National Indigenous History Month 2023 – Week 5: Reconciliation

June is the National Indigenous History Month (NIHM), an opportunity to acknowledge and honour the history, culture and resilience of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Nation.

We encourage all Canadians to take time to learn more about Indigenous Peoples and to explore our collective past. Knowing and acknowledging the past and its ongoing impacts is the first step towards healing and reconciliation.

2023 weekly themes

Each week will be dedicated to a different theme to highlight specific aspects of Indigenous history, cultures and perspectives.

Week 5: Reconciliation

To launch this fifth and final week with the theme of reconciliation, discover the resources available at Library and Archives Canada (LAC):

  • We Are Here: Sharing Stories is an initiative to digitize and describe hundreds of thousands of Indigenous-related collection items in LAC holdings. Over the last year, more than 360,000 images related to First Nations, Inuit and the Métis Nation have been digitized.
  • Co-Lab is a collaborative tool that allows users to transcribe, tag, translate and describe digitized images and documents from LAC’s collection—but most of all, it allows us to learn about our history. The more people who contribute to Co-Lab, the more accessible and usable LAC’s digital collection will be.
  • Guided by the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, LAC’s Indigenous Heritage Action Plan sets out 28 concrete actions that LAC will undertake by 2024 to demonstrate recognition of the rights of First Nations, Inuit and the Métis Nation in a way that is meaningful, respectful and transparent.
  • LAC’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission web archive allows access to archived websites of organizations connected with the Commission.
  • The e-book Nations to Nations: Indigenous Voices at Library and Archives Canada features 28 essays, accompanied by over 140 images, written by Indigenous staff at LAC to offer personal interpretations of collection items such as journals, maps, artwork, photographs, publications and audiovisual recordings.
  • The podcast Healing Journey: Project Naming at 15 celebrates the project that has provided a virtual space for First Nations, Inuit and Métis Nation communities to access Canada’s historic photo collections and engage in the identification of people and locations.
  • The Flickr album Healing Journey: Project Naming at 15 was created to accompany the podcast.

LAC acknowledges that a great deal of records related to First Nations, Inuit and Métis Nation peoples held in our collections lack important contextual information. As outlined in Vision 2030: A strategic plan to 2030, LAC is doing more to place collections in context, making them easier to understand by setting them in a wider historical and cultural landscape. We do this in various ways, including by offering theme-based collections and programs and by encouraging a variety of uses for the collections. The projects We Are Here: Sharing our Stories and Listen, Hear Our Voices support this commitment.

Reconciliation will not be accomplished overnight and is a journey that requires commitment from all people in Canada.

#NIHM2023

Associated links