Decade-long Brandon conference series focused on reconciliation and healing ends with eye to the future

A southwestern Manitoba initiative focused on reconciliation and Indigenous wellness, with roots stretching back a decade, came to its conclusion this week — but its organizers hope it will leave a legacy for years to come.

The first Creating a New Legacy conference, hosted by the Brandon Friendship Centre's Indigenous health and wellness committee, was held  in 2012, with the goal of building relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and groups, while also sharing knowledge about healing from the trauma of residential schools, said conference co-chair Lisa Ramsay.

The decade-long project — which included conferences in 2015 and 2018 — came to its planned end Wednesday with a fourth and final gathering centred on the theme "decolonizing the spirit."

"One of the beautiful things about Brandon is we've got some amazing leaders, we've got elders that have incredible courage and they started sharing their story years ago," said Ramsay.

"We've got ... community leaders who are social action-oriented, who are brave enough to say what needs to be said, hold people accountable and just keep moving forward. They've been role models."

Wednesday's conference, held at Brandon's Riverbank Discovery Centre, included presentations from residential school survivors and different community groups.

While co-chair Nellie Kopitz said the conference has evolved over the last decade, she said the vision remained the same — acknowledging that healing from residential schools will be an ongoing process for all Canadians.

She described "decolonizing the spirit" as a process of looking within and understanding how a person's thoughts, beliefs and emotions carry colonization in their everyday lives.

Breaking those cycles and making reconciliation a lifelong commitment is an important piece in renewing relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, she said, but that requires conscious action.

Part of the conversation about healing has been centred on balancing body, mind and emotional health, she said, while also healing the damage to hearts and spirits.

Ramsay said that includes "telling our truth about our life experience and the hurts that we carry deep in our soul."

"Once we say that out loud, we begin to heal ourselves," she said. "That process of telling it also heals other people."

Healing is possible, she said, and the process is made easier when the community is united in purpose.

"We are breaking cycles in our own family, and we're doing that work for a reason," said Ramsay.

"Our kids have access to a level of education that … previous generations didn't have. And by getting educated and learning the history in the schools and then being able to be employed and breaking the cycle of poverty, all of that liberates those young people."

She was grateful to see post-secondary and Brandon high school students in attendance at Wednesday's event, since they can be part of creating a better future. She hopes they'll carry the teachings from the conference into their daily lives.

"We carry that responsibility to keep sharing it and bringing that forward to the next generation, and our kids are going to benefit from the work that we're doing now," said Ramsay.

"We're gonna trust them to do this work as we get older and then we're just going to keep getting more and more healthy.… We're going to recover from all that we've been through."

Useful learning for future: public safety students 

Tess Manning and Ian Dealey, who are students in Assiniboine Community College's public safety program — formerly known as police studies — attended the Creating a New Legacy conference for the first time Wednesday.

They said they appreciated hearing stories from elders and residential school survivors, which gave them new perspectives on how to approach the police work they hope to do in the future.

Manning said Wednesday's conference left them with a better understanding of different cultures and people, which will help them work with all types of people in the future.

Dealy agreed.

"It's really opened my eyes to see how I can approach different situations now in the future," he said.

Dealy acknowledges there is a lot of work left to do on reconciliation, but he believes education is a major part of the puzzle.

"Hearing the stories was really impactful for me," he said. "Just getting the full story of what they were going through and how they handled themselves."