Indigenous Kannada Reconciliation

I'd appreciate if John Siliboy got to read this from our visit at the wellness center in New Glasgow last month..

Indigenous Kannada Reconciliation

I'd appreciate it if John Siliboy would read this after our visit at the wellness center New Glasgow last month (I had asked about whether or not the land acknowledgement had been done)

True Decolonization and Reconciliation:

We want the learning without the surrender. 

We want the language without the loss. 

We want to be useful, ethical, informed, and still untouched by what the word actually asks of us.

Five truths have become difficult to avoid.

1. Decolonization/reconciliation is not self-improvement.

It is not a better workshop, a warmer policy, or a more inclusive institutional mood. Tuck and Yang remind us that decolonization/reconciliation is not a metaphor. It concerns land, power, life, and the unsettling of settler certainty. If we turn it into professional language, we have already made it smaller than it is.

2. Responsibility is not guilt.

Guilt can become another way of centring ourselves. Responsibility is harder. It asks what we benefit from, what we normalize, what we inherit, what we protect, and what we avoid because it may cost us comfort or status. The TRC’s Calls to Action are not invitations to feel better. They are obligations to act differently.

3. Consent is not consultation.

This is one of the deepest institutional habits. We ask, record, summarize, and proceed. But free, prior, and informed consent means something more demanding: enough time, enough information, no coercion, and a real possibility that Indigenous authority changes the decision. Anything less is engagement theatre.

4. Humility is not tone.

We have used careful words and mistaken them for changed relations. Real humility changes the room. It changes who speaks first, who is paid, who holds data, who sets the agenda, who can refuse, and who carries authority. Humility is not how gently we speak. It is what we stop controlling.

5. We are not the exception.

Just because we care, read, listen, doesn't mean we have escaped the settler reflex. We have not. We have only learned to make usefulness sound more ethical. The desire to help can still be a desire to organize the world around ourselves.

The epiphany is not that decolonization or reconciliation is too difficult to understand.

Work begins when we ask the hard questions:

What must we stop taking?

What must we stop controlling?

What must we return?

What must we refuse to benefit from?

What must we make possible without needing to be centred?

That is where learning becomes responsibility.

That is where responsibility becomes relationship.