A Permanent Home for These Writings

For a while now, I've been looking for a more permanent home for my articles and writing.

Many of the pieces you'll find here were first published on the Pehta Foundation blog. That blog is no longer around, and when it went, these articles went with it. Since then, a lot of you have reached out asking where to find them. Some wanted to reread an article, some wanted to share one, and some wanted to cite one in their own work.

So I'm republishing them here. Over the coming days I'll be bringing the original articles across, keeping their original publication dates wherever I can, so they're easy to find and reference again.

There's also a bigger reason for this site, and it's something I've been struggling to put into words for a few years now.

There are two very different worlds that both go by the name "reconciliation."

The first lives mostly on corporate websites, LinkedIn profiles and celebratory events. It's a world of announcements, awards and Indigenous business success stories, and it is often a world in the absence of Nations and communities. Reconciliation Action Plans increasingly read like marketing documents, written to reassure institutional investors that a company is on the right path, regardless of its real or perceived exposure to Indigenous rights risk.

The second world is accountability to community. It's measured in the things Nations and their leadership are actually struggling with: enough housing, proper roads, the basics that a lot of Canadians take for granted. It answers to the Nations themselves, not to a shareholder deck. To me, that is what authentic reconciliation looks like.

The waters between these two worlds get muddied quickly. You can spend a morning with a community leader working through a housing shortage, then log into LinkedIn and scroll through a feed of celebration that seems to be happening somewhere else entirely.

I don't think the first world is all cynicism. There's real altruism in a lot of it, and plenty of good people inside those organizations. But that goodwill too often gets sidelined by corporate expectations and by how things will look to institutional investors. At its harshest, it becomes vanity.

That space between vanity and accountability is what I want to write about here. I think it's one of the most important conversations we need to have over the next five years.

Think of this site as the permanent home for that work, and for whatever I write next.

Thank you to everyone who asked after these pieces. Your interest is the reason they're back.

— Aaron