Robertson – accepting your role

Reconciliation is like an all-hands-on-deck kind of community movement. I think that the first thing you can do, I think, is accepting that you have a role. And I think that’s an important thing because we’re talking about residential schools, we’re talking about foster care, Sixties Scoop, all these different things. We’re not talking about Indigenous histories. We’re talking about our history as Canadians. And so if you are Canadian and you live in this country, I think you do have an accountability to what has happened, and you do have a responsibility to do something moving forward. It doesn’t mean that the past is your fault. It just means that we’re here in this country because of what happened. This country is a country founded on colonialism. And so I think it means that you recognize that, and you know that because of that, I think that you do have a responsibility to do something. And I think that’s the first part of it. The next part of it is deciding what that something can be. And that is a personal choice. I would never prescribe that on anybody. It’s a personal choice and it’s a meaningful choice. And then once you decide what you can do, it’s to actually do it, actually have the intention to do it. And then think about moving forward, how can we walk together better together in this community towards this long-term goal? And you have to have a long-term goal. You have to know that this is going to be a long haul. It’s not going to happen overnight. We’ve made a lot of inroads in the last 10 years, but no, there’s still trauma happening today. And so you need to know that the stuff you do, you may not see the results of that in your lifetime. Change takes generations, and so you have to also have faith that the stuff you do will have an impact over the long term, because that’s what it needs to be. It’s not going to happen tomorrow. And so if you take all those things in, I think that it means that what you do matters, and if one person isn’t doing something, then it holds us back a little bit.