ breath on my cheeks
Hearing their whispers in my ears
Reading the land, the country
Listening for birds

What’cha doing?
Gulpa Ngawal
Gulpa What?
Deep Listening
Watching for signs, not neon ones
Taking an inventory of all that has passed
And what is to come
Judging and loving you all at once
Drinking in the sadness of this place
Til I can’t take it any more

What’cha doing?
Gulpa Ngawal
Gulpa What?
Deep Listening
Calling out to hear my mother’s voice
Waiting, waiting to feel my next move
Hunting, hunting and gathering

What’cha doing?
Gulpa Ngawal
Gulpa What?
Deep Listening
Cracking open a load of muscles
Feeling the warm fire on my skin
Licking my lips
Animal fat slick on skin

What’cha doing?
Gulpa Ngawal
Gulpa What?
Deep Listening
Sexy looking good
Oozing charm
Reading the wind
Taking stock
Wishing I was there
Taking it in
Breathing
Living with my heart
Taking the steps of those who came before
All this and more
Is Gulpa Ngawal

Gulpa Ngawal means Deep Listening in one of the Indigenous languages of the Yorta Yorta people of Australia. Deep Listening can be defined as the idea of deep and respectful listening that creates and builds community.

This group of Australian Indigenous people involved in this Deep Listening project (PhD students, community leaders, educators, musicians, poets) came to The Banff Centre for an art of management conference. They used aesthetic processes to document their work and also to tell their stories. For example, one woman who makes all kinds of traditional articles of clothing studied, through the museum, these alligator teeth necklaces that hadn’t been made for 200 years. Now she’s starting to make them again and the community is starting to make and use them again, along with, possum skin cloaks and all kinds of things. So they use these aesthetic processes to do their work towards their PhD.

The Deep Listening process has also been used by their PhD advisor, a non-Indigenous woman, who was heading up the project. There were terrible fires in Australia a few years back, where there was loss of property and people being burned. She brought Indigenous people, survivors of the fires, property owners, all the people who were impacted together to use this Deep Listening process to share, talk about their experiences, and use ceremony, as a form of healing and also to rebuild their communities together. It’s really quite an amazing process and it’s based on the aesthetic processes I spoke about. Indigenous knowledge and ceremony are a huge part of the process, and it was successful and very impactful.

But this notion of listening deeply is not only about listening, paying attention to, being present and in the moment when you’re having conversations with other people. It is also about listening to the spaces in between, of what’s not being said, of the silences. You have to be aware and understand that. It’s also about listening to our ancestors, listening to your heart, listening to your gut, really paying attention to these kinds of things that we don’t often think about.

This morning someone said something about storytelling and story listening. I really like that. There are two sides to this. We don’t always have to speak, we don’t always have to eat up the air space. We need to listen too. We need to really be in dialogue. We need to be in dialogue with ourselves, as part of that journey inward, slowing down and paying attention to what really matters to you as a person.

With respect to listening to our Elders and becoming comfortable with silence, I would like to share a story about a colleague of mine who was doing his work down in the US. He’s a non-Indigenous guy from England. He landed down in southwestern USA, was just kind of dropped off after he’d made arrangements to be there. Someone said to him, “Well you’ve got to go meet this Elder over here.” They brought him to the Elder’s house, knocked on the door and introduced him to the old gentleman. The new guy sat down, and sat uncomfortably for 10 minutes… 20 minutes… until an hour’s gone by. The old gentleman served him tea and so on but he’s sitting there in silence. And I think he said he was there for at least a couple of hours, just sitting with this Elder. They’d glance at each other once in awhile and eventually my friend thought, “well, it’s time to leave.” And the Elder got up as he was leaving and said: “Come back tomorrow and we’ll visit again.”

So that’s a different kind of communication, a different kind of relationship — sitting in silence with another. I don’t think we ever really do that, but in Indigenous communities, long silences and sitting quietly together is part of communicating, part of conversations, part of feeling who you are within that moment, and deeply connecting to another.

Deep Connections

We have all kinds of ways to make deep connections within ourselves, or externally with others, to the environment, to the spirits. It’s like any kind of meditative practice, or other ways of connecting to your own spirituality. It could be deep religion or other forms of really journeying, slowing down and paying attention to who you are and what matters in your life and really trying to make those connections. We do that in our prayers all the time. Even business meetings start with a smudge and prayers in Indigenous organizations. It sets the tone for clear thoughts, clear ideas, good hearts and minds coming together to dialogue around a specific issue or the business at hand.

As posted on the Clothesline | Image: Calgary Arts Development

And of course there are deep ways to get involved in that with our four-day vision quests and Sundances and so on.

It’s this idea of listening to each other, of paying attention but also listening to the land, the frequencies of the land, really paying attention to all of that.

We hosted this panel in Banff not too long ago where we had Leroy Little Bear and Greg Cajete an Indigenous philosopher from New Mexico, and a U of C astrophysicist who’s discovered comets and has asteroids named after him.

The astrophysicist is a young Siksika guy but he’d grown up away from his community, he’d been removed from his culture, adopted away.

So when he listens to Leroy talk about how in his Blackfoot worldview there’s life in the rocks, and how you can hear songs and stories in the rocks, this young astrophysicist who has studied science, whose understanding is that when those asteroids collided with earth and started life, there was something there within the rock. He’s starting to learn the traditional stories now and making sense of the fact, that inanimate objects like rocks actually have life, they’re animated, that there is life in rocks. In our sweat lodge ceremonies, those rocks are called grandfathers, and they provide the heat for our sweats so we can do our prayers and ceremonies there.

And there are all kinds of deep connections to animals in Indigenous cultures. There was an anthropologist in northeastern BC in the Treaty 8 region. He studied up there with the Dene people and he wrote a chapter in one of his books about when an Elder died. The Elder was a powerful medicine man that everybody respected, who had strong relationships with animal spirits. The anthropologist, a non-Aboriginal guy who had been in the community for a while, experienced and he witnessed this event. When this Elder died, and they were having a big feast and ceremony around the fire — the animals came out of the forest. The animals came to say goodbye. There were deer, a moose might stick his head out, a bear, they were all there and this guy witnessed it. That’s the kind of relationships that a lot of our Elders teach us. We have these relationships beyond just human beings, with animals, with inanimate objects, with the world — we’re all related. When you look at systems thinking and the web of life — that everything is in relation to everything else, then you begin to understand that these teachings are from strong beliefs in our communities.

Even William Shakespeare recognized this in one of his works: “And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds Tongues in trees, Books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and Good in everything.” Shakespeare recognized that we can deeply connect to and learn from the trees, the brooks, and the stones in nature. There are lessons in all of these things that we can learn from if we take the time to pay attention.

Now I’m going to share a Cree story that you can listen deeply to. It’s a story about gifts, so it is a gift to each of you.

Brian Calliou shares a Cree story to illustrate the concept of Deep Listening

The Creator, the great spirit, was going to create a new being. So he called all the animals together in council and said: I have a challenge for all of you here in council. I’m going to create this new being and I have these gifts I want to give to this new being but I want to hide them in a place that’s really difficult to find because if they get the gifts too easily, they might just set them aside. So in order for them to really appreciate the gifts he has to work really hard to find it — to obtain it.

The first to speak was the buffalo who said: I know! I’ll hide it out in the prairies and down in the deep coulies and I’ll find a good hiding place for that and he’ll have to work hard to find it. He’ll have to wander around for quite awhile.

And the Creator thought about it for a few minutes and said: Well, that’s a really good idea but I don’t think it’s difficult enough for them to really appreciate this gift.

Then the fish, the pike, spoke up and said: I’ll hide them out in a deep lake, and I’ll bury them under the rocks and they’ll really have to spend a lot of time to find that and then they’ll really appreciate it.

And, again, the Creator said: It’s a really good idea but I don’t think it’s hard enough journey for them to really appreciate these gifts.

So then the crow said: I’m going to fly so far in the sky I’m going to put them right up on the moon and that’ll be hard to find. Then they’ll really appreciate the gifts when they find them.

And the Creator thought about that, too, and said: No it’s still not hard enough, they’d probably find that too and it wouldn’t be a hard enough journey for them to really appreciate this.

So they were all about done. They were out of ideas. They couldn’t please the Creator in finding a hard enough place to hide these gifts.

And then the mole walked up and said: Can I speak? I’ve got an idea.

And all the animals were kind of laughing at him and thinking what’s a lowly mole going to tell us? Let’s go.

And then the Creator said: Let’s listen. Sure, maybe he’s only a lowly little critter but maybe he’s got an idea.

So the mole said: What we’ll do is we’ll take it and we’ll put it down here in our heart and they’ll have a really hard time to go down there to find these gifts of love and truth and beauty and justice.

They will be in our heart because one of the hardest journeys we have is to go from here (head) and really go down here (heart) where things matter.

So I’ll leave you with that. We all have gifts, the gifts are within you. Use those gifts to be the best person, influencer, activator, disrupter that you can be to make this world a better place and always go from that good heart. Be empathetic, open to other ideas, other perspectives, other stories, and then share them as well and continue to do that good work. Be the creative, innovative people that you are.

This really is a great country. 150 years going forward we’re going to be an even better country because we’re going to live in right relationships with each other. And maybe we can take reconciliation south of the border because they could really use some help there. Ekosi, Take care.

Brian Calliou

Brian Calliou is a First Nations thought leader. He is Cree from northwestern Alberta and is married with two grown children and three grandchildren. Brian is a lawyer by training and remains connected with the Indigenous Bar Association. Brian still plays competitive hockey, albeit old timer’s hockey, or as a friend put it, “over the hill” hockey. Brian loves music such as blues, folk, rock and country. He plays guitar, sings and is working on songwriting. He has a strong commitment to social justice and views his work as helping to build a better world.

Brian is the Director of Indigenous Leadership and Management and leads a team of very dedicated people who also want to see a better world. Brian researches and writes about Indigenous community economic development, from a strength-based approach, that is, from a basis of stories of Indigenous organizational success. They call this a wise practice approach to community economic development, where they have identified seven elements that lead to success, including the central importance of Indigenous knowledge and wisdom. With research they have found that culture and identity are important areas that Indigenous leaders want to protect and cultivate as they face contemporary challenges and opportunities.

About the Creative Calgary Congress

Calgary Arts Development produced the first Arts Champions Congress in 2011 as a meeting place for people who make Calgary’s arts sector a vibrant and exciting place to work and our city a great place to live.

Renamed the Creative Calgary Congress in 2014, it returned on November 22, 2016 as a place to share ideas and explore ways that the arts and artists can play a leadership role in making Calgary a more curious, compassionate and creative place for all citizens.

Learn more about the day and add your voice