The objective of the Truth and Reconciliation Response Projects (TRRP) website is to generate and share creative and research-based solutions to immediate societal challenges and to develop opportunities for Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, artists and researchers across disciplines to meet and collaborate. In response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's reports and calls to action, TRRP will promote and implement Indigenous knowledges in meaningful, sustainable, and substantive ways and thus activate, in material practices, truth and reconciliation.
The TRC made education a focus by including the following post-secondary Calls to Action:
- We call upon the federal government to provide adequate funding to end the backlog of First Nations students seeking a post-secondary education (Call to Action 11).
- We call upon post-secondary institutions to create university and college degree and diploma programs in Aboriginal languages (Call to Action 16).
- We call upon medical and nursing schools in Canada to require all students to take a course dealing with Aboriginal health issues, including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, and Indigenous teachings and practices. This will require skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and anti-racism (Call to Action 24).
- We call upon the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, in consultation and collaboration with Survivors, Aboriginal peoples, and educators, to: [...] Provide the necessary funding to post-secondary institutions to educate teachers on how to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms (Call to Action 62).
- We call upon the federal government, through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and in collaboration with Aboriginal peoples, post-secondary institutions and educators, and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and its partner institutions, to establish a national research program with multi-year funding to advance understanding of reconciliation (Call to Action 65).
- We call upon Canadian journalism programs and media schools to require education for all students on the history of Aboriginal peoples, including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal-Crown relations (Call to Action 86).
The TRC Calls to Action provide the platform for our projects to:
- mobilize debate and discussion,
- create spaces to share knowledges and research,
- access resources of new and renewed disciplines, methodologies, and practices,
- acknowledge the heterogeneity of Indigenous peoples and pedagogies,
- work together to decolonize ourselves and the structures of systemic oppression and exclusion.
Undated archival photo of residential school children. Source: Wikimedia Commons