When I ask Grandma what reconciliation means to her, she asks what that even means. We look up the exact definition.

The restoration of friendly relations.

The action of making one view or belief compatible with another.

– Oxford Languages

She says she doesn’t think much of it, because she doesn’t think there is much possibility of it. There’s too much lateral violence against marginalized populations. “They break every promise, and now they are even being mean to their own, kind of tells you something,” she says. “You can always have hope. We’ve been hoping for 500 years now. How many years will it take?”

She asks me to look at the traumas they have impacted on us. “Have we reacted, fought back? The answer is no. We haven’t. It’s not our way of being. It’s hard to have hope that they will change after 500 years.”

She tells me she looks back to her life when she was not doing good behaviours herself. She had 64 years to change and she did. She made the effort and became a better person.

“Greed is what leads those people,” she laments. She begins to describe the intense greed in the system. It’s obvious when you begin looking.

She realizes as an older person she won’t be around to see any positive changes. “Sure, they let us do these marches and that, but they’re gonna come after us again,” she asserts. They’re still destorying the forests, killing the beings; these things are inexcusable.

“We have to get rid of the materialistic bullshit,” she suggests. “That’s what’s misleading people.”

She begins to talk about the Holocaust. The atrocities that we all thought were wrong are now coming back with denialism and blame at an ethnic group. How young people today don’t learn what we learned and are further removed from reality. The parallels are staggering.

“Fifty thousand people could live in a Native village and get along, many moons ago, and we’ve lost that,” she begins to explain, “it’s because of the way we’re all forced to live. They teach you to kick your kids out at 18, instead of always staying with your family. Total opposites. Kids are encouraged to separate from their families to make them vulnerable.”

I ask her what she thinks about days like the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation .

“These days give the average Native a few hours of healing, because they get to be around other Natives, hear the drum, and sing. Then they step back into the urban world, in an urban home, where everybody fights”

She wishes for a piece of land in the woods to be left alone. I wish this for her.

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