Indigenous justice animator also reports on All-Parties Table, teaching partnership with United Church of Canada
Calgary, Alta.
Men who survived abuse by Ralph Rowe, a former Anglican priest and Scout leader convicted of 75 sexual crimes against children in northern Ontario and Manitoba, aim to create an advocacy and advisory council to promote healing, the 12th Indigenous Anglican Sacred Circle learned on Aug. 8.
Dawn Maracle, the Anglican Church of Canada’s interim animator for Indigenous justice, said during a presentation on her work that survivors aim to establish the Men’s Advocacy and Advisory Council for Healing (MAACH), following their participation in sharing circles that Indigenous Ministries held in 2024.
Survivors debriefed when they returned home and created a draft proposal about what to do next, which they were presenting to First Nations chiefs the same week as Sacred Circle, Maracle said. Along with seeking an official apology from Scouts Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada, she said, survivors put forward their goal to establish MAACH.
“This is going to become their legacy,” Maracle said of the men’s healing council. “They really want to shift from being known as victims to survivors, and they want to be able to model the behaviour of survivors and people on their healing journey for others.”
Their plan, she said, is for MAACH to create peer group supports, in which survivors travel to communities and tell their stories, with the hope that it will encourage people to create their own local chapters to continue the work. Survivors also hope MAACH will serve as an advisory board for political organizations, family services, child welfare agencies and other groups to promote men’s healing and provide help for them.
Maracle said survivors want the Anglican Church of Canada to support MAACH. Church representatives plan to meet with them to discuss their proposal, she said, as well as the apology and how to move forward.
“Some people think [we] just need to apologize and that’s it, and that’s not the case,” Maracle said. “We want to continue ongoing dialogue and relationships with them to learn from our mistakes and to see how we can move forward with them in the most positive and supportive way that’s possible.”
Partnering with United Church to teach “Parallel Paths”
Along with supporting Ralph Rowe survivors, Maracle said she and Archdeacon Rosalyn Elm, the church’s Indigenous Ministries coordinator, have partnered with Tim Hackborn, Indigenous office of vocation minister for the United Church of Canada, to develop teaching of the Parallel Paths based on the Two Row Wampum.
Known in Mohawk as the Teiohate Kaswenta, the Two Row Wampum was a 1613 treaty between representatives of the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch government. The Haudenosaunee represented the agreement through a wampum belt, with two rows of purple wampum beads on a white background. Each row signifies a river, along which boats from the peoples travel in parallel as a symbol of respect and equality, constituting the Parallel Paths.
The Two Row Wampum shows how “we can have diverse peoples, governances, territories, philosophies, practices, and more while still sharing the same space”, Maracle said, and how people can “work together and honour each other with peace, friendship, and respect, even if we don’t think the same way and we don’t practice the same way.”
By pooling their resources, she said, the Anglican and United churches hope to create a curriculum aimed at helping non-Indigenous ministers learn how to open conversations with Indigenous people and to “teach their congregations to be more open-minded and educated and aware of issues that we face.”
All-Parties Table still drafting Covenant of Reconciliation
Maracle also provided an update on ongoing efforts by parties to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, including the Anglican Church of Canada—collectively known as the All-Parties Table—to create a Covenant of Reconciliation. The document is a response to Call to Action 46 from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which calls on the parties to produce and sign a such a covenant, intended to identify “principles for working collaboratively to advance reconciliation in Canadian society.”
Major staff turnover, both in Indigenous organizations such as the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and Tungasuvvingat Inuit (TI) as well as in the Department of Justice Canada, has slowed down the process, Maracle said. She said she would be meeting in September with Sara Stratton, the United Church of Canada’s reconciliation and justice animator, to re-organize the next agenda for the All-Parties Table.
Having completed different drafts from the parties, Maracle said, the All-Parties Table needs to compile them into one, which will require consulting with lawyers from AFN and TI as well as from Department of Justice Canada. “That’s the stage that we’re at right now,” she said. “Reconciliation is not a spectator sport.”
Missing and murdered people: ‘We live it every day’
Maracle concluded by asking Sacred Circle to provide real-time feedback using an app on their devices. She asked members what reconciliation meant to them. Responses included “healing,” “respect,” “listening” and “relationship.” She asked them to choose from a list of options describing how they felt about reconciliation efforts locally and nationally; the leading response in each case was, “A little bit is starting.”
The Indigenous justice animator also asked how many members had read the TRC’s 94 Calls to Action, the 231 Calls for Justice from the 2019 final report of the federal government’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and the articles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Bishop Isaiah Larry Beardy, suffragan bishop for the Northern Manitoba Area Mission in the Indigenous Spiritual Ministry of Mishamikoweesh, said he was thrown off by the question about reading the MMIWG Calls for Justice.
“When you ask a question about reading it, my response is, we live it,” Beardy said. “In my own community we have five men missing and one woman. They just disappeared. We’ve been searching for 30 years. I just want to clarify that … We read and live it every day.”
National Indigenous Anglican Archbishop Chris Harper said his own cousin was missing for more than eight years. Eventually, he said, a person was charged in relation to his cousin’s disappearance.
“What we got back from my cousin was basically part of the jaw,” Harper said. “This affects each and every one of us.” He led members in prayer for all their loved ones, for missing people, “for those whose hearts are broken” and for the work of Maracle and Sacred Circle.
Maracle asked what reconciliation efforts Sacred Circle would like to see locally and nationally. Members called for more support from non-Indigenous groups, churches and individuals; movement on recommendations, improved relationships and respect from governments, community presentations and “please not another blanket exercise.”
Responding to the comment on the blanket exercise, which uses blankets to represent Indigenous lands and the effects of colonization, Maracle said of the exercise, “Some people need it, but probably not most of us. And it’s only one tiny step in a long, long pathway. I appreciate the honesty because in order for us to move towards reconciliation, we must first have truth and then justice … and then we’re working towards reconciliation.”
