Reconciliation In Action

Pondering ways to read the Summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report, sisters, Hilary and Margot Gough, along with a friend, Maggie McBride, decided to create an opportunity for other people to read it and explore the significance of the report for themselves. With that came the Facebook tool - Engage with the TRC yxe.

Their end goal was to engage people with the TRC report, but the trio ends up inspiring others to get out and make a difference by engaging in reconciliation. Have a connection to the report or want to express your understanding of it? Reach out to Engage with the TRC yxe or tell us your story, email reconciliationsk@otc.ca

The following is edited excerpts from an interview with one of the organizers, Hilary Gough.

Q: Can you tell me what this [project] is? Is a Facebook page or, is it more than that?
A: It [the project] takes the form of a Facebook page. We’ve used Twitter as well to share the posts. We thought about the traditional book club format, or whether we might get other people involved in reading it. Could we consume it in small pieces? Could we discuss it somehow, or share some kind of reaction to what we were reading to motivate us to read and continue reading through the report. We discovered there had been, completely independent of us, folks who had crowd- sourced videos that recorded people reading the report.

Q: What is the process, how does it work and how did you set it up?
A: There are videos that had been created completely independently by a crowd-source project. We linked those videos with the corresponding text. We created a little spreadsheet of each of those sections and designated what dates they would get posted. Then we invited people to do get in touch with us if they wanted to contribute a reflection. If they wanted to contribute, what would do is send them the spreadsheet.
Some people wrote a poem, other people just pulled a quote that they thought was particularly interesting, or telling, or shocking, or new to them. [Others] summarized the content of that section and used that quote. Really, we just left it open to the reader to share something that they felt comfortable sharing with a broader audience.
Then, as organizers, we take that reflection and copy it as a post on Facebook and we would include the link to the YouTube video so that people seeing it in their newsfeeds on Facebook would be able to click the link.

Q: What was the objective?
A: The objective was to invite people to take on that learning and to do it in a way that invited other people to engage. I think it’s really important … It’s time for settler Canadians to take the responsibility of learning about our history and that’s really what we wanted to do by reading the report ourselves, but also, to invite other people by organizing this project.

Q: What were your hopes for other people’s learning?
A: What did I learn there? How is it still relevant today? How is it still impacting communities today? And how is that different than my reality as a settler Canadian.

Q: What are you hoping for an outcome for this project?
A: The more we understand it [the report], the more we can move forward from that place of understanding and really, really understand where other people are coming from. We just hope that more people read the report.

The group hopes to add a public event to their project sometime in the future, but it is still in the planning stages.