But first this morning we have another
keynote talk from one of my favourite people. Today in addition to celebrating
your practicum work and achievements we also celebrate Dr. Lyn Davis a faculty
member in PHSP who is retiring this year. Although we're not letting her go
completely she'll continue to teach in the program and kind of whenever she
wants on a sessional basis and she's already signaled that she's going to
come back and teach a course this fall so she's not going away she's just sor
t
of changing roles a little bit. However she is formally retiring so because PHSP is a small and relatively new school and our diverse admin and faculty
members have had to come together in a fairly quick and really cohesive way I
have to say to develop a coherent and student-centered program it for us it's
a big deal when one of our members is transitioning to a new stage. So we've
asked Lyn today as part of her celebration as she transitions to share
her wisdom with us in a keynote this morni
ng and as I hope you all know
today's lunch will be a PHSP sponsored pizza lunch and we're going to have a
little celebration for Lyn at lunchtime as well. So if you have funny
little anecdotes that you'd like to tell about Lyn that would be a perfect time
to do it or maybe just throw her bouquets whatever. So yes so lunchtime
today will be all about Lyn and there'll be pizza and I'll tell you more
about the details when we get closer to lunchtime.
Since Lynne will be speaking about herself and
her career I won't say too
much to introduce you I'll just maybe toss a little word salad at you. She's a
seasoned instructor who invests a lot of energy in her teaching and she's been a
senior instructor in our school since 2012 which was pretty much when we
started. She's a dog person, she's a passionate activist, she's a poet, she's a
radio DJ, she's a parent, she's a loving partner, she lives with Lyme,
she's funny, she's fierce, she's an LGBTQ advocate,
she's honest, she wears her heart on
her sleeve, and she's a trusted friend. She
I'm going to get teary here she won the HSD Teaching Excellence Award in 2013
and we love her to bits so without further ado Lyn. We're a very close school.
Good morning everyone I'm so grateful to be here. I'm very grateful to be standing
on this land and near this water that generations and generations and
generations of people who spoke the Lekwungan language Sencoten language
have cared for. I'm also very grateful to be a resident on the Esquimalt
traditional territories. There are lots of other traditional territories on
which I've lived and I wanted to show you some of them so as I talk about the
traditional territories I'm also going to use the colonizers name because some
of these nations are small and are now extinct and you might not have heard of
them. I was born on the land of the Tequesta down here and I grew up there
and on the territory of the Tocobaga. This map here says Seminole I know it's
hard to see so those two tribes as
they're called in the United, what's now the United
States. These were comparatively small tribes that were hunter-gatherer tribes
that lived on the water and when the Spaniards came those tribes were pretty
quickly decimated by disease, by being taken into slavery, and by
war with the Spaniards and so the Seminole Tribe emerged. Remnants of the
existing tribes joined with Africans who escaped from the slave trade to form the
Seminole nation and the Seminole nation is the only federally recogniz
ed tribe
in the US that does not have a treaty with the US. This is one case where the
colonizers were not able to defeat them. I also have lived on the land of the
Catawba in Winston-Salem North Carolina where I did most of my undergraduate
work and I did some graduate work and also lived on the land of the Mohawk
which is around Albany New York. I spent most of my adult life until I was 50
this says Choctaw but it's the land of the specifically of the Apalachee and
that is in Tallahassee Flori
da or once I get a beer in me I'll say it's
Tallahassee. I'm a southern girl too. I also got to spend four years on the land
of the Arapaho which is Denver Colorado and now as I said I live on the
territory of the Esquimalt Nation so these are my people. When my first great niece was born my
brother asked me if I would go on ancestry to develop a family tree and I
did and I found that I am pretty much 100% settler. So my father's side came to
the United States from Germany in the 1840s when ther
e was war and what was
called the unification of the nation that became Germany. This is my paternal
grandfather William Henry Davis and my maternal great aunt Mabel Davis Temple
and she really served as my grandmother. She was a very independent woman who
graduated from the University at 16, lied about her age began, teaching at age 17
and then when she wanted to retire they wouldn't let her retire because she
hadn't reached retirement age. They wouldn't acknowledge that she'd lied
about her ag
e and she didn't get married until she was 80 and my brother said
well Aunt Mabel why did you wait so long to get married and she was 4'10" tall and she pulled herself up to her full height and glared at him and
said young man I never found anyone suitable until I met Truman. So I loved
her she was great. Then here is my grandfather William Henry Davis with my
father Richard Eugene Davis and that photo when I first saw it I thought it
was my father with my brother but it isn't it's the generatio
n before. My
mother's side comes from the British Isles from what's now England and
Ireland. This is my maternal grandfather Paul Edward Fisk in the mountains of
Western Massachusetts on their family farm outside Huntington holding a pig. This is my maternal grandmother
Evelyn Jean Bain Fisk for whom I was named. I don't know much about her
because she died when my mother was four but I love this photo of her with a dog
and I think that I got more from her than just her name. This is my mother
E
sther Fisk Davis. Esther Jean Fisk Davis. Both she and my father were born
in 1918 and I want to pause in this and say that I'm very privileged to have
these family photos. My friends had loved ones who grew up in foster care or who
grew up in poverty have no photos of themselves, they have no photos of their
families and I want to acknowledge that. So I think this was probably taken in
1950 or 1951 yes I'm absolutely that old and this is my brother Paul and me
outside our family home in Miami F
lorida. And then here I am in full drag right
there this is the summer of 1965 when I was installed as a worthy advisor of the
March Sexson chapter of the Order of Rainbow for girls. In this photo we look
like an affluent normal family but we had just emerged from a few years of
chaos. My father was hospitalized for severe
depression and for reasons that I came to understand later my mother refused to
work and so my memory of those times are that we didn't have enough money for
electricity or fo
r food or for water much less for clothes or for books but
there was always money for booze and cigarettes. And that time of being so
desperately poor I think has shaped me in indelible ways. So in addition to my
biological family I've been very blessed to have other families and they're going
to play a part in what I talk about later so that's why I'm taking this time
to tell you about them. This is Leona LeBlanc who was my partner when I lived
in Florida and these two gentlemen here Mike Baile
y and Chris Bailey I consider
to be my sons. I met them when I was four, I was very lucky to be able to be an
important part of their coming to adulthood and I'm so connected to them
today as well as to Leona. And I remember when I took this when we had this photo
taken I was so nervous. This is the first men's shirt I ever bought I still have it
and I just thought I look so butchy and now I look at it and I go not really
but anyway. And then this is me and Janet Rabinovich
in Thailand several y
ears ago. Janet was an incredibly important activist here in
the Victoria area and she passed away more than 10 years ago. She also has two
children but in the process of losing Janet I also lost contact with her kids
and so I didn't feel it was appropriate to include photos of her children who
are now very successful adults also out there making a huge difference in the
world. And finally this is my beloved Patti.
We took this photo got taken at the queers funk dance and I'm in my
favorite outf
it which is my tuxedo. And these are my elders. These are women I
met at the Michigan Women's Music Festival they're part of my tribe.
They've all passed on. Three of the four died in 2015 which was the last year of
the festival but I wanted them to be with me today and they are. So I wanted
to because I have tortured especially the Bachelors students with making them
learn Excel I thought it only fair to use Excel to enter data and to create a
graph so that is what I've done. So this is how I b
urned money. I've had a lot of
jobs and I only included the ones that were full-time that I had for longer
than eighteen months and I know that you're not able to read this but I can
say that mostly I have worked in State Legislative settings developing policy
and doing program evaluations. I've also worked in private not-for-profit corporations
one time with an advocacy group another time with a group that was working with
different state legislatures. I've also produced women's music. I've cle
aned
houses, I've delivered the New York Times, I've delivered The Wall Street Journal, mowed lawns, repaired houses. My last few
years in the United States I was a private sector management consultant and
then when I came up here I established my own management consultant business so
that I could live here but work in the States until I became a landed immigrant
and then and I continued that consulting for a few years after I became a landed
immigrant. I first taught at the University in the fa
ll of 2002 and
except the three summers I've taught every term since. So as you can see that's my
real long lasting job and I feel that in teaching everything that I've done in
the past even delivering the newspapers has fit into teaching and I feel like I
have found my passion and I have found work that loves me as much as I love it
and I am so grateful for it. So I've been a Sessional in the School of Nursing,
Child and Youth Care, Social Work, and Public Administration and then I've been
a Se
nior Instructor or Assistant Teaching Professor in Studies in Policy and
Practice, their Dispute Resolution program and Public Administration and
now for the last five years blessedly Public Health and Social Policy. I've
been able to do work I love with people I love and it has made a profound
difference in who I am not only inside but also out in the world and
clearly I'm at the edge of tears because I am so grateful so thank you all for
hiring me, thank you for opening your hearts and your mi
nds to me, this has
been an amazing journey. So in my courses I included a lot about activism and those of you have taken Health 403 or PHSP 551 with me have known all these
terms. I'm not going to give a pop quiz on who remembers Cressman and Knight or
Orlovsky but instead I just wanted to bring these terms up to ground
my presentation in the work that we've done together. But rather than talk in an
academic way about activism I want to talk about what I've learned from my
lifetime as an activi
st and a lot of these things I know are things that you
already know and that's wonderful but I offer them to you as a sign of my
gratitude for your desire to learn and for your work and for your senses of
humor and your indulgences of me. So this is my beloved friend Frances and let's
see if I can get to the bah bah bah bah I don't use a MAC. Maybe it's up here, is it up here? Sorry
your instructor is human too. Can I get some help
ah thank you Oh maybe I did it almost there okay I just don't s
ee it on my screen
I'm sorry. Come on Frances. So I met Frances at the Michigan Women's
Music Festival we were entering accounting charge slips into the zahn
machine and two sentences into our first conversation I knew I had met a friend
for life. She passed away in August 2015 of a form of Alzheimer's disease but
this is from 2005. I spent I don't know 30 years pissed off. Angry, banging on
tables, shouting at people and I think that anger is a completely appropriate
response in the moment to a
n evil that you see being done or something you want
to change it makes total sense to me. But I actually think that what moves people
is love, real love and the secret to love is loving and if we can crank open our
hearts and actually love each other and let it in and let it out we're going to
be better. We're going to be stronger we're going to recognize that we have
managed to survive, we're going to see the survival and the spirit of survival
in everyone around us and we're going to be able
to compassionately deal with
what's going on. We're going to stop marginalization of people who are poor
and different, we're going to be able to welcome strangers into our midst and not
be afraid, we will vanquish fear. And fear is what's at the bottom of all of this
and if we can do that if we can find compassion and recognize it in
ourselves and others then we have a chance. We just have to start. We just
have to start and for me the starting place is cranking open my heart. Thank
you. So thi
s is a phrase I learned from Janet be the bridge and I want to give
two examples. The first one is with the Children Matter Coalition in Surrey. I
was hired to teach the agencies that comprise this coalition to teach their
staff how to do program logic models because that's what Health Canada was
requiring for to continue to fund these groups. So we set up a four-hour training
session in about 20 minutes into it I realized that this was not the way to go.
These were people who worked in very sma
ll agencies with very few resources
who were experts at network and at brokering and they didn't really care
about the difference between a short-term outcome a medium-term outcome
or a long-term outcome. So I said let's not do it this way. What if I come and
spend a day with each of you and we'll talk about what data you have and then
I'll put that into a logic model and if I think you need to collect some other
data we can talk about it and figure out what works for you and that worked. That
w
orked really well. So they could prove to Health Canada that their programs
were successful based on this program logic model but they didn't have to
create additional data just for the purposes of logic model so in that way I
think I was a bridge for them between the community level in the federal level.
The second example is work I did with the Victoria Lesbian Seniors Care Society
and we were funded by the status of women to survey community-based
programs that provided services to seniors an
d we wanted to find out did
they know there were lesbians in your clientele,
and if so did they do any kind of programming with their staff or their
other clients so that lesbians would be acknowledged and feel welcome and safe. I
did find out that there are no lesbians in Sooke which was really an amazing
surprise to me as well as to the 12 other lesbians I know who live in Sooke
but once we got that cleared up... So anyway it was a long lovely process the
staff of the agencies were very welcom
e but one of the things that I did is I
walked through each where each one of these programs was conducted and I
thought would I feel safe here? And I never saw myself reflected on the walls.
There were lots of photos of white heterosexual couples and you know my
brother is a white heterosexual couple I love him dearly but that's not me. So
what we came up with the bridge was two members of the Victoria Lesbian Seniors
Care Society agreed to sit for a poster and the agencies put this up and so i
t
was a bridge between people who used the services and the staff so that the staff
didn't have to say oh are you a dyke well you're welcome here no problem. This poster just said a lot so this poster I think was a the bridge. The
second thing is to be a translator and I was compelled to use this clipart of the
football. So in the American South football is not just a sport it's a religion. And
my younger son was on the high school football team and I was part of the
parental support group and I
had two missions one of which I was reasonably
successful in and the other one which I failed. So the one in which I was
reasonably successful is the parents had the tradition of getting absolutely dead
drunk at all the away games and I thought that wasn't appropriate behavior
not only because I come from an alcoholic family but also
young males love to drink and I think if they see their parents doing it in
public places and throwing up in the stands it's not really the best thing. So
I had to
translate my feelings about booze and about there being what I
wanted them to be as opposed to what they might want to be into language that
people could understand and so what I began to talk about with them was what
if there's a recruiter in the stands and they want to talk to you about your son
but you're too inebriated to form a complete sentence? Wouldn't you want to
make that connection and provide that opportunity for your son to get a
scholarship to go to college? That worked. The other
thing I really wanted to do
was you know I don't know if I've seen you all seen football games there's a
person at the side who holds a stick that marks the downs and I really wanted
to do that but I was never able to do but boy did I try. And the other way to be a
translator is when you talk with people in power so this is Randall Garrison
he's my MLA. He's a member of the NDP and he's an out gay man so what kind of
language would I use with him? How would I translate what I would like him to
do
into language he would understand? I would use language from the Socialist
ideology and I would also talk about gay and lesbian issues. So this is Maurine
Karagianis who is currently my Member of Parliament but she's not running again
and this is the Esquimalt City Council and that is Barb Desjardins who is
running for the Liberals. So if she is elected how would I speak
to her? I would talk about the importance of the individual I would use that
ideology right so that's part of being a trans
lator and all my 551 students will
only know I was going... So also look for allies and advocates in
unlikely areas and I've got two examples here from when my Florida days.
I worked in a legislature when abortion had just become legal federally and when
Roe v Wade was decided by the Supreme Court but each state had to enact its
own laws to allow abortion. It was a very hot topic and the Roman Catholic Church
was very much against allowing abortion so we were tasked with developing some
legislat
ion to create licensing standards for child care. There were no
licensing standards for child care in Florida at the time. And my committee
chair asked me to help him identify possible advocates and I thought what
about the church they really love kids and so the Roman Catholic Church turned
out to be a big advocate for us and from my own personal perspective I wouldn't
have thought of them but they were an advocate, they were our allies. Then this
building here this mansion on the shores of a l
ake in Lakeland Florida is owned
by the Junior League. The Junior League is a big thing in the United States and
it's mostly women who have enough income that they don't have to work outside the
home. I think then they come in at age 25 they stay in till age 40 and I used to
think of them as women who lunch. I never thought I had very much in common
with them and then I was working at the Center for Children and Youth in Florida
and we had gotten a grant from the Department of Justice who wanted
kids
who were held in adult jails to be separated from the adults by both sight
and sound. So I was going around to the 67 counties in Florida to find out if
they held kids in adult jail and if so which you know under what conditions. So
in Polk County which is kind of in the center of the state and at the time was
very agricultural and pretty rural the sheriff said yeah you bet we throw them
in the drunk tank. They skipped school we pick them up
bingo they're there and sometimes we don't call
their parents for a couple
days. So I went to the judge says no kids are bad
that's what's going to happen. I went to the school principals they thought it
was a great idea. I went to the editor of the paper and he didn't see anything
wrong with it. So when I was back in the office I was saying I don't know what to
do and a woman a little bit older than me who had volunteered there said "what
about the Junior League" and I fell off my chair laughing you know like really
come on and she said "I w
as a member of the Junior League" and I thought okay
I'll pull my foot out of my mouth now. But anyway she called she found out who all these
guys wives were, she set up a lunch date and I got to be a lady who lunches. And
the aim of the Junior League is to better their community and within three
months of that first lunch there was not one kid held in adult jail. So just
where you think you can't find people who will help you, you can. And then
there's using the right language and this always e
volves. I just love this
cartoon can you read it?It says undocumented immigrants refuse to learn
local language, still get food assistance. Very appropriate in the US under Trump
for whom I did not vote what a surprise. So these are some of the things that
I've learned about using the right language. At the Michigan Women's Music
Festival I quickly learned that with deaf and hard of hearing folks it's
really important for me not to talk like this they need to be able to see my face
and that havi
ng appropriate lighting is really important so if we're outside for
example I'm going to stand with my face in the sun rather than them so they have
a better chance of understanding me. I've also learned a little bit of American
sign language but just a very little bit but enough that we can converse so this
way I can do the right language. The other kind of language that I had to
learn is when I moved up here. There's a lot of variation in what words mean so
like when I met Patti my wife she wo
uld tell me these tales about her family
going to the cabin in the white shell and they'd all load up and then they'd
stop at the store before they got to the cabin and all the kids would fight to
sit on the two-four and by the third time she told me this story I just
finally had to tell her what was in my head and I said so what I see is the
back seat is loaded with pieces of 2x4 lumber and the kids are on top and she
said no it's beer and then I went oh that's what I would call a case of beer
but it's a two-four so the point of this is that different words have
different meanings in different contexts and if you've ever seen Geist magazine I
couldn't find it on the Internet I was going to show it to you
but they do a map of Canada with all the different terms that even though you're
Canadian you may or may not know and then there of course things that we all
know. So like I don't call my gay male friends fags.
I just don't. They can call each other that but I would never do it.
And t
hen there's the ever-evolving use of pronouns and I have really struggled
from years of taking Latin and diagramming sentences to use they for
the first-person singular but I think I've kind of got the habit of it. So be
aware of language and try to use the right language in the right situation.
Also know what you're willing to pay. There have been times that I have made
conscious decisions about what I will and won't do that have directly affected
my pocketbook. When I worked for the office of
the Auditor General in Florida
I did a program audit of the way the Division of Health created its budget
request. I turned it in to my supervisor she
liked it, then it went to review they liked it the Deputy Auditor General said these
aren't the right findings. So my supervisor made an appointment with the
Deputy Auditor General and we went and I was told this is what you have to find
and I decided I wasn't going to do it because it would have seriously undercut
the population health programs t
hat the division was doing and also there wasn't
the data to support it and I knew that meant the end of my career at the
Auditor General and in fact I was fired ten days later. And then they turned
around and they found a fellow whose adult son who didn't have health insurance
had just been a very severe accident, was a quadriplegic and they asked him
to do it. So while I'm very very sad that my colleague got saddled with that very
in my opinion unethical situation I made that decision and you
all have probably
faced similar things. And then of course know what you're willing to pay when
you're talking with family and friends and I think all of us have had that
experience of going deciding not to say or deciding to say. And there's one time
that still sticks with me that I haven't resolved so last summer I went to a
poetry workshop it's a big deal because when when the line was most virulent in
my body I completely lost my ability to write poetry but it was beginning to
come back and
so I was a week with this amazing teacher in these amazing poets
and I could feel my brain open again and feel my life come back to me and on the
way home I stopped in Parksville at McDonald's to get a McDouble and a small
fry and I was sitting at the table just really enjoying this junk food right and
there was a gentleman next to me who was talking about how he had emigrated to Canada about the same time I did
and he was saying the most virulent hateful things about homosexual people
and I wan
ted so badly to speak to him and I didn't have the guts because he
was so angry and I was so triggered and so instead I sat there with the food a
cold hard lump in my gut and found myself hoping that he would look at me
and see me as a man not as a butch I was that threatened. So there are times that
we say I can't pay that that's the price I can't pay it. That's part of being
human. So occasionally and this is very
un-Canadian. Warning. Smuggle. When I worked in the Florida Legislature I was
as
signed to rewrite the Purchasing chapter. I can assure you that is
probably the most boring law ever written and as I was working on it some
people came to me from a differently-abled advocacy group and
said do you know how people in this state get state-funded prosthetics and I
said no I don't and they said well they have to travel to Jacksonville and then
they make an appointment and they go to the warehouse and they go through the
shelves and whatever fits them that's what they get and so tha
t means that
people who used to be able to work before they had an accident work
probably couldn't work because the prosthetic didn't really fit them and
they got secondary infections and all kinds of things and the state used to
create custom-made prosthetics for each person who needed state assistance and
they said can you help us and I thought about it and it was literally two lines
in a whole chapter of law like probably 35 pages of this law and I
thought about it and I suggested some langua
ge and they said yes and so I put
that language in but I didn't mention it in the bill
analysis. I didn't even mention it to my staff director probably could have been
fired that much less the chair of my committee but it passed and people were
again able to have custom-made prosthetics so that's an example of
smuggling. Occasionally lie. This is very on Canadian I know. So when I worked in
the House Rules Committee my job was to work with the chair and the staff
director to decide what bills wo
uld go to the floor and when they would go and
the Everglades was a complete bloody mess
and a fellow who was the chairman of my committee was a passionate
environmentalist and we had this package of legislation that would have severely
curtailed farming in the Everglades would have unbanned the rivers would
have let the Everglades be a swap again a really wide river and we had barely
gotten it through the different committees. Well the big sugar lobbyists
were at my door every day when is this
bill going to come up when is this bill going
to come up and there came the day that I knew the day the bill was going to come
up but I didn't know the time and so they came in and said when is this bill
going to come up and I looked him square in the eye and I said I don't know guys
sorry because I didn't know the time but I knew the day and so the bill went
through the house before they had a chance to lobby against it. So
occasionally lie. And then threaten. This is also very not Canadian. So
when the
Liberals first came into power Janet Rabinovich was still alive and she
had helped form PEERS Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society
and one of the things that the people at PEERS all of whom are sex
trade workers and Janet had done was to begin to compile a list of Johns or
people who by sex and they were trying to get the Times Colonist to publish the
list. Times Colonist didn't think that was a very good idea but anyway a lot of
people knew that this list was floatin
g around
and so when the Liberals came in I happen to get a list of the programs
that they wanted to cut in the first three years and I was on the board of
Bridges for Women which is a program that provides bridging programs which
are programs for people who've endured several cycles of severe abuse. And
bridging programs were to be cut in the second year and I thought over my dead
body. So we first went to all the female MLAs
they were of course on our side we began to approach the male MLAs to
get enough
votes to get that off the list or at least to work with us to get that off
the list and we couldn't get enough people. So then Janet and I came up with
the idea that we're going to go visit people together. Hi I'm Lyn Davis I'm on
the board of Bridges for Women. Hi I'm Janet Rabinovich I'm the executive
director of PEERS the Prostitutes Empowerment Education Resource Society.
We're here together to talk to you about bridging programs and we really hope
you'll keep the funding of them
. It's all we had to say. The implication was there.
They've got the list and if you think you might be on it
maybe you'd want to think about this funding. So bridging programs still exist.
Again all these very un-Canadian but consider them. This is probably the most
important one. Connect your heart to someone else's. That requires a deep
listening and for me a settling in and when somebody is speaking to me not
running in my head what I'm going to say back but really listening cranking my
hear
t open as Frances would say. In the area in which I've most recently done
this is with people I love who have decided to transition to the other
gender. And that when they were women I personally I took it personally that
they wanted to transition like because that meant that being a woman wasn't
good enough and I listened and I listened and I finally got that that was
absolutely the right decision for that person and then we connected and I'm
very grateful I was able to do that. So that says ra
dical listening and a ton
of fire try it it's really cool. Also have fun, sing, dance, play, protest, these
are some of the artists that I really love and some of the protests that I've
done that really inspire me and here's a plug for CFUV Victoria's alternative
voice. Finally be yourself. This is well it's not the final one but it's close to the
final one. This is really complicated and I want to acknowledge that as a white
person with an education I have a lot of privilege and I also have the
choice
even though it may feel very theoretical to me to let my hair grow and to start
wearing dresses again and to pass as a traditional woman. People of colour don't
have that choice. Indigenous people don't have that choice. They can't do things
with their bodies that make them be labeled than other than who they are so
it is complicated. I personally think that who I am which is one of the great
gifts that Canada has given me is to be able to express physically who I am.
I just lost my thou
ght sorry. Anyway it's a privilege, it's complicated and I'm
very grateful. Keep your sense of humour. So these are two examples from teaching.
I can't imagine that any of us has loved either teaching or taking a research
course online it's really a bear right. So here we have the world's most
accurate pie chart - pie I have eaten, pie I have not yet eaten.
And then the other really echh part about teaching is marking papers. So here
we have paper grading bingo. Insert yourself into the politica
l realm. So
these are people from my tribe at Michigan the closing of the last
Michigan Women's Music Festival. I was last with them in August 2015. In
February of this year I was able to be with some of them and I heard Aisha
Moodie-Mills speak. She was the staff director, chief of staff for Michelle
Obama. She said this it made my blood run cold because I know it's true. If you're
not at the table you're on the menu. So I encourage you sit on commissions and
boards your school boards whatever
is out there no matter how small. Volunteer,
be on those, be at the table, run for office. I know people like she said that
was like yeah right but think about it. Think about it. This is a multi-party
system. Think about running for office. Run for school board you know that's
where the write really gets its tentacles and it's in the school system.
Walk your neighbourhood, talk to your neighbours about issues that are important to
you. If there's a candidate you endorse go door-to-door tell peo
ple why you
support this person. Vote. My mother worked in the Florida Legislature and
she was the second woman ever or in the whole history to do something other than
secretarial work and that is not to disparage secretarial work, it is to
honour my mother's courage and tenacity to begin to do other kinds of work. And
she would say many times they're going to put some idiot in office it might as
well be your idiot. And she knew a lot of them and not all of them are idiots but
a lot of them are.
So here's the BC election. If you're from BC these are the
dates please please please please please vote. It's really important. Finally take
really good care of yourself. This is the Michigan woman's music
festival in 1979. I'm the white lesbian in blue jeans. I encourage you to
immerse yourself in situations where you are deeply confirmed and you are
deeply challenged. I also encourage you to do the deep personal work that you
need to do to be an adult and to be present. Social justice I expe
rience as
very triggering and so here I am with my shirt that says poems not prisons and I
had just finally figured out that the depression in which I had lived my whole
life was not some abyss poured on to me by my parents and my grandparents it was
instead my frame that was around me and I could dispel the fog and I was so
excited so do that deep personal work. Exercise,
be out in nature, take care of other beings who are dependent on you. These
are our dogs Nellie and Phoenix somewhere in Fra
ncis/King Regional Park. Surround yourself with equally weird
people and love them deeply. This is my friend Monica Kendall and my best friend
Susan Strega. And in closing I want to read to you a
poem written by Chrystos. Who is she is Menominee, she is lesbian in two spirit,
she lives in Bainbridge Washington and she cleans houses for a living.
She has five books out. She occasionally comes here if you have a chance to
go hear her please do. This is Prayer For Her Students which I am using with
Chrystos' permission and blessing. The unbearable light of failure pours across
my hands twisted with scrubbing and lost hope so I push myself to think of others
to think of you may you never be caught here fighting back bitterness with every
breath may your work be welcomed may you walk in respect
may you be remembered beyond this day when I face you broken may my brokenness
empower you to a freedom I'll never know may my tears wash your heart free of
cruelty may you grow roses and vegetables
with equal ardor feeding soul
as well as belly may you never be ashamed of your tears or hide your
passion or pretend your anger is not crucial for change may you never lose
courage to understand your motive your actions your goals may you come to love
yourself despite the barrage of hatred which is
this war where we live may you come may you become may you be the love the woman
the man the person the flight I have risked everything
given everything to see the future is yours my friends love the
present do
good work to justice and thank you for letting me into your lives. Okay. First I have to
give Lyn a hug before you ask questions. Alright so I will walk the
mic around while I wipe the tears out of my eyes. Who's got a question for Lyn or
a comment? Thanks Lyn so much for
sharing your reflections and I especially appreciate the courage in
sharing things that you've struggled with that's a great example to hear. I'm
wondering if you have any reflections on in doing social justice work
experiences
working in the government versus working in non-government sectors and just how
you feel about effecting change in those different places as we decide where
would be the right fit for us. Okay so I've also done work provincially here
but as a consultant which is different than being an employee. My experiences
when I work in or with the public sector I have to be a lot more
clever have to be a lot more considered think about strategy think about goals
be really active in identifying
advocates and allies in and that's when
language becomes really really really important. I couldn't understand
everything that Bayla said yesterday because my hearing aid was going but I
think she talked a lot about that about taking that care whereas if I'm not in
the public sector I can more shoot from the hip. Other questions I'm looking
for hands. Oh you're so quiet this morning.
I was wondering what you thought about moving from the
States to Canada in terms of like the health care system
and how everything
operates. Oh yeah how much time do we have? I never thought I would be old enough to
see the kind of society where I can walk free as who I am. I value this Canadian society so much
because of our social safety net. I can't begin to describe to you the level of
poverty in the United States and yes we have poverty here we have unspeakable
poverty on the reserves we have unspeakable poverty in the big cities
but it's a little bit different than in the States or a lot big differe
nt
because in the States you are expected to provide for yourself. There is no
sense of this is my contribution to our well-being. It's a huge difference and if
I hadn't had health insurance I probably would have been I would have gone into
personal bankruptcy if I lived in United States and had Lyme I probably would
have lost my job and I probably would have had to declare personal bankruptcy
because I wouldn't have had health insurance and I would have had to pay for
everything. The main cause
of personal bankruptcy in United States are
healthcare costs. Yeah like one of my friends teaches in North Carolina she
has Crohn's disease and she'll probably have to go on welfare because she won't
be able to pay for her treatments and she won't be able to work. She's a
university professor. It's grim. Yay Canada
and we're not perfect. I'll ask you one line it's sort of on
the same theme as a question that Bayla got yesterday. I'm sorry I've
forgotten who asked but it's that question about or
the theme of in your
career journey how much do you - career it only looks
like a career now. Well yeah but I guess that's part of the question. In
your journey how much of that is chosen like how much do you
actively go out and seek new opportunities and how much of it just
comes as part of the process? Oh boy. For me it's been very rare that I've
chosen like when I've made major jumps. My dad used to say he was so glad that
he and my mom had two of us and what he meant was a boy and a girl bu
t he
really had two of us he had one straight kid he had one queer kid he had one kid
who decided to become a mathematician in high school and just retired from the
University after being a mathematician his whole life and then he had a
daughter who just said oh that one I'll do that one oh this one I'll do this
one. I think I get bored really easily and so most of it has been
jumping from one to the other. The constant thread has been the desire to
bring ... Hi Lyn thank you for your amazing pr
esentation
and just to share with us your amazing journey. My question to you now where you
stand is what do you see as your leadership philosophy now? Wow.
I think my leadership philosophy is really based on radical listening of
that deep deep listening like Rumi says or one of his many poems is I would sell
my tongue and buy a thousand ears and I think that by doing that listening that
then we can figure out what we need to do together and how we can move forward. Time for one more if there is
one more. No well we'll have a chance to continue
dialogue at lunchtime and through the day of course but thank you Lyn so
much for sharing a bit of yourself. Thank you.
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