Building Reconciliation Together: Transformative Intergenerational Mentorship

Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) outlines 94 calls to action to guide reconciliation between the First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and non-Indigenous peoples of Canada. Several actions are directed at post secondary institutions to play leadership roles, commit resources, and to provide culturally safe training and mentorship of Indigenous students. Our western-and-northern based team, represented by Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon, takes the TRC's challenge as the moral foundation from which to design and build our Indigenous Mentorship Network Program (IMNP). The vision of our IMNP is to accelerate the development and depth of undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, new investigators (NIs), and mid-career Indigenous (and non-Indigenous) researchers who are inspired and dedicated to address health disparities and health rights of Canada's Indigenous peoples. Six groups make up our team: 1) Elder First Nations, Métis, Inuit academic and community mentors; 2) Indigenous trainees; 3) Indigenous new investigators; 4) mid-late career mentors (Indigenous and non-Indigenous); 5) international Indigenous mentors; and 6) post-secondary administrators. The scope of our IMNP covers training activities that support Elders, mentors, and trainees to meet face to face, connect virtually, and to work with Indigenous community partners through intergenerational teams. Mentors, along with their institutions, will work with our program to create meaningful opportunities for NIs and trainees to be supported across the various research stages. Our IMNP program is philosophically grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being, relational ethics, ceremony, and spirit/spirituality. The diversity of our team will generate a dynamic collective consciousness to support and foster our trainees to weave Indigenous ways of knowing and being with interdisciplinary health focused-research (two-eyed seeing).