Category: First Nations

Australia’s new truth commission: The East Timor experience

June 15, 2021

The Australian state of Victoria, in May 2021, announced a truth commission. Here, Pat Walsh connects Indigenous-linked truth commissions to that of Timor-Leste.  By Pat Walsh Victoria’s just announced Yoo-rrook commission on truth and justice for our First Peoples rightly looks to a similar model in Canada. It also had a clear Indigenous focus and… More Australia’s new truth commission: The East Timor experience

Reflecting on Reconciliation

May 30, 2019

By Maggie Helwig (Excerpted from Flowers in the Wall: Truth & Reconciliation in Timor-Leste, Indonesia and Melanesia; original here. To situate myself at the start—I am a settler in Turtle Island/Canada (henceforth referred to as “Canada” simply for convenience), of mixed English, Irish, and German ancestry, living on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of… More Reflecting on Reconciliation

“Grandfather Crocodile is my inspiration: Abé Barreto Soares, poetry and nation-building in Timor-Leste

August 21, 2018

Poetry can help build nations. It is doing so today in Timor-Leste (East Timor), where themes of resistance to foreign rule, Indigenous re-assertion, language and the shape of the new nation intertwine. One of the country’s leading poets, Abé Barreto Soares, embodies the way these themes come together. Although it declared its independence from Portugal… More “Grandfather Crocodile is my inspiration: Abé Barreto Soares, poetry and nation-building in Timor-Leste

Pathways to Peace

November 23, 2017

By April Ingham Executive director, Pacific Peoples’ Partnership In the thick of conflict, a cycle of seemingly endless horror and injustice can occur.  Amid this darkness the faintest crack of light… can bring the courage, hope and action needed to release the pendulum effect, whereby the spiral downwards into chaos can eventually right itself and… More Pathways to Peace

Canada’s Conversation on Cultural Genocide

October 8, 2015

By Cynthia Dawn Roy After six years of investigating the impacts of residential schools in Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released a summary of its final report June 2. The report’s final conclusion was that the residential school system was an act of “cultural genocide”. Reactions to this term varied from incredulity and… More Canada’s Conversation on Cultural Genocide