Ten years ago, in 2015, after six years of listening to the testimonies of over 7000 residential school survivors, the late Honourable Murray Sinclair, Chancellor Emeritus, released the 94 Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 2016, Queen’s established its own Truth and Reconciliation Task Force to respond to the TRC Calls to Action on education. The resulting report, “Yakwanastahentéha | Aankenjigemi | Extending the Rafters,” published in 2017, laid out 25 recommendations for “sustained institutional change,” acknowledging that “the path to good relations [between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people] will not be quick or easy” (p.5). The Queen’s TRC task force recognised that leadership on reconciliation must come from the top; recommendation 2 from Extending the Rafters states:
Senior administrators must be champions for meaningful and continuous advancement of Indigenous initiatives.
For a few years after the release of the report, there was good progress on the recommendations of Extending the Rafters, including the appointment of the inaugural Associate Vice Principal of Indigenous Initiatives and Reconciliation (Kanonhsyonne, Janice Hill), establishment of the Office of Indigenous Initiatives, development of an Indigenous Studies program, the expansion of Four Directions Indigenous Student Centre, and much more. Queen’s was greatly honoured when the Honourable Murray Sinclair agreed to take on the role of Chancellor, the first Indigenous person to hold this position. In the last academic year (2023-24), we saw the hiring of Queen’s National Scholars in Indigenous Studies, a significant and exciting commitment to decolonisation and Indigenisation at Queen’s.
As a white settler scholar, I have attended several sessions at the Centre for Teaching and Learning about decolonising the curriculum; I have integrated Indigenous content into the courses I teach, and lifted up alternative ways of knowing. I enthusiastically participated in writing my academic unit’s application for a QNS position in Indigenous Studies. I do what I can to support the success of my new Indigenous colleagues, and dismantle the structures of white privilege, racism, and Eurocentrism at Queen’s.
As I understand reconciliation, decolonisation, and Indigenisation, these are important first steps. But they are just the beginning, and not nearly enough. However, there is only so much I can do as an individual faculty member, and my academic unit can do in hiring Indigenous faculty members and offering courses that centre Indigenous content and ways of knowing and learning. I would love to incorporate more Indigenous pedagogical approaches, such as story-telling and experiential learning, and alternative assessment strategies into my classes. I would love to offer a more embodied approach to education, instead of the “disembodied-heads-in-lecture-seats” Eurocentric way. But even getting to know students’ names, except for a few, is near impossible when my second-year class has 170 students and my third-year class has 110. Never mind any idea of getting to know who they are, what excites them, how they learn, or what gifts they bring.
And then along comes austerity, with a hiring freeze, staff layoffs, increased class sizes, fewer teaching assistants, downsizing the faculty complement, and the radical reshaping of the Faculty of Arts & Science. We have only gotten a toehold on reconciliation at Queen’s; how can we move towards the more radical, more hopeful, more transformative promises of decolonisation and Indigenisation in such a climate? We always knew that it would be hard, slow work to move past tokenism towards reconciliation, decolonisation, and Indigenisation in meaningful ways. It becomes so much more difficult in the harsh, hostile, and insecure environment that austerity creates.
Where is the leadership from the senior administration that the Queen’s TRC task force recognised as essential?
If we look to the latest document from the senior administration, the Queen’s Draft Bicentennial Vision (BiVi), there is no sense of moving anywhere beyond what Gaudry and Lorenz (2018) call “Indigenous Inclusion” — increasing the number of Indigenous students, staff, and faculty, and making tokenistic connections with Indigenous communities, without any significant transformation of the Eurocentric academy, ways of knowing, or power structures. There is no wrestling with our colonial past and the harms the institution has perpetrated. No sense that Indigenous ways of knowing are critical for the future of the planet. Not even a recognition that Queen’s continues to occupy the lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples without their consent and continues to materially benefit from settler colonialism. The BiVi calls for “bold, institution-wide transformation”—but not to decolonise and Indigenise. According to the Bicentennial Vision, we need transformation in response to emerging technologies, chronic underfunding, shifting demographics, and global pressures on international enrolment.
It concerns me greatly that the vision of the BiVi is to “build on our legacy” without any reckoning with the colonial harms of that legacy. As Sharon Stein (2025) argues, universities will continue to reproduce “colonial patterns of relationship, resource distribution, knowledge production, and ecological extraction if they do not reckon honestly with their colonial pasts and confront their colonial presents.”
In their assessment on the 5th anniversary of the TRC Final Report, Eva Jewell and Ian Mosby note that “as we have experienced time and again… it is unsurprising and decidedly on brand for Canada that its “most important relationship” with Indigenous peoples has been abandoned… (and arguably, has never been tended to in a meaningful way).”
Given Queen’s long and well-documented history of systemic racism, its pervasive culture of white privilege, and steadfast Eurocentrism, it would be decidedly “on brand” for the administration to abandon our commitments to reconciliation, decolonisation, and Indigenisation, beyond tokenistic gestures, in the name of austerity.
As the late Honourable Murray Sinclair, Chancellor Emeritus, reminded us:
The road we travel is equal in importance to the destination we seek. There are no shortcuts. When it comes to truth and reconciliation, we are all forced to go the distance.
As an institution, Queen’s has only just started on the road of truth and reconciliation. There is still a long way to go. I would love to participate in “bold, institution-wide transformation” —but not because of “emerging technologies” or reduced international student enrollments. The transformation I would like to see would begin by putting decolonisation and Indigenisation at its centre, in meaningful ways. That would be truly bold, creative—and responsible.
— with many thanks to my colleague, whose feedback sharpened, clarified and strengthened my thinking and writing
Elaine Power, Ph.D., is a white settler scholar and professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Studies.
Queen's Coalition Against Austerity 