Description

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How one woman came to understand her relationship with colonization through conversations with Indigenous people.

Can Indigenous and non-Indigenous people live in a treaty relationship despite over two hundred years of social, cultural, and political alienation? This is the challenge of reconciliation as well as its beautiful promise. Twenty-five years after the Ipperwash crisis, writer and social activist Heather Menzies showed up in Nishnaabe territory in Southwestern Ontario, near where her forebears settled, hoping to meet her would-be treaty kin. She was invited to help document the broken-treaty story behind the crisis, as remembered by Nishnaabe Elders and other community members involved in reclaiming their homeland at Stoney Point. But she soon realized that even the most sincere intentions can be steeped in a colonial mindset that hinders understanding, reconciliation, and healing. In Meeting My Treaty Kin, Menzies shares her journey. Her thoughtful, sensitive, nuanced account shows how a settler, through respectful listening, can learn what being in a treaty relationship might mean, and what changes—personal and institutional—are needed to embrace genuine reconciliation.

About the Author

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Heather Menzies is an award-winning author, activist, and adjunct research professor in the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. In 2013, she was appointed to the Order of Canada for her contributions to public discourse.

Praise For…

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"A thoughtful, sensitive, nuanced account of the personal groundwork that reconciliation requires, and the promise that listening with respect holds for healing our relations with one another."
— The Tyee

"Heather Menzies’s account of having to confront and unlearn the taken-for-granted knowledge, assumptions, and unequal power dynamics of her own white settler privilege is told with candour, critical self-reflection, and a willingness to change."
— Paulette Regan, author of Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada

"Heather Menzies courageously and humbly chronicles her personal journey of disrupting the colonial legacy through unlearning and deep listening to her treaty kin. Her story offers wisdom for going beyond words of apology to rebuild respectful relations with First Peoples. There is hard work in this journey, but there is also hope."
— The Reverend Dr. James V. Scott, O.C., former United Church General Council Officer for Residential Schools

"Through stories of her own personal journey of decolonization as a settler Canadian, Heather Menzies’s brave and honest memoir illuminates promising possibilities for all of us to revitalize our foundational treaty relationships."
— Lindsay Keegitah Borrows, author of Otter’s Journey Through Indigenous Language and Law