I want to share this lovely review of Meeting My Treaty Kin: A Journey Toward Reconciliation in last Saturday's Vancouver Sun. It's by Tom Sandborn, who doesn't say "highly recommended" often. I'm also honoured at how he understood my impulse to confront my colonial...
Here’s a link to my piece in the June issue of Broadview Magazine. I describe a moment when I was jolted into awareness of my unconsciously colonial thinking, and was challenged to change. Drawn from my memoir, Meeting My Treaty Kin: A Journey Toward Reconciliation,...
As a writer who’s spent 40 years trying to contribute to public-interest conversations in Canada, I want to salute Canada’s independent bookstores for the vital role they play in nurturing these conversations, and ensuring that diverse voices are heard, and local ones...
It’s hard enough facing the truth about residential schools. It’s even harder to face how the colonial and white-superiority thinking behind those schools’ long existence continues to shadow the thinking of non-Indigenous Canadians – like me. I only started facing...
Here’s a link to my essay in The Globe and Mail on national Truth and Reconciliation Day. It’s on what reconciliation requires of settler Canadians like me. I hope you’ll read it and leave a comment. I invite you to share how colonial thinking has blocked you, or how things changed once you took those blinkers off. Taking the reconciliation challenge is worth it!
Check out this essay I wrote for the Ottawa Citizen about the breakthroughs that occurred once I busted myself out of the colonial thinking boxes in my mind.
When the TRC released its calls to action in 2015, I took some action of my own. I discovered that an 1827 treaty had legitimized my great great grandparents settling in traditional Nishnaabe territory, in present-day Southwestern Ontario, in 1832. Checking out what...
I want to share what I learned as I prepared a keynote speech to a United Church regional council AGM, and also share a link to it so you can see the images. I became even more convinced that the trauma of displacement and dispossession that my forebears experienced...
The how of seeing reality fundamentally conditions the reality we work with. So to me, seeing nature solely through the lens of Western science is part of the problem. This book, reviewed here, reminds environmentalists (and others) of another, more deeply historical...
Heather Menzies received the honour of the Ottawa Book Award for Non-Fiction on Wednesday, October 21, 2015. Here is what the jurors said: Jury Statement: "In this eloquent memoir written from the heart, Menzies takes the reader on a fascinating trip to the...