Truth First

September 30 is a day to honour Survivors of residential schools, the children who never came home, and their families and communities. This year, we wanted our team at Ramp to spend intentional time with the material ahead of the day, then talk honestly about what it means for our work.

Before the day, we shared two Yellowhead Institute reports with the team. The first, Calls to Action Accountability: A 2023 Status Update on Reconciliation, tracks Canada’s progress on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action. The second, Braiding Accountability, reviews ten years of progress on the TRC’s healthcare Calls. On October 8, we came together to discuss them. This is the first of two posts sharing what came out of that discussion, and where it has led us since.

First, we want to thank the Indigenous educators, writers, researchers and activists whose work has guided our learning, and continues to. Our conversation builds on what our team learns from them year-round, through their courses, books, and the work they share. We’ve listed many of these resources at the end of this post, and we encourage you to learn from them, buy their work and follow them.

Second, this was a closed discussion among our team, all of whom are non-Indigenous. We reflected on our own work and where we can go from here, and we didn’t want to ask an Indigenous person to give their time or labour to help us do that reflection. Learning the truth is the first step in reconciliation, and it is our job as non-Indigenous people to do it.

A note on language: Indigenous Peoples in Canada include First Nations, Inuit and Métis, each with distinct histories, cultures and rights, and many distinct nations within them. Where we can, we name the specific nation or community. When we’re speaking more broadly, we use “Indigenous,” and when we refer to individuals, we use the terms they use for themselves.

When I started drafting the outline for these posts, my partner gave me a copy of Everyday Reconciliation: A Guide to Action and Change for All of Us. It’s written by two friends: Derek Aronhie:nens Montour, a Kanien’kehá:ka man who grew up in Kahnawà:ke, and Elin Sandberg Miller, a settler who immigrated to Canada from Sweden. This reading pushed me to think about how we can act next, as a team and as settlers here on Turtle Island.

Where we are today 

By Yellowhead’s count, 13 of the 94 Calls were completed between 2015 and 2022, and only one has moved since, when the National Council for Reconciliation Act became law in 2024. In Yellowhead’s 2024 piece “A Decade of Disappointment,” Eva Jewell put it simply: “the reconciliation dial is stuck.”

As a team, we talked about how the word truth often disappears from the discourse, with a strong focus on reconciliation from government representatives and the media. 

Indigenous voices have consistently been clear that truth has to come first, and that it goes beyond residential schools and the children who never came home. It includes Survivors and the intergenerational trauma carried by their children, grandchildren and communities. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission described the residential school system as cultural genocide. In 2019, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls called the violence a “Canadian genocide,” rooted in “state actions and inactions.” In 2022, the House of Commons unanimously recognized what happened in residential schools as genocide. The last residential school closed in 1996, and that harm continues in the issues still unfolding today.

Today, 38 long-term drinking water advisories remain in 36 First Nations communities. Indigenous people are about 5% of Canada’s population and about a third of people in federal prisons, and Indigenous children make up 53.8% of children in foster care. The federal tracker lists two of the 231 Calls for Justice from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls as complete. Land defenders continue to face arrest for protecting their territories, including Wet’suwet’en land defenders who opposed the Coastal GasLink pipeline in British Columbia.

Residential school denialism is also getting louder, as we saw the weekend before September 30, when a masked group showed up on Tkʼemlúps te Secwépemc land near Kamloops, and Kúkpi7 Rosanne Casimir said it was “taking away from the meaning of the day.”

In the recent Alberta referendum, where Albertans voted to remain in Canada, First Nations leaders reminded voters that the Crown signed Treaties 6, 7 and 8 before Alberta became a province. In May, an Alberta court found the province breached its duty to consult First Nations when it approved the separation petition.

As settlers and treaty people, we share the responsibility for calling out actions like what we saw on Tkʼemlúps te Secwépemc land, and for holding our governments accountable for upholding the treaties.

What’s next

After our discussion, we agreed to keep learning together, and to turn what we’d talked about into commitments we could be held to. Since then, our team has gathered the resources that have shaped our own learning, listed below, and we’ve started working out what those commitments could be. Next, we’ll share how we each came to this discussion and what we reflected on together as an agency, and after that, the commitments we’re making.

Resources that have shaped our learning

Reports and documents

• Yellowhead Institute, Calls to Action Accountability: A 2023 Status Update on Reconciliation
• Yellowhead Institute, Braiding Accountability: A Ten-Year Review of the TRC’s Healthcare Calls to Action
• United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Courses

• Home on Native Land, from RAVEN
• Indigenous Canada, University of Alberta Faculty of Native Studies, led by Paul Gareau (Métis) and Savage Bear (Montreal Lake Cree Nation)
• Yellowhead Institute’s open-access courses, including Land Back, a seven-module course based on its Red Paper

Books

• 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, Bob Joseph
• Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples, Gregory Younging
• Everyday Reconciliation: A Guide to Action and Change for All of Us, Derek Aronhie:nens Montour and Elin Sandberg Miller
• I Have Lived Four Lives, Wilfred Buck
• Indigenous Women and Feminism, edited by Cheryl Suzack, Shari M. Huhndorf, Jeanne Perreault and Jean Barman
• Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice
• Namwayut: We Are All One, A Pathway to Reconciliation, Chief Robert Joseph
• Rehearsals for Living, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
• The Knowing, Tanya Talaga
• Tough Lies, Jesse Wente
• Truth Telling, Michelle Good
• Unbroken, Angela Sterritt
• Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance, Jesse Wente
• When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance, Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel with Sean Carleton
• Who We Are: Four Questions for a Life and a Nation, Murray Sinclair

Film

• Beans, directed by Tracey Deer, about the 1990 Kanehsatà:ke resistance (often called the Oka Crisis), seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old Mohawk girl
• Dancing Around the Table, Part 1 and Part 2, National Film Board
• Klabona Keepers, available through Yellowhead Institute’s Land Back course
• Wilfred Buck, directed by Lisa Jackson (Anishinaabe), about Cree star knowledge keeper Wilfred Buck

Talks and podcasts

• Dr. Audra Simpson, “The Chief’s Two Bodies: Theresa Spence and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty”, keynote at RACE 2014
• Duncan McCue on decolonizing journalism
• Emma Talks: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
• John Mohawk, “Survive and Thrive”
• Lynn Gehl, “Centring Indigenous Knowledge”, Talking Radical Radio
• Think Indigenous podcast: Terry Brockie, and Dr. Pam Palmater on why educators should commit to Nation building and resist the constraints of the Western education system
• “Trans and Native: Meet the Indigenous Doctor Giving Them Hope”

Language

• FirstVoices, from the First Peoples’ Cultural Council, where more than 50 Indigenous nations, bands and organizations share their languages, oral culture and stories, and keep ownership of what they create

Indigenous-owned businesses and initiatives

• Cheekbone Beauty, founded by Jenn Harper (Anishinaabe)
• Indigenous Box, which helps Indigenous businesses reach new customers. We’ve used it for client gifts.
• Mini Tipi, and WOVEN, its youth initiative with Soaring Circle, a charity supporting Indigenous youth in education, careers and entrepreneurship
• Nish Tees, James Hodgson, based in Peterborough