 I now live on the other side of Canada on the traditional ends of the Coast Salish people. And this is literally the view as I look out from my home, the place where I live and work and play. And as I look out there, that's looking across the headwaters of Burrard Inlet, I see two different world views. I see the intersection of the nation-state and the rise of the industrial society together with the First Nations people. And this is really the crux of reconciliation for me. Reconciling these two world views, two world views of a transactional society, the rise of the industrial nation-state, with a relational society, with the people of the land. This is the heart of Reconciling these two different world views that we have to struggle with as we move forward. And I've learned a lot from the traditional people of the Coast Salish. They taught me that we need to hold each other up, that it's our work as humans to hold each other up. That's the other part of the hard work of reconciliation. And we've come a long way. And as an educator, I live in a very privileged world. I have a PhD, I have tenure, I'm white. I come from a good middle class family. I come from a lot of privileged. So what do I do with that privilege? So in my classes, I ask big questions. And I bring in other literature and I ask, I take Chair Diamond's questions. The world went from yesterday. What can state-based societies learn from traditional societies? There's lots of learning to do. But we're always learning. What do we learn when the nation-state faces the traditional people 25 years ago in the Okan crisis? Learning is happening then. Learning is happening deeply then about who we are and where we belong. 25 years later, the nation-state is looking together with traditional society in a different way. But the questions of what we are learning and how we move forward are still the same. We're always learning. We're always creating communities of learning and growth and moving forward. So one of my teachers was Chief Robert Joseph from reconciliation Canada. One of the ambassadors. And his invitation to us is how do we find a way to belong to this common place together? Our future and the future of our children rest on the type of relationships we build today. So relationships is this common theme in the field of restorative justice. So create one of the foundation and the principles of restorative justice in collaboration. At this was something I believe Barry Stewart said this morning. It's creating and re-creating and re-creating and re-creating again. A sense of belonging for each individual and each social group in Canada. We're a pluralistic society and we have to hold each other up not only as individuals but as the different social groups that make up Canada. And one of the champions of holding up our children, something that Chief Robert Joseph spoke of, is Cindy Blastock. Because our young Indigenous children are being disproportionately represented in many different systems within our country. And what she recognized, Cindy Blastock, is children are experts in love and fairness. So we have to redefine who our experts are. We're not going to find all our experts in our ivory towers. Our experts live on the streets in the small places, close to home. So I do a little bit of work at the intersection of children's rights and restorative justice. And the champion of this work is Senator Landon Pearson. And she too says human rights are all about relationships. So I've been doing some work at the intersection with upholding children's rights. And last year we worked with kids that live on the streets, close to the place where I work at Southern Freddie University. On one side of the street is the big university. And on the other side of the street are homeless youth that are exploited sexually every day. So I wanted to find a way to start working with these young people. That to use my privilege as in my big institution to find a way for them to go on too. So in this particular model that comes out of the work of Senator Landon Pearson, the whole idea is that us big people create the space for youth to come together. So we work with young people, undergraduates that at Southern Freddie University and UBC to open up a space and we train them to work with the youth. So some kids that live on the street don't have a very good relationship with adults. So my job was to create the institutional space and then get out of the way for them to do the work. So we worked not only across institutions, higher education. We worked with children on the street, we worked with Epitodes, we worked with the local youth agency and we collaborated together to create that space. And all us adults who represented bigger institutions worked with the youth and then we got out of the way so they could do good work. So it was a shared action and we asked the youth to create the questions and we asked because collaboration takes good questions. And the question they wanted to ask, what do you need as youth to live successfully within and beyond your community? So we asked that question and these are the young people that came in. They lived on the street. It was the first time I ever had a rat in a circle. We had a lot of conversations about how to create a safe space when some people needed a rat to feel safe because kids who live on the streets need someone to care for and the rat was the person that they cared for. So they brought the rat in and we learned how to live with the rat in a circle. Little James got a certificate at the end of the circle. I could tell a lot of stories about rats, but I won't. But what you need to see here is that these young people lived on the streets and the first day they didn't feel safe and they had to be brought in by their youth care group. But the next day and the next day after they brought their friends because the young people that we used as guardians were holding a safe space for them and our job was just to get out of the way. So I was delighted. I hope this quickly just goes a little bit about how to train them. We did lots of training to make sure they could hold that safe space. But we kept on coming back. It wasn't a linear state-based process with the beginning, middle and end. We created a safe space. We wanted to make sure the report was in their words. We went back, we made sure it was in their words and we kept on coming back and coming back. And then to my delight earlier this year the young girl who brought the rat called me up and said, Brenda, it's sexual exploitation week. We want to have a forum. We filled the forum with 200 people and brought everybody who needed to be there and they kept on coming back. Oh, two minutes, okay. Here we go. So they told us a lot. I'll share my slides later. But one of the most important things that they said was the day that the young girl with the rat took it with a best slide. She said, today I belong in SFU. That was a very good day. Because normally, normally she would be on one side of the street and all the privileged kids would be on the other side of the street. So we're doing the same place thing with First Nations now. Right now we're posting a dream colloquium called Returning to the Teachings and we're bringing First Nations ceremony into the institution. And it's the first time this has ever happened. We've done the traditional welcome but we're bringing the first nation practice into the institution and it's hard. It's really hard. Because they don't feel welcome there. They don't feel a sense of belonging there but we want them to belong. We need their ways of knowing to move forward. And the witnessing process is creating a strong social echo within our institution. A very strong social echo of a new way forward. And we're doing it before we hit the justice system. And then walking this path, some of the universities committed $9 million to addressing the recommendation of the TRC. But the money's not enough. We need new way forwards and employees because universities are part of that state-based system. They're very transactional in the way they pass down knowledge and practices. And we have to get beyond those transactional ways of knowing to relational ways of knowing to create communities of care. So it's going to take a lot of work and the money's not enough but we're moving forward in good ways. Black just yesterday, my students held reconciliation dialogues for the first quarter of 2021. So people are stepping up in different ways and they're hosting more circles today. And so what I'm left with is how do we create this connection between human rights, children's rights, Aboriginal rights in those places close to home. In those small places close to home that are meaningful. And so I cite Eleanor Roosevelt because I think New York needs a little bit of help right now. Strong women. And so how do we create those social community in those small places close to home? And she called to report in our hands and I think it's truly in our hands where reconciliation is going to start. Thank you.