09/30/2026
The history of residential schools and the climate crisis are connected through the same colonial systems that have sought to separate Indigenous Peoples from our lands, cultures, and languages.
This September 30, on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day, we honour Residential School Survivors, their families and communities, and remember the children who never returned home. 🧡
Residential schools did not exist in isolation. They were part of a larger colonial project of displacement and dispossession that disrupted Indigenous Peoples’ relationships with our lands and waters while making way for settler expansion and resource extraction. These systems and their impacts continue today.
Indigenous communities continue to experience the impacts of extraction, development, and climate change while protecting the lands and waters that sustain us all.
For ICA, this is why truth and reconciliation must also include climate justice.
Climate justice means respecting Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and self-determination. It means recognizing Indigenous Peoples as rights holders, land defenders, and leaders of climate solutions grounded in generations of knowledge and relationship with the land.
More than a decade after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its 94 Calls to Action, much of this work remains unfinished.
For settlers and non-Indigenous people, let September 30 be a call to action beyond awareness. Learn whose lands you live and work on and the responsibilities that come with being there. Read the 94 Calls to Action and identify where you, your workplace, or your institutions have a responsibility to act. Support Indigenous-led movements protecting lands and waters. Challenge policies and practices that continue to undermine Indigenous rights and sovereignty. Listen to our Survivors, Elders, and Knowledge Keepers.
There can be no reconciliation without action, and no climate justice without Indigenous rights.
