Can Indigenous and non-Indigenous people live in a treaty relationship despite over 200 years of social, cultural, and political alienation? This is the challenge of reconciliation – and its beautiful promise.
Twenty-five years after the Ipperwash crisis, writer and activist Heather Menzies paid a visit to Nishnaabe territory in Southwestern Ontario, near where her forebears settled on treaty land. She knocked on Cully George's door to offer condolences for the 1995 police-shooting death of her brother, Dudley George, which occurred when the Nishnaabeg reclaimed their homeland at Stoney Point.
As tentative relationships formed, she was invited to help the Elders and other community members tell their story of the broken treaty. But she soon realized that even the most sincere intentions can be steeped in a colonial mindset that hinders understanding, reconciliation, and healing.
In this thoughtful, sensitive, nuanced account, Heather Menzies shares how she learned to open her mind and her heart so she could genuinely listen and be changed.
Meeting My Treaty Kin shows the kind of personal groundwork that reconciliation requires, and the promise that listening with respect holds for healing our relations with one another.
