Pull up a chair. Coffee's probably on, and if it isn't, give me a minute.
I've always believed some of the best conversations happen around a kitchen table. Not in boardrooms, not at conferences, and certainly not in meetings where somebody spends forty-five minutes explaining something that could've been said in five.
At the kitchen table, people tell stories. They laugh. They cry. They argue about things they probably shouldn't. Somebody brings up something that happened twenty years ago, and before you know it, everybody's got a different version of the same damn story.
But somewhere in all that talking, something important happens.
We learn from each other.
That's really what I want this little corner of my website to be.
I've spent a good portion of my life working in and around systems that are supposed to help people. Housing, health, social services, community programs, governance, and all the policies that come with them.
And I've spent another good portion of my life on the other side of those same systems.
It's an interesting place to find yourself, knowing what it's like to need help from a system and later finding yourself sitting at a desk trying to help somebody else navigate it.
You start noticing things.
Like how the people who write policies aren't always the ones who have to live with them. Or how a program can look wonderful on paper while the people it's supposed to serve are still standing outside trying to figure out how to get in.
And sometimes, you realize the person sitting across from you knows more about how that system actually works than the people running it.
I've learned a lot from those conversations.
I've also learned a few things through my own mistakes. Some pretty spectacular ones, actually. The kind where you look back years later and think, Well, that was a stupid thing to do.
But life has a funny way of turning those moments into lessons, provided we're willing to pay attention.
Lately, I've been spending more time writing, painting, learning about Anishinaabe law, and thinking about the things we carry from one generation to the next. I've also been working on a book called Somebody's Auntie Said It, which started as a collection of stories and somehow turned into me questioning whether I really wanted people knowing that much about my life.
Turns out, writing a book and actually letting people read it are two very different things.
Who knew?
So this journal won't be about one particular subject.
Some days I'll talk about policy and the systems we live under. Other days it might be something I've learned about our history, a teaching that made me reconsider something, a painting that came out of a dream, or a memory that decided to show up while I was minding my own business.
I won't pretend to have all the answers. Half the time I'm still figuring out what questions I should be asking.
And I won't promise you'll agree with everything I write.
Actually, I hope you don't.
Because disagreement, when we take the time to listen, can teach us something too.
What I do promise is that what you read here will come from a real place. My experiences, my observations, my questions, and sometimes my frustrations. I'll do my best to distinguish what I know from what I think, and what I'm still trying to understand.
There might be a little swearing. There will definitely be some humour. And every now and then, I might say something that makes somebody uncomfortable.
That's okay.
Some of the most important conversations I've ever had started with somebody saying something nobody else wanted to talk about.
So welcome to my kitchen table.
There's room for another chair.
Miigwech for stopping by.
T Buzwah
Niigaan Naabidaa — Let's Look Ahead