Reconciliation and Decolonization Initiatives at Non-Governmental Organizations in Canada


Tyler Bateman, University of Toronto

In 2023, I implemented a 4th year undergraduate seminar, where I worked with undergraduate students and two organizations--the grassroots organization Council of Canadians and Indigenous organization Grandmother's Voice--to draft a project that filled the organizations' research needs. These organizations asked my students and I to find out what non-governmental organizations across Canada have been doing in terms of reconciliation and decolonization. The organizations asked for this because there is an impulse to make progress on reconciliation and decolonization among many NGOs, especially since the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions Final Report, yet many organizations are not sure of the appropriate path forward, and some see upper management as needing to be convinced of these initiatives through evidence of precedent and effectiveness. The project is grounded in the idea of Two-Eyed Seeing, shared by Elder Albert Marshall (e.g., Reid et al. 2021, "Two‐Eyed Seeing": An Indigenous Framework to Transform Fisheries Research and Management"), that emphasizes the importance of knowledge co-existence, when settlers such as myself and my students (who have all been settlers in these seminars) do this kind of work. The idea of knowledge co-existence, also expressed in other ways such as in the Two-Row Wampum Belt Covenant, indicate the importance of settlers not "incorporating" Indigenous knowledges into settler frameworks of research, but maintaining a clear understanding of the sovereignty of Indigenous knowledges and the importance of settlers not speaking as though they are holders of Indigenous cosmologies. I ran the course in Winter 2023 and Fall 2023, co-conducting, with student researchers, 6 interviews in Winter 2023 and 9 in Fall 2023. Most interviewees were from environmental organizations, but a few (

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