Show Notes
In our first episode, Tara Anderson discusses her understanding of reconciliation and how it has evolved over time. Since 2015, Tara’s understanding of reconciliation shifted from a biblical definition to a broader secular awareness. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s summary propelled her to become engaged in her local community by exploring a deeper understanding of Indigenous history and culture.
Tara speaks about embracing awkward questions. She highlights the important first steps to understanding reconciliation – educate ourselves, find mentors who can walk with us, and show up to places where we will meet new people. “If we aren't in the same space it is difficult to build relationships,” Tara states, encouraging her audience to take action.
We invited Tara into our house and around our dining room table to have a conversation around these five questions:
1. How would you define reconciliation?
2. What experiences have defined this understanding?
3. Where have you seen grace in the reconciliation journey?
4. How would you invite other people into understanding reconciliation?
5. Why is reconciliation important to you?
Then we recorded her reflections.
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Links from the episode:
Office of the Treaty Commission
Kairos Blanket Exercise
Truth and Reconciliation Final Report
Mennonite Central Committee Saskatchewan
Reconcile: Everyday Conversations is a project of Mennonite Central Committee Saskatchewan aimed at facilitating conversations among settler/non-Indigenous Canadians around our role in reconciliation.
Project Coordinator: Heather Peters
Recording and Editing: Joel Kroeker
Music by A Northern Road to Glory
More from Reconcile. Everyday Conversations
“Action is the part I really focus on in my understanding (of reconciliation) because we can say a lot of things and people can come to a lot of discussion tables, but if you're not actually doing the stuff it is going to be forgotten.”
“I think now though, it's using my voice to create safe spaces, to have tough conversations, but have this conversations in a respectful and safe way. So we can … hear that before you get to reconciliation, you need to hear this ugly truth, right?”
“The chef coat that you see is actually modeled after the Turkish army. And I think there's a lot of a lot of rules and etiquette, and kitchen ways of being that are actually at odds with indigenous culture. So I'm trying to, I guess you could say decolonize that kitchen experience for people.”
In all my conversations with people about reconciliation I have heard that it isn’t an individual journey people are on. The reconciliation path is filled with relationships, teachers, learners and explorers – it is filled with other people. So we have created a reconciliation study guide that accompanies this podcast for you to be able to take to your friends, churches, communities, or neighbourhood book clubs to engage with these conversations together.
“You have to be open to it. You might not want to listen or hear what someone has to say that has a different belief system…. God calls us to love everyone, to listen to their stories. This is what have gotten me started and motivated.”