RECONCILIATION THROUGH CIRCLE
7 years ago, our family adopted a Cree/Dene girl.
Ten days before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s closing event, I made a phone call. A regular phone call to our good friends to talk about our annual solstice party. A familiar hello and then, “Bonnie, would you and Mark consider parenting our daughter’s sister. She’s in trouble. She’s been in a transition home for 7 months and needs a home. We could parent these sisters together. Think about it.”
In the next few days, think about it, we did. We gathered as much information as we could. For 7 months, this 21 month Cree and Dene baby, who had previously lived with her Dene mother, and had been apprehended twice, had been living in a transition home, a group home for babies. She was physically healthy, but emotionally and socially withering.
Alongside many conversations I and Mark had with our own children and close friends, we also connected with an Anishinaabe elder from Roseau River Nation. I asked her what her thoughts were about a settler taking in a Cree Dene baby. She said to me, “What I know of you, you are a good person. Your goodness needs to be curious. And your goodness will make sure your curiosity flows through your heart. And eventually connect her with our people in ceremony.”
I also connected with a young Indigenous woman who was a reporter with CBC. She had been raised in the foster system. Her word, “how can we connect with our culture or our history when we are homeless. This girl is homeless, family-less and you are going to be family and home? It’s a no brainer to me.”
Eight days later, she moved in.
The challenge to be home, be loving, be curious also moved in.
And along the way, I discovered Circles For Reconciliation.
Over the last 4 years, I have participated and co-facilitated inside of these circles where 5 Indigenous participants and 5 non-Indigenous participants gather together, guided by the Anishinaabe Seven Sacred Teachings.
Inspired by evolving modules about our collective story, we meet for 75 minutes, once a week for 10 weeks. Each time, through our commitment to speak our own truth in conversation with these modules, this slow consistent work of discovery and letting go, understanding and confusion, tears and laughter, silence and truth-telling cultivates through the hardened and parched soil of my shame and ignorance. And in that soil, the seeds of new understanding and new relationships have been planted and are beginning to grow. My gratitude abounds for the vision of these circles.
Some recent Circles for Reconciliation include:
Co-facilitation alongside Grace Schedler with participants from Manitoba communities and the Human Rights Museum; co-facilitation alongside Chief Deborah Smith with participants from Beausejour and Brokenhead First Nations.
CTV News article and video
“Grassroots partnership takes on reconciliation”
by Rachel CrowSpreadingWings
STORIES FROM CIRCLES FOR RECONCILIATION
Meeting Karonhianó:ron Curotte
During the winter of 2020, deep into the pandemic, a circle of nine students from Marianopolis College, Montreal and one Metis man from Winnipeg gathered, through zoom, as a “circle for reconciliation”. Every Wednesday, early afternoon, I, alongside a Metis woman from London Ontario, facilitated this circle.
A powerful, beautiful, hope-filled, at times, uncomfortable exchange. Over the weeks, Karonhianó:ron Curotte, a woman from Kahnawákeró:non, a Mohawk Nation close to Montreal, told me a story I had never heard. I have witnessed profound strength in spirit and accomplishment in many Indigenous participants. But I had never met a person who had, from their beginning, been so deeply protected and nurtured through their Indigenous nationhood.
Over the weeks, I caught glimpses of the nourishing ground that gave this young woman her strength, her wisdom, her personhood. I found myself leaning in each time she held the silence around the other’s voice before she took up space for her own.
When I began writing this piece, I got in touch with Karonhianó:ron and asked for her blessing of this telling and publishing. I also asked her to review everything I wrote to ensure the important details and representation respected her story.
Thank you, Karonhianó:ron, for entrusting me to our exchange. Your strength has strengthened my journey.
“Speak my whole name”
For our first circle, I had a pen and notebook in hand, jotting down everyone’s name. When Karonhianó:ron Curotte spoke her name, half way through, I lifted my pen. I looked back at her name on my printed out email of our list of participants, and thought, I will need to remember that the K is a G sound, the R is not quite rolled but different then my R, and then I was lost. The circle continued and I knew I would have to ask her to say her name again, cause I missed it. There was a slight hot pulse of shame that ran through me. Why couldn’t I have caught more of her name?
A few circles in, one of the participants asked Karonhianó:ron if we could use a shortened version, like the first two syllabals — like “Guroon”. With a calm, straightforward word, she said “I would rather you try to say my whole name. My name means Precious Sky and if you say half of it it means Precious, the other half just means Sky, and my name is Precious Sky.” We tried and we bumbled.
As we bumbled, I began to see this bumbling as an act of reconciliation. Colonization, through residential schools and their forced English and French language, tried stripping every Indigenous person of their Indigenous language and in particular, their Indigenous name. Beautiful, complex, story telling languages where names reflect the power and beauty of nature mirrored in the person’s soul. Karonhianó:ron asked that we protect and honour that beauty.
As our circle bumbled, our mouths struggling with the “r” — a back throat kind of sound that had a slight roll but nothing like the “French roll”. To learn another’s language is to learn how to reshape not only the mind and the heart, but the mouth.
I recently discovered that most Indigenous languages are built from 70 percent verbs and 30 percent nouns, whereas English is the opposite, 70 percent nouns and 30 percent verbs. Kanien’kéha, a plant/tree, is not a thing in Mohawk, as it is in English. Since Kanien’kéha represents that which is growing and becoming, it is more like “treeing”.
With this understanding, I imagine, not only is Karonhianó:ron’s name whole in and of itself, the English translation, Precious Sky, doesn’t do it justice. I imagine that Karonhianó:ron is also a verb, a living being, becoming, always becoming, well beyond our desire to fix and claim into a noun. Since I live inside of the constraints of English, I try out more English words to understand the depth and nuance of a language that stands on its own: “Preciousdeepening Skybecoming”. When I do that, I am aware that the Mohawk language communicates its intent all on its own. Karonhianó:ron ultimately is Karonhianó:ron. And Karonhianó:ron taught us in that circle that her protection of Karonhianó:ron makes Karonhianó:ron whole.
At first, Karonhianó:ron’s request appeared to be the tiniest act of agency — “please say my whole name”; over the ten weeks, our/my work became a powerful pulse of empathy that grew from within my mind, my heart, my mouth.
“My Mohawk education happened because my elders protected themselves, and by doing that, protected me”
As Karonhianó:ron spoke about her school experience, I was stunned by her community, Kahnawákeró:non. This Mohawk nation had, with calculated ingenuity, successfully protected Indigenous education for their children. In the same breath, her community’s success cast a glaring light on the calculated determination of colonialism that relentlessly muscled away and in many situations destroyed substantial agency inside Indigenous communities.
I found myself wanting to hear her story again and again. Stories which told of grandparents and parents, creative aunties and uncles, people who never held ceremony in the same house or yard two times in a row to ensure that the Indian Agents wouldn’t catch them. Grandparents and parents, aunties and uncles, who fundraised in every way possible (since they did not meet the provincial and federal requirements for public funding) to ensure that their children would be raised and educated and surrounded by Mohawks of Kahnawá:ke — Kahnawákeró:non: surrounded by the Mohawk language, Onkwehonwe’neha, surrounded with their ceremony and prayer and story. Every chance she got, Karonhianó:ron gave credit to those brave and ingenious elders who created a strong and vibrant home and community of belonging.
From that effort, the Kahnawákeró:non community offered Karonhianó:ron Onkwehonwe’neha, the Mohawk language, for her first 13 years. Each childhood day, each childhood room, each childhood subject was shaped and determined by Onkwehonwe’neha language. The beginning and end of each day was held inside the Mohawk Thanksgiving Address; recesses were spent in the bush. Karonhianó:ron knew, from her beginnings, that her world was determined and nurtured by her Mohawk story born from her Mohawk elders. Since there are three Kahnawákeró:non schools in her community that tend to elementary, middle, and senior education, Karonhianó:ron had an entire childhood education, from pre-school until her graduation in grade 12, built upon the Onkwehonwe’neha language, and Kahnawákeró:non community.
“My Mohawk education happened because my elders somehow protected themselves, and by doing that, protected me.”
“Bring Ajah to our strength”
During one of our conversations about this article, I asked Karonhianó:ron what advice she had for my life with Ajah, our Cree Dene daughter. She responded, within a breath,
“Bring Ajah to our strength. To the strong musicians, the strong artists, the strong story tellers. Let her know what we were and what we have become. Be honest about the harsh road we’ve walked, in ways that she can understand. Read “Fatty Legs” to Ajah. It’s the book read to me about residential schools. Let her know who she is. And keep teaching her and being with her as she learns Cree. She is lucky to have you. And you are lucky to have her.”
“Travel by looking out the window”
Two or three circles in, this is what I remember Karonhianó:ron telling us:
“When I took the train into Montreal, I noticed a small marsh, surrounded by a forest. As we drove by, I saw birds, many different kinds of animals, the changing season shown through the changes in the tree colors, the sky, the water. Each time I took the train, that marsh and its forest were good company. One day, when I looked around, I noticed everyone was looking at their phone. I wanted to jump up and say to them, look out your window.
As the year went on, I noticed that the forest, and the marsh, little by little, disappeared. By the end of the year, a construction company had moved in and was building a housing/shopping complex with a sprawling parking lot. By the second year, the entire forest and marsh had been replaced. I often thought, very few of us are noticing these changes. Too many of us are travelling through with our heads in our phones.”
I think about her words often when I and others look into our phones rather than out the window, when I and others look into our phones rather than at each other. And I hear, echoing within, Karonhianó:ron: “I notice; very few of us are noticing”.