CITY SUPPORTS SONGHEES NATION
We appreciate how this leadership over the past five years, the City Family, Victoria Council and Songhees and Esquimalt Councils, have worked behind the scenes unheralded to build relationships and 'do' reconciliation.
This excerpt from Victoria Mayor, Lisa Helps March 13th, 2022 Newsletter:
In 2017, the City of Victoria declared a year of reconciliation, adopted the five municipal calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and began a journey of reconciliation with the Songhees and the Esquimalt Nations on whose homelands Victoria was built. We realized quite quickly that a “year” of reconciliation was a naive notion. We’ve worked well beyond 2017 – and will continue to work for the next many decades – to decolonize the City of Victoria.
When we began the reconciliation process, we went to both the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations and asked if they would like to participate in a reconciliation task force. They kindly told us that a “task force” was a colonial structure and suggested instead that we create a family, as the family is the unit of governance in Lək̓ʷəŋən culture. So we created the City Family, and set out on our journey.