by Patti Bacchus on March 11th, 2021 at 3:10 PM
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A Greater Victoria School Board public committee meeting March 1 was a rude reminder of how far school boards need to go in moving from performative territorial acknowledgements at the start of school board meetings to authentically welcoming First Nations to participate in decision-making.
That public online meeting started with the chair, Trustee Ryan Painter, taking the Indigenous-territory acknowledgement further than usual, saying it was “super important” to him to “really position ourselves in place and space where we are in terms of whose land we’re occupying and whose land we’ve come from, and I think it’s super important to situate ourselves in that space when we do this work, so just really opening my heart and being very open to that and hope that others are as well.”