Ideas - The "Reconciliation" Generation: Indigenous Youth and the Future for Indigenous People

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Indigenous activist Riley Yesno addresses the hopes, disappointments, accomplishments and misuses of ‘reconciliation’ in post-TRC Canada. The Anishnaabe scholar says Indigenous youth who came of age at this time are "meant to be responsible for seeing it through to its next stage."

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. I realized that I'd fallen into a trap. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. Where I was made to believe that Indigenous people's dreams should be nothing more than what are already most non-Indigenous people's expectations. This is Riley Yesnow, an Anishinaabe scholar, writer and commentator from Abnatang First, and Thunder Bay, Ontario. She teaches Indigenous Governance at Toronto Metropolitan University and is completing her PhD in Indigenous and Canadian Politics

at the University of Toronto. I'm grateful that I found teachers who showed me there were other ways to affect change rather than just through votes or boardrooms. She's spoken at events around the world, including the United Nations Climate Negotiations Conference and the Stockholm Forum on Gender Equality. When I see Land Back, when I think of resurgence,

I'm reminded that it's Indigenous youth, not Justin Trudeau, not any Canadian politician who leads Indigenous people to transformative futures. In November 2023, Riley Yesno delivered the ninth annual Indigenous Speakers Series lecture at Vancouver Island University. The series is presented by the university and ideas. There were 200 people in the audience, as well as several hundred participants online. Many were younger

people, and maybe that's not surprising given the title of Riley's talk, The Reconciliation Generation, Indigenous Youth and the Future for Indigenous People. On me, I am feeling very welcomed. You are all such generous hosts. I want to share a question that I frequently ask my students. There's a setup to it, and the setup goes like this. I show them a video. The video is from early 2020, and it's winter in the British Columbia interior. Early on, you see a video. The video is from early 2020, and it's winter in the British Columbia interior.

Early on, you see a woman. Her name is Frida Hewson, and she's the matriarchal leader from the Wet'suwet'en Nation. Throughout the video, she and several other Indigenous people and leaders are conducting a ceremony. They are drumming and singing and dancing and ringing a bell to call on their ancestors. Then, just a short distance away, watching them, you see a group of RCMP officers dressed in all black. There are helicopters and drones overhead. You can see police dogs panting in the distance. What separates the officers from Frida Hewson and the others is a makeshift gate, and what keeps the gate closed is a wooden plank that has one single word painted across it, reconciliation. One by one, you see each of the Indigenous people get taken away by the RCMP. Frida Hewson is the last to be forced out, and she's still singing as she leaves.

You then see the officers take down the signs and the red dresses that the members of the community had put up for murdered and missing Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people. The officers also put out a fire that the women had lit earlier. Burnt in that fire was a Canadian flag with an upside-down maple leaf on it. The flag reads, reconciliation is dead. The video ends by reiterating, reconciliation is dead. But it then adds, revolution is alive. At this point, I stop and I ask my students, did we just witness a funeral or a birth? Let me ask you the same question. Is it a funeral or is it a birth?

I was a teenager when I started to have questions, difficult questions about reconciliation. I was in high school, a notorious teacher's pet, and I had recently started coming into my political consciousness. That consciousness was insatiably curious, habitually in tune to injustices, and it presented as a constant screaming in my ear. Looking back now, none of this is surprising to me, given the context I grew up in. I grew up primarily in Thunder Bay, Ontario, a city with one of the highest urban Indigenous populations per capita in the entire country. In fact, recent estimates suggest that nearly 40%

of the population in Thunder Bay could be Indigenous, that it had been undercounted for decades. While I feel grateful for having always grown up around my community, people who looked like me and my parents and my grandparents, the high Indigenous population in Thunder Bay also resulted in very visible experiences of anti-Indigenous racism. After all, Thunder Bay is the city that has become infamous in recent years, seen as a concentrated example of the larger issues of anti-indigeneity that exist throughout the country. For example, in 2015, almost one-third of reported hate crimes in Canada in which Indigenous people were the victims happened in Thunder Bay, almost a third

of them. In 2018, an independent review of the Thunder Bay police concluded that there was widespread racism and anti-Indigenous racism in particular throughout the institution, and the police board had to be dissolved. Apart from growing up in Thunder Bay, I'm also the granddaughter of two residential school survivors, making me what we sometimes call an intergenerational survivor of the system. My grandparents haven't spoken to me much about their experience. I imagine in part due to the difficulty of reliving the experiences and also in part because I've been a bit nervous to ask too much. Still, I know that they attended both Shingwauk and Pelican Lake residential schools

in northern Ontario before they could return to the reserve at Matung First Nation, more commonly called Fort Hope. This is the community where my dad still lives, where my grandparents still have a house. It's where I spent a lot of early parts of my childhood. My community hasn't had clean water for longer than I've been alive, and the houses are almost all either falling apart or filled with mold or both. Why am I telling you all this? I have to admit that it is deeply uncomfortable for me to do so. I spend most of my days these days as a commentator and so having opinions about other people's business is usually my bread and butter. But I feel it's important to

know this backdrop to explain why my work took the direction that it has, where my knowledge comes from, and why only partial answers were never going to be enough to satiate those screaming questions I had. The questions I had were actually simple in one way, but they were also seemingly impossible to answer. I wanted to know why. Why all of this injustice? How has it been allowed to stand for so many generations? What are we doing about it? What can I do about it? My high school education only gave me the starting points to answer these questions. In history class, we had one day where we talked about the Indian Act in residential schools.

And still somehow, I didn't know that the middle school I went to, actually just down the road, had been built on top of a former residential school. I can, however, tell you a lot about so-called official history, like the uniforms that the Canadian soldiers wore in World War II. Ask me about a blitzkrieg, I know that one. In another class, we spent a day learning about efforts to dispossess Indigenous people from the land, but I wasn't made aware of the ongoing land defense efforts taking place in our own backyard, which actually included efforts from my home community of Fort Hope. And by the time I graduated, land acknowledgements were

becoming the standard across all schools in Ontario, but I still couldn't tell you what people's treaty obligations were or what my treaty rights were. So there were gaps in my formal education, to put it mildly. However, I did know that Canada had recently entered a supposed era of reconciliation. This era, I was told, was brought about by the Harper government's apology for Canada's role in creating and maintaining residential schools. I was told that reconciliation was a process to be guided by the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body which met with residential school survivors and their families over a number of years. I learned that these survivors came from across the country in

the thousands, and they bravely spoke the truth of their experiences in residential schools and the devastating consequences of those experiences. I also knew that from those testimonies, Canada had been presented with 94 calls to action to act as a roadmap of sorts to guide the reconciliation process further. And despite knowing all of this, I also knew that in a majority of cases, Indigenous people in my life still found themselves living much more difficultly than our non-Indigenous peers. And their problems didn't seem to be getting any better. I genuinely couldn't understand it. If Canada is supposedly committed to reconciliation, why did my community not have clean water? Why were Indigenous youth dying in Thunder Bay at rates so alarming that journalists were flocking

to the city and that books were being written about it? Why were Frida Houston and the other Wet'suwet'en being forced off their territory? When I asked these questions, sometimes verbatim to my teachers, to people online, and even to the Prime Minister, I was repeatedly assured of reconciliation's promise. I was assured we know it's bad, but times are changing and solutions are coming. Increasingly, it felt very difficult to trust the promise of change when my lived experience overwhelmingly pointed towards inaction and contradiction. So my questions kept screaming. Reconciliation is one of those words that I've come to realize can mean different things depending on who you ask. It's sticky,

and it's amorphous. The dictionary defines reconciliation as, quote, the restoration of friendly relations. I've heard many take issue with this definition, saying that in the case of Indigenous people in Canada, there haven't ever really been sufficient friendly relations to restore. To this point, some folks like Sandalini Gidd, who's an instructor of reconciliation studies at UBC, argues that what we should be seeing first is a process of conciliation, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as the action of mediating between two disputing people or groups before we could ever talk about reconciliation. However, when I ask my students to define reconciliation, they don't usually discuss about returning to any particular relationship.

They seem to see it as a process meant to address the harms Indigenous people have faced and are facing. In any case, I know very few people who seem to know of or strictly use the definition of reconciliation as it was described by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. What is that definition? The TRC describes reconciliation as a process to establish and maintain a mutually respectful relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in this country. It requires awareness of the past, accountability for the harm that has been inflicted, It requires awareness of the past, accountability for the harm that has been inflicted,

atonement for the causes, and action to change behavior. With this definition, I don't actually see any assumption about a pre-existing friendship. What I do see is the outline or a bit of a direction of a process to build something actionable, transformative, and new. And yet still, reconciliation receives different descriptions based on who you ask. The ambiguities and debates around the meaning of reconciliation persist among the public at large. And as I and many others have pointed out, there can be a few consequences related to the malleability of this concept. So first is that, as some of the most provocative critiques from those like Glenn Coulthard or Art

Manuel will argue, when different understandings of the process are permitted, we should always expect that the colonial state will pursue, whether consciously or unconsciously, the option that best upholds the status quo. Those who argue this point don't just theorize about it. They point to several of the realities of Canada's reconciliation landscape. For example, as the Yellowhead Institute has reported, to date, only 13 of the 94 calls to action have been completed. There have been zero in the realm of education, zero in regard to health care, and only one in the realm of justice, and that's the creation of the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls Inqu only one in the realm of justice, and that's the creation of the murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls inquiry, which then of course created 231 more

calls for action that haven't been completed. So it seems at this point Canada does love an inquiry. And of the ones that have actually been completed, changing the oath of citizenship for newcomers and creating a national statutory holiday. These things are important, they're good, but they also aren't too inconvenient to implement, we might say. They don't intervene in a foundational way into some of the most criticized and impactful institutions in the country. And at this rate, we aren't predicted to see all of the calls to action completed until at least 2065, when all of the survivors from residential schools will likely have passed or be few in numbers and quite elderly. So, those critical of reconciliation will say, Canada might take action, but it'll

likely be minimal, it'll be slow, and it'll be done in a way that doesn't fundamentally challenge its power, wealth, or any government's re-electability? Is it really reconciliation centering Indigenous demands if it's subject to the whims of the Canadian electoral system? More than that, non-Indigenous groups and organizations have increasingly tried to co-opt the symbols and the language associated with reconciliation and distort their original intent to their own advantage. So for example, people may make and sell orange shirts, a symbol of solidarity with residential school survivors, and they'll buy them through these major capitalist entities like Walmart or

Amazon. The people who buy those shirts will get to make their political positions visible, and it'll be Jeff Bezos who gets the money of the orange shirts on Amazon at the end of the day. visible, and it'll be Jeff Bezos who gets the money of the orange shirts on Amazon at the end of the day. And here, the only group which won't enjoy any material gain through this interaction will be indigenous people and survivors themselves. So in this sense, we see that reconciliation has become more than just a process. It's an economy, and one that often disproportionately benefits non-indigenous people, and in which Indigenous symbols of resistance and awareness can easily become commodities. Citing instances like this, skeptics say, even if we agree, and I do, that the TRC describes reconciliation as something transformative,

if the electorate doesn't understand or want that, well then, the government will say it can wait, or that it can be done differently, differently than survivors say it should be. Where does a process like this leave us? To me, it's one where we can do land acknowledgements, but we don't return land. We can have symbols and days of honor for residential school survivors, but we still let them live on the streets in disproportionate numbers. We can apologize, but we can also keep doing harm. If we accept that reconciliation has never been a static term, doesn't it make sense that the concept means something different to my grandparents,

who forged the idea, than it does to me, who's living through the pursuit of it? Think about it. The last federally funded residential school, Kivilik Hall, located in Rankin, Inlet Nunavut, closed in 1997. The last residential day school ended in 2000. I was born in 1999. In 2008, when Stephen Harper apologized for residential schools, I was in the third grade. When the TRC's final report was released, I was only about halfway through high school. So the Indigenous affairs landscape I and my peers grew up in differs radically from the one that my parents and my grandparents grew up in. And I hear this when I speak to Indigenous

people of different generations. When I talk to survivors about their struggle for justice, they frequently mention how it was a significant battle to get non-Indigenous people, never mind the government, to acknowledge that they were even experiencing and had experienced harm. Even if it was bad, that was for your own good, was a standard response. Then, people of my dad's age talk about how when people might acknowledge, and I quote, that sure the Indians have had a bad, that there was still a sense that it was their problem to fix, that we don't do enough to help ourselves. Now, I have heard those sentiments in my life too. No doubt they persist in certain places and among certain people, but they're not seen as appropriate or standard in the way that they once were. They're not the main approach to Indigenous affairs. And with this context in mind, I recognize why the advent of a state-sponsored

reconciliation project was so revolutionary, so important. When you've spent your whole life being told that the violence you faced was either your fault or it was your problem to fix, having the leader of the country which caused that harm tell you, I recognize it and and I'm sorry. That is significant. It's a moment that is undoubtedly hard fought for, and this is important. My point here is not to discount this moment's meaning for survivors. I'm not trying to say that their fight for this moment or for reconciliation generally is done naively or that it's pointless. It's not to say that Canada shouldn't be apologetic or that we shouldn't have symbols. Instead, what I am saying is that the context that which my parents grew up in, my grandparents grew up in, is not the same as mine. And I don't necessarily think it's the experience of many Indigenous youth today. And I want us to really consider what that means. In our experience,

we acknowledge the land. We have Treaty Recognition Week, we wear orange to spread awareness. In my lifetime, Canada has already said they're committed to change. We are the reconciliation generation, not because we created reconciliation, but because we've been born into the country and the Indigenous Affairs landscape that reconciliation has helped to shape. We have inherited the reconciliation project and are meant to be responsible for seeing it through to its next stage. This isn't just a personal belief, but it's something that the data supports me on, so get this. According to Statistics Canada, as of 2016, almost half of the Indigenous population in Canada was under the age of 25.

Young Indigenous people are the fastest growing demographic in the entire country, and we are going to be the people that Canada will have to negotiate with for decades to come. The groundwork we lay now, and we've already started to lay, will undoubtedly influence the nature of those negotiations. With this in mind, I'm ultimately arguing today that we must take the contentions and the dreams of Indigenous youth seriously. If we want to truly ensure that we build transformative relationships, as the TRC outlined, and that Indigenous people have been fighting for by various means for decades, then Indigenous youth, this reconciliation generation, must be central to our conversations now, not when they get older. I'm inviting you now to put yourself in my shoes.

By the age of 16 or 17, I'd taken all of that energy coming from the sense of injustice I mentioned before, and I was trying to channel it into community work. As a result, I was identified as something of a youth leader, and I was frequently asked to provide a perspective on youth and Indigenous issues. This sort of perspective was in higher demand than I thought it would be, and not long after I started speaking publicly, I was being flown around the country and the world by different organizations on a regular basis. I visited Calgary, Montreal, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Regina, St. John's, Stockholm, Katowice, and Paris. I quickly spent just as much time in conference

rooms as I did in classrooms. My teachers were very generous with me. In each of these places, the other young people at these conferences and I would find ourselves gravitating towards one another, especially if it was other Indigenous youth who were primarily invited and who were around. We soon realized that it was the same handful of us who were often tapped on to join these events. We even jokingly called ourselves the regulars of the reconciliation conference circuit. I thought that one was good. These conferences were where the politics that I carry with me today started to really come to life. More specifically, what really changed me were the conversations we had in between and after the conference sessions.

In those informal moments, we weren't just a bunch of young people in a room full of adults vying for their respect or their ear. We weren't calculating every word to young people in a room full of adults vying for their respect or their ear. We weren't calculating every word to ensure that the grown-ups in suits would take us seriously. And the way that young people generally experience ageism and are told that they should just be grateful for having a seat at the table at all could be the basis for a whole other talk I'd give, but I digress. I'd give, but I digress. During those in-between moments, we were allowed to be ourselves, speaking to each other authentically and unguardedly. And young people say things to one another like, did you hear what that minister said in the last session? What bullshit, eh? They expressed frustration, fatigue, and skepticism, all of which I had felt, but

until that point in my life, I had never heard another person say so unapologetically. Their no-F's-given attitude inspired the little teacher's pet like me. To be clear, it's not that I think that older folks weren't thinking or saying those things, they just weren't saying them to me. And in many cases, I have to imagine that they did so out of a protectiveness, a hope that by preserving the original intent of reconciliation, that younger people wouldn't feel the same anger and resentment I now know can be so pervasive amongst all generations, but older generations especially. In any case, it was younger people who opened up the space for me to be critical and the possibility

of imagining something other than the way that reconciliation has always been presented to me with them I felt seen I felt empowered I felt hopeful their anger matched the anger I felt and they too were consumed with questions about the state of injustice and the solutions that we'd unconvincingly been presented with. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, in North America on Sirius XM, on US Public Radio, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive

eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short-sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. Riley Yesno's lecture at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia, was the ninth edition of the university's annual Indigenous Speaker Series. It was established in 2015 after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called on educational institutions to lead the way on reconciliation.

Her talk is called The Reconciliation Generation, Indigenous Youth and the Future for Indigenous People. When I was just a couple of months shy of my 18th birthday, I cut ties with a major youth leadership initiative in Canada. The group was new at the time, and they were tasked with providing advice to leaders in the government on issues that matter to youth. And spoiler alert, issues that matter to youth is basically everything. I'd originally applied to be a part of that group because I'd been told my whole life, explicitly and implicitly, that running for office, working in the Canadian government, and trying to change the system from within was the ultimate way to effect change. I fully believed that. When people tried to be encouraging to me,

they'd tell me they were sure, quote, I'd be the prime minister one day. And they'd tell me that voting in Canadian elections was the best way that I could support my communities and I'm sure people in this room right now have both heard and probably said these types of sentiments before as well. Imagine then how incredibly destabilizing it was when I got into those halls of power only to find that they were way more hostile than they were transformative. For example, I'd go into meetings with some of the most widely honored and powerful people in the country, where they would then express views that were deeply problematic, deeply harmful, and there would be no repercussions. Younger people

would frequently share their experiences, their traumas, their dreams, only to be shut down or walked through the government's justification as if we disagreed with a given policy because we just simply couldn't understand it. On more than one occasion, I left rooms in tears, not because they were espousing racist, anti-Indigenous views. Remember, I grew up in Thunder Bay. I'd heard racism before. I left because I felt full of grief. Grief because, as I shared, I really believed that the way forward was to get into these positions of power and make them work for my people. I didn't expect that work to be easy, but I also didn't expect it to feel always so hostile, on guard,

like every interaction was a fight or interrogation. Even if working in the system were the best option, it increasingly felt like working in that space would come at the cost of my well-being, especially over time. For how long would I have to spend my time and my energy trying to convince these politicians of Indigenous peoples' humanity, of the need to listen and act with urgency given our struggles. Even if I made the tiniest change while I was there, how much would it have cost me in exchange? Nowadays, I often want to roll my eyes when I think about teenage Riley's heartbroken reaction to finding out that politicians can be bad. They can be ignorant. They can be ineffectual. But then I fight the urge to say duh, and instead I offer the younger me compassion. I was told my whole life by every

adult person I trusted to trust the system. I was told that the country was really sorry, and that Canada's most important relationship was with Indigenous peoples. Why should I have not believed that? What other truth did I have to pursue? sorry and that Canada's most important relationship was with Indigenous peoples. Why should I have not believed that? What other truth did I have to pursue? I no longer feel embarrassed or ashamed for believing what every trusted person in my life told me to believe. And actually, I think we should all find it tragic that on some level we now expect young people to accept that the institutions that are supposed to be there to help them may hurt them, that it's just a part of growing up, and that we tell them it isn't brave to be optimistic, that it actually makes you foolish. Instead now, looking back, I feel

grateful that in the fallout of this grief, while I was trying to reimagine what change could or should look like, I call this my recovering anarchist phase, other Indigenous youth gave me hope and they gave me community. They took me under their wing and confided in me similar experiences, anger and sadness, and I'm grateful that I found teachers who showed me there were other ways to affect change rather than just through votes or boardrooms. In academia, we often label these other approaches as examples of indigenous resurgence. Has anybody here heard about the Red Power movement from the 60s and 70s? I see some nods. Nice. Okay. So organizations that were around this time were pretty radical. The Native Alliance for Red Power, for example, which was founded just a short bit away in Vancouver, was regarded as a sister organization for the Black Panthers in the U.S. Other groups like the Indians of All Tribes from the U.S. took part in some unbelievable

direct action protests. In 1968, for instance, Indian of all tribes began an occupation of Alcatraz Island, demanding the return of stolen land and the rectification of broken treaties across the country. The activists lasted 19 months on the island before President Richard Nixon had them removed by force. These groups from the 1960s and 70s were badass, but I somehow hadn't heard of their work before I started talking to radical young people, and I have a degree in indigenous studies. Besides the so-called Oka Crisis, or as we'd call it, the Ganasatake Resistance, most of my education on indigenous resistance revolved around landmark court cases like Delgamook, Vanderpete, and Sparrow. I learned about Harold Cardinal and the Indian Association of Alberta, the people who challenged Pierre Trudeau's proposed policy changes regarding the infamous Indian Act in 1969.

And to be clear, I'm very glad I learned these things. My point here is not to say that the former badass approaches to resistance are better than the latter. I'm not here to lobby you. I actually think that the work Indigenous people and others do every day to pursue a vision of reconciliation that the survivors intended, the ones who stop Canada from passing harmful legislation, who hold powerful people accountable on their own turf, they are more than admirable. Where would we be without leaders who do this work like Cindy Blackstock or Marie Sinclair? Yes, as an advocate and social movement scholar,

I fundamentally believe in the social movement mantra, all tactics, all battlefields. Instead, what I'm trying to emphasize is how stunning and validating it was to learn about resurgence, this other history of Indigenous responses to colonialism. I got to feel the full scope of Indigenous resistance that's always existed, and it was especially validating after feeling so utterly defeated by my short stint in government. I wanted to learn from those Indigenous people who, in every generation, have decided that if it's going to be an uphill battle against Canadian settler colonialism, then at least it's going to be an uphill battle on our terms. Those people who don't want to change the system from within, but who want to dismantle the system and build a community fire with all of the pieces that the system was made of.

Similar to reconciliation, resurgence has also manifested along generational lines. In the 1960s and 70s, they were an important political movement for my grandparents, the rise of the Red Power. And in the 90s, my parents grew up with instances of contestation like the Ghana-Satake resistance. And then in the 2010s, Idle No More came to prominence. And that's the action that's often associated with activating a whole new generation of Indigenous resistors. For those who might not be familiar with Idle No More, the movement began in 2012 in response to the Harper government's proposed Bill C-45, the Jobs and Growth Act. It was an act that would have affected over 60 pieces of existing legislation, including those directly affecting Indigenous people like the Indian Act.

The government wanted to make these changes without any proper consultation or consent. The movement sparked in response to this legislation, but it quickly grew into a full-on national fire, speaking to more general conditions of oppression that Indigenous people had long been facing. Still running today, Idle No More established a massive network of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people committed to liberated futures for the land, the water, and the sky under which we all live. They believe in pursuing these futures outside of the state through non-violent protest. Now, it's the 2020s, Indigenous people have begun to mobilize even newer movements and frameworks

that I think encompass that longstanding spirit of resurgence. Take, for example, the Land Back movement. If you aren't familiar with Land Back, it first came to life on Instagram in 2018 when Arnell Tailfeathers, a Blackfoot online creator from Manitoba, made a viral meme using the phrase. I'll never again have meme

prejudice as I once did. Quickly after he made this, the words Land Back began appearing throughout the Indigenous community. People made art and crafts that incorporated Land Back and donated often these profits from the creations to ongoing land and water defenses. But what exactly does Land Back mean? Defining land back is both easy and complicated. Complicated because there's no land back approval board. There isn't somebody who can say that counts as land back, that doesn't. But when we look at the way that Indigenous people use the term, we can see that there are common attributes. Land back centres on material restitution, not symbolic gestures.

It's about demanding that Canada act in accordance with our laws, rather than squeezing Indigenous nations until we find ways to make our laws work within Canada's. With those attributes in mind, I define land-back as any action taken with the goal of returning jurisdiction, authority, and resources to Indigenous people. This may include returning actual physical parcels of land back to Indigenous stewardship, or it might mean refusing to follow laws of colonial government in favor of those traditional laws that Indigenous people articulate on their territories. As the Yellowhead Institute writes, land back is a nod to the wave of emerging artists and members finding new ways to communicate old demands. To address frequent questions about Land Back in advance, I will point out that for a vast majority, Land Back doesn't necessitate the removal of non-Indigenous people from their communities or properties.

Indigenous people are a people who are deeply aware of the violence and displacement of dispossession. We are not looking to recreate the violence that has been done onto us, onto others. And actually, I think it's a very direct and tragic result of colonialism that so many of us have come to believe that domination and force are the only ways that we can possibly acquire or express power. Just because that's the way that colonial states have maintained their power does not mean that it is natural, it is inevitable, or it's right. Instead, indigenous people have long expressed visions of living together that are premised on peace, friendship, and respect for other worldviews. If Land Back is

a resurgent effort, as Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Beresemoke Simpson reminds us, resurgence is fundamentally about solidarity and good relations. I'd also like to point out that just because resurgence efforts like Land Back don't directly center on non-Indigenous people, that does not mean that non-Indigenous people don't have things to benefit from efforts like Land Back. Statistics from organizations like the World Bank of the UN indicate that Indigenous people are the world's best protectors of biodiversity. According to a report from the World Bank, for example, we make up around 5% of the world's population, but we protect about 80% of the world's remaining

biodiversity. So while returning resources and power to Indigenous people is the ethical and moral thing to do, it's also in many ways the thing that may benefit us all the most in the long run. As an anecdote to illustrate this point, I once had an older white gentleman ask me during a presentation about Land Back, what's in it for me? That's kind of exactly how he said it. His question was blunt, and so I offered him an equally blunt response. Well, for one, you get a livable planet. So to return to the question I asked at the beginning of the talk, is reconciliation dead? Have we witnessed a funeral? Should we all simply forget it and pursue resurgent efforts like Land Back instead? No, that's not my point.

I do recognize that Indigenous people, youth in particular, have expressed grave concerns about reconciliation, and I'm not going to try and tell them here that they're wrong. But at the same time, I've argued that reconciliation means different things to different people. And I don't know that reconciliation actually dies until a critical mass of us see it as having passed away. And even then, I have to wonder if maybe the term has become so entrenched in Canadian institutions and economic endeavors that it would take a much more directed approach to dismantle entirely. Perhaps we could live with a zombified reconciliation, an idea that has had life but has been declared dead by the people whose its livelihood fundamentally depends upon, and yet reconciliation persists. Maybe a horror movie idea. In general, though, what I'm

saying is this. If reconciliation is to die, we know it isn't because of the work of the survivors who have advanced the concept and who've pushed the rock up the hill. It's because of Canada, who seems to insist on making that hill as steep and as forbidding as possible at every turn. I'm saying that it's my experience that Indigenous youth have serious and widespread criticisms of reconciliation as they've inherited it. And I'm saying that now more than ever, we should be taking the contentions of them seriously. I'm saying that I want Indigenous youth to feel that they have options available to them that go far beyond what even the TRC has laid out. On that last point, one time I was asked to give some short remarks during a cocktail hour of a conference in Ottawa. The conference was about Indigenous

child welfare, and the prompt they gave me to start my remarks was the following, what is your dream for Indigenous youth? Immediately I thought, okay, I'm going to be in this ballroom with a microphone and some seriously powerful people in the country. And I need to make my point in short order while fighting to be more interesting than the cocktails. I thought about my key points. If they only hear two or three things that I think Indigenous youth need, what should they be? Access to education, opportunities to work in their own communities. I made a list. But then, as I was trying to turn my long list into a short list, I realized,

what the hell am I doing? Is my wildest dream for Indigenous youth that they have access to higher education? My wildest dream for them is that they don't have to worry about dying young? My wildest dream for them is that they don't have to worry about dying young. I realized quickly that I'd fallen into a trap where I was made to believe that Indigenous people's dreams should be nothing more than what are already most non-Indigenous people's expectations. This trap is a travesty. And I think when we don't tell young people that truly anything is possible, that they don't have to just exist comfortably within Canada, but they can build something better than Canada, that we are contributing to putting those limits on their possibility and to all of our possibility. In that moment, I made a commitment to myself to never again limit my expectations to the bare minimum of healing. I will settle for nothing less than thriving.

So again, I bring up Land Back and Resurgence not because I want you to think they're superior to the notion of reconciliation, though I have been transparent about that role that they've played in my personal journey and how revitalizing they've been. There are multiple theories of change to combat colonialism, and we need them all. In fact, most critics of reconciliation seem to agree with this point. Resurgence is not automatically a disavowal of reconciliation. Reconciliation efforts can and have reduced the harm experienced by indigenous people, and thus it creates more room for us to pursue these resurgent efforts. They can be cooperative ideas. Most resurgent scholars instead advocate for us to pursue these resurgent efforts. They can be cooperative ideas. Most resurgent scholars instead advocate for us to be careful with our interactions with the state.

They tell us to be wary of Canada's true intentions at all times and to strategically choose our investments and moderate our expectations of what can happen through working with the state. But with all of this said, I bring resurgence and land back up today because I want you to consider the way that youth are responsible for increasingly creating and fostering their growth. Young people spray paint land back in downtown Toronto. They hashtag their pictures with it. They get it tattooed on their bodies. when I think of resurgence, I'm reminded that it's Indigenous youth, not Justin Trudeau, not any Canadian politician who leads Indigenous people to transformative futures.

And I'm asking everyone, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to honour younger people's criticisms. I want us to feel pride when we see them protest. And these protests, which beyond their explicit demands, tell us that Indigenous youth are saying, we are alive. We care about our future. We are fighting like our ancestors have. I want you to hold their hand when they grapple with how impossible it can feel to change any of this. I want you to share in critique and refuse to uphold shallow actions taken in the name of reconciliation, and instead demand the birth of something truly transformative and revolutionary. I'm asking you to learn all of the many histories of Indigenous resistance, including and beyond the current reconciliation model. I ask this so you can give Indigenous youth a full sense of the brilliance that is their birthright.

They're already showing you the way forward. Will you join them? Riley Yesno, delivering the 9th Annual Indigenous Speaker Series Lecture at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Hi, this is Riley. Riley, this is Nala Haya. Hi, how's it going? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. How are you? Good, good. This is Riley. Hi. Riley, this is Nala. Hi. Hello. How's it going? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too.

How are you? Good, good. Thank you so much for coming. Yeah, yeah. I had the chance to speak with Riley when she came to our Toronto studio. It's only the second time I've had COVID, which I know for a lot of people, like I know people on their like fourth or fifth line. I know.

And I was mostly caught up, so i had like four shots already so i think that helped too yeah yeah yeah and do we does riley need headphones yeah unless you you feel no it's all good if it gives you something it adds something to the conversation yeah yeah we're good to go greg's talking to you in my ear yeah he's just saying we're good to go we can go um whenever you're comfortable and ready we can get started all saying we're good to go. We can go. Whenever you're comfortable and ready, we can get started. All right. We're good. In the lecture, you said that symbols which aren't followed up by action are basically empty, that they're worse than useless. What's one of the worst examples, do you think, of that kind of symbolic action that really yields nothing?

Oh, OK. Two things that come to my mind. Well, I think first is like a site of heavy critique already in Canada, which is the land acknowledgement, right? You get the sketch shows about it even and all of those things. I think people can really clearly see the way that a land acknowledgement is useless if we're not willing to do that other part, like act on the acknowledgement, give the land back. And also, like the acknowledgement itself is sometimes frequently, I think, so poorly done where the names are just like grossly mispronounced or they have like the wrong territories. I'm sad about this because like acknowledging the land, acknowledging our relations is actually a very indigenous practice. The idea of a land acknowledgement didn't have to be this like neo-colonial, like weird co-option. It could have been like a very, I think, meaningful,

and it still can be in some cases. But it has been used, I think, in many ways as like a check mark to be like, okay, we're doing our thing. We're acknowledging indigenous people, yada, yada, let's go. And so that's a very, very obvious one. What tends to happen when you verbalize those thoughts i often um get mostly just this like look of of like i feel like people like really take it um into like this personal shame sphere um so like for example I was at the University of Toronto last year and I was helping. They were taking down a picture of Egerton Ryerson. And I told them, I was like, you know, this is great.

I love not having to look at Egerton Ryerson when I walk the halls. But we should also note that, like, this is the bare minimum. And you do have to do the bare minimum maybe to get to other things. But I don't know how long I want to spend like clapping and patting ourselves on the back for this and you could tell they were like not expecting maybe that sort of reaction and it just got so quiet and they all looked at each other and almost looked like they wanted to apologize to me and I can understand that like there is some time that needs to be given to like learning and correcting correcting and even just having grief over, you know, how much we have to do and how much we, you know, are imbued with every day of colonial, you know, ideals.

But at the same time, like, getting stuck in that shame place, I think, really prohibits us from also taking that action, which is the call. So, yeah. It's good to know that there are voices that call out the symbolism. Do you think there's enough of them? I think if there isn't yet that they're coming. So one of my thesis, like the point of my thesis right now

is to look at indigenous youth who, like I have dubbed the reconciliation generation because I think we grew up again in this era of recognition. And so it doesn't feel as revolutionary as our parents, as our grandparents. And so I think that there is maybe that like BS level, the tolerance for BS is a lot lower. And I think we see that with things like the Land Back movement, with a whole bunch of other social movements that I've been studying, where young people, I think, are the leading voices. And part of that, I have to imagine whether or not they explicitly say it'm curious how you think the climate crisis affects this conversation, but affects the value of the land that you look to for the future. Yeah, I mean, whenever I think about land back and the climate crisis, I think about, again, a panel I was on.

And at the end, a non-Indigenous person said, I just don't understand how non-Indigenous people are supposed to be involved in Land Back, they said. They were like, I feel like reconciliation is clearly about the relationship between Indigenous people and Canadians and the Canadian state, and I just don't see what the benefit is for non-Indigenous people when it comes to Land Back. And so the part of Indigenous people having Land Back is not because it's just the moral thing to do, but also because, like, I do believe that it is our only way to a livable future. I think that we have spent so much of the last, like, you know, 10 years or so talking about innovating our way into a green future, like solar panels and electric cars are going to save us. future, like solar panels and electric cars are going to save us, when fundamentally, I think it is about a transformed relationship with land, with labor, with consumption, with all of these things. And the people that already know that model and are willing to teach it to us are Indigenous people.

And so this idea that, you know, we have to look to big corporations or the government or whoever to get that, I think is actually, you know, delaying what could be a very easy process. And so Land Back, yes, centers Indigenous people, but I do think it's for all of us in that regard. It's a very persuasive argument. And I'm wondering how far you think you and others have gone in actually persuading others that this is the way forward? persuading others that this is the way forward? Oh, man. I mean, I think so. First, I think that anybody who is partial to an Indigenous activist stance is so because of the work Indigenous people have done. So I know that we have seen this like major transformation in the cultural climate

around Indigenous affairs since especially, you know, 2015 in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But as Canada has really profoundly failed to meet the urgency of those demands, we know that anything that has gotten done is because Indigenous people have not stopped going into schools and writing articles and showing up on the front lines. And so any mobilization, I think,

is entirely to our credit and to the credit of our few really strong allies. I think also, again, looking to youth, when you look at what is their number one maybe goals for the future, the things they care about most in the elections, climate change, if it's not the top, it's in the top like three or five. And so from there, I think we have an audience and perhaps, you know, a cohort of comrades to come into this fight with us. And young people, in my experience, also are way less adverse to all the, but what do I get from it? Questions that I get from adults, all of these, you know, rebuttals that I have learned to fight off have never really come from children or from youth. So I've put a lot of hope into there. How hopeful is this generation?

I think that we are really hopeful. I mean, even if you talk to them and you say, are you hopeful for the future? And they say like, I don't know. I think by virtue of their actions, they're saying I'm investing whatever energy, time, resources I have into building something for the future. There's this like really, I think, outdated and lazy notion that young people are apathetic. like even just like volunteer rates. Young people volunteer more than any other age demographic in this country.

And so we might not show up to the polls in the way that some people would like. But I think that maybe that is a cause for reflection to say, why have we not created systems that work for young people? Why are we not reaching out to young people themselves instead of it being, you know, a knock on young people's ability to show up? I think if you're looking for it, you'll find them doing that work. And that work has to be motivated by some sort of hope. I wonder when you stood in front of that crowd at VIU, what were you hoping to leave with them? I think I was hoping to leave maybe this idea that the future isn't settled. And whether or not they were fully

convinced by my argument or not, that it at least put like a little question mark or an asterisk in their brain. I think that the narrative that we have about reconciliation in the mainstream is like pretty monolithic, that if you critique it, you're against Indigenous people, you're against survivors, you're against all of these things, when in fact, I think it's actually a very loving gesture to say, I'm not sure about this. I want this to be right. I want to get it right. And I think we only make those corrections through critique and through discussion. They might not have left being fully radicalized into my reconciliation is dead sort of narrative, but maybe it was it cracked something open a little bit. I wanted to be able to leave the stage and say, you know, I did something at least that felt authentic and

then to say, wow, that was, that was a very honest talk. Yeah. It was an honest talk. Thank you very much for bringing it to our airwaves. And I look forward to hearing what you do next. Thank you. next. Thank you. Riley Yesno is an Anishinaabe scholar, writer, and commentator from Abnitung First Nation and Thunder Bay, Ontario. She delivered the ninth annual Indigenous Speakers Series lecture at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia. in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Her lecture was entitled The Reconciliation Generation, Indigenous Youth and the Future for Indigenous People. This program was produced by Greg Kelly and Anne Penman.

If you'd like to comment on anything you heard in this program or any other, just go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Laura Antonelli. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Lisa Godfrey is the acting senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.