As federal funding falters, Vancouver, the ‘City of Reconciliation,’ offers crucial lessons in Indigenous relationships – The Globe and Mail
In 2013, more than 70,000 people took to the streets of downtown Vancouver and walked four kilometres in the rain to show their support for building relationships with Indigenous communities.
Known as the Walk for Reconciliation, the event kick-started a longer journey of reconciliation within the city, an effort that would lead Vancouver to become the world’s first City of Reconciliation in 2014.
Today, the importance of centring reconciliation at the local level is growing increasingly clear. Indigenous affairs have faced years of funding cuts at the federal level, and, in recent months, Indigenous critics have urged Canada’s major political parties to centre reconciliation in the forthcoming federal election.
Ginger Gosnell-Myers, a member of the Nisga’a and Kwakwak’awakw Nations and an urban reconciliation specialist, suggests that city governments might offer a more promising site of change. “Cities are ground-zero for reconciliation,” she says.
