Chapter 3: Living In Circle: Reflections On Compassionate Leadership And Living The Terms Of Truth And Reconciliation

We are two educators and academics who live and work in British Columbia, Canada. As a country, we have been engaged in inquiry about how to reconcile the settler-Indigenous history that has caused hundreds of years of harm and suffering for First Peoples. This national inquiry was initiated in 2007 as a commission that “provided those directly or indirectly affected by the legacy of the Indian Residential Schools system with an opportunity to share their stories and experiences” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada [TRC], nd). The commission’s process was completed in 2015 and yielded thousands of stories from residential school survivors. A series of 94 calls to action for truth and reconciliation were identified to redress the history of suffering and abuse that continues through multi-generational trauma in Indigenous communities across Canada. In our province of British Columbia (BC), the Ministry of Education released in 2016 a re-designed provincial curriculum that incorporated Indigenous culture and ways of knowing throughout all grades and content areas (British Columbia Ministry of Education, nd). Teachers and administrators had access to professional development opportunities to learn and develop new ways of weaving Indigenous content and knowledges through their teaching. For many educators, ourselves included, teaching was becoming an opportunity to live out the calls to action issued in the report. Living the terms of truth and reconciliation is a diverse experience across learning environments across Canada. We understand Truth and Reconciliation as a process and as an ongoing learning journey that is situated in place and relationships. Settler educators each have a responsibility to ongoing learning that is unsettling (Regan, 2010) of colonial ways of being an educator.