The Plane Crash In Your Backyard: Facing the Truth about Reconciliation

Once upon a time you may not have known you were living your life blindly around the wreckage, but you do now and have no excuse if you're not helping clean it up.

Today is Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

I know I’m not the only Saskatchewan-born and raised resident who grew up fascinated by my grandparents collection of arrowheads and other Indigenous tools. Like in many others, the origin story in my family was relatively simple: grandpa or great-grandpa “found” them on the Saskatchewan land they settled.

In my family, those intuitive and ingenious handmade tools sat in buckets in cold storage for decades, moved only when one of my grandparents or great-aunts died or went into a long-term care home. It was shockingly recent, probably around fifteen to twenty years, that my sisters and I came to the realization of what those buckets represented.

Growing up, to us those arrowheads were super cool, but that’s where it started and ended. They only came out or were of interest when we were learning about making pemmican in Social Studies and got permission to bring a few to school.