Continue to fill the space created by the TRC with dialogue

Don’t wait for “the big home run” or the “big solution” that will resolve Canada’s troubled relationship with Aboriginal people. There are many things on the journey of reconciliation that are “doable” and everyone can exercise acts of reconciliation, said Hereditary Chief Robert Joseph.

Chief Joseph is the Ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and a member of the National Assembly of First Nations Elders Council. He was formerly the executive director of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society and is an honourary witness to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

He was addressing the BC Assembly of First Nations on June 24 and called upon the provincial arm of the Assembly of First Nations to create a Reconciliation Portfolio to ensure implementation of the TRC report and the 94 calls to action.

Joseph said there has never been a better opportunity to pick up the tools of reconciliation and challenge Canadians to treat Indigenous peoples as equal. Nor has there been a more important time to hold government’s feet to the fire.

Joseph said there are a couple of profound narratives that have unfolded over the last year that will “bring about a change that you have never dreamed of before.” The first is the exploration of truth by the TRC, and the second is the awareness brought by the Tsilhqot’in title decision, the first Supreme Court of Canada ruling of First Nations title, delivered one year ago in June.

He said Canadians are beginning to learn more about Indigenous peoples because of these two narratives.

Because of the TRC report, Joseph said there can be no dispute now about what First Nations have been saying all along about what happened in those schools. Joseph said he has spoken to many hundreds of Canadians who said ‘I didn’t know’ and have asked ‘How could it have happened?’

The words ‘cultural genocide’ have shaken the country,’ he told the BCAFN delegates, making people come to see that the kind and gentle country they perceived Canada to be was not the reality for first peoples. He encouraged survivors to keep telling their stories to demonstrate that it was cultural genocide.

“We can help create a lens of reconciliation,” said Joseph, by engaging Canadians, corporations, and industry to change their attitudes, creating new allies, making them part of the struggle and the journey.

He said Indigenous peoples will transform the soul and conscience of the country.

The BC-AFN is the starting place for this kind of work, Joseph said, because it is very progressive. The chiefs, he said, can appreciate not only the past victimization of the residential school era, but can look beyond that into the future and not “soak” in that victimization.

Joseph, however, said he wants the national organization to also establish a Reconciliation Portfolio.

He said there needs to be an effort made now to keep a focus on the TRC report and the Tsilhqot’in decision, otherwise he fears the dialogue and interest generated by these events will die.

Emcee Gwaans (Beverley Clifton-Percival) agreed that each delegate could choose to do one small act of reconciliation every day.

First Nations can provide a lot of guidance on how this country needs to be different, said Doug White, former chief of the Snuneymuxw First Nation and currently serving as Interim Director of the Centre for Pre-Confederation Treaties and Reconciliation at Vancouver Island University. Such direction is an important part of reconciliation, he said.

“We are in a time that is remarkably historical,” with the TRC opening up an important new opportunity and space for dialogue, he said, and “it’s up to us now to fill that space.”

Chief Joseph holds two honorary doctorates. The first received was an honorary law degree from the University of British Columbia in 2003, and in 2014 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the Vancouver School of Theology for his work in reconciliation and renewing relationships between Aboriginal peoples and all Canadians. In 2015, he was appointed to the Order of British Columbia.