Truth, Reconciliation, and stuff to read

The Reading List for 27 Sep 24

Photo by Tandem X Visuals on Unsplash

Wednesday evening, The Rooms hosted a talk by Dean Oliver, late of the federal museums and these days working with Know History, a private-sector research company that these days is doing a great deal of work with and for Indigenous communities across Canada.

Oliver’s talk was about memorials and remembrance and the importance of understanding that our collective understanding of what an event or person in the past means will change, sometimes quite dramatically, over time. What is important today may not be important tomorrow or may not be important in the same way and for the same reasons.

Monday is National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Some of you will have it as a day off work. Most won’t in Newfoundland and Labrador. What we will have Monday are plenty of performative displays on social media and in the local news media, especially CBC. What we won’t see much of is truth about Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador and therefore any start at reconciliation of any meaningful kind.

What we will see is stuff like this week when a fellow from the mainland told all the Newfies they’d done a good thing by Red-washing an old holiday in Sin Jawns. And then he rattled off a list of stuff about the police and education - where we need appropriate information - so we could do better. What First Voice calls “appropriate” information about Indigenous people is up for serious question and it's actually a good thing the provincial government has done nothing so far on this. What First Voice is pushing is not appropriate information. It is - for the most part - garbage. Old myths. Fairy tales and self-serving fiction. We need to talk a lot publicly, which is what groups like First Voice shy away from.

What we won’t get from groups like First Voice or anyone else in authority for that matter is hard discussion about exactly who is and who isn’t Indigenous in Newfoundland and Labrador, for example. We won’t hear any talk about the real differences between Newfoundland and Labrador and the rest of Canada historically and today when it comes to Indigenous people. We also won’t hear any talk about substance abuse, which is at the core of many of the health provinces across our province and involves both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

This is another form of the politics of silence and it cuts across all lines socially and culturally in Newfoundland and Labrador. People talk about what is easy and ignore what is hard, what requires a change of mind in everyone, what requires some maturity and what requires us all to come prepared to shed our prejudices and our fears and find the common ground, which is reconciliation for real.

Dean Oliver is an historian, which means he thinks about the world in a certain way. He has learned humility from his experience as a professional historian, his experience in the public service, and now at Know History, Inc. Humility leads us away from the dogma, from the easy declarations by people who haven’t been there of knowing easy answers when the people who’ve been there know there aren’t any. Humility knows that you have to take the anger and the pain from others and then find a way to connect with them anyway, to build trust, to build a meaningful relationship one human to another. Genuine reconciliation, in other words, doesn’t come from a top-down process where people meet behind closed doors and then announce their secret deal to the rest. It is genuinely inclusive and open and meets all comers, some of whom will be found wanting. Saying they are short a few pounds of credibility is part of the process but it’s in that process, that back and forth that we will find both shared truth and genuine reconciliation.

Maybe next year we can start with some truth.

Humility and Understanding. Two key ideas. For more, please…