Acting with one mind: Gwich’in lessons for truth and reconciliation

Acting with one mind: Gwich’in lessons for truth and reconciliation

In the early 1920s, on the banks of the Peel River next to the community of Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories, Dinjii Zhuh (Gwich’in) families gathered in grief. Anglican missionaries were loading children, some as young as two, onto boats bound for the St. Peter’s Indian Residential School in Hay River, close to 2,000 kilometres away by water. Teetł’it Gwich’in Elder Mary Effie Snowshoe recalled this moment as a “sad story” passed dow…