Circles that rekindle spirit and wisdom with Eimear O’Neill and Hazel Bell Koski

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener 

I’m so glad you’re here. So today, I’m really glad to bring in Eimear O’Neill and Hazel Bell Koski. The theme of season one of our podcast is around the spaces where we come together. What I’ve been learning in the conversations so far is how conferences, gatherings and workshops have this potential to change our lives: the people we meet, the ideas we get exposed to, and then kind of the relationships and webs of people that start to grow out of the friendships. Sometimes we can connect to people from other countries, religions, and places in these spaces. Those kinds of root networks or webs become the places to hold the future that we dream of.

This podcast today builds on the stories you heard in Episode 6 and 7 with Belvie Rooks. In those conversations, we explored the power of intergenerational collaboration and of circle, and when elders hold space for young people, offering them safe spaces, to listen to them and hear who they are and who they’re becoming.

One of the people in Belvie’s big network is Eimear O’Neill. Belvie told me the story of meeting her at a workshop and having a profound experience that changed her understanding of history. I’ll ask her to share that story today. Eimear and I have gone on to put on workshops together. I traveled to Toronto and got to see this incredible community that she and her late husband Ed O’Sullivan created at the University of Toronto Transformational Learning Center. She has done a lot of work around collective healing, and looking at the traumatic effects of the colonizing and some of the structures we inherited. She integrates Irish Indigenous ways of knowing, as well as art and research and trauma-informed ways of seeing the world.

I’ve heard in a lot about collective healing. Particularly for Americans, we have an amnesia they call it American Amnesia. Many people don’t know their ancestors. There was so much uprooting and people emigration, enslavement, genocide, people being taken off their land, and moving to new lands. This created a lot of trauma. There’s something to relearning those stories and expanding our view of the history because often the history is taught by those who won the war, or who don’t want the full story to be as clear. I’ve learned how important it is to understand that full story, because without that we can’t fully heal and create something different.

Belvie invited me to Toronto to meet Eimear and Ed and attend one of the gatherings we’ll talk about today, called Spirit Matters. One of the young people and artists who I met there was Hazel. I got to witness her bringing her gifts of artistry into that whole community space and it was incredible. I’m excited to have her join us today for another kind of intergenerational conversation. We are also bringing in the theme of arts and healing and social change, which we talked about in the previous episode. Hazel is a woman of Anishinaabe, Finnish, Irish, and English heritage. She’s a multidisciplinary artist and creative facilitator, and she has a lot of experience working with diverse intergenerational collaborations.

Beth Tener 

Eimear, please remind us where you’re coming in from today.

Eimear O’Neill

I’m coming in from Canada, just north of Toronto, where I have a place next to the Grand River, Six Nations territory. I consider it part of my responsibility to take good care of this land, which is theirs. I know that’s maybe a new idea for some of your American listeners. In Canada, First Nations have made sure we give more respect to the relationships that we have together and to what we share together. They have been extremely active and sharing of their knowledge so that we can begin to shift some of our own practices to be more open to indigenous ways. I’ve been learning with indigenous elders, since shortly after I arrived in Canada in 1972. It has been a way of learning that has brought me back to my own people or my own indigenous ways. And my own history from Ireland. I had not recognized the interconnections.

Beth Tener 

Hazel, where are you coming in from today?

Hazel Bell Koski

I’m calling from the beautiful unceded, traditional territory of the Squamish nation, which is also known as Squamish nation. And it’s a small town called Gibsons, it’s on the Sunshine Coast. It’s a 40 minute ferry ride from Vancouver. Yeah, all these lands out in BC are unceded. There is no treaty. That is a powerful place to be in.

Beth Tener 

And I’m coming from the other coast from the Atlantic coast in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is right along the Atlantic Ocean on Abenaki lands.

Eimear, I want to bring us into that meeting with Belvie. Please give us a little background of your childhood  and how that influenced your interest in these questions of collective healing and intergenerational dialogue.

Eimear O’Neill

You mean, apart from all the family marks that we all carry?

Beth Tener 

Well, yeah, that too! How much time do we have?

Eimear O’Neill

We don’t have enough time. I was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. My father and mother moved to Ghana, when I was two. It wasn’t Ghana, then it was the Gold Coast. It was named that because of the slavery. This is where the slave castle is that Belvie spoke about, when she spoke about going through the Door of No Return. I grew up beside that for my first few years in Africa. Then Ghana became the first African country to actually get out from under British rule and become independent. I was aware of that even as a child.

Then I moved up into the Ashanti region, which was further from the coast and still had a lot of the cultural richness that framed my understanding of women, as powerful people and of the natural world as my world, as the place of my origins. It was the place that I was completely connected to and where I became a more ecological being. I was in nature every day, knowing the names of all the creatures and the plants. My dad was a geographer. He shared that as we walked and moved around.

Then they sent me back for a good British education. I don’t know why because they were quite critical of British education, but they sent me back to Ireland.

I was at university when the Civil Rights/people’s democracy movement aros. I got an in-depth learning of civil rights and movements that were of violent and that were non-violent. I made my choice for the non-violent ones. As soon as I finished, I was a social worker in both the the Catholic area of the city and the Protestant area of the city. Because I married a Protestant, I was able to be Mrs. Bennis on the Protestant street and Eimear O’Neill on the Catholic Street.

That kind of splitting gives you a taste of the kind of historical splitting that we need to do when we come from places where there’s a long history of violence and colonization. Ireland is the place where really, the processes of colonization got home. Being right beside England, we actually, were the first place where those processes were tried out from 1157, when Pope Adrian was English, the first and the last English pope gave Henry the second Ireland to make them into proper Christians.

Beth Tener 

Can you just give us a little more of your story and how you ended up in Toronto?

Eimear O’Neill

I’ve been a therapist in collective trauma for 40 odd. But I got interested in constellation work, which is about patterns of relationship in collective groups. I went to a workshop in it. And there’s this beautiful black woman, who’s standing up and taking, representing Mother Africa in one of the constellations. I’m standing close beside her, trying to work out whether I should be representing a colonizer or a colonized, since those were the choices. She saw me moving between the two. Afterwards, she came up to me said, “I think I can ask you this, so what wounds caused your people to do what they did to my people? It is an extraordinary question. So compassionate. I didn’t think about it intellectually. The words just flew out of me. “Well, 900 years of somebody else standing on our necks.” Because I was aware in that moment of what we went through, we then took and carried out onto other people’s elsewhere.

Beth Tener 

I remember Belvie, saying, that some of the harshest slave drivers were the Irish. That’s what she knew, as someone who’s descendant of enslaved people. So that was where her question came from. You’re sharing that Irish were colonized for many years before they ever landed on US shores, just to see that history.

Eimear O’Neill

And to realize that we have forgotten the indigenous knowledge that First Nations in Turtle Island, for example, have held, which is why I learned so much from them and was able to come back to my own. Maybe for being less colonized, and more able to stick to what had been important to them, in terms of land, the ceremonies, the spiritual connection to the land, and the languages that hold the knowledge of the history and the land. Those are what gets taken away. It is a lot easier to take land from somebody who has no spiritual connection to it.

Beth Tener 

Hazel, feel free to chime in if you have anything to add.

Hazel Bell Koski

I would say that taking children helps to sever that connection to land and the spiritual connection, and the ancestral connection. I heard some elders talk about; what it must have felt like to see your children taken and to know you can’t pass on the knowledge and to know you can’t go get them. That loss is a big fracture in intergenerational learning.

Eimear O’Neill

It makes me realize, Hazel, as you say that, I wasn’t taken away. My parents gave me away because the colonization for them was so deep, that they still believed that the colonizer could teach me better than they could.

Beth Tener 

And how old were you when you went back to England? Did they go with you? Or to Ireland?

Eimear O’Neill

No, they sent me on my own at age 8, to my grandparents. Then after two years I went to the nuns in boarding school. Not residential like First Nations have suffered here in North America but still limiting of who you are.

Beth Tener 

So Eimear, if we could kind of move forward in this story, you made your way to Canada and met Ed. It was similar to our podcast with Belvie and Dedan. I look at you two as this power couple. Tell us a little more about how you two found each other and the spirit of how you worked together and created the Transformational Learning Center.

We were both in Toronto. Ed was teaching at the Ontario Institute for Studies and Education. I was living about two blocks away. Our children were at school together and they became friends. It was actually our sons that set us up, because they thought we were both in their words, “Earth Nuts,” interested in Irish spirituality. They set us up for coffee date. He was not my type. But somehow, once he began to talk about how important Earth centric learning and education was, I was enthralled. Once I heard his music collection, then we began to dance that was even more,

Beth Tener 

…then it was over.

Eimear O’Neill

It was over, no more resistance. What I discovered was that he was American and he was Irish identified. His  parents were directly from West Cork, which is a very indigenous area of Ireland, where the language is still spoken. I learned he had more years than I had in social justice and equity work, including male female relationships, and relationships with indigenous people. So we shared not just a music collection, and a love of dancing and blues, we shared a real passion for social justice as it is lived in the moment as it is taught in a school, as it is spoken of in a group.

When Ed retired a couple of years after we met, he had a whole group of wisdom keepers, people like Tom Berry, Matt Fox and Matthew Lerner. I had some from the feminist community like Belle Hooks. We decided we to bring all those wisdom keepers together in a gathering, rather than in a conference. Because conference suggests the sort of top down talking that we’re used to in education. What I and he wanted was a gathering where you met in circle, and could see each other and share directly from your own experience. That’s what we set out to do and did pretty successfully for six gatherings,

Beth Tener 

These are the ones you called Spirit Matters, and they were in Toronto. What were the streams you are blending in these gatherings?

Eimear O’Neill

We were bringing together indigenous wisdom keepers and educators from all over the Americas, from Africa, from India. Vandana Shiva was at that first one. These were people who kept some sort of connection with education and people who had given up that connection to foster more indigenous knowledge. From the very beginning, the local Indigenous people and wisdom keepers were part of the group and framed the opening ceremonies. They were part of every discussion.

Beth Tener 

This was bringing them into a university with the other students, right?

Eimear O’Neill

We had access to graduate university space. We opened it up to a wider community. We also changed the process. The first one was the usual conference process. By the second Spirit Matters, where I met Hazel, we had shifted that so that it wasn’t people on the stage talking to people in the audience, but holders of wisdom who were part of larger sharing circles. We’d all bring it back into a larger plenary, to bring the understandings together. The depth of understandings that came up from that was amazing. life changing.

Beth Tener 

Bringing these people ll together, having that chance to connect the different traditions just felt so rich to me. Hazel, I want to bring you into the story. Can you share with us how did your life stream enter into this confluence of folks in Toronto?

Hazel Bell Koski

I was raised out on the Pacific Northwest here in Vancouver, and on the Sunshine Coast. In 1998, I moved back to Toronto to go to film school. I was an artist and a bit of a punk rocker. in 2006 I heard about this logging road blockade. That was the longest standing indigenous logging road blockade. And I started to be like, “Why isn’t that on the front paper? Why don’t I hear about that till now?” This is Grassy Narrows.

This moment, started to weave together my love for the planet. My mom always kept me really close to nature. Grassy Narrows is close enough to where my ancestors came from there. I thought, “Oh, that’s my ancestral land. I’ll go there to start to learn about my grandmother and my great grandmother’s people.” And I thought, “Oh, I could bring my film camera with me.”

I was feeling like, I love this place, but I’m not really doing a lot. I’m bringing cloth bags to the store. I recycle my things. But I’m not actually making a difference. I’m living a privileged life as an artist in downtown Toronto. And the question that started coming for me was like, there’s got to be more to life than this. I’m connecting that to Spirit. I turned to Spirit and I said, “Can you please help me, combined with my need to call myself to action?”

That was a year before about a year and a half before I found Spirit Matters and Ed and Eimear. I started researching Grassy Narrows, I learned about all the people who were involved and I reached out and I took myself there. I got invited. It’s like very snarly and cold, and they’re like, You come in February. Let’s go. And I was like, I’m there.

That took me across Canada on a speaking awareness tour. We ended in Seattle, Washington and then I flew back. Because that’s where all the logs from Grassy Narrows go, to a company called Warehouser. So I go back to Toronto. I get an email out of the blue. It says “do you want to be a videographer at this event called Spirit Matters?”

On the trip, I learned that I didn’t want to be an activist. I didn’t want to spend my time fighting. But I met a lot of elders and I got to sit in my first healing circle with an elder. When they passed that eagle feather around, it was like waterworks when it got to me…because I was so hungry. I was raised in a beautiful way close to the land by what you might call hippies. But I was raised without a structure. My spirit craves structure – that structure of sitting in circle passing eagle feathers, smudging.

I was thinking when you talked about how you shifted Spirit Matters from a conference to circle, with learning and then bringing it back and reviewing. I craved all of that. I looked up what Spirit Matters was and saw elder, elder, elder, wisdom keeper, all coming from all over the world. “oh, yeah, I’m there.” When I got there, they said all you have to do is film the plenaries. And then you can participate in anything you want.

I would say the you were correct, Beth, that Ed and Eimear are a power couple. They were on the stage at University of Toronto. They’re just so bright and funny and have this wisdom flowing out of them, with this levity. I consider punk rock like a frequency. They had the frequency of punk rock that was very alluring.

Beth Tener 

Punk Rock Irish.

Hazel Bell Koski

Yeah, badass Canadian mix. Edmond had a beautiful accent from New Jersey, that was really alluring and inviting. They announced at this gathering that there was going to be a trip to Ireland called Rekindling Indigenous Spirit. One of my ancestral streams is Irish. I made another vow to Spirit that I would go with them, even though I didn’t know any of them. I was like a fly on the wall at this gathering. The gathering offered me some profound healing around grief and shame, of being white skinned, but feeling indigenous. That is a whole confusion that can happen within people who are not connected to their ancestral roots. The practices can give us so much grounding and stability and a place to move from to explore our whole self. I had some deep healing that Spirit Matters. There were people there who were able to support that for me.

Beth Tener 

I’m going to speak for a lot of people from America who might be listening to this, particularly for white Americans, there’s not a lot of the connection to indigenous roots and ancestry. The language you’re using about smudging and Turtle Island, those are terms probably a lot of people won’t know. So maybe you could explain those. What I hear in what you’re saying is that knowing the ancestors and reconnecting to these ways such as how to hold circle together, is something that got cut in all this colonization. Like you, when I came into these spaces, you could feel something that makes you start crying. You feel that it’s a very innate human need of how we belong and are held in a lineage and a tradition that many of us might not know we were even missing. We might just be longing for something we don’t quite know what it is.

Hazel Bell Koski

I was so hungry and so thirsty for something I didn’t know what it was, until I got in that first circle. And then until I met Eimear and Ed and this whole community of the Transformative Learning Center that did everything in circle. Diane Longboat was there, who is from Six Nations, Haudenosaunee, a medicine woman from Soul of the Mother. What she would say is “you come to my circle, come to my fire and get strong and then go to your people. Go to your lands go and learn about their practices.”

Since I’ve been on this journey a bit longer, I would say that these are innate human practices. This is ancient technology that we would all have, like the fire for instance. All of our ancestors built and worked with fire and smudging is like clearing your energy field was smoke from the sage, tobacco, cedar or sweet grass here on Turtle Island. There’s also frankincense and myrrh and there’s all these other different plants that were burnt from different parts of the planet. It was a set practice of clearing energy their ancestors knew. They would have all worked with water. They would have all sat in circle, welcomed children, and marked the seasons. That’s what I was missing. I wanted some structure.

Beth Tener 

How would you define Turtle Island?

Eimear O’Neill

Turtle Island is all of the Americans both North and South. It comes from one of the origin stories of the humans,  on the back of the turtle and the turtle coming to the surface of the waters to form a land. According to geomorphology, the rocks in Turtle Island are the oldest exposed rocks on the planet. Whatever bits we add to the human story, the fact is those are extremely ancient rocks that have held life for a very long time. That’s the origin of calling this Turtle Island. It also stops it from being divided along political and national lines, because those are lines on a map, that are not part of the geography of the world.

Beth Tener 

Eimear, can we go back to your story of when your path you and Ed met Hazel. How did that relationship evolve or develop? I remember at one point, Ed called himself a talent scout, am I remembering that right?

Eimear O’Neill

Originally, it was Ed Sullivan, which is a heck of a name to be carrying in the US in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. He put the O back when he and I met up. It been taken off by the people of Ellis Island. So he was Edmund O’Sullivan, and he still called himself a talent scout, sort of half joking, whole and earnest, because he got through more graduate PhDs than anyone else in that part of the university. He supported people’s own talent. He wasn’t interested in them doing work in his area of interest, he was interested in supporting what he called people with a full head of steam, with their own sense of what mattered, who needed the backing to bring that forward and out into the light of day. He was thus very successful as an advisor. He was also somebody who brought out the vulnerable and best parts of people that are often hidden away, because they can be tender. He was really good with people like Hazel or like myself, in saying, you’re a great speaker or don’t say that about your writing. He made sure you saw in yourself what you were carrying. That was a wonderful gift.

Beth Tener 

Such a gift, that ability to shine a light and call forth the gifts and potential that we don’t even know we have. We need it mirrored. Hazel, can you share about what that experience was like as you came into relationship with Ed and Eimear and how did that affect your path?

Hazel Bell Koski

It started with Eimear so saying, “you’re on the trip” and then suggesting that I apply for a travel grant or a Canada Council grant to support that trip to Ireland. I did apply for that. I received the funding with Eimear in place as a mentor. The funding was to support these intergenerational storytelling circles in downtown Toronto. We were going to do 10 of them. We ended up going on to do 50 of them and they were all arts based. We had food and bus fare, and held them all over Toronto. Eimear and Ed helped hold those. We hosted the first very first one at their house.

In planning to do that, I had gone to meet Eimear for the first time. It was there, in the little cottage in Toronto, where Eimear gave me this beautiful touchstone, which was “you are a meeting place of bloodlines.” Because at this place in my life, I felt so disconnected and ashamed. Becoming a meeting place of bloodlines was more empowering than being not enough of this and not enough of that.

Beth Tener 

That’s a beautiful way to give you a way of seeing your identity.

Hazel Bell Koski

Yes. We went to Ireland and I got to know them and just be supported and welcomed in. Their mentoring style is “just come along for the ride and show up.” Both of them would call that forward in me,  wanting to share all my gifts and be in circle and help out. All along the way ,they’ve said, “Hey, how about this? Why don’t you apply for this grant?”

One of those huge moments, which I hear in Belvie’s interview was about the impact of the Universe Story and Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry. In 2009, Ed kept asking, have you heard of Brian Swimme? I said no. He said “ “oh  gosh, you need to know about Brian Swimme. And then Brian was coming to the University of Toronto. And so Ed said I think you need to film it and be here.

I give thanks for my awareness and my head on my shoulders. When I hear good advice, I take it, when I know it’s going in that direction. Spirit helps me. I have a work ethic and a discipline that allows me to say “Okay, I’ll do that,” which I give thanks for. I will just be available on the day.

Brian Swimme is down on the stage of an old auditorium at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where the Transformative Learning Center was housed. He was used to having a remote control with his slide show. But they didn’t have that. There is no remote control option. So I find myself halfway up the auditorium with the projector and I have to move the slides ahead in time with his talk. We very quickly got in sync and we had a beautiful time. He looked at me the first three slides and then from that point on, you sensed it in sync.

What he shared on that stage transformed my life. He gave me the language that was alive in me. I knew why I did stuff. I didn’t know why I made art. But when I heard the story of the universe as 14 billion year creative event, that humans are on the cutting edge of it, I thought “Oh, this is why I make art.” Basically, from that moment on, I got on a soapbox for the Universe Story. I was going to move to California and study at the California Institute, but I had these projects started.  I remember being in Ed and Eimear’s living room, on fire, like on the soapbox. They were both looking at me. It was like they threw a bucket of water on me. They’re said  “Ok, maybe just to calm down a bit and have a look at what’s going on here.” I appreciated that. There’s so much I can say about that. It’s natural to be in relationship with elders who can hear you and see you.

Eimear O’Neill

Ed always referred to Hazel as his cub she referred to herself as his cub. Ed was called Bear. He’s been adopted into indigenous peoples, in different ones, Africa, in Turtle Island, and he’s been given the name Bear. There are people who can hibernate and hold what they know, over time underground, until it’s needed. They are protective of the vulnerable. And they are extremely good with their cubs, both in in helping them learn to survive and teaching them to play. Play is where a lot of kids do their creative thinking and working through.

Those of us who are artists carry that forward into our everyday life. Arts and individual and collective creative expression are so important because words are in our dominant language, they’re in English. Art is in everyone’s language mostly. And it can hold all sorts of complexities and paradoxes. It can be seen in a moment and then it can be unpacked over time. You think about what we’re still learning from great artists who have been previous to us. So even your own art, you can understand it more or get epiphanies about it over time.

Ed wasn’t an art person per se. He refused to admit that he could even draw anything. But he could certainly draw people out. He was an educator, so he could draw out the artist in other people, even when that was not supported by the culture. And that made a huge difference for many.

Beth Tener 

Eimear, I remember you saying that most indigenous languages don’t have a word for artist, is that right? Because everyone’s an artist?

Eimear O’Neill

They sometimes have a kind of a word for artists, but they don’t have a word for art, because it wasn’t separated out from the rest of living. Expressing creatively what you wanted in your life or about your ideas was just woven through life. It wasn’t until the so-called Enlightenment that it got separated off. An elitist group became the ones who could define what was art, and also give it a worth. Whereas art making has its own worth, its own way of knowing. It was important to recognize that the way it was treated in most of our mainstream culture was actually oppressive and elitist, rather than opening it up for everybody to actually be able to participate in it.

Beth Tener 

It feels like that’s one of the healing movements of our time: to free art up into everyone’s hands again.  I have given myself a new title called Community Artist. So it’s very much in the spirit of what we’re weaving here, those who weave community like Ed…and  you creating the spaces where others’ art and the creativity of the group comes alive. It’s its own artistry that I think we need to call forward and name as, as a role and as a suite of capacities.

In the podcast with Belvie, we heard how the interactions with Belvie and Dedan created seeds in the lives of Liz and Matt. Hazel, what seeds have you carried and where have those landed?

Hazel Bell Koski

One of the big seeds that I didn’t say, is that Ed and Eimear placed Spirit Matters 3 into my hands to tend and grow. I was able to co-host that with them and bring in all of these young people that I have been working with.

Beth Tener 

To me, part of the mentoring is letting you have that big opportunity to rise to.

Hazel Bell Koski

I didn’t know what was exactly happening until partway through. I was like, “Oh, this sneaky Ed, oh, yeah, I’m his cub.” Spirit Matters 3: Youth and Elders in the Web of Life was a beautiful gathering. It felt like a village in downtown Toronto. It happened at this same time that all of downtown Toronto was fenced off because the G7 was happening, along with big protests. We were up there for three days in this like the fifth floor of OISE.

Beth Tener 

Just to put a picture to this Transformational Learning Center we’re talking about, it’s a nondescript big university building with multiple floors. You go up to the fifth floor, and it’s has cubicles. But there’s a center of it that they transformed, with all these colorful prayer flags and a big centerpiece. I’d never been in a space quite like that.

Hazel Bell Koski

I hosted a workshop called Made by Hand, which was a title inspired by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. We made stencils in the morning, silkscreened them in the afternoon, sewed them together, and hung them at the open mic events.

Beth Tener 

Wow. In one day, it all got created together.

Hazel Bell Koski

Yeah, I think there’s for sure still silkscreen ink on the floor at OISE. So that thread of those flags, I continue to silkscreen, and stencil and do it with all types of community. When you hear “follow your joy,” this is really that work for me in life because I love cutting stencils. And I love silk screening. I did it on T shirts, but that sort of oppressed me. So I started to do it on found fabric and didn’t know what to do with it, even though we had made these flags.

All these flags of found fabric piled up. For the Spirit Matters you were at Beth, Momentum, when we hosted Universe Universe, as part of the like adorning of the space, we decided to make a ton of spirit flags. It was incredible. We had these spirit flags, and they started to talk to me for about a year. They said: “hang us outside, hang us in Trinity Bellwoods,” which is a Park in downtown Toronto. You don’t really know what to do when flags are talking to you. To hang them, I would need people, I would need ladders. People might talk to me, you know, being a little bit of a shy forest creature.  I’m a bear – my work is in gathering people.

Then I ended up packing up my life in Toronto in 2014 and moving out West. It felt like my time in Toronto was over and they needed to come out west. For me, I was moving to be near my parents. When I got out here, I ended up hanging the flags in the forest and experiencing the power of them, this resonant field. They create this healing space.

I would watch people come and rest and nap. I hung them at a festival out here. Then I went with Eimear to a gathering at Hollyhock called Summer Gathering. It was another gathering like Spirit Matters with people coming from around the world. Some of the people who were these elders who then became elders for me out here in the West. Rupert Sheldrake was there, who writes about morphic fields and resonant fields.

I ended up hanging the flags secretly in the morning so that everybody had to walk through them on the way to the plenary, on the day that Eimear and I were presenting about the Transformative Learning Center teachings. Later that day, Rupert came up to me. We had had a moment earlier in a breakout group. He said “I just wanted to tell you that the resonant field of those flags, that enclosure in the forest, is astonishing. It’s more powerful than some temples, synagogues and standing stones.”

I was like “ I knew it. I knew it!” That was 2015.

Also at that gathering, I met a woman called Peggy Taylor, who is one of the founders of Partners for Youth Empowerment, which has a model of creative facilitation and these camps called Power of Hope. They are youth camps open for a huge cross section of youth. Really vulnerable youth get to go and youth who’ve had lots of privilege and family support. The facilitators are mixed in with a youth. It’s about 20 facilitators to 40 youth. It uses an Open Space format.

They invited me into this model of creative facilitation. At that gathering, Peggy was said “What are you doing next week? Come to Power of Hope.” So I went and I brought the flags there. At that gathering, she said, “you need to know Kelly Terbasket, who is one of the cofounders of Indigeneyez. That fall, I started training with Indigeneyez in their creative facilitation model, which comes from the Power of Hope, the Partners for Youth Empowerment model. Basically, ever since then, I’ve been woven into this beautiful community of creative facilitation and land-based learning, indigenous knowledge on the West Coast here and in the Okanagan in the interior.

Beth Tener 

Eimear, what do you hear in this, what is the pattern?

Eimear O’Neill

Well, there’s a couple of things. The idea of prayer is important for so many peoples all over the world. Some of it has become corralled by particular groups, religions, images. One of the reasons why the flags that Hazel makes with people are so important is because the images silk screened on them are things that are sacred to the people present. It might be otters, turtles, or dragons. These are prayer flags that hold the prayers, the images that raise the hearts of the people who make them.

Beth Tener 

I’ve never quite heard of something like that. It sounds so beautiful.

Hazel Bell Koski

Eimear coined the term Prayer Stream. She saw some Air Streams, those little silver bullet trailers. She thought, wouldn’t it be awesome to have a Prayer Stream, like pop up prayer room? That’s what the flags are, because I come with two suitcases. There are 1000s and 1000s of feet of them and I can fill a forest, a shopping mall, a church. We will hang them anywhere. We call the installation Prayer Stream now. We come and hang the flags. We also run workshops and make them in elementary schools, with elders and at community events. We call that the Kinship Flag Project. I also make them to sell them.

Beth Tener 

I want you to come out to this coast and do a Prayer Stream! This sounds so wonderful.

We’re coming towards the end of our time. What is the wisdom that’s come out of your experiences that you’d like to invite others to?

Eimear O’Neill

Educating and meeting in circle, in the way that the technology of indigenous circles is held, where everybody speaks from their own place and experience. You don’t speak to somebody else. There’s usually a prayer stick or something that goes around.  You speak but only when you hold that you don’t cross talk. You show up in all of who you are and you get to see all of who somebody else is in the circle. What comes out of those circles is extraordinary.

I’d like to see circle processes used in education with children so that they don’t get taught from the top down, especially around climate issues. In circle, they get to share their feelings and their sensitivities about what’s going on and their creative capacities. It makes an enormous difference when you meet and talk and teach in  circle. It’s all we did. We didn’t teach any other way.

Hazel Bell Koski

I was thinking circles too. To gather in circle and eat together and play together. I feel there’s a great amount of grief that we need to share in a safe space. It’s using the circles to hold especially with something as powerful as grief.

Beth Tener 

Yes, we can hold it with many nervous systems. So much of what we’re trying to cope with is more than any one body or nervous system can hold on its own. So being able to hold it with more bodies around us, as well as the Earth and the ancestors. When we’re connected to the rituals and structures that connect us with the ancestors, that’s how we cope. I think part of the overwhelm, the anxiety and depression people have is because we don’t have that. I think of it as containers, bowls to hold it, so it’s held in community.

Hazel Bell Koski

Yes, both Eimear and I are nodding a lot to everything you’re saying.

Beth Tener 

Well, thank you both so much. This has been a pleasure. Sorry, it has to end. I want to keep talking.