ons) organizations talk about their encounters with the realities of aboriginal people in Canada.
As we went around the table and heard each person's story-of extraordinarily high levels of poverty, addiction, and suicide; decades of abuse by "well-intentioned" governments and churches; conflicts over the extraction of oil and other natural resources; thousands of stuck land and treaty disputes-it became obvious to me that I did not come from a country that had successfully overcome such challenges. My colleague Ursula Versteegen says that our most important learnings come not simply when we see the world anew, but specifically when we see ourselves-and our role in creating the world-anew.[20] On that day I saw that I was part of a society that was exercising a terrible power-over.
One aspect of this Canadian situation was the widely held mental model that aboriginal people needed to "be developed." This model had been institutionalized in, among other practices, a policy of aggressive assimilation that since the 1850s had taken children away from their parents to be educated in church-and state-run residential schools. One of the founders of residential schooling in North America characterized his approach as "kill the Indian and save the man."[21] Residential schooling created a legacy of physical, emotional, sexual, and cultural abuse. By the time the last residential school in Canada closed in 1998, this power over aboriginal people had been replicated for generations.
After this meeting in Ottawa, I and a few colleagues began working with a team of national government and aboriginal leaders to try out a new way to unstick this stuck situation. We chose as our entry point the extraordinarily high rate of suicide among aboriginal youth: five times the Canadian average. But after four years of on-and-off efforts, we had hardly moved forward at all. We kept running into roadblocks, large and small. At one point we were frustrated in trying to c