The University of Windsor and the Can-Am Indian Friendship Centre have entered into an agreement participants say represents a “powerful” shift towards reconciliation.

At a gathering outside the Ojibway Nature Centre on Wednesday representatives from the post-secondary institution and friendship centre signed a memorandum of understanding committing the parties to work jointly on initiatives advancing truth and reconciliation, learning, respectful knowledge creation, and the well-being of local Indigenous and campus communities.

“Today is a monumental day that I never thought would come to fruition,” said Jennifer D’Alimonte, Can-Am Indian Friendship Centre president.

Under the memorandum of understanding, D’Alimonte’s organization will collaborate with the university to ensure its Indigenous campus community feels a sense of connection and belonging. The work will focus on language, culture, and traditional teachings, D’Alimonte said.

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“Advancing truth and reconciliation is crucial for the university’s future,” said UWindsor president Robert Gordon. “We have the responsibility to indigenize and decolonize the university to make it a place where Indigenous staff, students, faculty, and community members feel supported, and where the impacts of intergenerational traumas are addressed.”

As Gordon and D’Alimonte signed the document under a beating sun, the Little Creek Singers performed an honour song, singing and pounding in unison on a single drum. Small birds and butterflies fluttered overhead.

Once the signing was complete, the musical group sang and drummed again while officials and event attendees encircled them in a round dance, moving hand-in-hand to the rhythm.

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Beverly Jacobs, the university’s senior advisor to the president on Indigenous relations and outreach, called the memorandum’s signing “powerful.”

“I feel that we’re right in the midst of a shift of understanding our relationship. Today is a celebration of who we are as Indigenous people and to remember that the genocidal policies didn’t work.

“We’re here to build those relationships as well as to respect each other,” Jacobs said. “We all know about the history of education and the residential school system — our people have been forced into that system, our children.

“Our people suffer as a result of the impacts of colonization, but we’re also very successful in being able to recover from genocide.

The Can-Am Indian Friendship Centre was incorporated in 1982 and has become the “focal gathering space” for the local Indigenous community, said Elayne Isaacs, university Indigenous relations co-ordinator. It offers a connection to cultural roots and access to social services programs.

The University of Windsor contacted the Can-Am Indian Friendship Centre last fall “with a desire to take meaningful, reconciliatory action,” Isaacs said.

The memorandum of understanding’s signing fell on National Indigenous Peoples Day, which was first announced in 1996 and occurs in Canada annually.

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