Featured Resource: Indigenous Truth and Reconciliation Toolkit

Published August 19, 2021

With many people thinking about back to school and learning, now is an important moment for Canada’s housing co-ops to explore reconciliation.

CHF Canada created the Building better relationships: a reconciliation toolkit to help your co-op do just that.

Released in 2020, the Toolkit features printable pages suitable for posting in your co-op, as well as a list of readings, resources and links to promote reconciliation with Indigenous peoples through learning and relationship building.

To help you start, we broke down ideas in the Toolkit into four different themes:

1. Ideas for knowing and honouring
2. Ideas for good process
3. Ideas for healing the relationship
4. Ideas for action

Encourage your members to wear an orange shirt on September 30

CHF Canada staff taking part in Orange Shirt Day 2020

Canadians were reminded of the horrific legacy of the “residential school” system with the discovery of the remains of 215 children on the grounds of the Kamloops residential school. In her Statement on Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, CHF Canada president Tina Stevens joined others calling on the government to make Orange Shirt Day a national day for Truth and Reconciliation.

In July, Canada did make September 30 a statutory holiday for public servants. The official name is the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, but the day is widely known as Orange Shirt Day. People across Canada wear orange to remember the Indigenous children forced to attend residential “schools“.

Why an orange shirt? Its origins are in the story of Phyllis Jack Webstad’s first day at a residential school. You can watch Phyllis tell her story here.