If Michael Ochoa could imagine an ideal day of truth and reconciliation, it would look like "a big community dinner," with people of different backgrounds and walks of life mingling and getting to know each other.
"That would be my ultimate Truth and Reconciliation Day," he told The Morning Star ahead of the statutory holiday on Sept. 30 which was first recognized in 2021 to give Canadians a chance to reflect on the country's history of colonialism and the residential school system that has burdened Indigenous communities with generational trauma.
Ochoa, a youth justice worker, is a member of the Okanagan Indian Band's Public Safety Office, which was created in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Everything we do is about truth and reconciliation," Ochoa said of the Public Safety Office.
The relatively new department was shaped by the OKIB community. Jami Tonasket, community safety coordinator, said the Public Safety Office developed its mandate through meetings with OKIB elders and families. A funding opportunity had come up around 2018, setting in motion a grassroots effort in which band members discussed what was needed to help make the community safe.
Topping the list was measures to safeguard the younger generation.
"Number one was anything that had to do with our youth, to provide supports and education and advocacy opportunities for the youth to be safe and healthy," Tonasket said.
In this way, the department was founded on an expansive definition of the word 'safety' that was not merely reactive to problems affecting the community, but aimed to foster community safety proactively by creating better paths for youth to follow.
And the youth are given a voice: Ochoa leads the Youth Leadership Council, which provides a way for Syilx youth to participate in OKIB government and raise issues that affect them.
There have been many challenges over the last four years, from the pandemic to flooding and wildfires to the ongoing toxic drug crisis, and through those challenges the Public Safety Office has endeavoured to hear and respond to the lived experience of OKIB members, and to help members heal by bringing them back to their traditional roots.
"Our truth and reconciliation is to continue to get our truth out there the way we see it, and to heal in a good way using our identity and our culture and our teachings," said Ochoa.
Tonasket said the number one thing the community has asked for is "the safe spaces to speak their truth, to share their story, to practice their ceremony, to get that education and supports that they require so that they feel safe personally, so that they can support their family, so that they can support community."
For Ochoa, truth and reconciliation involves reckoning with colonial history that dates back to the 14th Century, while providing space for the truths of individuals living in the here and now to be expressed.
"If we're going to have truth and reconciliation we need to hear our truth," he said. "We need to get our truth out on what happened to us, not what everybody wants to believe, not the stereotypes, but how we traversed what happened to us and why people see us in certain ways."
Const. Neil Horne, RCMP liaison officer with the Indigenous Policing Service, spends a great deal of his time in the OKIB community. He was at the Public Safety Office during its Coffee with a Cop event Sept. 17.
Horne's role is to provide an enhanced policing service to the OKIB. More specifically, he said his role is to bring the truths that Ochoa and Tonasket speak of back to the detachment so that police officers can learn from them.
Horne acknowledged that past interactions with RCMP officers are a source of trauma in communities like the OKIB. He said his role involves learning from that history to improve on the future relationship between the band and the police department.
Ochoa said between Indigenous people and the RCMP, the negative stereotypes go both ways, but added Const. Horne is "the perfect example of helping us break stereotypes when it comes to the RCMP by his temperament and the empathy he has for people."
The RCMP is just one organization that can better serve the OKIB community once the truth is on the table.
"One big thing this department does is we reach out to every organization we think could have anything to do with our people and we try to deliver that truth to them," Ochoa said.
More information on the Public Safety Office can be found at okib.ca/services/public-safety/
