Before I begin, what the heck is ReconciliACTION? 

Let’s talk about it!

In this post I will be talking about a British Columbia First People’s project, also known as BCFP, where we focus hard on what the difference is between Reconciliation and ReconciliACTION. While we keep our driving question in mind: “How might we engage in meaningful reconciliation?”

Here’s what we learned:

Reconciliation VS ReconciliACTION

Reconciliation:

• About fixing the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.
• Involves understanding the past and recognizing harm done.
• Focuses on respect, learning, and building a better future together.

ReconciliACTION:

• About taking action to support Indigenous communities.
• Moves beyond words and into real change.
• Examples include learning about Indigenous cultures, speaking out against injustice, and supporting Indigenous businesses.

To summarize,

Reconciliation = Understanding

ReconciliACTION = Taking steps to make things better

With this background knowledge…

Lets hop into the project!

Source

We started by getting into groups, that were specific to Indigenous people of BC but also  broad enough to have lots of information to share with the public. I chose to be in the Language Revitalization group, ever since the beginning I was excited about my topic and working with my group (Susan, Caden, and Jasper).

We started off by building our knowledge, we did this by doing literature notes on articles relevant to our topic.

Here is my craft link.

As a group we combined and shared the information we learned, we came up with some great brain storming and ideas for what we would like our exhibit to look like, here is what our first draft idea was:

As we progressed, we created a design pitch and interactive design pitch, here are some of our  first draft thoughts:

To see the rest of our brainstorming click here.

This was all in our first attempt at our ideas, we ended up executing our stand quite well, we all wore a red top and black bottoms, we created the hello sign, we created the memory game (with a pronunciation list), we had the interactive website with headphones, all of which was accompanied with some mint tea.

Here are some photos of the creation process!

Everything went smoothly except for…

One difficult situation where we couldn’t teach people the languages, since our group was Language Revitalization it was hard to work around. If we did try to teach others we would be moving in the opposite direction of Reconciliation, since none of us are connected to the heritage or have been taught by someone from any of the nations it can be disrespectful to teach. To overcome this, as a team we made a pronunciation cheat sheet list (using First Voices as our resource) for others to read, we created it based on our research and how we assumed it would sound like, while educating others that it could be incorrect.

here is how our group’s exhibit looked:

Overall I’m very proud of how my group came together to create something so awesome, it was engaging to all audiences and we got our message out strongly. We managed our time well and ended up making some fantastic work that I’m so happy with!

Thanks to everyone who came out and supported, if you want to see more check out my instagram at: ssofiag.4

Thanks for reading, hope your winter was great, see you in my next post!!