I’ve spent many years studying, working with and even helping teach and develop the 8 Shields Model with Jon Young and OWLink Media.

It has been several years since I moved to Hawaii and stopped working directly with the model and it has been interesting to see how the model applies to life, work and vision outside the relatively small circles of programs related to it.

First, the “road map” of human meta-cultural DNA that the model attempts to clarify and codify is always applicable to the individual. The core routines, shields, and cultural principles always hold valuable insight for me. If I’m stuck in one or more aspects of life there is always a way to flank the blockage and shake it loose. As a personal reflection and growth tool, the 8 Shields Model is pretty darned handy.

Beyond that it gets much trickier to integrate. And to a point, the better you are at using the model personally, the more your internal language reflects it… the harder it is to express both yourself and the model in mixed company.

Cue Monty Python voice:

“It’s only a model.”

Silly as that YouTube link may be… its not too far off from what “The Model” looks and sounds like to just about everyone else if you aren’t careful in how to go about expressing it.

I’ve found that the best thing to do is not to explain it. I don’t even bring it up. No one cares about Tom Brown or Jon Young. Ingwe who? Uh, huh.. boy scouts, Africa… wait, where does the turtle come in again? Tracking… you mean like UPS? Sure, the Mohawk, I’ve heard of them: pretty violent, weren’t they? Killed a bunch of white colonists? Right… I need to get going… talk to you later…

Here in Hawaii it’s even worse. The whole seasonal cycle, such an easy way to show how the model is based on natural patterns, doesn’t exist here. Sure, you can divide the year up into 4 chunks but only westerners do that. Here the year is divided in half – K’au, or the dry season, and ho’oilo, the wet season. The whole “white hair and cold bones of the elder in the North” just doesn’t apply. The ~concept~ does but the imagery used to illustrate it does not.

And this serves to highlight how insidious the language we use to talk about the 8 Shields Model can be. Even though the concepts we are talking about are universal the stories and language we use to share those concepts is specific to our experience. If you confine the concepts too strongly in the iconography and imagery of a particular place it will fail to translate to other places.

And if you identify yourself too strongly with that iconography and imagery… YOU will fail to translate to other places.

It’s a model. Its a map. Its a model and map of something. That something is the world around you and within you. The many sit spot stories from the Kamana Program and the Art of Mentoring program, for example, are inspiring and informative… but what happens at YOUR sit spot is real. Your sit spot experiences will be completely different than Tom’s or Jon’s or mine. The model, represented here by the stories, then serves as a vehicle to better understand and deepen your own experiences – not to define them.

The key thing to realize is that how we learn the model is often vastly different from how we apply it. I can’t do an Art of Mentoring with my Hawaiian friends. The way I learned the model holds little resonance for them and its up to me to find some way to apply my knowledge of the model to my way of being here. For example:

When I’m sitting with a group of Hawaiians telling derogatory (and deserved) stories about how Haole’s (“tourists” in Kamana-speak) always get Hawaiian culture wrong, always do the wrong things even with the right intentions… I just listen. Because of this I am not Haole, not painted with that same brush. Instead I tend to be treated as ilikea – a “little bit white.”

As the conversation continues it sometimes moves into derisive remarks about how disconnected the Haole is. No roots. No awareness. No humility. No sense of greater responsibility. No wonder they make a mess everywhere they go. Why can’t they just leave Hawaiian culture alone instead of co-opting it and turning it into something its not and never was? They never get it.

“We have to start somewhere. How will we ever relearn what a healthy culture is if no one shows us?”

That comment, quietly spoken by the lone ilikea that everyone seems to have forgotten was there, can change the conversation. It shifts from being motivated by feeling misunderstood and disrespected to feeling sad and long suffering, but determined – like an elder brother trying to find a way of helping a younger sibling who is lost in the world. Which is the situation, is it not?

Imagine if I had instead told the story of Jon Young standing on the street corner. Or waxed eloquent about the importance of elders. Or explained how the core routines can magically turn haoles into ilikeas. Look at me! Look at what I know! I know how to solve your problems!

That. Is. Haole.

That is not respectful. Not effective. Not coyote.

Its a very fine edge you walk as a person between cultures. The 8 Shields Model is invaluable in helping navigate those treacherous waters but useless in providing the language for you to bridge those yawning cultural chasms. As much as the model’s language is inspired by native tradition and the natural world we have to be very, very clear that it is NOT a native tradition. Not even close. It’s a model – and a model in and of itself is a very western way of looking at things.

At its best the model as we speak of it is the best attempt we know of to identify a path to regain a sustainable and healthy mindset, culture and way of life. At its worst it looks like a bunch of white people trying to act native. Both observations are “true”: which one other people see depends on you.

It’s only a model. Don’t think of yourself as the representative or ambassador of a model. Instead, be the change you wish to see in the world, embody fully the principles, routines and practices that the model provides and let the insight that arises from them serve as your road map to your new place – be it emotional, spiritual or physical.

And when you speak of your insights use your own voice, your own words and speak the language of the people you are speaking to. It’s only a model but you are a person. So are the people around you. Connect as people and don’t let the model become yet another cause for division and misunderstanding.