Show Notes
Spurgeon Root, Director of Outreach Ministries at Healing Hearts, has immersed himself in the work of reconciliation over the past 20 years. Along with his family, he has lived in the North-Central neighbourhood of Regina, a community with a high population of Indigenous people. In this podcast, Spurgeon and his daughter Keziah, discuss their views of reconciliation within this context. They both come with a posture of learning and building relationships where all parties have choice to maintain relationships. To achieve reconciliation, Spurgeon states that a person should look at the relationships involved and what work is needed to move towards a healthy relationship on both sides.
Spurgeon highlights the importance of understanding reconciliation as an ongoing action that impacts both our personal lives and our institutions. People must prepare to work on reconciliation for generations. As Spurgeon says, “For some people this might be disheartening because it seems like a never-ending task. But on the other hand, it can take some of the pressure off because there is no deadline. Just keep going.”
We invited Spurgeon and Keziah 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 their reflections.
******************************************************
Links from the episode:
Healing Hearts Ministries
Christian Community Development Association
If ‘indigenizing’ education feels this good, we aren’t doing it right by Monique Giroux
Office of the Treaty Commission events
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.”