‘Educates and encourages action’: SLC Brockville unveils new legacy space to promote Indigenous learning, reconciliation

In the spirit of Chanie Wenjack, Gord Downie and reconciliation, Brockville’s St. Lawrence College (SLC) campus unveiled a new legacy space on Thursday, Oct. 17.

Legacy spaces are described as safe, welcoming places where conversations and education about Indigenous history and our collective journey towards reconciliation are encouraged and supported. They also serve as symbols and reminders of the important work each of us needs to undertake in responding to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action. The Brockville space is supported by the Downie Wenjack Fund (DWF), an organization inspired by Chanie’s story and the late Tragically Hip frontman’s call to build a better Canada. The fund aims to build cultural understanding and create a path toward reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada.

A similar legacy space was unveiled at the school’s Kingston campus last year, and another will open at the Cornwall campus tomorrow (Oct. 18).

Members of Wenjack’s family, Keira, Harriet and Jared Visitor, attended the ribbon cutting in Brockville.

“This space inspires,” Keira Visitor remarked to the crowd. “It educates and encourages action, and [gives] the motivation to make a positive difference, and do something,”

Shelley Aylesworth-Spink, SLC’s Vice President of Student Success, called the legacy space part of the college’s “ongoing work to expand our approaches to land-based learning and to incorporate Indigenous learning outcomes in our program curriculum.”

The hope is that the space “will strengthen our community’s understanding and our commitments to indigenous ways and history, while helping to celebrate and to respect the traditions of the peoples on whose lands we live and we learn today. As people participate in programming in the space, or if they simply visit it independently, they’re being encouraged to both reflect as well as to consider reconciliation in the lens of your learned, lived experience.”

Along with the legacy space, a special parking space at the front of the college has now been officially reserved for visiting elders.

“It’s our honour to ensure elders visiting SLC are provided with a convenient complimentary parking at parking location as they join us to share their knowledge and their gifts,” said Aylesworth-Spink.

In a land acknowledgement at the beginning of the unveiling, SLC’s Brockville campus dean Les Casson noted that this new space and the gathering it prompted honours the resilience and strength of Indigenous peoples who endured a traumatic history of stolen lands and cultures. “We are here today…to remember and lift up those who’ve been lost to it, and to commit to creating together a future rooted in justice, reconciliation, community, and hope.”

Casson continued, “As visitors, as settlers and immigrants, as citizens, students, and educators, we share a responsibility to recognize that our life on this land has come at a terrible cost to those who loved it first, and that we are accountable to build a shared life that honours the land and the peoples who have cared for it for thousands and thousands of years.  
 
“And so, grounded in that hope and that promise, I am honoured to affirm that St. Lawrence College is situated on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe Peoples. May we always be grateful to live and learn—and play and love and listen and create together—on these lands.”