In a diary I posted here, I got into a an off-track discussion about what power is with one of the commenters. After reading what the commenter wrote and thinking about how said commenter used the term "power," I shared what my definition of power meant from the cultural perspective I was given growing up by my Alaska Native side.
You can read the exchange here.
Now, I give lectures every now and again about cultural differences between Arctic and Subarctic peoples and the rest of mainstream, modern American peoples. I talk about worldview differences and similarities and how to be more sensitive when encountering people from cultures that are different from your own. One part of those lectures usually begins with a word association about how the people attending the lectures define "power" or what they think of when they hear the word "power."
As word association, where the audience shouts out answers, is a little awkward to do in this format, I'll go over some notes I took during one particular lecture (all the lectures seem to follow the same basic ideas of mainstream, modern, predominately White American culture, so a sampling of one lecture is actually a fairly decent representation for the whole -- I've given this particular lecture about 10 times and it remains fairly consistent) below the fold: