Rosemary Cairns shares an instructive tale from one of her experiences working all over the world: a meeting in the remote city of Yellowknife, in Canada's Northwest Territories. Like many such meetings convened by the government, it was a mix of aboriginal and non-aboriginal people.
"I noticed how many of the aboriginal people weren't speaking," Rosemary says. "There seemed to be a certain tone to the comments of many of the non-aboriginal people (although they probably wouldn't have noticed it). It had to do with that sort of realistic approach--let's look at how things really are, which in so many aboriginal communities seems to be a catalogue of non-achievement, a wasting of resources, and an unspoken agreement that it will take a long time before things change."
"In my earlier years, I would have probably said that out loud and alienated three-quarters of the room," she continues. "But one of the great things about aging is that--like aboriginal elders--I've taken to telling stories instead."
Feeling quite nervous, she says, Rosemary told the group a story of what had happened in Old Crow, a remote aboriginal community in the neighboring northern Yukon territory, during World War II. The people of Old Crow had heard on the radio about the children who were orphaned as a result of the bombing of London. They placed a high value on children and family, so they wanted to make a difference. Despite their remoteness and comparative poverty, the few hundred people living in Old Crow collected about 700 dollars, a very large sum for them. They sent the money to the British High Commissioner in Ottawa, who sent it on to London.
The commissioner actually came to visit Old Crow to thank them for this contribution. They passed the hat and raised another 70 or 80 dollars.
"There was dead silence after I had finished telling this story, a story that I believed described the kind of people who were in the room with me," Rosemary says. "I wondered whether I'd made a mistake and thought that I must have sounded naive."
But in telling the story, Rosemary had challenged the unspoken assumptions underlying the conversations in the meeting. The story she had chosen contained irrefutable proof of the capabilities of native communities. That provided a new ground, a new social agreement about who could speak and what they could talk about. And soon a young aboriginal man raised his hand and began to tell of his work in a small community on the other side of the lake.
"He spoke from his heart," says Rosemary, "from his authentic experience." That he spoke and how he spoke was even more important than what he said. He opened up the meeting to participation by many of the aboriginal people who had been silent up until then, and to a different level of discussion about development.
One person's carefully chosen story can interrupt the status quo and create new options for a group.