Living and working in a tight-knit community is both rewarding and challenging. We are all interconnected in a myriad of ways, both personal and professional, leading to strong and complex relationships.
When one goes through the schooling required to become a clinical counsellor, the avoidance of dual roles is emphasized over and over again. It is central to our code of ethics and is intended to eliminate relational factors that could interfere with counselling progress.
A dual role is when I’m both your therapist and something else, such as family, supervisor/manager or business partner. Information from one role could negatively influence the dynamic of the other. In a larger urban centre, this avoidance of dual roles goes as far as acquaintances, fellow volunteers or any connection outside of the counselling space.
However, as the Haida people have known for millennia, Gina ʹwaadluxan gud ad kwaagid | Ginn ʹwáadluwan gud .ahl kwáagíidang — Everything depends on everything else. This knowledge of interconnectedness links all living things and the natural world. It is a value that guides us in how we manage our relationship to resources and land. It also acknowledges that, as humans, we are all connected to each other.
Nowhere is that more true than in a small town on Haida Gwaii. What I call grey-zone dual roles are par for the course in our small communities, such as kids going to the same school, volunteering alongside each other, sitting on boards together and showing up at the same gatherings.
As a result, when personal or professional relationships become ruptured, it isn’t only the individuals involved in the dispute who are impacted. Relationship ruptures can have far-reaching ripple effects throughout social circles, workplaces and professional networks.
We can’t avoid the occasional rupture. Things are going to happen; friends disagree, business arrangements go sour, couples break up and workplace decisions don’t go our way. So what do we do when this happens? Where are the spaces where we can address the impact of these ruptures when they go beyond the individuals at the centre?
Historically, here, conflicts that impacted community well-being would be addressed in the longhouse. The matriarchs and the chiefs would be consulted, and disputes would be resolved or moved forward. Today we see a resurgence of the Tllyadah - Making it Right potlatch, which is a promising remembering.
However, we non-Haida people don’t have that cultural space for personal reconciliation. This was very apparent to me when I walked into a space intended for women creating community and was confronted with individuals at the centre of a conflict that I had been peripherally impacted by. I didn’t know what to do. So, as women often do, I did nothing in order to preserve the peace.
Yet it ate away at me, so some days later I sent a voice memo to a group chat associated with that group. I meant it as a call in, but my incomplete knowledge and poor choice of words (and the cardinal sin of not checking who all was in that group chat) made it a call out. I even said it was a call out in my message without considering the implications of those words. Oops.
What I wanted was the discomfort recognized. What I intended was to move the conversation forward on a community level. I was trying to ask the question of what we do when a conflict, often rooted in the institutional systems we operate in, causes harm on a community level. How do we, as women and community members, address this?
What I did was hurt already hurting people and inflame a very complex situation. I’ve had to do some deep soul-searching to clarify for myself what conditions prompted me to speak so bluntly on a conflict that wasn’t my own. And part of that is the lack of a community mechanism to speak about these things. It causes frustrations to build and leak out in often inappropriate ways and spaces, sometimes directed at the wrong people.
I’ve had to apologize a lot, but from this misstep a lot of great conversations have also been had. Conversations around community and belonging, around the idea of sisterhood and around the distinction between calling out and calling in. The central conflict is also being spoken about in ways, I hope, that invite a softening.
I think we all need to practise calling in, inviting people to lean into a conflict and see what can be birthed from the destruction and chaos. We need to create more safe community gathering spaces where we can have these tricky conversations in ways that don’t blindside people and leave them feeling attacked. Spaces that can exist outside of institutional limitations. We need Giid tlljuus | Gin 'waadluwaan daman tl' ḵinggang — Balance.
I think if we can do it anywhere, we can do it here on Haida Gwaii.