The road to reconciliation: where we're at with the calls to action in northern Ontario

Lina Dokis Gagnon doesn't remember hearing much about Indigenous people when she was in high school. 

"Nothing much was discussed about. I never learned anything about my culture within the school setting, I always learned it from my family," she says.

Now an Indigenous support worker at St. Charles College in Sudbury, she says that's changed.

Incorporating Indigenous studies into all school curricula is one of the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission generally seen as being completed. 

There is another call for publicly funded Catholic schools to be required to teach Indigenous spirituality which Dokis Gagnon says is still left up to the discretion of individual teachers. 

"They like to integrate it within each other, but of course it always has a certain place and time," says the member of Dokis first Nation.

She would like to see more staff hired to support students at the high school, where some 700 of the 1,300 teenagers self-identify as Indigenous. 

Jennifer Petahtegoose teaches Indigenous studies at St. Charles and says she often feels like she's on the "frontlines" of reconciliation.

This week she is keeping an eagle feather on her desk, given to her in memory of her aunt who ran away from residential school in Spanish and travelled over 100 kilometres on foot to her home community of Atikameksheng.

"I wish she could walk in and see," Petahtegoose says of her work in the school. "She'd be amazed at how far we've come."

Other calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have not come very far in the last six years.

The number of Indigenous kids in the child welfare system has not decreased and governments are not providing annual reports detailing the situation. 

In the north, Indigenous children's aid agencies now oversee the care of those kids, but sometimes have trouble finding Indigenous homes to place children in.

Duane Moleni of Sault Ste. Marie is an alternative care parent for Nogdawindamin Family and Community Services.

He is originally from New Zealand, born to a white mother and a Polynesian father he never knew.

Moleni says he and his partner go to great lengths to make sure the children in their care stay connected to their culture. 

"I can never fully understand. It's always an ongoing journey to learn," he says. 

"It's a commitment to support that any child that's in our home for a short period of time, a long time, a weekend. A big part of that journey is their cultural identity, their heritage."

One call to action checked off the list earlier this year deals directly with Indigenous identity.

The federal government is waiving any fees associated with Indigenous people changing their name back to a traditional or spirit name, for the next five years.

Peter Kapashesit of Moose Factory did that on his own 30 years ago. Before that some of his documents called him Peter Small, the English translation of his Cree name. 

"I always thought that I'm pretty fortunate to have a Cree last name and I thought 'I'm going to use that,'" he says. 

"We should go back and use our real names."

The calls to action also try to address some of the big questions about who should have control of the land now known as Canada.

Batchewana First Nation has been asserting its right over its traditional territory from the St. Mary's River north up the Lake Superior Shore for the past decade.

That has included logging forests without permits from the Ontario government and negotiating with the province for the return of Lake Superior Provincial Park, which Chief Dean Sayers says was ``stolen.``

The commission calls for a new royal proclamation clarifying the relationship between Indigenous people and the Crown, the United Nations Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous People being adopted by parliament and Indigenous nations included in the Canadian Constitution.

But Sayers fears those moves would actually erode Indigenous sovereignty. He says instead Canada needs to look at its own constitutional structure and come to the talks with First Nations clear on who has the power to do what.

'I consider Canada to be a nation under Indigenous jurisdiction'

"There needs to be a plan in place and it's unfortunate that the only way we seem to get the Crown to the table is through their own legal system," Sayers says.

"And when we get to the table we find out they don't have a mandate to have fruitful discussions."

"We can pick up where history left off back in the day when we had these good intentions and continue to chart that course today."

Sayers says under the treaty system it should be First Nations who are giving permission for the development of mines and issuing hunting and fishing licenses. 

"I consider Canada to be a nation under Indigenous jurisdiction," he says.

"It's not the other way around, where Canada is the primary and they'll find some space for us in their constitution. It's backwards."

While some Indigenous leaders feel that "miles and miles" of progress can be made in the next five to 10 years, Sayers says he thinks it could take much longer than that. 

"We're not going to sit dormant. We're going to push and push," he says. 

"The relationship will evolve and we need Canada, Canadians to have an appetite. Prepare to have an appetite for the change that's going to come. The major shift that's going to come."

That shift might be marked on every Sept. 30 now that the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is a federal statutory holiday.

Many First Nations in northern Ontario will hold solemn memorials Thursday for those who attended residential school.

It will be a different tone at the North Bay Indigenous Friendship Centre, which is putting on a barbecue, with carnival games, cotton candy and popcorn, as well as traditional dancing and singing. 

Executive director Kathy Fortin sees this as the best way toward reconciliation.

"Having this kind of event rather than a memorial I think is going to bring a lot more people rather than a memorial service where a lot of people are hesitant to come."