As our McMaster community prepares to join people across Canada in observing the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on Sept. 30, we do so with a fresh and deep commitment to advancing reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
As an institution of higher learning which values and supports Indigenous education, research, knowledge, traditions and partnership, it’s vital that McMaster be an active, serious agent of genuine reconciliation.
Our commitment to reconciliation is now embedded in McMaster’s new strategic plan, Bolder Together, as one of its four foundational pillars.
A moving and important part of our public launch of the plan earlier this month was seeing and hearing Vice-Provost Indigenous Beverly Jacobs compare the plan’s four foundations – Indigenous reconciliation, operational excellence, environmental stewardship and bold thinking – to the principles of peace, trust and friendship.
She described them as the basic components of a healthy relationship, as portrayed by the Haudenosaunee two-row wampum belt she displayed at the podium.
“For a relationship to work, we have to work together in peace, we have to trust each other, and we have to be friends with each other,” Dr. Jacobs said.
The launch event had opened with a stirring delivery of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving address by faith keeper Derek Sandy, which Vice-Provost Jacobs welcomed as a demonstration of the university’s commitment to reconciliation and honouring Indigenous ways of being.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report of 2015 was the stark result of a painful process that made a public record of detailed and indisputable evidence of the governmentally sanctioned residential school system which subjected Indigenous children to forced separation from their families and communities, physical and sexual abuse, malnutrition, disease, uninformed and non-consensual scientific experimentation, forced sterilization and death.
I want to encourage everyone to pause and reflect on Canada’s shameful and harmful residential school program, which for more than a century fractured families in a deliberate attempt to assimilate Indigenous peoples.
Sept. 30 is a solemn and important day for everyone to pause and reflect and to consider the actions we have taken, and which we plan to take, to advance reconciliation with Indigenous communities.
We are observing the day here at McMaster by cancelling classes but keeping the university open, as a way to facilitate participation in campus activities and events that foster understanding and promote reconciliation.
The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is a time for non-Indigenous Canadians, including me, to refresh our commitment to learn, acknowledge, remember and take action to reconcile the multi-generational hardship that Indigenous people continue to endure.
It is a commitment we must keep every day of the year, by remaining cognizant of our ongoing responsibility to respect, understand and include Indigenous knowledge and culture, to build on our foundation of Indigenous education and to dedicate ourselves sincerely and permanently to reconciliation.
Susan L. Tighe, President and Vice-Chancellor, McMaster University