In honour of National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, I want to share with you about something that happened to me this week and I encourage you to share this experience with others who might benefit.
The day before yesterday, I went to have my driver’s licence changed back to British Columbia. I had spent the last year in Manitoba after living in BC for nearly 20 years.
I presented two pieces of identification: my Manitoba driver’s licence and my Métis citizenship card. I was told my Métis card could not be used as the primary identification they required. Instead, I would need to come back with my birth certificate and, because my name had changed since birth, my marriage certificate as well. They made me an appointment for the next day.
And there was something deeply ironic about standing there having this conversation with staff wearing orange shirts.
I asked questions. At one point, it was suggested that perhaps the problem was that my Métis card was from another province, but that explanation didn’t make much sense to me: my birth certificate and marriage certificate are also from another province. Eventually, I was told simply, this is the policy.
I want to be clear that I was kind to the people helping me. I was patient. I know the people standing behind that counter did not personally write the policy, and I wasn’t asking them to magically overturn it. But I did keep saying that I would like to formally request that the policy be changed.
I spent about 15 minutes explaining what I had been required to provide to obtain my Métis citizenship card. I explained that Métis people are one of the three constitutionally recognized Indigenous Peoples in Canada, alongside First Nations and Inuit. I explained the genealogical documentation involved in establishing my citizenship. I physically showed them documentation tracing my family lineage back eight generations.
I explained that I had been required to produce vital-statistics records establishing not only who I am, but who I descend from. A formal genealogy, and not only my own long form birth certificate, but my mothers and grandmothers too, along with the marriage certificate. A process that took several years. and traced my lineage to these lands before Canada was Canada. And still, the answer to how do I request to have the policy changed was: this is the policy.
Finally I asked, “If you worked somewhere and believed a policy was discriminating against you, where would you go to ask that it be reviewed?” That question got me an email address.
The next day I returned with the documents they requested and got my BC licence. So this isn’t really a story about whether I eventually got my driver’s licence. It is a story about where discrimination can and does still live.
Sometimes discrimination doesn’t look like someone shouting a slur. Sometimes it lives quietly inside a policy, inside a form, inside a list of acceptable documents, inside a computer system, inside a rule that everyone has become so accustomed to following that nobody remembers to ask who wrote it, whose reality it reflects, or who carries the burden created by it.
ICBC’s current identification policy specifically recognizes a Secure Certificate of Indian Status as primary identification, and that policy seems to only have come into effect in 2022 by BC government direction. Yet Métis citizenship identification is not afforded the same recognition as primary identification a distinction made despite the extensive process involved to attain one.
My Métis citizenship card exists because I went through an extraordinarily rigorous and document-intensive process to establish my identity and ancestral connection. And yet, standing at that counter, the document representing that verified Indigenous citizenship did not establish my identity in the way their policy required.
If you’ve never encountered something like this, you may never have had reason to think about it. And that is precisely the point. Privilege can look like never having to notice the policy at all.
When was the last time you, as a non-Indigenous person, had to trace eight generations of your family lineage to have an identity recognized?
When was the last time you had to explain to someone behind a counter that your people are constitutionally recognized? When was the last time you had to educate the institution serving you about the legitimacy of the identification that institution was refusing to recognize? And when was the last time you had to decide whether you had enough energy left to fight about it?
Because that is the part I want people to understand today.
Policies are not neutral simply because they are policies.
Canada knows this. Indigenous people certainly know this. Policy took Indigenous children from their families and sent them to residential schools where children were tortured and didn’t make it back alive. Policy created genocide both physical and cultural when children where separated from their lineage, languages, cultures, identities, families and communities.
Policy controlled where Indigenous people could go, what they could practice, how they could live, and whether Canadian institutions recognized their identities and rights. Policy put Indigenous adults in asylums for acting to Indigenous where they were then sterilized without their knowledge and permission. Those policies were also once simply “the policy.”
And the consequences were devastating.
We do not get to pretend that all of this belongs safely to history, either.
Indigenous children are still being removed from their families and placed in foster care at vastly disproportionate rates. According to Statistics Canada’s 2021 Census, Indigenous children represented only about 7.7% of children under 15 in Canada, yet 53.8% of children in foster care. The foster-care rate for Indigenous children overall was approximately 14 times that of non-Indigenous children. For Métis children it was 6.2 times the non-Indigenous rate, and for First Nations children it was 18.2 times the rate.
Canada has nationally acknowledged the devastating intergenerational trauma caused by residential schools and other colonial policies, yet many Indigenous people are still offered only a limited number of funded counselling sessions through specific programs. It is entirely possible to create policy that provides long-term, adequately funded trauma therapy while the current six sessions policy, carried by many, cannot reasonably address generations of systemic trauma, abuse and family disruption. Reconciliation cannot be found in acknowledging the wound while refusing to adequately fund the healing.
A place to start your reconciliation journey is to advocate for better care to be written into policy.
There are still policies, institutions and cultures in this country whose consequences fall disproportionately on Indigenous people. Indigenous women, girls and 2Spirit people continue to experience devastating levels of violence. And just days ago, masked men associated with a group linked to white nationalist and white supremacist ideology appeared on Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc territory near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. They later displayed a grotesque “Got bones?” banner mocking the search for children who never came home. They were brave enough to come onto Indigenous land to intimidate Indigenous people and mock the children who never came home, but not brave enough to show their faces.
If you know who these men are, do not protect their anonymity. Report what you know to the RCMP and speak loudly and publicly against what they did. The people targeted by white supremacy should not also be expected to carry the burden of confronting it alone.
Last year, I sat in a room with a group Metis people while one of three non-Indigenous persons there told me, on my birthday, that Indigenous people belonged behind barbed wire somewhere. When I spoke up and said those words were hurtful, somehow I was framed as the problem. If this is happening in your family, your workplace or your community, stop participating in the scapegoating of truth-tellers. When someone names racism, discrimination or harm, do not make their willingness to speak about it the problem. The problem is racism and will remain so as long as silence is a requirement for membership.
So today, on National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, I find myself thinking about orange shirts. Wearing one matters. Remembering the children matters. Honouring Survivors matters. But reconciliation cannot live only in an orange shirt. It has to make it into the policy manual.
It has to make it into the boardroom. It has to make it into government databases and identification requirements, hiring practices, health-care systems, schools, courtrooms and social-service agencies. It has to make it into those ordinary, boring places where somebody once sat around a table and decided what the rules would be, and everyone afterward simply kept enforcing them because that’s the policy.
And once again, I find myself wondering: Do I spend the time? Do I write the email? Do I document the problem? Do I educate another institution? Do I write another essay explaining why something needs to change? Do I once again have to explain to people whose lineage on these lands may be far shorter than mine why Indigenous identity deserves to be recognized and treated with dignity and respect?
Why is this work still so often left to us?
So today I want to ask something of non-Indigenous people who genuinely want to participate in reconciliation. Look at the policies where you work and in the places you frequent. Look at the forms. Look at the identification requirements. Look at the procedures everyone follows because they have always been followed. Ask who wrote them, whose lives they were designed around, who they unintentionally exclude, and who has been carrying the burden of pointing that out. Then, speak up and ally with those who are.
I wonder how many everyday policies that disadvantage Indigenous peoples are sitting right under the surface, largely invisible to the people who are never harmed by them.
Maybe that is somewhere for your reconciliation journey to begin.
Not only by wearing the orange shirt, but by asking what needs to change beyond the orange shirt and then advocating for that change.
Written by Autumn Rock
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About the Author
Autumn Rock is a 2 Spirit, Metis, trauma-informed recovery practitioner, somatic trauma and attachment therapist, writer, recovery coach, and educator. Through Somatic Paths Wellness, she supports individuals navigating trauma recovery, attachment wounds, addiction recovery, ADHD, nervous system regulation, and relational healing. Her work integrates somatic approaches, trauma-informed care, attachment theory, lived experience and practical recovery support to help people build lives rooted in safety, connection, and self-trust.