University aims to travel path to reconciliation

Gary Manson spent one year at a residential school and a decade more in reform schools and jails, often awash in his own anger.

For him, truth means acknowledging the abuse that began his first night at school. Reconciliation means somehow putting things right.

“The truth is hard for people to hear,” the 68-year-old said. “When you put it together with the country we are in, reconciliation means to make things better.”

Manson, a member of the Snuneymuxw First Nation in Nanaimo, serves as elder-in-residence at Vancouver Island University, which is hosting Reconciliation Road, a series of talks, workshops and events to engage people in the process of reconciliation between aboriginal and nonaboriginal people.

Sharon Hobenshield, director of aboriginal education at the university, said she believes all of Canada will have to sit in a position of discomfort for a period.

Aboriginal people will have to develop enough trust to tell their stories, confident they will be heard. Non-aboriginal people, meanwhile, will have to have the patience and strength to acknowledge the harm, even horror, landed on aboriginal peoples.

That’s the truth part, and it’s not over yet, Hobenshield said.

“There are still a lot of people who haven’t told their stories and non-indigenous people who haven’t stood and listened to those stories or witnessed some of those truths,” she said.

“We will have to be in a position of uncomfortableness for a long time before we uncover those truths.”

The tougher part of the process is the reconciliation.

Hobenshield, a member of the Gitxsan First Nation, said she worries modern Canada might be too anxious, even impatient, to fix everything all at once with First Nations peoples. Nobody should expect one answer, one policy or one program to make it all better, she said.

“That’s the hardest thing about the reconciliation process, to get past this illusion that we can just get to one aspect and then we’ll all have good feelings,” she said.

“Reconciliation is about being committed to long conversations, about being uncomfortable as we unpack different layers of the things that have kept us apart.”

Ralph Nilson, president of Vancouver Island University, noted that education, the old residential school system, was once an instrument of oppression.

Now, he said, education must do its best to further, honour and respect the truth and reconciliation process.

“It is precisely because education was once a tool of oppression of aboriginal and mis-education of all Canadians that education now will hold the key to reconciliation,” he said.

Nilson said coming to a place of reconciliation will have an enormous impact on the provincial economy. Without the enthusiasm and good will of aboriginal peoples, he said, many developments will not happen.

“There has to be involvement and conversation with communities on the coast and the First Nations communities,” he said.

“These conversations are going to be about education, they are going to be about co-development and really seeing each other. It will be about working together for a shared economic future and a common social fabric.”