Episode 1 - Indigenous Perspectives: Stories from Indigenous Public Servants
The ESDC Indigenous Perspectives podcasts explore being Indigenous in the Public Service, what reconciliation is for individuals, and what it can be for Canada. In their own words, public servants give voice to diverse experiences - and struggles - around what it means to be Indigenous: from being firmly rooted in community, to living in two worlds but belonging in neither. Discussions about the legacies of history, the role of culture in the workplace, and how to move forward on reconciliation shed light on the varied factors that motivate Indigenous people to join, and stay, in the Public Service.
Duration: 40:04 minutes
Transcript
(soundbyte: Janice Edgar)
“It’s kind of mind-boggling that a country that I cherish so much as a Canadian, I feel like we’re such a good country. And you know I struggle with that now, I struggle with my Canadianness, and what that really means to me now.”
(music: “Hoka” by Boogey The Beat)
Indigenous Perspectives. Stories from Indigenous public servants.
“Tansi.”
In Northern Manitoba, where I was born and educated from Kindergarten to University, that was the greeting I heard. Cree, for Hello and How are you?
“M'on ana'ntaw,” I hope.
This is Indigenous Perspectives, a program where we hope to explore the experiences and perspectives of Indigenous public servants, what reconciliation means to them, and what it can be for Canada.
The song you are hearing, “Hoka”, is given to us by DJ and producer “Boogey The Beat”. “Boogey” who lives in Winnipeg where he also goes by the name Les Boulanger, is Anishinaabe, and he mixes traditional Pow Wow music with hip-hop with power and majesty, and I thank him for his gift to this program.
While reconciliation is a topic of current conversation in Canada and the focus of this audio series, it's not a new topic and the conversation began a long time ago.
In July 1, 1967, on Canada's 100th birthday, Chief Dan George delivered his “Lament for Confederation” in front of a crowd 32,000 people at Empire Stadium…
We know him as Chief Dan George, but that wasn't his name. That was the name given to him when he was swallowed up by the residential school system at age 5.
His name was only one of many things he had taken away, and that all Indigenous people had taken away, during this dark time in Canadian history.
But he took that name, accepted it, and became great in spite of it. In spite of all he lost.
He was a longshoreman for 27 years before an accident forced him to look for other work.3) And so he became a construction and school bus driver, and then in his 60s… a renowned television and movie actor.
As a child, I listened intently to him speak. Passion and wisdom flowed from his gentle voice. I remember wishing he was my grandfather. I wished he could tell me stories.
And I wasn't the only one. As an actor, and a poet, and an author, and a social activist, he became the face of his people for generation. The Elder. And he did not squander the opportunities that his fame had given him. He did not rest comfortably and bask in the adoration. He did not lose sight of who he was, and where he'd come from. He never left. Even after he became a star, he remained on the Burrard reserve in North Vancouver, living in the same house he had built for his wife and children.
And he worked. And on that day in 1967, he risked everything.
He'd rehearsed the soliloquy for his family, who loved it. But would Canada love it? Or accept it? Or tolerate it? Would he leave the stadium alive?
John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X had been assassinated for speaking out.
And when he'd uttered the last words, there was silence from the crowd at Empire Stadium. Seconds of silence, in a space that held 32,000 people.
Silence until, they stood up from their seats, and clapped, and cheered, sustaining an ear-splitting acclamation of nearly 10 minutes duration. Applause as long as the speech itself.
And Chief Dan George, cried. And his family, standing behind him, cried.
And for a moment, everything seemed possible.
And in the years ahead, before his death in 1981, some of his dreams for the future came to pass, and more, in the decades after.
But how much and how little has changed in the 50 years since his historic speech?
What does reconiliation mean, and how far have we still to go?
That's what this series hopes to cover.
And now, in their own words, the thoughts and feelings of some of Canada's own public servants.
(flute: Greg Reiter)
TODD:
Speaking only from your own perception and your own perspective, what does reconciliation mean to you personally?
TIM:
Great question. It's broad but it's meant to I guess be inspirational. And I what I do say is, you know, “those that understand will never judge. Those that judge will never understand” and what I mean by that is you need to create a space to allow reconciliation to be infused in either your day to day life, your personal life, your view of the other – in this case Indigenous peoples – and maybe understand that what was taught to me as a child or my current thinking maybe has evolve a bit, and “understanding the other” is reconciliation. “Now I get it.” And I think that can be infused whether it be LGBT issues, you know, however you interpret the other. “Ok, now I get it. Yesterday, I didn't. Today, I do.” That's reconciliation.
ANDREA:
I have such a hard time with reconciliation as a term. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this over the last couple years. People often ask me when I was working at INAC. I was part of like an Indigenous employees kind of group and we had all kinds of talk about reconciliation. I was asked, “Well, what does that mean to you?” What reconciliation is to me is that we will eventually get to a point where we won't have to talk about reconciliation. It'll just become mutual respect and understanding and moving forward together will just be part of what we do. We won't need to label it. We need to talk about things all the time. Granted it means a lot of different things to different people.
JEANNETTE:
Reconciliation is about resilience. It's about honoring the truth and reconciling with the future. Language is an instrument to reconciliation and I wrote a little poem that speaks to this theme:
Parler notre langue
C’est bâtir nos communautés
Parler notre langue
C’est renforcer nos familles
Parler notre langue
C’est renouer avec nos racines
Parler notre langue
C’est recréer nos traditions et notre culture
Parler notre langue
C’est assurer notre survie et la continuation de la vie
L’apprentissage de sa langue sacrée est une responsabilité personnelle, familiale et communautaire
PAMELA:
Reconciliation for me means having a Canada where wherever I live and wherever I walk I hear Indigenous languages. I see Indigenous monuments of history. I can taste the food wherever I want and I can hear the music. Just like the way the Italians have Italy, Germans have Germany, East Indians have India – that, for me, is reconciliation. And if by sharing my idea of reconciliation to the non-Indigenous people, if they can help in their job do that work and where I want the non-Indigenous people to start – as Indigenous people are slowly doing, too – is to start reconciliation within themselves. So what does that mean? So that means like you've got to start your healing journey.
JANICE:
It's kind of mind boggling that a country that I cherish so much – as a Canadian I feel like we're such a good country and we talk about our land, you know, this beautiful land – and then, you know, what do we do to the land? We've lost our connection to the land. We don't respect it. We don't take care of it. We rape it. We ravage it. You know, I struggle with that now. I struggle with my Canadianess and what that really means to me now. And you know I'm somebody who cries when they play when I hear the national anthem and when I lived overseas I was very proud to call myself a Canadian and share that world with those when I was in Arabia and with others and to talk about this beautiful country. And yet, the more I learn about our history and the past and our record with Indigenous peoples the more I struggle with whether that pride is misplaced. And when I hear people say, “Oh, that happened a long time ago, you know. Get over it.” You can't reconcile things like this by just getting over it any more than I could reconcile my depression and my trauma that I experienced in my past without really looking at it and peeling things away. And discovering what it was that was truly making me so sad and really looking it in the eye and facing it and working to overcome it and accept it as a part of who I am and a part of my life story and moving forward. But with full understanding and full knowledge of what my past has been. So I guess I see parallels between each individual and where our country is in its healing journey.
PAMELA:
Everybody, l like I said earlier, is walking around and pain and that means it's our responsibility as an adult to look at that pain and to heal it so that we can become better parents, better employees, make better contributions to our small community in whatever part of the city we live in and be able to make a better contribution to our whole entire nation, Canada. But it all starts from ourselves. First we have to reconcile with ourselves. And then we can start reconciling outside of us in our family because they're reconciling with those in our community and the more we work and we can better reconcile with our nation and we all have to do it together. For me that's what reconciliation is. And, you know, it's all about relationships. A relationship with myself, the relationship with all the people around me, but that's where it starts for me, is my own healing journey and I would like everybody else do the same thing, because it's their responsibility to start with themselves first.
ANDREA:
I don't come from a family that has members that went to residential schools, so that part of reconciliation means something to those people. It doesn't mean that to me. My grandparents’ generation were really good at outrunning the Indian Agents, so they never went, which was great. But to me it's getting to a point where we can just talking about it, where we can just move forward together. I feel that there is there's a lot of talking but I don't see the action yet. I don't know what that means. How are we going to quantify this? How are we quantifying reconciliation? How are we going to say, “Hey, in 2020, we've made 'x' progress at reconciliation.” What does that mean? Like, if I can't see what it means to me, I wonder what it means to the rest of Indigenous Canada? What does it mean to the Government of Canada? What does it mean to Canadians? I have no idea. If I'm having this much problem with it, I wonder, what do other people think about it?
TOONEEJOULEE:
For me, it means that there is acknowledgement of work to be done. There's acknowledgement that there are issues in the past that need to be corrected and are being corrected and continue to be corrected. Most recently Inuit in Newfoundland and Labrador received an apology as part of their residential school when the Government of Canada apologized to residential school survivors. Ten years ago or so Inuit in Newfoundland and Labrador were not included in that because the Government of Canada, the federal government, stated that it was a provincial run school and responsibility therefore the federal government didn't have any obligations to that demographic area. So, that's one example of reconciliation correcting some of the past policy or political or program decisions.
LEESIE:
I want to use an example of the recent apology. Prime Minister apologized to residential school survivors in Nunatsiavut. They had been excluded the first round and the Inuk man who kindly accepted that apology was wise because Inuit need to continue to move on. This was part of reconciliation. Now if you look up the Innu Nation, they did not accept that apology. This means that the Innu are put on hold for now until they're ready. So for Inuit, an apology is part of reconciliation. There has to be an acknowledgement and then acceptance so we can move ahead, move on. This is part of reconciliation.
RYAN:
So from my experience in the federal public service there is definitely a different feel especially with new government. But again I can understand how a lot of people have [inaudible] towards success because there's not really going to be a whole lot of tangible results. And I think people see that in the government itself too but there's a lot of going through the motions and it's something that when I first heard in the government I was trying really hard to get in in any way, and I tried to get in through equity through being native and it's something where there's all these policies and all these actions that are available but nobody really knows how to connect the wires and nobody really has any interest to look into it. There's no support system so I think that's kind of the same feeling that people may get when we talk about reconciliation. They're a little bit worried that it's going to be this long a roundabout journey where people get big conversations and arguments but maybe not really get anywhere when it's said and done.
JEANETTE:
Right now we're hearing the word reconciliation bandied about incessantly and one wonders what it truly means. Accountants use the term for those tables, the books are balanced, the check-book matches, the bank statement confirms the company's accounting records, or even an individual's. In theology it's returning to faith or harmony after conflict. Reconciliation can be to ideas, narratives, persons, groups. The term is also used to refer to a process to a positive outcome or goal. In light of the Truth and Reconciliation Report's 94 calls to action wherein the word is repeated over sixty five times. What does reconciliation truly mean to the Indigenous people in Canada – the First Nations, the Metis, the Inuit? Secondly, what are the employees of the government doing towards achieving this goal and in particular number 57 of the calls to action. The government of Canada, that I I'm privileged to be an employee of, is the country's largest employer and has the machinery carrying out the Government's agenda. The public service can make a real difference and working towards reconciliation so there are thirty four federal organisations that are responsible for fulfilling the Government of Canada's obligations commitments and constitutional responsibilities to Indigenous peoples.
JANICE:
This is a huge, huge challenge and I feel as though we've been here before. We were here when you know the RCAP report was released. There was an article in The Globe and Mail by I think her name was Elisia Elliot. She's Mohawk from Six Nations and it was an incredibly fascinating read. And she talked about the frustration about not having been consulted no consultations when you know the government a government made the decision to that we're going to fix this problem by creating two new departments: the Department of Crown and Indigenous Relations and Indigenous Services and her comment was: “You know, that's what we do all the time.” And she documented in her article like all the different names for Indigenous Affairs over the years and how we, you know, bureaucratically we make these shifts. And again it's like it's like smoke and mirrors. You know and so, is it real? Are we really ready to do the work? It's like asking an alcoholic, “Are you ready to really commit to not having another drink?” and how painful and difficult that is. Or somebody who's addicted to anything and to peel off those layers of pain and hurt and really look and really be willing to see what got you there and acknowledge it. It's painful. Anybody who struggled in self growth. And so for a country to go through that process, to me it's no different. It's really no different. Layer upon layer of things that we've told ourselves to make things better. But maybe we were just running from the truth.
TOONEEJOULEE:
The other thing for reconciliation is finding a place for non-Indigenous people to really learn about First Nations, Inuit, Metis people and the communities. I think it's the responsibility for each individual to learn more about it.
TIM:
And narrowing it down I think I would argue can be a bit – I don't want to say “dangerous” – but you could eliminate certain interpretations of what reconciliation is. I use the term reconciliation as “understanding the other” and what I mean by that is I give presentations to allow people to understand a bit of our history, the impacts of residential schools not only on Indigenous individuals, survivors, inter-generational survivors, but you know I try and inform people that this country as a whole is wounded. So reconciliation can be whatever you define it through whatever interpretation you want. So if you happen to go to a church that could be a different interpretation. If you were the Government of Canada it could be a different interpretation. If you're a teacher it could be a different interpretation. So all of those are accurate and I try and just kind of inform people so that they can understand the other and if there is a space to understand the other, you know, the realities are it wasn't taught in our history books. Not a lot of Canadians knew about the legacy of residential schools and residential schools themselves. So but if there is a space for people to be open enough to understand our history then we have a space so someone can define through whatever filter they're looking through: one of reconciliation.
ANDREA:
I like measurable things and measuring social progress is difficult. There's all kinds of ways to do it. But I feel like if we're going to say to the rest of the world, to the United Nations, to people in the Commonwealth, to Canadians, that “Hey, we're making strides on reconciliation” then we need to define what that means with Indigenous people. And I'm not sure… there is definitely not a common definition of what it means and what success looks like. some people may consider it to be, you know, a complete implementation of all historic treaties. A complete implementation of modern treaties. OK. But I don't know if that's what it means to me. I think to me it just means mutual respect and acknowledgement that things happened in the past and like putting the supports in place that Indigenous people can live the same way as other Canadians. There's a massive gap there. But like that gets into a much larger issue that was an issue before reconciliation was a term. So, closing socioeconomic gaps. I think if we could do that then we'd have no talk of reconciliation because there wouldn't be any problem. Everybody would be moving forward using the same kind of goalposts, like moving towards same objective. There'd be no more gaps.
JEANNETTE:
Now other organizations are also commenting on reconciliation and the National Aboriginal Economic Development Board has highlighted significant gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians in terms of high school completion, university completion, labour force participation, employment, and average annual income. And this is their quote from their book, their report: “Providing equal opportunity for Indigenous people will help Canada address the ongoing economic challenges caused by low productivity and demographic change from an ageing population.” That is from Chief Terrance Paul, board member and chief from Membertou First Nation. This includes equal access to education and training and economic opportunities more broadly, from access to jobs and equal employment conditions to resources for starting a new business. In its reconciliation report, it continues and estimates that closing the productivity gap would lead to an increase of twenty seven point seven billion to Canada's GDP per year and some of the estimated increases in employment income earned by Indigenous peoples across all provinces and territories. Additionally there is an estimated 8 billion opportunity dividends to gain each year from reduced poverty and lower healthcare, social, and other associated costs. So this means that if Indigenous people had the same education, if Indigenous peoples were given the same access to economic opportunities, if the poverty rate among Indigenous people were reduced, overall if the gap in opportunities for Indigenous communities across Canada were closed, this is the result of twenty seven point seven billion annually for a boost of one point five percent of Canada's economy.
JANICE:
When I applied for the Free Agent program, I knew in my mind the only thing I wanted to work on was reconciliation and wellness. Reconciliation is a big word and for me it really is about helping people understand a different way of being and recognising that there is value in that understanding. You know, I've been coordinating some Blanket Exercises in the past couple of weeks at Fisheries and Oceans and it's a powerful learning experience because people can immerse themselves into the history and become an Indigenous person for a short time and live the history within an hour – five hundred years of history. But it puts you in the role and the first time I did it I just remember… the first time I felt so moved around. I just got pushed around and you were living here and you get pushed over there and through that history I was really like… the feeling I got was it was really tumultuous and nobody cared about me. It was just what they wanted to do, what the settlers wanted, and I was just a pawn being moved around that. That was one of the big things that I felt when I did that exercise. The other thing that happened was I was, you know, identified as one of the people who was enfranchised in that role play. So I lost my status because I became a teacher. And when that happened I like I sat down after that when we had the sharing circle and I was bawling. And I was thinking, wow, I wonder if that happened. I wonder if that happened to my ancestors. Is it possible that somebody in my lineage lost their status for something like that. I don't know. There's a lot of mystery around my ancestry and sometimes I question it and the more I learn about how unwelcomed and how degraded Indigenous people were in the past I can understand why people didn't want to admit it and they'd want to hide it. And they wouldn't want people to know. And so they would become assimilated to protect themselves.
JEANNETTE:
Right now we have Indigenous awareness relationship and it's become a top priority for this government. And the school of public service is hard at work on its own contribution to reconciliation. And they've developed an Indigenous Learning Series and I invite people to participate in the upcoming workshops. I am one of the facilitators. The series will range from events and courses to videos and jobs. And what it's going to do is going to help us understand our duties and obligations. We're going to understand indigenous peoples histories, contemporary experiences, legal rights and hopefully foster the creation of respectful relationships and effective collaboration. And as an individual what can I do for reconciliation? Ry Moran who is the director of the Truth and Reconciliation Centre in Winnipeg asks five questions. Do I know any Indigenous people? If not, why? Have I ever participated in ceremony? If not, why? Am I able to name the traditional territory I stand? If not, why? Have I meaningfully engaged in deep conversation with Indigenous people? If not, why? And have I read an Indigenous author? If not, why? For me, books are great conversations starters, as are meals and a cup of coffee. It would be Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people sitting in a circle speaking to one another, sharing a meal together, participating in ceremonies throughout the day. The healing work happens when we allow new friendships to take hold and to continue to share meals together as the years pass.
TIM:
You know the human dimension is limited on so many levels, right, and Justice Sinclair said, and I agree with him, you know, residential schools impacted Indigenous peoples for seven generations. We can't just simply apologize or say I'm sorry, or change a policy and it's over. This country as a whole is wounded. Indigenous peoples, when you look at all the healthy social indicators, are at the lowest level on multiple sides. So when you see those levels, whether they be the suicide rate, education levels, average income levels, when those are equitable – not exactly the same, but equitable to other sectors of society – then I think we can start patting ourselves on the back and that's going to take a long time. There are still issues that people look at the news and residential schools was only one policy. There were multiple policies that were held against Indigenous peoples and it was just two weeks ago we saw the announcements on the Sixties Scoop, non-implementation of treaties and others as well so this is just one of the issues that this country needs to unpack. And for Indigenous peoples need to heal from so I would make the same argument as Justice Sinclair which is, you know, five or six generations. It's going to be a long time but it's something that this country can take on. Once the, like I said, the most vulnerable sector of society comes back to center. Then I think you can start and that's going to be a sustained commitment required at multiple levels. And, you know, the calls to action – 94 of them – I think every Canadian can see themselves in at least one of them. So I think, you know, a good start is reading the executive summary of the TRC final report, the calls to action – 94 of them – and look at how can people contribute towards reconciliation.
Indigenous Perspectives: Stories from Indigenous Public Servants is a production of Employment and Social Development Canada
All opinions expressed on Indigenous Perspectives are strictly those of the individual and are not necessarily those of their employer.
Public servants featured in this episode were Andrea Dykstra, Janice Edgar, Jeannette Fraser, Ryan Jeddore, Tooneejoulee Kootoo-Chiarello, Pamela Kupeuna, Tim O’Loan, and Leesie Naqitarvik.
Our main title music is by Boogey the Beat, with additional music provided Greg Reiter.
I'm Todd Lyons, host, writer, and technical producer for this series.
Thank you for listening.
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