Thanks for empathizing, book-launch audiences, when I confessed: I’d thought I could sidestep all that colonialism baggage by calling myself treaty ally and kin, not realizing the baggage was inside me. The power dynamic of colonialism and white superiority was like a...
The trick about taking the reconciliation challenge is taking responsibility for colonialism without feeling so personally responsible that you freeze and do nothing. Here’s a video of me responding to Cree-Lakota playwright Clifford Cardinal’s Land Acknowledgement...
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...
It's been quite the journey these past four years -- learning about my treaty heritage and the responsiblities associated with it. As part of this, I worked with some Nishnaabe members of the Stoney Point Reserve as they told their story of reclaiming their ancestral...