We sat in a circle inside a converted industrial space in Toronto. Outside, the city carried on. Inside, Indigenous leaders, municipal staff, and organizers from across Canada strategized around land rematriation.

Not in principle, but in practice. At scale.

The gathering was held with responsibility to those not yet here—thinking in seven generations, rooted in Haudenosaunee teachings that ask us to consider those who came before and those who will come after.

Again and again, the conversation returned to the same question: What does it mean to try to build decolonial futures through institutions designed to contain them?

Many in the room were already working inside city governments or alongside them: drafting reconciliation action plans, trying to establish Indigenous land trusts, pushing for meaningful co-governance. Eight years after Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report, much had been named, but change kept stalling where it required a redistribution of power.

The constraints were familiar: Jurisdictional limits. Funding tied to unrealistic timelines and measurable outputs. Indigenous knowledge brought in, consulted, cited, and moved past. One leader spoke about his people being treated as an extractable commodity: knowledge taken in transactional ways, rather than held as something with its own integrity. Indigenous washing, he said, chips away at agency and hope within our communities. The room needed a breath after that.

Over forest tea and honey harvested on site, Elder Catherine Tàmmaro shared teachings from Anishinaabe and Wendat stewards—ways of relating to land, time, and responsibility that did not fit easily within the structures we’d been naming.

I was honoured to have been invited to help steward this gathering, oriented around how we embed Truth and Reconciliation into the civic life and structure of Canadian cities. At times that meant slowing the room down, and letting a question stay open rather than moving too quickly to solution. At others, it meant noticing when the conversation narrowed into what institutions could accommodate, and easing it back toward what people were actually trying to build.

There were many questions we could not answer: What does repair mean while harm continues? Is it even possible to make colonial systems more relational and consensual? How do we begin to loosen the logics of extraction and scarcity that shape how decisions are made, and move toward systems of abundance and generosity?

We did not leave with agreement on what repair would look like—only the sense that it could not be contained within existing structures, and that, for now, the work continues through them, carried by those who keep pressing at their edges, drawing from ways of being that have long held what these systems cannot.