Traditional Principles

 

Family Development

The family provides love, nourishment, warmth, and stability needed to develop as whole, healthy people. If the family is strong, individuals grow strong. If the family is weak, so are the individuals. Through resolving suffering, families begin to heal, strengthen and turn once again to strong kinship, sharing, and respect as the basis of family life.

There are four aspects to family life that are interconnected and need attention. They are the marriage relationship, the parent-child relationship, the sibling relationship and the gr and parent and gr and children relationship. This is not intended to represent the nuclear family but to reflect the strong kinship ties of aunts, uncles, cousins who fall into parent and sibling roles in the Métis tradition.

A family may have its own set of unique patterns that must be understood before a new vision for the families emerges. The patterns may be negative such as in the abuse of alcohol or they may be positive such as strong loving family unit. When intervening to strengthen or heal families the various relationships must be clarified honestly to underst and the family as a whole. It must be understood that if one aspect of the relationship is troubling then all relationships within the family are tainted by dissension. A healthy family will view themselves as interconnected. It is suggested; the family molds the individual while a collective of families forms communities and nations.

Community Development

Individuals and families make up communities. It may be a geographical community or a community based on common goals or a community of visionaries attempting to shape and change reality. Whatever the case, the role of individuals or families is to exp and and include social, economic, political, and spiritual issues.

The relationship in communities can be effective or ineffective, healthy or unhealthy, honest or dishonest, genuine or fake, similar to those in families or between individuals. If a community has developed negative relationships as its main mode of operating then factionalism and jealousy can become rampant. Healing these divisions will take time, but it is an essential part of positive change and community development.

The teachings emphasize the growing ability to see outward and examine the external view – to learn, to critique, to analyze. The lesson of duality teaches, the community must turn the view back to themselves as if with a mirror. Self-examination is constantly balanced, when decreasing blocks such as blaming, dependency, envy, jealousy, racism and sexism within communities.