Episode 19: Braiding and Balancing Wisdom with Melanie Goodchild

Episode 19: Braiding & Balancing Wisdom with Melanie Goodchild

Marti and Todd welcome guest Melanie Goodchild, founder of the Turtle Island Institute, to discuss systems change that centers on relationships for mutual benefit. Melanie shares her experiences and wisdom on complexity, resilience, balance, and what we all need to move forward together, carrying centuries of indigenous wisdom and her Anishinaabe perspective alongside her Western academic education.

The conversation flows from identity to language to our ways of being and relating that can impact the systems we live and work within.

Special Segment: Excerpt from Relational Systems Thinking (Melanie), co-authored with Dan Longboat, Diane Longboat, Rick Hill, Kevin Deer, Peter Senge, and Otto Scharmer.

Guest: Melanie Goodchild

Melanie Goodchild (Anishinaabe) is moose clan, from Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Ketegaunseebee First Nations in northwestern Ontario. She is the founder and Co-Director of the Turtle Island Institute and Faculty member of the Academy for Systems Change. Melanie believes in reawakening and honouring the teaching methods of her ancestors, of “coming to know” on the land, and so she supports initiatives that seek to connect people to ceremony, story, art, language and the land.

She has an HBA and MA in Sociology and is a PhD Candidate in Social & Ecological Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. She is a Research Fellow at the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation & Resilience (WISIR) and her work focuses on understanding complexity theory, resilience thinking and deep systems awareness from a uniquely Anishinaabe perspective. Melanie is an alumna of the International Women's Forum (IWF) Foundation's executive global leadership program (2015/16) sponsored by Harvard Business School and INSEAD. She is also a proud member of the Iron Butt Association, riding her Harley-Davidson motorcycle 1000 miles in 24 hours.

Timeline

0:38 Todd’s opening thoughts

2:46 Melanie’s introduction

5:49 Identity - knowing who we are

13:14 Knowledge and wisdom

20:45 Bridging language for systems

24:43 Rivers, resilience, and word bundles

28:13 Tea & relationality

36:40 Complexity fitness

38:03 Seven Fires Prophecy

41:50 Appropriating indigenous knowledge

49:18 Spirit & humanity

51:42 Four directions

58:20 Excerpt from Relational Systems Thinking (Melanie)

Quotes

“Knowledge resides on the land, revealed to you through personal experiences on the land.” — Melanie Goodchild

“If you live near the mountains, or the ocean, or the deserts, or the canyon, or the rainforest—wherever you are, are you listening to the frequencies? Are you tapping into those? If you're not, you're missing a whole part of what knowledge and wisdom has to offer.” — Melanie Goodchild

“We've been colonized by a certain mental models—that true knowledge is only something that's written or can be counted or even observed.” — Melanie Goodchild

“English tends to limit us to nouns. So if we think of a lake as an ‘it’, or if you think of the earth as an ‘it’—a thing—how do you be in a loving, reciprocal relationship with that being?” — Melanie Goodchild

“I've tried to bring my scholarly mind together with my heart, and always go back and forth, recognizing that even in my scholarship, I have learned from the land.” — Melanie Goodchild

“I always think what would my aunties and uncles say? What would they encourage me to do? And they might say, go out and put some tobacco—some asemaa—on the land and talk to the trees and listen to the wind. And we really do that. It's because that's where the messages come. If you're not open to it, then you'll miss part of what could help you in expanding, or filling up your knowledge bundle.” — Melanie Goodchild

“It's very hard for Western people to bridge from that awesome dimensional experience in nature, back to the office when they're dealing with paper and computers.” — Marti Spiegelman

“How we use language can create a bridge. Language can open us or close us. ” — Marti Spiegelman

“Writing in English is a challenge because of the translation of spiritual, contextual knowledge. Translating into English immediately compromises something, and you have to figure out your own threshold for what you're going to compromise.” — Melanie Goodchild

“I kept thinking about these words. Environment. Do we have a word for environment? No. We don't have a word for environment or nature or ecology or biosphere.” — Melanie Goodchild

“Even though language is an outcome of our experience in the world, I think there are original languages that will still come back and rattle the cage around the Western heart and crack it wide open.” — Marti Spiegelman

“English and the Western education system teaches us to memorize definitions. That's how we pass tests. It teaches us to decontextualize knowledge so that it can be captured and owned. So if you learn, if you memorize a poem, or you learn an equation, you remember the definition of something that as an individual, you now have in your intellect. But from our perspective, if you're learning, then you are learning in service of the community, and service of the relationships you have—particularly with unborn generations.” — Melanie Goodchild

“With colonization, the lack of access that indigenous peoples have to some of our homelands, those ceremonies and those teachings, those medicines that we gathered, those animals that used to live there. If they're not there anymore than there's a challenge of keeping the spirit of that alive.” — Melanie Goodchild

“Our language is so place-based that we don't even have a word for place because place would have 10 different descriptions.” — Melanie Goodchild

“Language is really important in how we use it, and what we're willing to understand, and what we're willing to encompass and experience within a given word.” — Marti Spiegelman

“In navigating our participation in systems, if there's an artistry to it, I don't need to conceptualize it. I'm creating within it.” — Todd Hoskins

“Cultures that have lost touch have come to other cultures like ours to say, ‘How do I reconnect with those ancestors? What might my ceremonies have been?’ That type of healing requires quite a bit of humility and courage—to go on a healing journey to reconnect with ancestral traditions.” — Melanie Goodchild

“Every generation is called to think about how we are being loving ancestors.” — Melanie Goodchild

“Shifting consciousness is the hardest part of systems thinking.” — Melanie Goodchild paraphrasing Donella Meadows

“Relational systems thinking is about centering relationships for mutual benefit.” — Melanie Goodchild

“The anthropocentric bias is [the belief] that this is all for human beings by human beings for the future of human beings.” — Melanie Goodchild

“When you face your center, that can be really scary. You need help. The whole kind of path, I think for me and for others and that the elders have taught me about, is that you need to petition. For help, you need to petition to the spirit beings, to the ancestors. That's why we have the items that we have in our medicine bundles.

We have drums and songs, rattles, feathers, opwaagan pipes, sticks, masks. Those are all ways that we can tap into those frequencies because the human mind can be rational and it can run away with you. We need to bring ourselves back to that center and it's not always easy. And it's of course it's the hardest thing to do when you really need it, or when you're in crisis, or in that fear or flight adrenaline mode of crisis.

That's when you draw on those helpers the most, and that's when you sometimes want to abandon them the most and rely on your intellect. So that's a little bit of the message that I bring to change-makers and systems thinkers is to understand it's about balance.” — Melanie Goodchild

“It's not about abandoning science or your intellectual faculties. It's about balancing them out.” — Melanie Goodchild

“Things have now gotten out of control. We are now going to see fundamental change in the world, and we're going to regress ourselves and pull ourselves back into restoring that sacred feminine, predicated on kindness and compassion, caring, love. That's the real impetus of change. If systems theory and practice can conscience us to that way of understanding the world, then we'll see some really fundamental change.” — Dr. Dan Longboat

“The authority of our knowledge as indigenous peoples has come from a place of spirit, not out of the minds of men and women. Because it has come out of a place of spirit, it is perfect. And it served our ancestors well for thousands of generations and it will continue to serve us. And we have a choice of whether we want to recognize that, authenticate that, activate that, and put that process back into place to help us see the entire system.

And what is our place in that? It's all about peace. It's about love. It's about compassion. It's about all of those things that come out of ganigonhi:oh—the good mind. That's what the good mind is. So it's bringing back the good mind.” — Dr. Dan Longboat