Indigenous advocates have the “curse of knowledge!”

Happy Monday y’all! That’s right, we’re all cursed with knowledge of our culture and the Indigenous approaches to everything.

With this curse, we risk not communicating our approaches in a way for the government and our sector(s) to understand us.

This is why we tell stories; they are a powerful tool that helps people understand the Indigenous perspective. But what if we don’t have an opportunity to tell a story?

When it comes to strategy and program design, these are not deliverables that host stories. Thus, we need to expand our toolset to fit a multitude of mediums.

It’s our job as Indigenous youth advocates to learn how to communicate about communal approaches to policy for young Indigenous people so we can onboard others to the idea.

What I’m seeing in the youth advocacy space is what I like to call “froo froo” language about Indigenous approaches, meaning the words mean nothing to someone learning.

For example, things like “Indigenous ways of knowing, connecting to culture, land; and gathering in community” are phrases that fall short of explaining the necessity of these elements in our approaches.

When we’re in meetings, we don’t have the time to share a story in a roundabout way to illustrate the intrinsic nature of Indigenous approaches.

I often need to explain the young Indigenous perspective in these settings and have come up with a few zingers that I always fall back on because they work reliably.

I’ve developed some talking points and rationale in this Google document; please use it at your discretion and share as much as possible! 🙂 :

The more people understand the Indigenous youth experience, the better Indigenous youth can be supported. Build off these talking points, and contact me with any questions!

Top tips when speaking about Indigenous approaches to youth reconciliation:

• Most people are afraid of offending, so you need to give them confidence to talk about it.

• The better you communicate the communal approach, the more confidence you will build in your community partners because they copy your language.

• It’s normal to feel frustration when misunderstood - that’s the price of the curse of knowledge.

• People want to understand you, but they will need time.

In other Frayed Feathers news, my dog ate the power cord to my microphone’s power supply, so I couldn’t record a Podcast last week. (🐕lol)

It made me reconsider my approach to the Podcast, and I will record a couple in advance, so I have more time to address any problems like that moving forward.

Also, the Frayed Feathers designer has been hard at work with the newsletter’s homepage: https://frayedfeathers.beehiiv.com/ and my personal LinkedIn banner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/baileywaukey/ (self-plug).

Lastly, I’m changing my newsletter approach. I initially wanted to offer weekly news article links and provide commentary, but I feel I bring my value by creating resources bi-weekly.

So, moving forward, I’ll be posting a newsletter every two weeks, and I’ll include a deliverable in each edition to support your youth reconciliation journeys.

This week on the Frayed Feathers YouTube channel, we discuss how to coach young Indigenous leaders.

Some key points include:

1. How to coach them to communicate about political problems.

2. The “streamlined” path to policy is gated behind a Master’s degree.

3. How coaching young Indigenous leaders is different.

4. The use of project development as the learning experience.

Subscribe here for tomorrow’s episode!: https://www.youtube.com/@FrayedFeathers?sub_confirmation=1 

Peace out! ✌️