Ten years ago, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission published its 94 Calls to Action, offering a roadmap for how all Canadians could work to heal the generational wounds inflicted by the residential school system. Since their release in 2015, only 15 calls have been completed and 17 remain completely untouched.
MCC’s Indigenous Neighbours program encompasses a wide variety of projects, support and advocacy that varies greatly from province to province. Here are five examples of ways MCC’s work aims to carry out the Calls to Action in the different contexts in which we work.
Call to Action 59
We call upon church parties to the Settlement Agreement to develop ongoing education strategies to ensure that their respective congregations learn about their church’s role in colonization, the history and legacy of residential schools, and why apologies to former residential school students, their families, and communities were necessary.
MCC is a founding member of KAIROS, an ecumenical ministry administered by the United Church of Canada and the creator of the KAIROS Blanket Exercise (KBE). The KBE was first developed in 1996 as a tool to build understanding and educate churches and settler communities on the impacts of the church’s role in colonization and residential schools.
Participating in a KBE allows those involved to engage with the shared history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada by walking through pre-contact, treaty-making, colonization and resistance together in an experiential way.
“The KAIROS Blanket Exercise has a consistent profound impact on many people,” says Randy Klassen, Indigenous Neighbours coordinator for MCC Saskatchewan. “The diverse details of history are brought together and given shape as a unified story, and the body feels it. We see it regularly: head knowledge sinks down to the level of the heart. The KBE doesn’t only give knowledge, it shares experience; and by doing that, it builds empathy.”
In Saskatchewan, MCC is one of the most active facilitators of KBEs in the province. Last year alone, 25 KBEs were carried out by MCC for churches, schools, community groups and civic employees in Saskatoon.
Call to Action 30
We call upon federal, provincial and territorial governments to commit to eliminating the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in custody over the next decade and to issue detailed annual reports that monitor and evaluate progress in doing so.
Indigenous Canadians make up around 5% of the nation’s population but account for around 32% of the population of inmates in Canadian prisons. When accounting for gender, the numbers are even more stark — Indigenous female youth, for example, make up 60% of all female youth admitted to correctional facilities, and more than 50% of female inmates in federal prisons are Indigenous.
Fiona Li is MCC Ontario’s Indigenous mass incarceration advocate and says her legal background initially led her to believe the reasons for the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in Canadian prison was a legal issue, but she’s come to see it has many more roots.
“The crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is what drew my attention to this issue in the first place,” says Li. “But working with Indigenous partners in Ontario in support of their work of reconciliation, visiting prisons and doing research revealed to me how many factors contribute to the colonial system — housing, health care, CFS, they all play a part in upholding the issue.”
Li recently presented on this issue at Map the System, a global competition where students are invited to rethink social and environmental issues and propose how to change them. She’s currently working on an interactive educational activity like a KAIROS Blanket Exercise that focuses specifically on the prison pipeline for Indigenous people in Canada.
Call to Action 10.vii
We call on the federal government to draft new Aboriginal education legislation with the full participation and informed consent of Aboriginal peoples. The new legislation would include a commitment to sufficient funding and would incorporate respecting and honouring Treaty relationships.
In the 1870s, when Mennonite farmers first arrived to a region of fertile farmland southwest of Winnipeg, Manitoba, they encountered well-established Ojibwe communities. These first interactions were the genesis of a “secret treaty,” remembered by members of Swan Lake First Nation, even as it faded from the memories of the local Mennonites.
This agreement is the subject of The Secret Treaty: A Lost Story of Ojibwe and Mennonite Neighbours. This short graphic novel depicts a tour given by Swan Lake Elder Dave Scott through that same territory, explaining the impacts of the treaty and how it was not treated the same by colonial Mennonites as it was by Swan Lake First Nation.
MCC Manitoba and the Mennonite Coalition on Indigenous Solidarity supported the graphic novel’s publishing and a book launch tour that made stops at some of the locations referenced in it across southern Manitoba. In addition to promoting the graphic novel, the tour aimed to exemplify an early positive (though broken) Indigenous-settler relationship — a model that can inform our work for right relations today.
“One of the things that has been a high priority for us, particularly here in Manitoba and Treaty 1 territory, is to understand our relationship to treaty and to treaties more broadly,” says Kerry Saner-Harvey, MCC Manitoba Indigenous Neighbours coordinator. “Working in the framework that the treaty relationship is about respect and an ongoing reciprocal relationship is essential for the work of reconciliation.”
Call to Action 61.iv
We call upon church parties to the Settlement Agreement, in collaboration with Survivors and representatives of Aboriginal organizations, to establish permanent funding to Aboriginal people for regional dialogues for Indigenous spiritual leaders and youth to discuss Indigenous spirituality, self-determination, and reconciliation.
In Tatamagouche, N.S., MCC is a supporting partner of Tatamagouche Centre and its work with land justice and rematriation — the return of land to its ancestral keepers. Rematriation is a term used distinctly from repatriation in that its name identifies the important value of Indigenous women leading the process of restoring relationships between Indigenous people and their ancestral land. This truly historic work is among the first of its kind in Canada.
The Tatamagouche Centre runs many different programs including workshops for skills like gardening or cooking, Peace and Friendship gatherings and Indigenous education. One of its biggest projects currently is working toward turning the land on which it stands (currently owned by the United Church of Canada) over to the Women of First Light, a non-profit group led by Indigenous women from Wabanaki territory.
“I think for some people, land return can feel like one of the scariest pieces of reconciliation because they don’t understand it or know what it can really look like,” says Jonathan Schut, MCC Atlantic Canada regional representative. “The work we’re supporting at Tatamagouche is a good example of the relational and collaborative work of returning land as part of the larger work of reconciliation.”
Call to Action 74
We call upon the federal government to work with the churches and Aboriginal community leaders to inform the families of children who died at residential schools of the child’s burial location, and to respond to families’ wishes for appropriate commemoration ceremonies and markers, and reburial in home communities where requested.
Started in 2016 in Langley, B.C., the Walk in the Spirit of Reconciliation is an annual walk to commemorate the lasting impacts of residential schools in B.C. and across Canada.
The event is facilitated by a committee made up of members from many local church denominations, as well as MCC and Mennonite Church B.C. The 36 km path traces the footsteps of the Indigenous children forced to attend St. Mary’s Indian Residential School from 1863 until 1984. The route is broken up into short segments and participants are invited to walk as much as they’re able over the three days or join a solidarity walk in their own neighbourhood.
Last year, nearly 300 people walked over the whole weekend, which included a dinner at Kwantlen First Nation and several learning sessions hosted by local Indigenous knowledge keepers and church leaders. The Walk’s committee works in relationship with local First Nations to engage the community in ways that continue the work of truth and reconciliation.
Top photo caption: Attendants of SOAR Saskatchewan in February 2025 participate in a KAIROS Blanket Exercise led by Randy Klassen, MCC Saskatchewan Indigenous Neighbours program coordinator, knowledge keeper Starla Bruneau and Elder Maryann Napope. (Photo courtesy of SOAR Saskatchewan)