Aboriginal Professional Association of Canada

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Aboriginal Professional Association of Canada

The Indigenous Professional Association of Canada is an association for Indigenous professionals within the Greater Toronto Region and across Canada.

10/06/2026

Fresh jobs on the IPAC Job Board! 🪶

This round has openings at Mount Royal University, the Council of Ontario Universities, Hay River Health & Social Services, the University of Manitoba, McGill, and TMU Faculty Associations.

Know someone who'd be a great fit? Share this post or tag them below.

See all the listings here: https://indigenousprofessionals.org/career-posts/

10/01/2026

This was the scene on a highway overpass near Kamloops on September 27. Masked men, flags, and a banner asking for bones.

We want to be clear about what that message leaves out.

Nobody needed a shovel to know children died at residential schools. The churches and the government wrote it down themselves. In 1907, Canada's own medical officer reported that nearly 1 in 4 students at the schools he studied had died. More than 4,000 children have been documented by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, and records were lost or destroyed, so the real number is higher.

Communities never claimed to have dug anyone up. Radar finds disturbed soil, and those findings are checked against school records and Survivor testimony. What happens next is their decision. Many have chosen to let the children rest.

And when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission asked Ottawa for $1.5 million to search for burial sites in 2009, the answer was no.

The good news is that people showed up. Drummers, singers and dancers gathered to cleanse the area, and on September 30 the community came together at the Tk'emlúps powwow arbour.

Swipe through, read it, and share it with someone who needs to see it.

If this brings up anything difficult, the Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line is open 24/7: 1-866-925-4419.

09/30/2026

Today is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

More than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were sent to residential schools. Some of them are our grandparents, our parents, our aunties and uncles. Some never made it home.

For a professional association, this day isn't only about remembering. The TRC's Call to Action #92 speaks directly to Canadian businesses: build real relationships with Indigenous communities, open the door to jobs and training, and make sure your people know this history. That work doesn't stop on October 1.

Wear orange. Go to a gathering near you. Read the Calls to Action. And if today is hard, please reach out. The National Indian Residential School Crisis Line is open 24/7 at 1-866-925-4419.

Every child matters.

09/28/2026

New jobs are up on the IPAC Job Board! 🪶

This round includes openings at BC Hydro, Right To Food, Phelps Group (remote!), Vancouver Community College, Skawahlook First Nation, and the University of Manitoba.

Know someone who'd be a great fit? Share this post or tag them in the comments. You never know who's looking.

See all the listings here: https://indigenousprofessionals.org/career-posts/

09/15/2026

You have probably sat through a land acknowledgment that mentioned the Dish With One Spoon. Almost none of them tell you what it says.

It is an agreement between the Anishinaabe Three Fires Confederacy, the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Made between nations, not with any government.

Three rules.

Everything the land provides sits in one dish, and nobody owns the dish. Everyone eats with one shared spoon, which means you take what you need and no more, so there is enough left for the people who come after you. And no knife goes into the dish, because a knife in the dish means blood in the food.

Shared access with no owner. Restraint held by relationship instead of enforcement. Violence ruled out before it starts. That is a serious piece of law, and it has held for centuries.

The territory runs across the land between the Great Lakes and east along the St. Lawrence. If you are reading this anywhere in southern Ontario, you are almost certainly in it.

Next time you hear it named, you will know what is being named.

09/14/2026

Six new roles just landed on the IPAC job board, and the range this week is something else.

A President & CEO role at William Osler Health System Foundation in Brampton. A Dean position at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. A board seat with Credit Union Deposit Guarantee Corporation in Regina. Plus roles with the City of Thunder Bay, the University of Calgary, and Wellington Catholic DSB in Guelph.

If you have been thinking about a move, or you know someone who has been quietly ready for a bigger role, this is a good week to look.

All six postings here: indigenousprofessionals.org/career-posts

Which one are you sending to a friend?

09/12/2026

Two First Nations owned firms just became one team.

This month Odawa Relations, co-founded by Travis Boissoneau, CPA, joined forces with Lodge Consulting Inc., founded by Hillory Tenute. They were careful about the language: not an acquisition, a reciprocal partnership, with both firms keeping their integrity intact. The image they used was the braiding of sweetgrass.

Travis is a member of the Anishinabek Nation from the Ojibway Nation of Garden River First Nation. He has served as CAO of Nishnawbe Aski Nation and as Regional Deputy Grand Council Chief for Lake Huron, and he is a CPA.

Two firms built by First Nations people, for First Nations communities, deciding the work is better done together.

Congratulations to the whole team. 👏

09/05/2026

If you have ever driven Highway 12 into Orillia, you have driven over the thing Toronto is named after.

Toronto comes from tkaronto, a Mohawk word meaning roughly where there are trees standing in the water. People assume it is about a forest. It is not. It was describing wooden stakes driven into a lakebed, standing up through the surface.

Those stakes are at the Narrows between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching. Mnjikaning, the place of the fish fence. Cedar, maple and birch, driven into the lake bottom and angled into a gap, so that fish moving between the two lakes were funnelled into one opening. The fish come through twice a year, deep water in winter, shallow water to spawn.

The oldest stakes carbon date past 5,000 years. Silt and cold water preserved them. It is the largest and best preserved wooden weir site known in eastern North America.

The Anishinaabek, the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee all fished there, and the Dish With One Spoon is the agreement that made sharing one fishery possible. The Chippewas of Rama are its stewards today.

The name travelled south down the carrying trail over the years until it landed on a place that never had the weirs at all. The weirs are still where they always were. The fish still run.

If you grew up around the Narrows, we would like to hear what you were told about it.

Photo: Art Duval

09/02/2026

Six new postings went up on the IPAC Job Board this week, and there is some serious range in this batch.

The City of Toronto is hiring a Director for its Indigenous Affairs Office, and the Government of Nunavut is looking for an Assistant Deputy Minister of Operations in Iqaluit. University of Manitoba has an open rank Indigenous Scholar position in Winnipeg, so applicants at any career stage from Assistant to Full Professor can apply.

The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation is hiring a Program Director for Environment in Toronto. CMHA York Region posted two more: a System's Analyst in Newmarket and a part time Mental Health Intake Specialist in Vaughan.

Everything currently live is here: https://indigenousprofessionals.org/career-posts/

Direct links to each posting are in the comments. Know someone who would be a fit? Tag them.

09/01/2026

We went looking for the original names of all five Great Lakes.

Ontario is Wendat, from Ontari'io. Michigan is Ojibwe, from mishigami, the large lake. Erie is a shortened form of Erielhonan, the Erie nation's own name for themselves. Three of the five names sitting on that map right now came out of Indigenous languages.

The other two are French. Superior is lac supérieur, the upper lake, which the Anishinaabe have always called Gichigami. Huron comes from a French word about rough hair and it was meant as an insult. The people it was aimed at are the Wendat. Same nation that named Ontari'io.

Here is the part worth sitting with. Not one of those five names came from a government. They came from languages that were here first and are still spoken.

Address

191 Gerrard Street E
Toronto, ON
M5A2E5

Website

http://www.indigenousprofessionals.org/

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