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  • Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliation
  • Jeff Corntassel (bio), Chaw-win-is (bio), and T’lakwadzi (bio)

Indigenous Storytelling is Connected to our Homelands and is crucial to the cultural and political resurgence of Indigenous nations. According to Maori scholar Linda Smith, “‘The talk’ about the colonial past is embedded in our political discourses, our humour, poetry, music, storytelling, and other common sense ways of passing on both a narrative of history and an attitude about history” (19). For example, when conveying community narratives of history to future generations, Nuu-chah-nulth peoples have relied on haa-huu-pah as teaching stories or sacred living histories that solidify ancestral and contemporary connections to place.1 As Nuu-chah-nulth Elder Cha-chin-sun-up states, haa-huu-pah are “What we do when we get up every day to make the world good.” Haa-huu-pah [End Page 137] are not fairy tales or entertaining stories for children—they are lived values that form the basis for Indigenous governance and regeneration. The experiential knowledge and living histories of haa-huu-pah comprise part of the core teachings that Indigenous families transmit to future generations.

The nation-state of Canada offers a very different version of history than those of Indigenous nations—one that glosses over the colonial legacies of removing Indigenous peoples from their families and homelands when enforcing assimilationist policies, all of which were intended to eradicate Indigenous nations. The residential school era, which can be said to begin in 1874, is one example of the racist policies that were imposed on Indigenous people.2 Designed to strip Indigenous people of their languages and cultures, the residential schools were administered by the government of Canada and run by four well-known denominations or churches. By the time the last residential school closed in 1996, over one-hundred-thousand Indigenous children had been forcibly removed from their homes.3

According to Paulette Regan, Euro-Canadian scholar and academic liaison to Truth and Reconciliation Canada (trc), settler Canadians have much to account for:

Settler violence against Indigenous peoples is woven into the fabric of Canadian history in an unbroken thread from past to present that we must now unravel, unsettling our comfortable assumptions about the past. At the same time, we must work as Indigenous allies to “restory” the dominant culture version of history; that is, we must make decolonizing space for Indigenous history—counter-narratives of diplomacy, law, and peacemaking practices—as told by Indigenous peoples themselves.

(2)

Given the monumental task ahead to restory the settler version of history, this paper explores the structure of Truth and Reconciliation Canada along with some of the criticisms that have emerged recently from residential school survivors regarding the shortcomings of Canada’s attempts at reparations for residential school survivors in the form of Common [End Page 138] Experience Payments (cep). We anchor our discussion in haa-huu-pah as a form of truth-telling in order to demonstrate how Indigenous stories of resilience are critical to the resurgence of our communities. Moreover, haa-huu-pah are fundamental to teaching our families and communities who we are and how to govern ourselves on this land, intending to lead us toward action. After all, “Awareness of truth [...] compels some kind of action” (Waziyatawin 11). Processes of restorying and truth-telling are not effective without some larger community-centred, decolonizing actions behind them.

Thus, haa-huu-pah signify a starting point for renewing Indigenous family and community responsibilities in the ongoing struggle for Indigenous justice and freedom. Haa-huu-pah also represent an alternative to the Canadian state’s vision for reconciliation, which seeks to legitimize the status quo rather than to rectify injustice for Indigenous communities.

As Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel point out, “[T]here is a danger in allowing colonization to be the only story of Indigenous lives. It must be recognized that colonialism is a narrative in which the Settler’s power is the fundamental reference and assumption, inherently limiting Indigenous freedom and imposing a view of the world that is but an outcome or perspective on that power” (601). A restorying process for Indigenous peoples entails questioning...

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