NCTCA 2022

For millennia, Indigenous people sustained thriving, living cultures and societies on the back of the Turtle. We wove our histories into intricate and beautiful stories to keep our truths alive, generation upon generation upon generation. Then those ships sailed armed with a colonial toolkit filled with the necessary implements to commence a course of systematic impoverishment among Indigenous peoples. With clear intention they sought dispossession through law and policy, the creation of dependency and ultimately near total oppression of what had been self-determining forever. One of those implements was the strategy to dismember Indigenous families, and thus communities and nations, by taking the children. There is the colonizer’s account of that. We see it in the history books. And then there is ours. Creating and holding space for Indigenous people to correct history; to impart the truth, is a necessary pre-requisite to reconciliation. Let us, together, light a dialogue fire and keep the flame burning until the truth overturns the colonial lie.