Denise is a sḵwx̱wú7mesh knowledge keeper with a PhD, and 20 years in rooms where people had stopped telling each other the truth.
Everything I know about cultural humility, I learned from people who were furious with me.
“If I stuck around long enough and did not scare easily, the people softened and accepted me. Then the learning could begin.”
— Dr. Denise Findlay
When the relationships underneath are strong, the change everyone says they want becomes possible.
Get to Know Denise
The Circles
Nobody was doing this work when I started.
I was one of a handful of people in Canada going into communities to sit in circles about lateral violence, which is the harm people end up doing to each other when generations of harm have been done to them and there is nowhere else for it to go. I started in my own community, and before long I was working with Indigenous Peoples from all over, and with the non-Indigenous relatives working alongside them.
I got plenty of it wrong. People arrived frustrated and sometimes aggressive, and I had to keep looking at my own part rather than theirs. Almost everything I understand now was built out of being wrong in front of people who had every reason to write me off and chose not to.
I kept going back for what came after. Something opened in those circles once people let me in, and I’ve never found it anywhere else.
There was a lot of laughing on those hard early roads, which surprises some people. Sḵwx̱wú7mesh peoples have a wonderful sense of humour. We love to laugh and we love to make other people laugh, and that has never once been at odds with the seriousness of the work.
The same thing everywhere
I worked in a lot of places before I understood what I was looking at.
There was a crown corporation in there, and a stint at every level of government you can name. Non-profits came after that, then community health and mental health agencies. The work took me across Canada and into the United States, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I was coaching Indigenous entrepreneurs and sitting with social workers, physicians, teachers and parents.
Despite the vastly different settings, the same thing was going wrong in all of them.
The people were bright and well-meaning and stuck, and the leaders were often the most stuck of anyone, held in place by beliefs about what they were allowed to do and what would happen to them if they tried something different. I watched a lot of people spend their working lives waiting for permission that was never coming.
Once I could see it, I could not stop seeing it.
There were psychosocial and relational dynamics operating below the level anyone present had language for, and they were the reason communities and whole organisations could not get where they were trying to go.
Seeing it and moving it turned out to be different things. I’d name what everyone had been avoiding, watch the room agree with me, and then watch nothing change.
A lot of people in this work build a long career on the part they are already good at and leave the rest alone. I had been at it long enough to get away with that.
I didn’t want to.
Education
In 2014 I went back to school and eventually earned my PhD.
I enrolled at Simon Fraser University to do a masters in Contemplative Education, a discipline concerned with the inner life of the person doing the teaching rather than the material being taught. At the same time I went further into my own Sḵwx̱wú7mesh way of life than I ever had. That was two educations running at once, and neither one would have been enough by itself.
I found mentors to learn from and I stayed with them for years. Dr. Gordon Neufeld taught me attachment, and his work still shapes how I understand every relationship I am in. Contemplative practice came from Dr. Heesoon Bai. I learned facilitation and process work from Dr. Stephen Schuitevoerder, and Indigenous education and ethics from Dr. Deanna Reder. Everything I teach now grows out of what they gave me.
The Diagnosis
I came away with a clear picture of why cultural humility training keeps failing people and organisations.
Underneath most workplace education sits an assumption that people will do better once they know better. Approaches built on that assumption are ineffectual, and I’ve watched them fail in every sector I’ve worked in.
Information on its own doesn’t develop a person, and an underdeveloped person handed a new tool will use that tool to do harm.
In traditional cultures the purpose of education was the cultivation of a human being who could act with integrity. What we have now is consumer driven.
After a surface-level cultural humility training, people go back to their desks with new vocabulary they are frightened of using wrongly. It drives people further apart and makes them more careful about what can safely be said out loud.
Cultural humility isn’t a quick fix. It’s a lifelong practice of examining your own assumptions and the power you hold, and staying open to being changed by the people around you. It gets built slowly inside people who are in relationship with other people willing to tell the truth. The organisations that keep buying half-day trainings arrive five years later having spent a fortune but are still stuck in the same conversation.
The Imperfect Friend
I spent years working out what builds cultural humility, and what I arrived at was the imperfect friend.
Being an imperfect friend carries warmth and allows space to get things wrong in front of each other without the relationship ending.
My Elders taught me that when a person falters, you bring them into ceremony and take care of their feelings. So what I ask of the people I work with is that they stay in the room while they get it wrong.
“I have a deeper sense of grounding and steadiness in knowing that I will do my best, that it’s ok to not know, that I can stay in connection with myself and others, and remain accountable.”
— Rachel Foster, Clinical Lead
My Answer — Gathering Our Medicine (GOM)
I didn’t develop it alone, because a framework about relationships written by one person would have been a contradiction.
Elders, knowledge carriers, youth, frontline workers and parents sat in the rooms where it was made and helped to shape it into what it became.
What had been built for parents in a handful of communities grew into something informing community and family healing, and it turned out to work anywhere people were doing hard things alongside each other.
It puts people back into relationship with each other. What people tell me afterwards is that the capacity to feel things and be close to others came back, something most of them had written off.
“Gathering Our Medicine grows cultural safety and humility in people instead of teaching them as concepts.”
— Dr. Denise Findlay
Naming Ceremony
In May 2024 I stood on sacred blankets with ten of my family and received an ancestral name that nobody in my family had carried for six generations.
I’d been away from my community for twenty-one years before I came home in 1998, and it took until that day to stand on those blankets. Coming home meant learning my own language and having some hard conversations I didn’t want to have, and there were times I questioned whether I had the right to be doing it at all
My aunt told me that nobody was going to make this easy and nobody was going to give me permission. It was my birthright and I had to take it.
The name I now carry is Tslekxáliya.
What it asks of me is that I put my relationships ahead of everything else, and that when something knocks me off the path, I find the strength to get back on it.
That’s the same thing I ask of every person I work with, and I wouldn’t ask it if I hadn’t had to do it myself.
Where It's Going
Every year, as more of our lives move online, we get less practice at being human with each other, so real connection has become something you have to seek out on purpose. Sitting with someone who disagrees with you is a skill, and so is staying in the conversation once it turns uncomfortable. Telling the truth when it’ll cost you something takes practice, and going back to repair when you’ve hurt someone asks more of you still. Like any other skill, when we stop using them, we lose them.
The survival of our species rests on the capacities that make us human and humane, and the biggest of those is our ability to collaborate and communicate across difference. No machine is ever going to do that part for us.
I’m more urgent about this now than I’ve ever been. In the wake of AI, the whole point of education has to become the cultivation of the human being, and that comes down to the quality of our relationships.
So I’m igniting a relational revolution.
The way we communicate and treat each other has been broken for a long time, and I’ve stopped waiting for institutions to fix it. What I want is enough well-cultivated humans in enough rooms that the way people get treated at work and in their communities stops being something they have to survive. That takes people who refuse to quit on each other when connection gets hard.
No matter what I’ve been brought in to fix, underneath it is always the same human need.
People want to belong somewhere and be accepted as they are.
That runs through everyone I’ve worked with regardless of their title or background. So I’m building that place. It’s called W.I.S.E. Nation, and it’s for people who are done accepting the status quo and ready to co-create something better. This is your invitation to join me.
The wisdom you need is already in you. I’m not going to put it there. My job is helping you remember it and put it to work, so you can become the imperfect friend who gets a stuck relationship moving again. Relationships evolve when two people are willing to do the hard part and stay in it. That’s how we stop circling the place where things unravelled and start building what comes after.
Meet the Team
I don’t do any of this on my own.
I have an incredible team who are as committed to this work as I am, and they help me reach places I could never reach alone. Between us we’ve walked into some of the hardest rooms in the country and come out the other side with people talking to each other again.
“Being Sḵwx̱wú7mesh shapes how I see everything and it runs all the way through this work, but nobody wants to be reduced to just one part of who they are. Real inclusion comes down to whether people are seen and trusted to contribute. That’s where belonging begins.
If you want that in your own organization or community, come and talk to me. But… don’t hire me because I’m Indigenous. Hire me because I’m good at what I do.”
— Dr. Denise Findlay