Indigenous resurgence & [Indigenous] innovation

In order to know where we are going, we need to know where we are; to know where we are, we need to know who we are; to know who we are, we need to know where we come from.

–Anishinaabe Elder Art Solomon

Innovation. There’s an air of excitement and potential when you speak this word into a room – let’s innovate – we need to innovate – how can we embody innovation? It seems so many places are embracing the bullet train that is innovation. Moving from entrepreneurial and tech spaces, the innovation buzz has been filtering into the space of systems (education and healthcare, for example), nonprofits, and community organizations. The language of innovation has infiltrated workspaces and organizations (co-creation, prototyping, ecosystems) and I am sure that post it note sales have skyrocketed (IYKYK). I’m all for ways and processes to hold systems accountable to do better, to decolonize, to provide support and resources in a way that aligns with values of equity and anti-racism because the alternative status quo is violent and isn’t meeting the actual needs of people and communities. But does social innovation have the clout to do the heavy lifting that decolonial futures will require? 

A recent series of posts from Action Lab founder Ben Weinlick about innovation, social innovation, lab spaces, and unlearning (I HIGHLY recommend reading these deeply reflective and significant contributions) got me thinking about my time in and around innovation and systems change and the tensions of Indigenous research, evaluation, and learning in social innovation. And so, in this blog I set out to reflect on the kinds of spaces where Indigenous grounded evaluation and learning are particularly critical and what I have learned about innovation as a lever/or not for Indigenous resurgence.

The first time I heard the term social innovation was in 2013 through my work at the Winnipeg Boldness Project. I have been embedded in, adjacent to, and moving around the spaces of innovation since that time. I feel like this was a momentum building time for social innovation in Canada specifically within Indigenous organizations and communities. I was excited to hear about new ways of bringing people together to think about the wicked challenges¹ that we face and to commit to new solutions to transform these challenges. Within this excitement I was keenly aware of the power of underlying worldviews and assumptions that often ground these spaces. I was eager to push and expand the thinking and processes of social innovation to consider what it might look like within an Indigenous paradigm/foundation.

In that timespan of learning about and getting to know social innovation, there was certainly a tension – a push and pull back and forth with a healthy dose of skepticism thrown in. What was social innovation? How might this process support communities to thrive? How might social innovation be a parallel process towards Indigenous sovereignty considering the ongoing resistance and advocacy from Indigenous peoples in Canada? Where did the answers to these questions align with the ongoing work of Indigenous communities, leaders, and Nations? This questioning and critical analysis began to come in from all across Canada and was the impetus for the Indigenous Innovation Summit, hosted November 19-21, 2015 in Winnipeg Manitoba. In the sharing of stories during the Summit came a clear message. Indigenous peoples have always been innovators. How we have been in relationship with the environment around us has allowed us to be responsive, flexible, iterative and to generate innovations in response to and in relationship with the land, waters, animals, and systems that we are in relationship with. So what was this new field that everyone was so excitedly offering Indigenous communities and organizations to work with? 

To share a little bit about what I have learned about relationships for innovation – and how Indigenous methodologies have been supporting Indigenous innovation, I need to back up a couple of years before the Summit to the beginning of the Winnipeg Boldness Project. In 2013 I had recently accepted the opportunity that transformed the pathway of my career. I had been working on different projects in Winnipeg organizations for a while, and had just begun working on my PhD. I had said I wasn’t going to work through this degree, like I had the last ones, but family and community responsibilities proved me otherwise. It was winter in Winnipeg and I remember the cold snowy day well. Diane Roussin and I sat in the sun drenched space of Neechi Commons in conversation about this new project that she was gathering a team for, in the North End of Winnipeg, where I grew up. 

It was a social innovation project, yet to be named, with a goal to change outcomes for young kids in the community, so that by the time they entered kindergarten they would be ready for school (but what if that wasn’t really the outcome or indicator of success that the kids or families were hoping for?? – hold on to that thought…). Enter a year-long community grounding and knowledge gathering process to understand what the community actually hoped for, what the experiences of families with young children were experiencing, and to see where the Winnipeg Boldness Project might fit. For me, this meant connecting with the community in a way that offered multiple mechanisms for engagement, for sharing their stories and eventually culminated in long standing guide groups, including the Parent and Caregiver Guide Group, community members who continue to inform and drive the project today. This linked report speaks to the development of the guide group, diverse mechanisms of engagement, why a guide group was/is critical to a community driven innovation project, and shares some of the learnings about participatory arts based methods of engagement and sharing story. This brings me to one of the first lessons of Indigenous innovation work: who is driving the work matters, and how we begin is key. 

The ways that we sat together with the community mattered, how our small team showed up in spaces mattered, and what we were asking of the community mattered. We gathered stories and experiences through familiar community development processes incorporating some newly learned social innovation tools using post it notes, dotmocracy, and values mapping – and other arts based methods such as photo voice. We were listening to the community and we were grounded in Indigenous ways of being with community. We hosted conversations and circles and gathered with food and for ceremonies. The result of this work – building relationships, building trust, and engaging with story and experiences in ways that supported meaningful participation was a project that looked a lot different then the initial vision to ensure children were ready for school. This report, outlining the work of those first two years, shares the journey from that initial vision, to one that was grounded in the community priorities and understanding of what success must look like for their families.  

Since my time at the Winnipeg Boldness Project, the examples and invitations into Indigenous innovation have grown. In this article by Kris Archie and Jessica Bolduc, they share the ways that their organizations are living principles and practices of Indigenous innovation – informed by ways of knowing, being, and doing that are grounded in wisdom and traditions that have always been. At the 2015 Winnipeg Summit, noted by the authors, the Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair shared,“Innovation isn’t always about creating new things or creating new ways of doing.” Rather, it “sometimes involves looking back at our old ways and bringing them forward to this new situation.” 

The work of the Indigenous Innovation Initiative is another example of the growth of support for Indigenous innovation- they support and empower First Nation, Inuit and Metis innovators and communities to identify and solve their own challenges, transform lives, and drive inclusive growth and health through innovation. There are many stories of the work that they support in their first bi-annual Impact report released in June 2022. To ground the report, they share their understanding of Indigenous Innovation:

Indigenous Peoples have always been innovative. In a Western context, the innovation process is often rooted in the creation of new ideas —usually technology-based— that will bring us closer to the future. In an Indigenous context, innovation is generally rooted in the continuum of all our relations: our ancestors and relatives gift us seeds of change and growth and teach us how to nurture them so that they grow into the relationships, infrastructure, economies, systems, and medicines that will sustain and care for all our relations —past, present, and future. We understand that innovation isn’t always about creating new things, and we prioritize Indigenous innovation as being critical to creating shared futures where all Peoples, and the planet, can thrive. We use Indigenous innovation to reclaim, revitalize, and reapply ancestral ways of knowing and being to new contexts. By doing so, future generations can also feast from the harvest, and enable sustainable growth and wellbeing of their own communities, Lands, Waters, and Skies for generations to come. (p.3)

So, catalyzed by the reflections offered by Ben on the work of the Action Lab and by the experiences I have had since my time at the Winnipeg Boldness Project and in the trajectory of my work afterward I felt like it was an opportune time to mark my own reflections on Indigenous innovation and story. Sparked by knowing that how we frame the work of innovation can come from the way that things have always been done, or it can be different. For me one of the insights that has come forward is that innovation, Indigenous innovation is more than a stand alone set of tools or processes. Rather, Indigenous innovation is how we can work together with a vision that is rooted in resurgence. 

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is one of the roots of my understanding and journey with Indigenous resurgence. She has been one of those beacons that allow me to reflect on how I want to show up in my work. Leanne speaks of resurgence specifically as it is rooted in her understanding and experiences as an Anishinaabe kwe. What it means to dig deep into a re-engagement with ways of knowing, being, and doing that come from the lands, languages, and worldviews through which we are in relationship. And to nurture those relationships so that they offer us grounding and direction in how to be. How to be leaders, teachers, students, families, communities, and Nations. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2021) builds on and transforms from Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (2011). It’s so interesting to see the interconnectedness and expansion of her thinking from one book to the next and I appreciate the ways that she makes visible the threads and weaving of the stories she offers.

My dissertation work gathered stories as I sat in conversation with Indigenous full spectrum birth workers to learn about how they incorporated traditional knowledges and practices from their Nations into the way that they supported people in their reproductive wellness. This was firmly planted in the stance that fundamental relationships with body sovereignty, traditional knowledges, and strong relationships with self, family, land, and community have the ability to transform the health of this generation and all of the generations to come. This is Indigenous innovation. This is a catalyst for Indigenous resurgence. 

When I think about Indigenous innovation, social innovation, and Indigenous resurgence some challenges come to mind. First of all my worry goes directly to the danger of co-option of processes that are so disconnected from the roots and vision that what results is surface level changes that don’t transform systems but rather entrench inequities. That’s my doom and gloom scenario. This makes me think of the work of Adam Gaudry and Danielle Lorenz (2018), Indigenization as inclusion, reconciliation, and decolonization: navigating the different visions for Indigenizing the Canadian Academy, where they explore Indigenous inclusion, reconciliation Indigenization, and decolonial Indigenization. At the beginning of this post I spoke about the leeriness to new buzzwords – my leeriness comes from witnessing institutions pick up the work of reconciliation and decolonization in ways that do not fundamentally transform but rather offer a new coat of paint on buildings that will continue to process Indigenous students and knowledges without critical shifts. What are the visions for Indigenizing the academy? Is this the space that needs to be Indigenized or do we need to start fresh from a new foundation? I ask some of these questions in my first episode, Making Introductions. And so too, I bring these same questions forward into the innovation and learning space. 

So how can we stay connected to context, content, process, and relational accountability in order to take the time and to make sure that visions of Indigenous resurgence (and therefore Indigenous sovereignty) are beacons for innovation? For me there are fundamental questions that need to inform and anchor how we are thinking about and then actioning systems change/transformation/innovation work include:

1. Who is (collectively) leading this work, and how are they being resourced/supported?
2. What are the values underlying innovation?
3. What are we trying to make better and why?
4. What processes and structures are informing the development?
5. What worldview and principles drive the search for new ways of knowing, being, and doing? 

For me, these questions align well in not only innovation foundation building and implementation but also in the evaluation and learning. Whether we are co-creating, prototyping, or iterating new approaches or whether we are evaluating the process, progress, or outcomes, or whether we are embedded in the learning – we must always be reflecting on the transformation as it is taking place. The questions are the same, and the critical reflection must be the same. In the last blog post, when I spoke about how and why the stories we tell matter, these questions help us to get to the root of action that can be taken to build new scaffolding by telling new (old) stories. 

A solution, strategy, or pathway will always be driven by how we define the issue that we are working on together. And so back to Indigenous resurgence – if, as evaluators, researchers, scholars, leaders, funders, activists we are looking to support the re-engagement with ways of knowing, being, and doing that come from the lands, languages, and worldviews through which we are in relationship and ensure there are diverse opportunities to nurture those relationships so that they offer us grounding and direction in how to be (Simpson, 2021) then innovation needs to listen, unlearn, and listen again. What if the values and assumptions underlying innovation began from here:

• Decolonial
• Anti-Racist
• Equitable
• Participatory
• Community Driven
• Relational Accountability
• Being Good Relatives
• Towards Liberation, Collective Wellness & Thriving

What if Indigenous innovation and (decolonial?!) innovation was resourced to be led by BIPOC leaders, activists, communities, and organization? What transformation could be possible? What if the starting point was not only that systems (education, social work, health) needed to be fundamentally transformed but that we also needed NEW systems from these new foundations? And what if these same values were the measures through which we learned about and evaluated systems change/ innovation/ transformation? Reflection begets questions, begets reflections, and so on and so on. But that is the very point of evaluation and learning isn’t it? 

Next week I will release an episode with Terrellyn Fearn of the Turtle Island Institute. TII is one of the spaces that has emerged as a result of resources and support for Indigenous voices to lead the work of innovation that is grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing. To be able to look back at the old ways and to bring them forward into today – to shift the way that systems are structured and relate to Indigenous peoples. To dream into being new systems. Until then – be well – Gladys

¹ For more on Wicked Challenges check out: https://ssir.org/books/excerpts/entry/wicked_problems_problems_worth_solving & https://medium.com/@ldunn_24152/wicked-challenges-cb58f08db367