Who Carries the Truth?

For our peoples, we have always known who we are. Our lineage and clans passed down, we were gifted names to carry with honour and pride, we held sacred stories to teach lessons and share understanding of the world we were entrusted to steward. Since time immemorial, we have known ourselves and the role we play amongst all our relations.

Before contact, there was no land-ownership or borders — we were all children of the land, entrusted to care for it and all our human and non-human relatives. We would fish, hunt and gather knowing that the land needed to sustain all beings, and understood thetime it needed to heal and regenerate. There was nothing broken in this way of being. It had sustained us since time immemorial. And then others arrived, carrying ways of being, knowing and doing entirely their own.

It is understood by most that the things we do not understand can evoke fear. Some approached our peoples with curiosity and mutual understanding. But many met what was different with fear, and from that fear, superiority. European norms of hierarchy and possession were introduced, soon followed by control and oppression. Because our ways of being, knowing and doing were so different from their own, work was done to "save" us: through treaties, and later through legislation such as the Indian Act, which reached past how we governed ourselves and into how we were permitted to identify as peoples at all. That machinery did not disappear. It still decides, to this day, who is recognized and who must prove it — in the status cards we carry, in how our Nations hold elections, in the ordinary systems that still ask us to account for ourselves.

That saviourship was never rescue. It was control, fueled by a fear of what was too different to sit comfortably beside. So the truth is that the oppression of our peoples was necessary to the comfort of the settlers, and this truth is something very hard for many Canadians to sit with in modern society. The idea that the society that they love and share pride for was built off the hardship of the original peoples of the land is uncomfortable. Canada as a country has begun the process of reconciliation, however before true reconciliation can happen, there must be truth, and acceptance of the truth.

Speaking to the truth requires fact and evidence. And the facts tell us something many would rather not hear: this is not distant history. It is not the ancient Romans, or the Egyptian Pharaohs, or some black mark left behind in a century no one living can remember. Much of it happened within the lifetimes of the people reading this.

Consider the proximity. The last residential school in Canada did not close until 1996. While Indigenous children were still inside those walls, children across the country were growing up in Disney's golden age — The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, and Pocahontas, a film that recast the colonization our peoples were still surviving as a romance, and handed a generation the very myths of the white saviour and the savage Indian that justified everything the schools were built to do. In 2007, the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history, was implemented. That same year the first iPhone was released. The pass system, which required our peoples to obtain written permission from an Indian agent simply to leave their reserves, was in effect until 1941. The racially segregated federal "Indian hospitals" did not fully close until 1981. The Sixties Scoop carried on into the 1980s. Birth alerts were only phased out between 2019 and 2023. And it was not until 2021 that the unmarked graves of 215 children were confirmed at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School — a place that operated until 1969.

The timeline goes back further still. The first residential school opened in Brantford in 1831, targeting Mohawk children, decades before Canada became a country in 1867, and before the Indian Act was enacted in 1876. Potlatches, powwows and other ceremonies were banned from 1884 to 1951. It was not until the 1980s and beyond that lawsuits against the Government of Canada and the churches began in earnest, and 1990 that the Oka Crisis, a 78-day standoff over land rights, forced a national reckoning and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, whose final report landed in 1996. The formal apology from the Government of Canada did not come until 2008, alongside the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose six-volume report and 94 Calls to Action were not released until 2015. The first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation was observed only in 2021. And as of mid-2026, independent trackers like Indigenous Watchdog report that just 14 to 15 of the 94 Calls to Action have been fully completed, even as the Government of Canada states that over 85% of the 76 calls involving federal leadership are completed or “well underway”.

Laid out this way, the point becomes hard to avoid. While many regard the oppressive relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Government of Canada as "history," much of that machinery of control operated well into modern life, and in some cases remains today through the Indian Act. Our peoples understood the devastating impact of residential schools from the very beginning, the abuses widely known and shared within our communities, yet it took until the 1980s for the public to begin to understand, until the 1990s for the Government of Canada to begin acknowledging its role, and until the late 2000s for a formal apology. Denialism has persisted throughout — sustained not only by what was taught, and never untaught, in schools, but by a broader unwillingness to accept a history that unsettles the story Canada tells about itself. It became a harder position to hold after the graves were confirmed in 2021, and still, there are those who deny it to this day.

This is the heart of it. The truth has never been hidden. It has been carried, openly and at great cost, by our peoples, in our experiences, in our stories, and, when that was not deemed enough, in the physical evidence of graves. The burden to prove the truth has always fallen on us, and in many cases the bar has been raised higher the closer we come to proving it. It is the same demand at every scale — whether proving what was done to our children or proving, at a counter, that we are who we say we are. What has been withheld is not the truth. It is the willingness to accept it. Reconciliation has never stalled for lack of evidence. It stalls where acceptance is refused.

This burden of proof does not only live in the large reckonings. It lives in the ordinary ones, too. Long after the treaties were signed and the Act was written, the demand that we account for ourselves settled into the routine of everyday life. It shows up quietly, in the administrative labour of proving that we are who we have always known ourselves to be.

Think back to the status card — a card that names us as belonging, issued by the very system that once sought to define us out of existence, and one that must be renewed, re-proven, re-documented on a schedule set by others. For many of our peoples it is a familiar rhythm: gathering the paperwork, making the trip, waiting, explaining, confirming an identity that was never in question to begin with. It is a small thing. But small things, repeated across a lifetime and across generations, are their own kind of weight. The truth we carry is not only the truth of what was done to us. It is the daily truth of what it still costs to simply be counted.

This burden is not one our peoples should have to carry alone, or carry the way it has always been carried. At OneFeather, it is the labour we have set ourselves to see, and to ease — not because the burden should exist in the first place, it should not, but because for as long as it does, the weight of proving one's own belonging should be lighter than it has been. Recognizing that weight is just the beginning — building the means to lift it, in the ways communities tell us they need, is the work we carry forward.

Despite the hardships, abuse, racism, forced assimilation, and oppression, our peoples are still here fighting for inherent rights, defending the land and approaching relationships with Canadians with open hearts and open minds. While September 30th's National Day for Truth and Reconciliation was born out of somber circumstance, many Nations choose to treat this day as a celebration of what could never be taken from us: our resilience, traditions, culture, identity. We are still here.

OneFeather's head office is on the unceded territory of the Songhees and Lekwungen peoples, and each year we see the annual Songhees powwow held in downtown Victoria on September 30. It is a celebration and invitation to all who occupy the territory to join, learn, and celebrate the vibrancy of our cultures through ceremony. This September 30, we encourage you to seek truth, sit with the uncomfortable, and reconcile in whatever way supports your heart and spirit. Whether you attend an event, participate in meaningful learning,watch an Indigenous film, or read a book by an Indigenous author— reconcile in a good way.