Challenging Conventional Thinking on Indigenous Expectations

It's not that long ago that the Indigenous community was left on the sideline of development to watch fortune and opportunity become realized by developers and others, while Indigenous peoples struggled for even the simplest recognition of the most basic of the rights that form the foundation of their storied identity.?This struggle lasted hundreds of years and seemed entrenched for many more.?

To the credit of government, developers, and the Indigenous community, in little more than a decade and a half, together they have turned hundreds of years of history rooted in marginalization, into vast opportunity and discovery of responsible development for everyone.?What makes this even more remarkable, is the two worlds couldn't be more incompatible from a purely technical standpoint, as one is driven by capitalism and the other by socialism.? After all, capitalism is founded on building personal wealth and the survival of the fittest, while socialism is founded on spreading wealth and shared survival of the collective at large.

While the expedient pace of this evolution (some would even call revolution) is admirable and long overdue for a young and developing country, the relatively sudden burst of change and growth has also created some unique challenges that threaten to potentially stall and flatten out the very evolution that created it in the first place.?Not much unlike the teenager who starts off short and in a matter of months suddenly grows exponentially all in one summer.?At first, they become gangly and uncoordinated, suffering from the inability to take advantage of the new growth.?Even discouraged by the initial perception that they have arrived only to realize the new size doesn't just translate into success as they don't yet have the coordination and confidence to measure up to their suddenly smaller counterparts.??Eventually, the coordination comes, which leads to learning how to best use the new size, which leads to all-important confidence.?Then almost as surprisingly as the sudden growth, one finds themselves taking their place amongst the others who have already developed and taken theirs. Part of this transition is learning to recognize the older habits one developed before the growth that helped compensate for being smaller and on the outside looking in, and replacing them with newer habits that better suit the new growth while putting one in the best position to maximize the opportunities now before them from being on inside now.

For centuries the Indigenous community has been living in a paternalistic and marginalized world that fostered dependency at the expense of their independence.?They have been treated as wards of the state surrounded by government bureaucracy (by its very nature) designed to limit risk by establishing conventional predictability, stability, and control, at the expense of innovative, creative, and unconventional thinking that tends to create and manage risks into opportunity.??They have become hardened by depending on the legal system to realize and fight for even the most basic recognition and rights.?A system that too is founded on black-and-white, rigid thinking at the expense of practical, creative evolutionary rationale.

Consider for a moment the habits to survive in that world are not the same habits to survive in the new world and expectations resulting from the growth.? The new world the Indigenous community finds itself in now is an entrepreneurial one relying on the need to not only challenge conventional thinking but to regularly rethink while having the ability to creatively find innovation that will lead to discovery.? One that not only requires someone to actually embrace calculated risks, but to fearlessly chase them.?One where very survival itself requires the independence needed to outcompete their competition.?

What a decade and a half has done is change the narrative for the Indigenous community from that of fighting for their place and opportunity to now trying to realize the immense opportunity before them.?Not an easy endeavour or mindset to change after generations of the aforementioned application.?Like the gangly teenager, the challenge is to persevere through the disappointment and discouragement that comes from not always being able to meet the expectations of the new opportunities, to allow internal growth to catch up to external growth.??To embrace the need to recognize that some old habits will need to be replaced by new ones, that better suit the new playing field and will better position the ability to navigate through the minefield that lies before the opportunities themselves.?Half of this battle lies in just being aware of and understanding both the challenge and opportunity at hand.

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness... James Thurber

Part of the new awareness is not only recognizing that the world of opportunity and independence is on a capitalistic playing field, but that one doesn't stop being Indigenous when developing the skills and habits to be successful on that field.?It's really a matter of switching hats back and forth and there are many examples where the Indigenous community that has been most successful, has learned to do this.?Another part of the new awareness is for developers and government to understand that for responsible development to reach its full potential in our country, the challenges the Indigenous community faces with growing into the expectations resulting from the sudden evolution becomes a mutual enterprise (pun intended) that we would all be remise to not value enough.

Without losing sight of the paradox between the need to manage awareness accordingly, and the unforgiving nature of commercial capitalism, the real question becomes: Can we step out of our comfort zones to collectively challenge conventional thinking and clear the way to unfettered discovery, while inspiring a sense of capability, thereby together setting the bar of possibility even higher?

Peter Politis www.forevergreen.ca