Demonstrators march up Yonge Street in Toronto as Canada marks National Day of Awareness for Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and 2SLGBTQI+ people, also known as Red Dress Day, on May 5.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Iloradanon Efimoff is an assistant psychology professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. Ry Moran is the inaugural associate university librarian – reconciliation at the University of Victoria. Mary Agnes Welch is a partner at Probe Research Inc. in Winnipeg. All are on the team of researchers who co-created the Canadian Reconciliation Barometer.
When Iloradanon graduated high school in 2010, she couldn’t have imagined her Fraser Valley school offering an Indigenous language course. Seven years later, though, Haida became one of many Indigenous languages offered for credit in B.C. high schools.
Today, she introduces herself in Haida at the start of each semester at the Toronto university where she teaches, where she has seen shifts in attitudes toward reconciliation across Canada every year. As a student, she did not even hear the phrase “residential school”; now, students arrive in her classes well versed in the history and continuing impact of residential schools, and hungry to learn more about Canada’s settler-colonial history and present.
But what about the Canadians who lack access to these evolving curricula? What about the million-plus newcomers who have arrived in Canada since 2020?
There are many things worth celebrating ahead of National Indigenous Peoples Day. People living in Canada were more likely to know about residential schools and agree this system caused harm to Indigenous peoples – deliberately, on a large scale and for a long time – compared with 2021, according to the latest Canadian Reconciliation Barometer, a huge national survey of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada. Roughly 69 per cent of non-Indigenous people (and 86 per cent of Indigenous people) agree that past harmful actions continue to negatively affect Indigenous peoples today.
Meanwhile, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada were more likely in 2022 than 2021 to agree on the state of reconciliation; for example, we are more likely to agree that Indigenous people are not thriving. Though this fact is itself not a positive thing, our agreement on it is. Agreeing that there is a problem – a huge one that strikes at the heart of Canada’s egalitarian ideals – is the first step toward fixing it.
With more Canadians understanding the reality of residential schools and growing agreement on where we are at on reconciliation, we are making progress toward the “truth” part of truth and reconciliation.
But in a way, that is the easy part. The barometer reveals that there is a lot of hard work left to be done. For instance: We do not agree that there is continuing inequity in systems such as child welfare, criminal justice and health care. Many non-Indigenous people are not interested in or do not support Indigenous causes and communities. There is little cross-community interaction, as non-Indigenous people are largely not attending Indigenous cultural events or supporting Indigenous justice movements. And only about one-quarter of us disagree that Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada have equal life outcomes, even though much work must still be done to create equality in areas such as employment, physical health, education, mental health and financial security.
Broader challenges must also be faced. Headlines denying residential-school harm, the fading dialogue about reconciliation, and the focus on performative, symbolic changes over systemic and structural action are all barriers to reconciliation.
We are not the only ones feeling ambivalent about reconciliation. The Yellowhead Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University recently stopped tracking the 94 Calls to Action because of a lack of action. Progress on the National Council for Reconciliation, promised in 2015 to track progress and ensure accountability, has been achingly slow.
Despite halting progress in some areas, these past few years have brought real hope for reconciliation. We have seen Canada’s first provincial First Nations premier in Manitoba, Canada’s first Inuk governor-general, a host of new courses in Indigenous languages and culture in schools across the country, and the inaugural National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. But if non-Indigenous people in Canada are serious about being allies in pursuit of reconciliation and keeping this hope alive, they need their own “firsts” to move some of the indicators tracked by the barometer.
Crucially, we need to get to know each other a bit better. One of the most powerful figures in the barometer survey is that only four in 10 of us – Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike – have friendly and comfortable relationships with each other that are based on cultural respect and trust. While it is unrealistic for all of us to sit around a dinner table together, there are concrete steps people can take to build relationships with Indigenous knowledge, perspectives and, ultimately, people. There are many Indigenous scholars, filmmakers, artists, musicians and more from whom we can learn to create a more grounded understanding of what this country’s past, present and future look like from Indigenous perspectives. This National Indigenous History Month, seek out that content.
Of course, reconciliation is not about hugging it out in the absence of fully realized human rights. The systems and structures that benefit some, while actively working against Indigenous peoples’ rights, need to change. But Canadians need to use the relationships they form to tear down these barriers. This requires first knowing what those barriers are, seeing the injustice within them, and then working together to build better systems and structures moving forward.
Reconciliation is the establishment of respectful relationships, as defined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The barometer shows that despite progress, we still have a long way to go – and reminds us that reconciliation is possible only if the hard work is shared.