The second to last winter exhibition of the year and its one that I’m actually kinda happy with how it turned out.

The theme of our room was reconciliACTION, with 7 different groups:

• Cultural revitalization.
• The 94 calls to action.
• Land acknowledgment.
• Days of reconciliation.
• Language revitalization.
• Funding and land.
• Indigenous media.

I was a part of cultural revitalization, along with Tom, Jessie, and Kira (their blogs linked on their name).

The driving question for this project is “How might we engage in meaningful Reconciliation?” To answer this question, we had to learn about why reconciliation is important, what reconciliation means, what it looks like, and what is not reconciliation.

The dictionary definition of reconciliation is “the restoration of friendly relations.” Upon learning more about reconciliation though, we came up with our own definition for reconciliation with the #my reconciliation includes. My definition of reconciliation is this: “My reconciliation includes acknowledging the past, working to revitalizing indigenous culture in the present, and moving towards a better, more meaningful future.” Examples of this is the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and indigenous languages and cultural revitalization projects.

Something that would not be reconciliation is tokenism. This is something like surface-level gestures or symbolic actions that doesn’t  lead to any change. This could be performing land acknowledgments that doesn’t have any real value. Another would be cultural appropriation, which is the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of a different culture without fully understanding or respecting the element’s significance to the other culture.

I believe that reconciliation is important because, in order to move forward, we need to make up for our past wrong doings. Say you did something bad towards a person you cared about, and now the relationship between the two of you is falling apart. You cannot move forward along with this person unless you reconcile with them, which is recognizing that you made a mistake, apologizing, and making amends so that your relationship can heal and you will have a healthy relationship moving forward.

It is important to know and accept that reconciliation might not heal all wounds completely. It’s also important to keep in mind of that past wrong doings and make continuous efforts in making sure it doesn’t happen again.

We also did a bunch of individual research on our topics and I found out about cedar tree restorations. I had an interest in learning more about this and I decided to do this for my exhibition. My idea was to create a board with images to help with my talking, along with items that would be made from cedar for display. The room where we were going to present our learning had a pole in the middle of it, so I turned that into a cedar tree. I unfortunately did not get any photos of my work, but you can kinda see it in the first photo at the top, as well as the photo below.

One thing that I did notice was that there seemed to be a lack of communication in our group. We had trouble figuring out who was doing the audience engagement, and who was going to hand in things. Two people in our group were very shy and the other two didn’t seem to keen on talking with others, so I was forced to come out of my shell to talk to my team to get things done and sorted, making sure everyone knows what they’re doing.

During the creation of the tree, there was not enough paint to cover the whole tree, so I improvised and got some help from my friend to just paint lines on the cardboard to make it look like tree texture. Also, when I was putting the branches on the tree, the tape couldn’t hold up the cardboard under all the weight of the branches, so it fell multiple times and I had to go find more branches outside, as well as use stronger tape (its the black tape you can see at the top). I think that, overall,  turned out pretty darn good.

I was able to learn quite a few things from this project, and more importantly, I was able to come up with a question to our driving question: To engage in meaningful reconciliation, we must believe in and understand the process, actively learn about their culture, as well as support the efforts of revitalization.