National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

In Canada, today is National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. It is also a day of mixed feelings.



The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation started as the grassroots Orange Shirt Day in 2013 to commemorate all the things taken from indigenous children at Canada’s vicious residential schools, from their clothes and innocence to their lives. From 2008 to 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented the history and impacts of the 140 federally run residential schools in Canada, and concluded with a report containing 94 Calls to Action. After this victory, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) was launched in 2016, and delivered its final report (Reclaiming Power and Place) with 231 Calls for Justice in 2019.



I was out of Canada, living in Japan when all this happened. I had left Canada in 1996, an indigenous person who had experienced racism many times during his youth here. When I returned to Canada in spring 2023, I was both hopeful with all the land acknowledgments and holidays that things were better. My mother was Nunatsiavut (status Labrador Inuit), and my great aunt had been a Labrador Inuit elder who advised the Labrador Foundation, the wing of Memorial University made to study Inuit culture there. The only reason I was not status was due to The Indian Act’s second generation cutoff / blood quantum, a colonial rule that was designed to reduce indigenous numbers by disqualifying mixed blood children of indigenous mothers, thereby cutting off the matrilineal identity that were central to indigenous peoples across the Americas. In my absence, the NunatuKavut Community Council (NCC) had fought for decades for recognition. Their efforts culminated in 2023 with the Newfoundland & Labrador premier’s apology to NCC for residential schools, which followed a 2017 apology by then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Any day now, I reckoned, there would be a breakthrough.



How wrong I was.




In November 2023, Natan Obed, the head of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), wrote an attack letter accusing the NCC of being a ‘shapeshifter’ organization because it changed its name (although the ITK has changed its name twice). Shapeshifter is a slur in Inuit culture, and Obed’s word choice was ironic considering he was born in New Brunswick, raised in the USA, and couldn’t speak Inuktitut. A week later, the head of the Nunatsiavut followed his lead, parroting Obed’s attacks and adding a complaint about the $75 million the NCC has received from the Newfoundland government (while omitting the $225 million his group has received).

For three years NCC members have been in an anguished limbo as Newfoundland’s media published hit pieces against them, and Memorial University called in mainland ‘pretendian hunters’, who were ignorant of Labrador’s history of assimilation, to create a report denying NCC claims. (I was in the focus group for the report, and as a former professor I was appalled by the unprofessionalism, such as changing ZOOM groups the night before to ghettoize NCC members and using mainland ‘experts’ with no background in anthropology, sociology, or history.)

On September 9th, 2026, Ottawa ended its talks with the NunatuKavut Community Council (NCC), ending their bid for recognition. This was especially painful since NCC includes residential school survivors, who were addressed in Canada’s 2018 apology to residential school victims. The Carney government had already denied the land claims of the Innu, the First Person group living in southern Labrador, who are now filing in Supreme Court. Then, days later, Mark Carney met with American billionaires to sell Canada, including Labrador’s hydroelectric potential and natural resources. Instead of having three indigenous groups to consult with, he has now whittled it down to one.

So today I will go to the Truth and Reconciliation gathering in nearby (colonially named) Queen’s Park, and like a ghost I will move through that conflicted space, neither fully Canadian nor status indigenous.



But I know who I am.