How to Have a Reconciliation Conversation!

I am so pumped to do this video. I am so excited because often I get asked, what do we do? Like, we want to be part of reconciliation, but how do we do that? What are the steps? What can we do? What do we need to learn all of those things? Well, so many of my videos are based on what happens in my world because I am constantly in cross cultural cultural relationships as Anishinaabe Kwe, working with non Indigenous people. Often reconciliation conversations come up. And recently I made a point of having a reconciliation conversation. And that's when I realized this is exactly what you can do. So let's talk about it. Sam Mishko, Pokanon Queen Additiona Kasman. Hi, everybody. My name is Sandy Boucher. I'm Red Thunderbolt, woman of the Loon clan, a proud member of Seine River First Nation in Treaty 3 Territory in Northern Ontario. And like I said, today, we're talking about how to have a reconciliation conversation. Because seriously, if we look to the government, and I'm talking about all of the parties, I think they're doing it wrong. They are starting nationally, which I guess is their mandate. It kind of makes sense when reconciliation has to start locally. And personally, I can remember a few years ago I actually sat on a diversity committee here in the city I live in. And often there were power struggles between different marginalized groups. And I remember speaking to one of the other participants outside of the room because there really was no room for discussion at those meetings. Another problem. But I said to one of the other committee members that if we can figure out diversity in a room of 20 people, we have no right to be preaching it to a city of 110,000. That makes us hypocrites. If you don't know how to do it, how about you don't teach it? And that's why I love the work I do. I'm talking about diversity and inclusion and empowerment. I live and breathe and act on those things every single day. The other thing is I consciously and consistently work on both sides of the feather. I am in First Nation communities empowering Indigenous people as often as I'm working with non Indigenous people and helping them to understand and get the clarity they need. I am balancing the feather, which is reconciliation. Isn't it so often we're still just thinking of ourselves, and that's not how you swim in the water between the lanes. So one of the things. Well, before I go into what I want you to do, first off, I want you to remember to use the path, the four sacred tools, always, often, patience when you try to speak in reconciliation terms or about reconciliation with someone, they may not get it. They may not be on that page yet. That's okay. Be patient. Be patient with yourself. If you make a mistake, this is a learning curve. You're going to make mistakes. Learn from it. Keep going. Awareness. Be aware of what's going on for the other person. I. I recently took my first southern vacation. I really wanted to focus on that white sand beach that I dreamed of my entire life. Put an autoresponder on my email explaining that I was away on a southern vacation and gave them contact information for my assistant. Yet still I had customers calling. They had tried emailing first, then texting, then calling. That's a bulldozer. That is not swimming in the middle of the lanes. That's storming into a community that is not going to help. The other thing, excuse me. That I find is incredibly important in any cross cultural relationship is transparency. Because this reminds me of for a brief period of time when my children were teenagers, my nephew came to live with us. He was at odds with his parents. My brother was incredibly frustrated, asked me if I would look after him for a while and I was happy to do it. But what I quickly realized, and maybe a bunch of you can relate when you are now parenting a child you didn't raise, they will do things that you never even thought of forbidding. Like he would do things my kids would never what's going on with my hair that's funky. He would do things that my kids would never even think of because it was ingrained in them that this is not acceptable from when they were toddlers. So it was a whole new learning curve. It's the exact same thing with the cross cultural relationship. Something that is second nature to you is second nature to you because that's your cultural experience. Even if we're talking about the culture that is your office, the culture that is your processes. Right. The culture that is mainstream may not be a given in my world. For example, when I always bring up the what looks like the absolute worship of the clock by non indigenous people. That's how it looks to many indigenous people. The most important conversation will suddenly end if that big hand touches the 12th. And that makes zero sense to us. I you know, when that you're asked to speak, I can easily do a keynote for 45 minutes. But sometimes a conversation needs longer than that and, and fitting into that box is foreign to many indigenous cultures. So the other thing I want to say if you're indigenous watching this and you're probably not going to like what I'm about to say, but it's the truth and I respect you enough to say the truth. If we want to start having more reconciliation conversations and moving towards reconciliation, the onus may be on us for a little while. Because the reality is if we're working with mainstream and something isn't working for us and we don't say anything, silence is acceptable acceptance. We cannot expect them to be mind readers. We have to be confident enough, empowered enough, you know, to be able to speak up, not attack, not condemn, not slam on social media, no passive aggressive baloney. We need to be able to say, you know what, this makes me uncomfortable. We have to teach them. Now, I'm not saying we need to teach all of Canada. I am saying that when you work with someone, you should have expectations of that relationship as well. And if they're not meeting the expectations, then you need to be able to speak up to that. Which brings me to what I wanted to share with you today. So just for a little bit of context here, often I have a non indigenous entity, a corporation, a business, a university, a hospital, whatever the case may be, reach out to me and they want to meet with me to discuss me potentially doing some kind of training for them, whether it's a lunch and learn or a keynote at their conference or a half or full day seminar training. So we have that meeting and I find out their needs and what their concerns are and make sure that what I'm going to say meets those needs. I don't have any cookie cutter thing I'm going to say every single time I want to make sure it's relevant to them. We get that all figured out, we get the times figured out, we get the pricing figured out. All of that is well and good. Now we have an event scheduled and then it happens. Not always, but often. Now there's processes to processing a payment and, and even preparing for an event, especially if you're a large corporation. I understand that, but every now and then I will have someone, usually from the IT department, reach out and once now for context again, I use a PowerPoint presentation when I speak and I just heard the grounds. I know I am not one of those people that read a slide. I am just very conscious of the fact that many people are visual learners. So what happens is I may be speaking and an image will come up behind me. That really highlights my point and it just makes it easier for people to remember what I've shared with them. So often they want my PowerPoint ahead of time. And in some cases, depending on whatever platform or process they've got going on, they actually want to be able to control the PowerPoint and advance the slides. Well, for one, that is not going to fly. There's a hard pass on that one. As I explained to them, my presentation is always like a well thought out speech. And often I am changing a slide in the middle of a sentence to highlight a point I'm making. As I always share with them, no amazing speech that people remember includes the words next to slide please. So 99% of the time that's a non issue. And in some cases I even send them a PowerPoint as a backup just in case mine doesn't work, just so they can sleep nights. Mine always works. We're good. My computer is hardwired to make sure there's no issue when I do virtual events. I got this. I have been doing this for 15 years. But as I said, sometimes they want the PowerPoint ahead of time. Now we have an issue. Because the way my world works, my mind is always focused on my next event. Like I may be having booking conversations with an event for an event two months from now, six months from now, but when I go into preparation mode, I am focused on the next event. And in case you didn't know this, a day that changed everything. That virtual course that I shared with you while I was on holidays, I swear that seminar. For one, it's my very first seminar. For two, that seminar was dictated to me because I was not a motivational speaker. I had never designed a seminar before. But I went when I was daydreaming that day and sat down to write it. I could not write fast enough. That was in my mind. That was Creator telling me what my audiences needed. That had nothing to do with me, except I was the vehicle. So I always have my PowerPoint designed, I have the framework designed. But as I start thinking of that event coming up, I start getting these messages like, oh, you should include that. They're going to need to understand this. I believe it's Creator telling me what someone in that audience needs. It's not up to me to decide what they need. Creator is the one who knows that audience, not me. I've never met them before. Which means my PowerPoint often changes right up until I arrive at the event. I have made changes to a PowerPoint presentation the morning of an event when I'm in my hotel room. So sending a PowerPoint ahead of time is not going to work because you're not going to get the one I'm going to use. It's just going to be confusing for everyone and I don't want it sent out to anyone because it's just pictures. Unless you have the context and the story that I'm going to tell with the picture, it's not even going to make sense. So recently, very recently, I got a request for my PowerPoint presentation. And I swear it was like one of those, aha, lightning bolts, Oprah moments, you know, just the light bulb went on and I kind of grinned. It was an email I received and I wrote back and I said, okay, first sentence, I'm not even kidding, said, this is now a reconciliation conversation. I did that on purpose because I wanted them to understand that what I'm trying to do in this moment is find a way to swim in between the lanes. So I went on to explain what I just explained to you, that I upgrade my PowerPoint in line with my teachings right up until the very last minute. So I'm really not comfortable sending in ahead of time. I then asked, can you please explain to me why you needed ahead of time? So I'm not going to assume they're just demanding or whatever. Is there some, you know, policy of your, some bylaw that you're trying to meet? In this case, it was actually an accessibility issue. They needed to ensure that whatever is in the PowerPoint is big enough text or whatever for everyone to read it. But I didn't know any of that. So I just asked if you explain to me why you think you need it ahead of time, we can find a way to meet in the middle. And I sent off the email. They wrote back, I had explained what's in the PowerPoint and in this case it's like four slides. They were totally fine. If that's all it is, then we are totally cool. If you're going to be asking the questions orally anyways, it doesn't matter. And we were able to swim between the lanes because of the transparency, because I highlighted it as a reconciliation conversation. So. So think about it. You could be doing this all the time. Even if you don't work with non indigenous or with indigenous people, if you're non indigenous or vice versa. You know what I mean? Even if you're not in a cross cultural relationship, imagine your teenager wants to do something and you're concerned for whatever reason. You could share your concerns. You could announce, this is a reconciliation conversation. I want to try to meet you in the middle. Here is my concerns. You tell me why this is important. To you and you find that compromise, that other person is going to feel heard. It's not about power tripping and you have to do it my way. Because if I hear anything like that, I will cancel the event. I am not jumping into that box. Because I agree to work with someone doesn't mean I give up my freedom to be me. I have always run my business in line with my teachings. That will never fly. But we get to have these amazing conversations. I have always said reconciliation is going to be a million conversations. Millions and millions of questions and apologies back and forth as we figure out how to swim in the lanes between or in the water between the lanes. Isn't that exciting? So the next time, if you're non indigenous and you're working with an indigenous person, you cannot say, so is this comfortable for you? Because they may be disempowered. They may, they are marginalized, racialized in many, many, many cases. So maybe they're not comfortable saying to you that they're not comfortable. Instead say, so does this fit how you normally do things? You're not saying there's anything wrong with their process. You're just being open to hearing is this comfortable for them without saying it that way. And indigenous people, again, we need to speak up and say, you know what, that doesn't, that doesn't work for me. That's normally not how we do things. By sharing and being transparent without attacking. We can have the most amazing reconciliation conversations. And if we start practicing with the people in our world, then it's not even uncomfortable anymore. It becomes habit. And guess what? That means we become inclusive. And that would be a huge part of reconciliation. Isn't that exciting? I fully intend on intentionally having way more defined reconciliation conversations. I will be using that intro line in my emails every single time I have to point out this might not work for me. I am dying to hear what you think of this idea. I know for me it is awesome. It works. It allows me to be me. And sometimes there's more compromise than other. And honestly, if I come across an entity that is not willing to compromise, then they're not willing to hear my words anyways. They're not ready to truly consider reconciliation. I have zero interest in being a check mark and saying that they did the training. If they're not open to some kind of compromise, some kind of change, then why are we even having this conversation? I have zero interest in wasting someone else's time. Please don't waste mine. I think it's so exciting. I totally, you know, what? When. When this person wrote back and said, no, you know, Absolutely. Now that I know that we totally don't need the PowerPoint, I wrote back and said, you know what? You literally just made my day. Absolutely. Thank you for the most amazing reconciliation conversation. You just gave me so much hope for the future. So you can do the same thing. Have the conversation, and then please say thank you when it all works out. And if it doesn't, learn from it. Remember, patience, awareness, tenacity, humility. That's the path to reconciliation. I'm Sandy Boucher, and I cannot wait to see you tomorrow. I love you. Take care. Bye. Bye.