Note: This entry was borrowed from my personal Reconciliation Journal.

It has been a busy week getting ready to add some new content to this Complex Systems Frameworks Collection.  In my spare time or while pulling weeds in the garden, I find myself thinking a lot about the idea of an Indigenous collection to help make the connection between Indigenous frameworks and systems thinking. As I zoom out on the conversations I have been having, I can see that my initial thoughts were fairly reductionist and probably somewhat colonial. I was looking for the way to include Indigenous ways of knowing in my website.  

What was I thinking? Of course, there will be as many ways to do this work as there are Indigenous ways of knowing from diverse Indigenous communities. I need to let the structure emerge from a relational approach.  I will learn much about this with the help of Tom and Tanya who wrote “Indigenous knowledge systems are inextricable from the specific Indigenous context from which they arise, and should not be appropriated into colonial endeavours, or by those outside of the Indigenous context.”

What is currently emerging for me are several different threads/pathways linked to different conversations and resources.  In one case, I’m thinking about the shape of collaboration with the authors of a framework that has been developed in community and has been used to guide research led by the community.  In another conversation I am thinking about stories that embody systems thinking with some beautiful artwork created by an Indigenous artist.  This I hope will be a collaboration that shares an Indigenous perspective on systems thinking in organizations and business.

I often ask people where are they finding joy these days. It helps us get started in a good way.  My place of joy currently is in doing this work and working in an emergent way. This satisfies my curious nature and fills a need to do something worthwhile.