Three Sisters (Discussions‪)‬

We begin our conversation about decolonization on our way to the lower longhouse of the Cayuga Nation, the first stop on Jacqueline's tour of Six Nations of the Grand River and surrounding area. Our journey ends at the site of an old residential school in Brantford. Lila: To speak about decolonization it is necessary to first recognize one's own relationship to colonization. Mine is a complicated one. I grew up thinking of myself as a Canadian. It wasn't until the late 1990s (I was well into my 40s by then) that I learned from a cousin, quite by accident, that my grandmother was an Aboriginal woman. My mother continued to deny this fact until just before she passed into the Spirit world in 2004. It dawned on me, rather slowly, that if my grandmother was Aboriginal then so too was my mother. It took my daughter to point out that if my mother was Aboriginal than so was I and so was she.