Memorial University students, staff, and faculty are encouraged to attend the second annual Forum on Indigenization and Reconciliation at Memorial (FIRM), taking place from Friday, Nov. 15, to Wednesday, Nov. 20.

Expanded from the first virtual FIRM event in November 2023, this year the program includes in-person days at Signal Hill Campus, Grenfell Campus and Labrador Campus, which are also accessible virtually. Similar to last year, all sessions will be recorded and available to participants for future viewing on the FIRM Brightspace site.

In a 2022 op-ed I wrote that discussed the priorities identified in the Strategic Framework for Indigenization (SFI), I shared, “Each of these priorities requires working together and starting with conversations as basic as discussion around the things that happened. This takes time. It takes support. Indigenization is a long-term objective with many interrelated steps woven through the strategies outlined in the SFI.”

Learn to sit together

For those who attended FIRM in 2023, you may have noticed the conversational nature of most of the sessions. This is deliberate.

Certainly, some sessions require more formal presentation, but generally, we aim to be in conversation. As well, FIRM is planned, quite intentionally, for that conversation to be an internal one among the students, staff and faculty who make up Memorial.

In this long-term project, we need to learn how to sit together in this space, to get to know one another within the context of Indigenization and reconciliation, to appreciate that we may have different roles to play, and to understand that while discomfort may be part of these processes, we can be kind to one another as we navigate them.

Our internal relationships are key to moving forward as a community. The Office of Indigenous Affairs is eager to nurture these relationships, to engage with the Memorial community and to move forward in a good way.

FIRM is one place where we hope we can build community around the ongoing work and the work to come.

As I previously noted in 2021, “While it’s helpful to know and learn from what other universities are doing in this area, our experience and our pathway at Memorial University is rooted in this place, in the lands and the peoples and the histories in this province.”

We hope you will join us.

Learn more and register by visiting the FIRM web page, where you will also find the schedule a glance. For those who are interested but not available to attend, you are still encouraged to register to access the FIRM Brightspace site and recorded sessions.