My Journey

An excerpt from my Journey Toward Reconciliation:

My journey toward reconciliation is a continual process that will assist my upcoming teaching career and life in general. It began when I was introduced to Orange Shirt Day and residential schools in grade seven. However, the term “reconciliation” did not appear until I attended high school. During those four years, I grasped the meaning of this term and noticed a significant increase in my comprehension of Indigenous history. The university classes I have attended furthermore contributed to my overall journey, considering I learned a variety of new topics about reconciliation that were undiscussed in previous years. Those include the power of white privilege, equity concerning diversity, and indigenization within a classroom setting. Despite my expansion of knowledge, my journey toward reconciliation is not just simply retaining new information. I was taught in high school that reconciliation meant recognizing and acknowledging past harms to form better relationships. Although this definition needs to be honoured, I realize it is what initiates my own journey. I underwent the base process of learning and acceptance, and my second phase is discovering how to actively implement the knowledge I obtain into my life and the others around me. Essentially, my current journey toward reconciliation is seeking the balance between learning and doing. 

Click the link below to read my entire paper:

ECS 101- Journey Toward Reconciliation

My Aesthetic Representation

I decided to take the topic of truth and reconciliation and connect it to my personal skill of painting. I created a landscape, which represents Mother Earth. She is sacred to Indigenous culture, and Indigenous peoples advocate for her protection due to their deep respect for the land that ties in with their beliefs and values. Mother Earth has been around for an immense change from the pre-colonial period to the present day. She saw how it left society searching for balance again. Joseph Naytowhow explains exactly what type of balance I mean. He expresses, “I teach people to respect the old ways while embracing congruent contemporary ones” (Naytowhow, 2021). I believe one result of truth and reconciliation is this recognition of a balance between old and new. It also symbolizes my reconciliation journey of balance between learning and doing.