Riley Yesno on how change will come from Indigenous youth
We've inherited the reconciliation project and are ‘meant to see it through,' says Anishnaabe scholar
In February 2020, police shut down a ceremony led by several Indigenous leaders to honour ancestors. Participants were arrested, and removed from the Unist'ot'en territory — and the fire that was lit was extinguished.
"Burnt in that fire was a Canadian flag with an upside down maple leaf on it. The flag reads: "Reconciliation Is Dead," RIley Yesno said in her lecture at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, B.C.
It might appear, she suggests, to be a funeral for reconciliation as we know it. And that may not be such a stretch, especially for a generation that has grown up with all the promise and disappointment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) final report in 2015 — resulting in Canada's implementation of 94 Calls to Action.
Riley Yesno is an Anishnaabe scholar, writer and commentator from Eabametoong First Nation and Thunder Bay, Ontario. She teaches Indigenous governance at Toronto Metropolitan University and is completing her Ph.D. in Indigenous and Canadian politics at the University of Toronto.
In November 2023, Riley Yesno delivered the 9th annual Indigenous Speakers Series Lecture at Vancouver Island University.
Here are some excerpts from her lecture, The "Reconciliation" Generation: Indigenous Youth and the Future for Indigenous People.
Listen to the full lecture and interview with Nahlah Ayed by downloading the IDEAS podcast.
'We are the reconciliation generation'
"If we accept that reconciliation has never been a static term, doesn't it make sense that the concept means something different to my grandparents who forged the idea, than it does to me who's living through the pursuit of it?
Think about it:
The last federally funded residential school, Killik Hall, located in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, closed in 1997.
The last residential day school ended in 2000.
I was born in 1999.
In 2008, when Stephen Harper apologized for residential schools, I was in the third grade."
"When the TRC's final report was released, I was only about halfway through high school. So the Indigenous affairs landscape I and my peers grew up in differs radically from the one that my parents and my grandparents grew up in.
My point here is not to discount this moment's meaning for survivors. I'm not trying to say that their fight for this moment or for reconciliation generally is done naively or that it's pointless. It's not to say that Canada shouldn't be apologetic or that we shouldn't have symbols.
Instead, what I am saying is that the context my parents grew up in, my grandparents grew up in, is not the same as mine. And I don't necessarily think it's the experience of many Indigenous youth today. And I want us to really consider what that means.
In our experience, we acknowledge the land. We have Treaty Recognition Week. We wear orange to spread awareness in my lifetime. Canada has already said they're committed to change."
"We are the reconciliation generation — not because we created reconciliation, but because we've been born into the country and the Indigenous affairs landscape that reconciliation has helped to shape. We have inherited the reconciliation project and are meant to be responsible for seeing it through to its next stage.
This isn't just a personal belief, but it's something that the data supports me on. So get this.
According to Statistics Canada, as of 2016, almost half of the Indigenous population in Canada was under the age of 25. Young Indigenous people are the fastest growing demographic in the entire country, and we are going to be the people that Canada will have to negotiate with for decades to come. The groundwork we lay now, and we've already started to lay, will undoubtedly influence the nature of those negotiations.
With this in mind, I'm ultimately arguing today that we must take the contentions and the dreams of Indigenous youth seriously. If we want to truly ensure that we build transformative relationships, as the TRC outlined, and that Indigenous people have been fighting for by various means for decades, then Indigenous youth — this reconciliation generation — must be central to our conversations now, not when they get older."
Resurgence and Land Back
"Defining Land Back is both easy and complicated. Complicated because there's no Land Back approval board. There isn't somebody who can say 'that counts as Land Back; that doesn't.' But when we look at the way that Indigenous people use the term, we can see that there are common attributes.
Land Back centres on material restitution, not symbolic gestures. It's about demanding that Canada act in accordance with our laws, rather than squeezing Indigenous nations until we find ways to make our laws work within Canada's.
With those attributes in mind, I define Land Back as any action taken with the goal of returning jurisdiction, authority, and resources to Indigenous people. This may include returning actual physical parcels of land back to Indigenous stewardship, or it might mean refusing to follow laws of colonial government in favour of those traditional laws that Indigenous people articulate on their territories."
"As the Yellowhead Institute writes, Land Back is a nod to the wave of emerging artists and members finding new ways to communicate old demands.
To address frequent questions about Land Back in advance, I will point out that for a vast majority, Land Back doesn't necessitate the removal of non-Indigenous people from their communities or properties. Indigenous people are a people who are deeply aware of the violence and displacement of dispossession. We are not looking to recreate the violence that has been done onto us, onto others.
And actually, I think it's a very direct and tragic result of colonialism that so many of us have come to believe that domination and force are the only ways that we can possibly acquire or express power. Just because that's the way that colonial states have maintained their power does not mean that it is natural, it is inevitable, or it's right.
Instead, Indigenous people have long expressed visions of living together that are premised on peace, friendship, and respect for other worldviews. If Land Back is a resurgent effort, as Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson reminds us, resurgence is fundamentally about solidarity and good relations.
Just because resurgence efforts like Land Back don't directly centre on non-Indigenous people, that does not mean that non-Indigenous people don't […] benefit from efforts like Land Back. Statistics from organizations like the World Bank and the UN indicate that Indigenous people are the world's best protectors of biodiversity.
According to a report from the World Bank, for example, we make up around five per cent of the world's population, but we protect about 80 per cent of the world's remaining biodiversity. So while returning resources and power to Indigenous people is the ethical and moral thing to do, it's also in many ways the thing that may benefit us all the most in the long run."
*Excerpts are edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Anne Penman, with help from Sean Foley.
