Corporate talks and workshops

Their most requested workshop, and the one people remember longest. From the first few minutes, something shifts in the room. For the length of a half-day or a full day, participants step into the world of the First Nations, and find themselves both returning to their own depths and meeting, often for the first time, the lived reality of peoples still carrying the weight of colonization.

In person, it opens with a striking exercise, “the circles,” that can only be lived fully in the room together. It moves into Grandfather Dominique’s own account of the residential schools, and the long road to forgiveness he chose to walk. No one leaves untouched.

Leadership exhausts us when we think we have to hold it all alone. Okima points the other way: to lead is not to carry everything on your own shoulders, but to know, deeply, that you are part of something larger.

In the vision of the First Nations, real leadership holds two strengths together. It needs the capacity to act and decide, but it draws just as deeply on the feminine dimension of our being: listening, silence, reflection, emotional intelligence, and the art of staying in relationship.

Here, Grandfather T8aminik opens the book of his life, its brightest pages and its darkest. From the beauty of his ancestors’ nomadic world, through the ordeal of the residential schools, he arrives at something hard-won: a message of acceptance, of forgiveness, of healing.

It speaks with rare force today, when every organization, like every person, stands at a crossroads: to return to what matters most, or to drift toward what quietly erodes the ties between us.

Mino Matisiwin: wellbeing and the art of living well, in the Anicinape language.

For the space of a talk or a workshop, Marie-Josée and Grandfather T8aminik carry you deep into the Canadian boreal forest. The songs, the words of wisdom from a thousand-year-old tradition, the foundations of the medicine wheel and the Seven Teachings… What unfolds is an encounter with the beauty and strength of the first peoples’ philosophy: how to live in true relationship with yourself and others, and in quiet kinship with the natural world.

Nitakinan means “our land”, though the word carries far more than that. To the first peoples, the Earth is not property but mother. She does not belong to us; we belong to her.

Elder Dominique and Marie-Josée return again and again to one conviction: the real change the climate needs must begin inside the human heart. Clear the pollution within, they say, if you truly mean to clear it from the Earth.