Good Morning Everyone,
I hope you got a chance to relax over the past weekend, and a belated happy Indigenous People’s Day to everyone around the world. A little local history from me on that point:
Where I live in the U.S., the Yesañ (or Tutelo) as well as the Saponi people lived until the 1740s when they migrated north with and were adopted into the Cayuga Tribe of the Iroquis First Nations Confedaracy under the collective name of Nahyssan in 1753. The last known full-blooded Tutelo speaker, Waskiteng (”Old Mosquito”) died in 1870 at the age of 105.1
The Catawba people also resided near where I live, along with the Cherokee, but they instead were driven south and west, rather than north by European colonization.
I wonder what their interpretation of agency would be?
In remembering last week, I defined agency as:
“the capacity of individuals to act on their own will and shape their lives, influenced but not wholly determined by social structures, resources, and personal beliefs.”
I also mentioned that through an animistic lens:
“agency as a ‘creature’ can move freely, adapt, and evolve”
if given the right environment.
But it’s safe to say we don’t all have the same environment. Nor can we assume that the environments we live and grow in are healthy.
Social structures, personal experience, and other entities all exert varying degrees of stress and anxiety on us.
We rarely have the amount of influence we’d like, and what provides freedom to maneuver for some is inherently limiting to others.
It’s important to realize this not out of despair or nihilism, but rather as an opportunity to do what you can, where you can, when you can, and with whom you can.
This matters because we often mistake constraint for lack of agency, we see obstacles and assume our hands are tied.
But agency isn’t about having no challenges.
Challenges demand adaption; they are everywhere, and they are the reason exercising agency helps us grow.
Despite this, it is still a choice to take or not take action. The reason so many people choose not to do something different is there is no certainty on the other side of action.
Step forward to survive and thrive, or stagnate in your certainty and die.
Agency then, moves freely not because of perfect conditions, but through continual, iterative right choices to craft new pathways regardless of the terrain. It isn’t fixed, but rather flows through all things, adapting and evolving as it needs to.
What keeps us stuck is not just ourselves. It’s our upbringing, our grievances, our hopes, our needs.
And while that feels isolating, because all of those things color our perception of what our environment is, but these experiences are uniquely experienced by us all.
That gives us shared, co-created meaning we can connect over.
Through shared meaning, we can lead.
If you got a chance to watch Princess Mononoke over the weekend, I think you’ll see what I’m getting at through a few quotes I pulled out.
“You cannot alter your fate, my prince, however you can rise to meet it if you choose.”
- Village Elder“It’s your fate to go there and see what you can see with eye’s unclouded by hate. You may find a way to lift the curse, you understand.”
- Village Elder
“Does that right hand of your’s wish to kill me now, Ashitaka?”
”If it would lift the curse, I would let it tear you apart. But even that wouldn’t end the killing now would it?”
- Lady Eboshi and Ashitaka
“Life is suffering, it is hard. The world is cursed, but still we find reasons to keep living.”
- Leper
We will only ever have so much influence over our environment, and in that we cannot alter our fate. Choosing to meet our intersecting realities with unclouded understanding and compassion, we can lift the curse of collective stagnation over time.
Engaging rather than withdrawing, building rather than consuming, the vision of a better future stops being accessible only to a few.
If we use our choices to push others down rather than raise them up with us, the collective meaning and empowerment we could find remains stuck or worse, regresses.
“We will not go. We will eat the human. Yes. Let us eat the man-creature … If we eat the human we will steal his strength and we will drive the other humans away.”
- Ape Tribe“You know you can’t possess the humans strength by eating him. All that will do is turn you into something else. Something even worse than human.”
- San
In uncertain and chaotic times, success in life, survival, will not be achieved by simply doing what those before you have done.
All that will do is turn you into something regressive, something even worse than a toxic leader.
“Nago died far from here … he had become some kind of demon. One day he attacked our village. If you want proof, look at my hand … the mark remains.
- Ashitaka
You will always bear the marks of your environment but you can choose how you rise up to meet it.
Start with yourself and the impact you can have in the smallest way. If you want to shape your future, enable others to shape theirs.
Until next time,
- Chris
Contour Lines is my anecdotal newsletter segment that weaves whats going on in my life with my thoughts on leadership as well as personal and organizational development.
If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.
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Robert Vest, 2006, “Letters of Chief Samuel Johns to Frank G. Speck”.
Vest, “An Odyssey among the Iroquois.”