Indigenous Truth And Reconciliation Quotes

Rebuilding an inequitable and harmful relationship is not easy. But for the good of all our children – Indigenous and not – the hard work must begin.

Each of the denominations had to deal with both alleged and actual sexual misbehaviour involving missionaries and young people in their care.

As part of their offensive, the British experimented with germ warfare, distributing among the Indians blankets that were from a smallpox hospital at Fort Pitt.25

Sir Francis Bond Head, who concluded shortly after his arrival in 1835 that the civilization policy was a failure. To him, Aboriginal people were a dying people who should be moved aside for settlers. He proposed relocating them to Manitoulin Island, where he expected them to live their final years in peaceful isolation.89 To achieve his goal, he organized what amounted to a forced surrender of over 670,000 hectares (1.5 million acres) of the Bruce Peninsula in 1836.

Children were sent to the schools to ‘protect’ them from the influence of their own parents and culture. Like reserves, the schools themselves were places of isolation in which children were to be ‘civilized’ and assimilated. As with all Aboriginal policies, the schools were funded in such a cost-conscious manner that, no matter what one thought of their goals, they were doomed to fail from the very beginning.

Mount Elgin students had less than one hour for recreation in a day that stretched from 5:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m.

In Aboriginal terms, the kinship was one that engaged concern and support with a respect for the autonomy of the individual, while, to the Canadians, it was one in which the children would obey the parent.

When governments talk of truth and reconciliation, and then push unwanted infrastructure projects, please remember this: There can be no truth unless we admit to the 'why' behind centuries of abuse and land theft. And there can be no reconciliation when the crime is still in progress. Only when we have the courage to tell the truth about our old stories will the new stories arrive to guide us. Stories that recognize that the natural world and all its inhabitants have limits. Stories that teach us how to care for each other and regenerate life within those limits. Stories that put an end to the myth of endlessness once and for all.

A land acknowledgement or territorial acknowledgement is a formal statement, often spoken at the beginning of a public event, that it is taking place on land originally inhabited by or belonging to indigenous people. In Canada, land acknowledgements became popular after the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (which argued that the country's Indian residential school system had amounted to cultural genocide) and the election of liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau that same year.[2] By 2019, they were a regular practice at events including National Hockey League games, ballet performances and parliament meetings. Critics of land acknowledgements have described them as excesses of political correctness or expressed concerns that they amount to empty gestures that avoid actually addressing the issues of indigenous communities. Ensuring the factual accuracy of acknowledgments can be difficult due to problems like conflicting land claims or unrecorded land exchanges between indigenous groups. In the United States, the practice of land acknowledgements has been described as "catching on" as of 2020.

Many children did not survive. Thousands of children died in the schools. Thousands more were injured and traumatized. All were deprived of a measure of dignity and pride. We, as a country, lost the opportunity to create the nation we could have been.

Sir John A. Macdonald warned that if Asian Canadians had the vote, they would “send Chinese representatives” to Parliament, where they would enforce “Asiatic principles,” which he described as “immoralities” that were “abhorrent to the Aryan race and Aryan principles.”86

Colonialism also impacted the colonists. In 1857, the British executed those who had taken part in the Indian Mutiny by firing cannons at them at point-blank range. One young British soldier wrote to his mother, “You can’t imagine such a horrible sight.” A month later, however, he confided that “I … think no more of stringing up or blowing away half a dozen mutineers before breakfast than I do of eating the same meal.

How can we believe in reconciliation in the face of such quietly violent disregard? However, persist we must.

Reconciliation requires systemic change. it is not about rote land acknowledgement, apologies, and carefully staged public relations events designed to give the impression of a sincere effort.

Apologies must go hand in hand with substantive, systemic change, which, in turn, will support meaningful reconciliation.