On Thursday, Sept. 29, students and community members attended a half-day truth and reconciliation symposium titled “Where Reconciliation Happens: Right Relationships & the Land,” held in Bandeen Hall from 1 to 4 p.m. The panel consisted of four main speakers, Dana Lois, Dakota Brandt, Lee McCombe, and David McCombe, as well as a message from the Odanak. The symposium was part of a week of Truth and Reconciliation events supported by the Estrie Higher Education Hub.

Dakota Brandt, from Six Nations of the Grand River, opened with a Haudenosaunee address which is directly translated as the “Words That Come Before All Else.” She explained that the address is recited at an event “to come together as one” and thank people and nature who are present. After a land acknowledgment, Vicky Boldo, Special Advisor Indigenous Student Support, opened with a Cree Thanksgiving song.

Lois Dana, Penobscot, is the Student Life Counsellor at Champlain College, working with Indigenous and intercultural students. She shared the history of the Abanaki on behalf of Odanak Chief Richard O’Bomsawin, who was unable to attend. Dana put up a map on a projector showing the territory where the Abenaki, traditionally called the W8banakiak, lived. She asked the audience what was different about the map, and immediately, someone said, “No borders.” Only geographical features like lakes and mountains were scattered on the map.

“I am a descendant of people who were hunted,” Dana said. She stated that her ancestors, the Penobscot, exist today in far fewer numbers than they did at first contact with European colonizers. In 1755, a proclamation by Spencer Phips designated the Penobscot to be eliminated, offering scalp bounties for men and women worth about 12,000 and 6,000 CAD in modern currency value. 

Next, Brandt spoke about her upbringing and the impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). For her, Truth and Reconciliation is as new a concept to Indigenous people as it is to non-Indigenous people. It was only several years ago when the TRC was active that many people heard for the first time what their own family members had endured. It was only then that many began “finding out why (their) family is the way they are” and learning where dysfunction comes from.  She drew from a personal anecdote of realizing that the reason her parents never said “I love you,” growing up, was because their parents – her grandparents – never heard it from the nuns in the residential school. 

Growing up near what was one of the oldest residential schools in Canada – the Mohawk Institute – Brandt recalled family members always referring to it as the “mush-hole”, referencing the food served. The one exception to “mush” was a hard-boiled egg given at Christmas and Easter, the anecdote striking Brandt with the fact her family members were still there on holidays. “(The residential school system) was never about assimilation. It was about subjugation,” she said.

Lee and David McComber, from Kahnawake, were the final panelists of the day. Lee is a Bishop’s biology graduate, and David is a graduate of Champlain College. They echoed each other on the responsibility to maintain the land for future generations. “Our modern world takes but doesn’t leave for future generations,” David said at one point. Later, Lee explained a lost relationship with the river running along the Montreal South Shore. With a bridge that was built over it, came highways, powerlines, and the dumping of toxic waste. To her, people’s responsibility to and relationship with the land is a gift. 

David shared that he didn’t know anything about residential schools growing up. “Not being able to learn my songs, why someone is dancing, I never gave much thought to it.” But, when he got a job at Kahnawake Survival School at the age of 29, moving into a teaching life, he had to learn who he was. From the burning of fields, to how the Indigenous were pushed aside onto “postal-sized stamps of land,” to the symbolism he sees in the presidents carved into Mount Rushmore, he said, “People call us resilient. We don’t want to be resilient anymore. We want to live.” 

The truth and reconciliation symposium was just one of many events hosted that week to engage the community of Bishop’s University, Champlain College, the Université de Sherbrooke, and the Cégep de Sherbrooke in what Dana called, “ongoing unlearning.”