ReconciliACTION: Framing Reconciliation and Exploring What it Can Look Like

Join us in welcoming Heather Watts who will guide us through the importance of reconciliation and discuss how we can practice it, both individually and as professionals.

Agenda:

• Eagle Feather Teaching
• Framing Reconciliation, personally and professionally
• A Brief History of Residential Schools
• Findings of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada
• Closing Reflections: What can Reconciliation look like for you?
• Question & Answer

About our speaker:

Heather Watts is Mohawk & Anishinaabe from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. Education has been a central part of her work over the past ten years, obtaining degrees from Syracuse University, Columbia University Teachers College, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Heather is currently a third-year doctoral student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, and is the President of an Indigenous consulting firm, First Peoples Group. Her consulting work primarily consists of truth and reconciliation training, and working with municipalities and organizations in developing reconciliation frameworks.

Orange Shirt as a Symbol:

The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation coincides with Orange Shirt Day, a day-long campaign designed to promote awareness and education of the residential school system and the impact it has had on Indigenous communities.

The use of an orange shirt as a symbol was inspired by the accounts of Phyllis Jack Webstad, whose personal clothing—including a new orange shirt—was taken from her as a six-year-old during her first day of residential schooling, and never returned. The orange shirt is thus used as a symbol of the forced assimilation of Indigenous children that the residential school system enforced.