Show Notes
Dave Feick, executive director of The Micah Mission, has spent his life meeting people wherever they are and walking along with them for a bit. In these spaces, which he often views as holy moments, he recognizes the importance of breaking down walls and learning to build bridges with one another to achieve reconciliation. Dave believes that the purpose of reconciliation is to live compatibly with one another and to not put people into a mold that society wants them to be.
Dave has challenged these molds many times in his work as a prison chaplain and reintegration chaplain. He has witnessed that, “Our prisons today are very much the residential schools of yesterday. We are still finding ways to oppress people, we are trying to make them fit into a certain type of mold that society wants. And it’s just not working.” He challenges us to work towards reconciliation by visiting those who are or have been incarcerated. “Treating them with respect and understanding their situation goes a much longer way than to ignore them and reject them.”
We invited Dave 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 his reflections.
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Links from the episode:
Micah Mission
TRC Calls to Action
Canada’s prisons are the ‘new residential schools’ by Nancy Macdonald, Feb 18, 2016
Broken system: Why is a quarter of Canada’s prison population Indigenous? by Vicki Chartrand, February 18, 2018
For indigenous women, prisons are the adult version of residential schools by Carol Finlay, March 28, 2016
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.”