TRAJECTORY OF AWESOMENESS™
Establishing Ethical Space based relations
Ethical Space is both a journey and a destination—and the Trajectory of Awesomeness is your guide. Created by Gwen, the Trajectory of Awesomeness is a set of preparatory steps for getting to the best possible Indigenous engagement by expanding your knowledge and skills for Ethical Space-based relations.
The trajectory begins at the core, where you start by building your knowledge of Canadian and US histories, law, Ethical Space, Indigenous worldviews, perspectives on conflict and resolution, culture, and your own motivations and biases.
Equipped with these understandings, the second phase asks you to assess your organizational readiness, and specifically to support the people tasked with advancing the relationship. Using the RRRA (Rapid Reconciliation Readiness Assessment), you diagnose and identify any challenges to engagement and prescribe resolutions that enable your organization to advance reconciliation. These could include policy analyses, organizational restructuring, and reconciliation visions and strategies.
With this organizational readiness, you can then move to engagement planning. This third phase is where you look externally to understand your partners’ goals, visions, strategies and perspectives; there’s a lot of work to do here to understand your partner. People often want to start at this phase, but, as the concept of k̓ɬʕac̓xn reminds us, it’s important to look beneath the obvious to deepen understandings of Indigenous perspectives and solidify your organizational preparedness before doing so. Understanding requires open-mindedness and the principles of reciprocity, relevancy, relationality and responsibility. We’ll talk about these principles in more depth in the Summer Edition of our newsletter!
Ethical Space enters at the fourth phase. As a journey, this phase invites you to practice Ethical Space, continuously deepen your understanding, and, with your partner, create something new built on deep respect and collective creativity. Refer back to May’s newsletter for a recap of Ethical Space concepts.
The Trajectory of Awesomeness is a lifelong path of learning and relationship-building—and it’s one that we’re proud to walk with you at the IEI.