Starting with our own truth

In Truth First, we shared why truth has to come before reconciliation, and where things stand today. This post is about what we did with that: how I came to our team discussion as a settler, and what we reflected on together as an agency.

Our own ancestral truth

In the Environics Institute’s 2026 survey on reconciliation, most Canadians said individuals have a role to play in reconciliation. Saying so is easier than acting on it, and the onus of addressing the ongoing impact of colonization rests with settlers, and not with Indigenous people.

That’s why we at Ramp looked at this discussion through two lenses:

1. As the people on our team, who are settlers
2. As an agency

Each of us is on our own learning path; below is a bit about mine:

I’m a settler of Irish descent. The Gaffneys left Sligo around 1850 during An Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger), and farmed in Perth County, Ontario, on Huron Tract land (treaty 29), the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe and Attawandaron peoples. The Thompsons and O’Briens arrived in Nova Scotia in the mid-1700s. Some were among the founding settlers of Oxford, instrumental in the land theft and displacement of Mi’kmaq people. For several years, I was part of a Mi’kmaw Elder’s circle of care, helping with cooking, cleaning and walking her dog. Over those years, our conversations about our relationship to each other and to the land shaped how I understand my family’s history and my responsibility today. Through that learning, I committed to act in allyship, taking responsibility for the harm my family’s settlement caused and for my own presence on this land today. I do what I can, when I can, through petitions, protests, direct and mutual aid, and ongoing solidarity with Land Back actions.

I grew up near Six Nations of the Grand River, the most populous First Nation in Canada and the only First Nation community that includes all six Haudenosaunee nations: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora. I went to high school in nearby Brantford at Pauline Johnson Collegiate, named in honour of the Mohawk poet E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), who was born on Six Nations. In school, I was never taught the true history of those lands. Like many of us, I learned a revisionist post-contact history told from a settler point of view. Reflecting on that today, I think about how many of my classmates lived on the reserve. We sat in the same history classes and were taught the same version of events, which they knew to be skewed because they knew their own history. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for them.

Over the last decade or so, I’ve learned from others in ways that changed how I understand historical and present-day issues affecting Indigenous peoples. That includes 1492 Land Back Lane. In 2020, Haudenosaunee land defenders occupied a planned housing development on unceded Six Nations land along the Grand River. The treaties were made with the Crown, but the province often developed the land, and the land defenders held that Ontario had no jurisdiction over it. Most mainstream coverage framed them as lawbreakers and said little about the land’s history. By then I knew that history and stood with the land defenders, and because this was happening close to where I grew up, I talked with friends and family who still lived there to help them understand it too.

Why am I sharing all this? Because of a call-in I once received from a nêhiyaw (Cree) classmate in a group training program. They appreciated the intention behind land acknowledgements, but as an Indigenous person, wanted to hear about each of us: our family stories and our relationship with the land. We were then offered tools to help each of us create our own compass for navigating Indigenous and colonial truths and for understanding and exploring Indigenous perspectives. My takeaway was that truth also starts within ourselves, by acknowledging our own ancestral history and what it means for our role and impact as settlers on this land.

It’s from this lens and understanding that I showed up to our team discussion.

As an agency

Our head office is in Toronto, on the territory of the Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, and covered by Treaty 13 and the Williams Treaties. Today, Toronto is home to First Nations, Inuit and Métis people from across Turtle Island, and one of the largest Indigenous communities in Canada. The community-led ‘Our Health Counts’ study found at least twice as many Indigenous people in Toronto as the census counts, and Indigenous-serving agencies estimate about 70,000. In the City’s 2024 Street Needs Assessment, 9% of people experiencing homelessness identified as Indigenous, three times their share of the city’s population.

We’re a settler-led agency working in this city, and everyone on our team is non-Indigenous. Our work shapes how organizations, many of them in health, housing and social services, tell their stories, which gives us influence over whose voices are centred and whose are left out. In our land acknowledgement, we say that we are settlers here, immigrants and newcomers from this generation or generations past, and we commit to Indigenous solidarity and to decolonizing our own practices. So far, how we act on that has been informal. When we can, we donate to Indigenous organizations, and we’ve attended Indigenous-led events like Indigenomics Bay Street and the Sponsorship Marketing Council Canada’s June Breakfast Forum on building deeper connections with Indigenous culture. When client work involves Indigenous communities, we bring in Indigenous partners, as we’ll outline below. Until now, though, we hadn’t defined what our commitment looks like in our day-to-day work.

Our recent team discussion centred on the framework in Braiding Accountability, developed by Dr. JoLee Sasakamoose. Its early stages (Engage, Learn and Strengthen) cover statements, training and advisory roles, while the later stages (Change, Implement and Harmonize) set priorities and share authority, together with Indigenous peoples. The report found most institutions stop early, calling this reconciliation theatre: “the calculated performance of reconciliation through acknowledgments, training, or program branding.”

As a team, we agreed that we’re currently sitting at Learn, moving into Strengthen.

• When a project involves engaging Indigenous audiences, or communications designed in part for Indigenous audiences, we bring Indigenous consultants and experts onto the team in paid roles to work alongside us. When the balance tips to work that is mostly for and about Indigenous communities, we aim to direct that work to Indigenous consultants.
• We recommend centring Indigenous voices and collaboration in our proposals where there’s a clear need. As Emma on our team put it, “Even asking the question in an RFP puts the issue in front of the people making the decisions.”

To move toward Change, the next stage of the framework, we ended our discussion with a commitment to reflect on what we could commit to, what agreements we could make, and how we could uphold them. 

Since then, I’ve come across Meeting in the Middle, a City of Toronto engagement strategy co-developed with the Toronto Aboriginal Support Services Council, and it really helped shape that reflection.

Next, we’ll share where we landed. The resources that have shaped our learning are listed at the end of Truth First.