Reconciliation Is Not Only About the Past. It Is About the Future We Choose.

A recent post from Hamilton Mayor Andrea Horwath prompted an important question for us: what if reconciliation is not only about addressing the harms of the past, but about reconsidering the values that shape our shared future?

What if we have misunderstood the scale of reconciliation?

For years, reconciliation in Canada has often been discussed as something primarily concerned with the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and the institutions that harmed them.

Residential schools. The Sixties Scoop. Broken Treaties. Dispossession of land. Missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit people. The suppression of language and ceremony. Children separated from families. Communities displaced. Indigenous laws and systems of governance deliberately undermined.

All of that demands truth, accountability, justice and repair.

But there is another part of this conversation that we do not talk about nearly enough.

A society cannot build systems around domination, extraction and separation without those values eventually affecting everyone who lives within those systems.

Colonialism did not create one set of values for Indigenous people and another for everybody else.

It created institutions.

It created laws.

It created economic assumptions.

It created ideas about land, wealth, family, authority, gender and whose knowledge mattered.

And generations later, we are all living inside many of the systems those ideas helped build.

A society practices its values everywhere

Think about what colonization required.

Land had to become something that could be claimed, divided, bought, sold and extracted from.

Indigenous Peoples had to be separated from that land.

Children had to be separated from parents.

Languages and cultural practices had to be suppressed.

Indigenous women were displaced from traditional roles, governance and community structures and subjected to systems that increased their vulnerability to violence.

Entire ways of knowing had to be dismissed so that another worldview could be established as superior.

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluded that persistent human and Indigenous rights violations lie at the root of the disproportionate violence experienced by Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people, and described these violations as genocide.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented how those same colonial systems reached into child welfare, education, health, justice, language, government and virtually every major institution in Canadian life. Its 94 Calls to Action were deliberately directed not simply to Indigenous communities, but to governments, schools, businesses, churches, health systems, the justice system, media and Canadians themselves.

That matters.

Because reconciliation was never supposed to mean repairing Indigenous Peoples so they could better fit into Canada.

It asks Canada to examine itself.

What if the problem is also the lens?

Much of contemporary society teaches us to understand ourselves primarily as individuals.

Success can become accumulation.

Land can become property.

Nature can become a resource.

Time can become productivity.

Children can become outcomes.

Elders can become dependants.

People experiencing poverty can become statistics.

Community can become something we participate in when we have enough time left over.

And somewhere along the way, it becomes possible to have more ways to communicate than any generation in human history while experiencing profound loneliness and disconnection.

It becomes possible to produce extraordinary wealth while families cannot afford homes or food.

It becomes possible to know that our environmental choices will affect generations not yet born and continue making them anyway.

It becomes possible to remove a struggling child from a family more readily than we address the conditions causing that family to struggle.

These are not exclusively colonial problems, and Indigenous teachings should never be reduced to a convenient cure for everything that troubles contemporary society.

But there is something important for Canada to learn here.

Across many distinct Indigenous cultures, Nations and knowledge systems are teachings that emphasize relationship, reciprocity, responsibility, community and our obligations to those who come after us.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples itself recognizes the distinctive relationship Indigenous Peoples have with lands and waters and their responsibilities to future generations. It affirms self-determination, culture, community, dignity and Indigenous Peoples’ right to participate in decisions affecting their lives.

Canada has formally recognized the Declaration as a framework for reconciliation, healing and peaceful relationships grounded in justice, respect, human rights and good faith.

Imagine what happens when those principles stop being confined to conversations labelled Indigenous reconciliation.

What would health care look like if relationship mattered as much as efficiency?

What would child welfare look like if keeping children safely connected to family, culture and community were our starting point?

What would economic development look like if we asked not only what could be taken from the land, but what responsibilities came with taking anything at all?

What would government look like if decisions were measured partly by their impact on people who will live seven generations from now?

What would our communities look like if caring for Elders, feeding neighbours, protecting water and raising children were understood not simply as private responsibilities but as collective ones?

Those are not questions about returning to the past.

They are questions about building a future.

Reconciliation is not Indigenous Peoples fixing Canada for us

There is an important caution here.

Indigenous Peoples have already carried far too much of the burden created by colonization.

Reconciliation cannot become another demand that Indigenous people educate everyone else, provide teachings on request or offer Canadians a more spiritually satisfying worldview.

Nor does working through an Indigenous lens mean borrowing ceremonies, teachings or traditions without understanding where they come from.

It means listening.

It means respecting the sovereignty and distinctiveness of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples.

It means honouring Indigenous laws, knowledge and leadership.

It means recognizing rights rather than treating Indigenous participation as consultation we can choose to ignore.

And perhaps, for non-Indigenous Canada, it means having enough humility to acknowledge that the systems imposed through colonization were never the only possible way to organize human life.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission called for renewed relationships based on mutual recognition, mutual respect and shared responsibility.

Those words are deceptively simple.

Mutual.

Relationship.

Respect.

Responsibility.

Imagine organizing a society around them.

We cannot separate the past from the future

There is sometimes a temptation to speak about reconciliation as though Canada faces a choice between looking backward and moving forward.

That is a false choice.

We look backward because the structures created in the past continue to shape the present.

And we tell the truth about the past precisely because we want something different for the future.

You cannot separate children from families for generations and imagine that family systems will emerge untouched.

You cannot suppress languages, identities and cultural knowledge and expect there to be no consequences.

You cannot dispossess people from land and then treat the resulting inequality as though it appeared naturally.

You cannot normalize violence against Indigenous women and girls and pretend that the values allowing that violence exist nowhere else in society.

And you cannot build relationships with the Earth primarily around ownership and extraction and be surprised when the land, water and climate begin showing us the limits of that relationship.

These histories do not belong only to Indigenous Peoples.

They belong to Canada.

Which means reconciliation belongs to Canada too.

Not as guilt.

Not as charity.

Not as an annual ceremony.

As responsibility.

And, perhaps, as possibility.

Because reconciliation asks us to repair relationships that colonialism tried to sever — between Peoples, between generations, between families, between knowledge systems and between human beings and the land that sustains us.

Those relationships matter deeply to Indigenous Peoples because they were deliberately attacked.

But restoring the value of relationship may also help all of us.

The goal is not to make Canada a little kinder while leaving its fundamental assumptions untouched.

The opportunity is much greater.

It is to ask what becomes possible when we stop measuring progress only by how much we can acquire, extract or control, and begin measuring it by the strength of the relationships we leave behind.

With one another.

With the land.

With our children.

With our Elders.

And with generations we will never meet.

That is why reconciliation is not simply about healing Canada’s past.

Done meaningfully, it can help us heal our future.