National Day for Truth & Reconciliation

Ben Peltz – Video Transcript

Hey, everybody. My name’s Ben Peltz, and I’m the interim Executive Director of Kawartha Youth for Christ | Youth Unlimited. Alongside the interim role that I’ve taken on in Kawartha, I’m also the pastor of Curve Lake Christian Assembly, which I’ve been doing for about six years now, and before that, I spent about 10 years running summer camps in northern Quebec with First Nations youth.

You might be aware, but there’s an important date coming up for First Nations people, and that’s Truth and Reconciliation Day taking place on September 30th. It’s an interesting time to be a pastor to First Nations people because over the last few years, a lot of people have developed strong feelings about things like Truth and Reconciliation Day because of the way they feel like things have been politicized or the media has presented things in an unfair way. Despite that, I actually think it’s pretty important for Christians to pay attention to Truth and Reconciliation Day and to use it as an opportunity to grow in their understanding of how our shared history has affected people, as well as walk in reconciliation with our First Nations people.


I actually think that truth and reconciliation are not just values that Indigenous people have, but things that we as Christians should have at the core of our faith. I think of passages like where Jesus says, the truth shall set you free, which of course, refers first and foremost to our relationship with Him, but also just generally speaks to the fact that when we have a right understanding of how things are, it enables us to live rightly within the world. Or also, when the apostle Paul, in 2 Corinthians, says that all Christians are called to a ministry of reconciliation, reconciling across our divides, including the people groups that we are a part of, as a sign of the way that God has reconciled humanity to Himself in Jesus Christ.

Because of these things, I think that we should share this desire to understand what has affected Indigenous people over the years and to make sure that we’re walking the right relationship with them. And the Indigenous people that I know in places like Curve Lake very much approach the Day through that lens. They’re not looking to guilt or shame people or to come away with a political agenda that we all share, but really just want to share the way that they’ve been affected by our history and build strong relationships with non-Indigenous people so that we can build new ways of living together in our land.

And I think that Truth and Reconciliation Day, in particular, is often used by communities as a first step into that kind of understanding and relationship building. They expect a lot of non-Indigenous people to come out and participate in the walks or things like that that take place on TRC Day. And they’re often eager to share their personal stories and to begin building relationships with the newcomers in that environment. 
So it’s a safe place and a helpful place for somebody like me to begin building relationships. It’s also worth noting that I think that the first step of that relationship is such an important part because it’s really only in long-term shared experiences with one another that we begin to heal and to truly understand what is going on in our world.

I think, for example, of one of the young men that I got to know early on in my camp ministries. 
 And towards the end of the week, I was driving him back into the First Nation community near the camp,  And when I dropped him off at his house, I remember him saying to me very clearly, when I said, I’ll see you next year. 
He said, no, you won’t. Everybody says that, but they never come back. Well, fast forward a year, I came back, ran the camp again, And as we were entering into the community, he lit up and said, “Ben, you were right. And I said, what was I right about? 
And he said, you came back the way that you said you did. And then what proceeded was a conversation which he shared, the way that he had been hurt by intergenerational trauma in his communities, and even the way that he had hurt other people as a result of that trauma. And he asked me if I thought God could forgive him for those things. 
And I said, He can, and we got to pray to that effect together. I realized in that moment that that conversation would never have opened up if it weren’t for the fact that I had first gone to the community and gotten to know this young man, and then kept going, kept building relationships, which built up some trust that allowed him to then share what was going on in his life.

As Christians, we are always eager to share the good things that we believe about God and how we want to see Him working in people’s lives, but I think we have to start with the simple task of going and knowing and building a relationship. 
And that really is at the heart of what Truth and Reconciliation Day is all about. So I invite you this coming Truth and Reconciliation Day–look and see what’s going on in your local community, whether it’s at a friendship centre in the city you’re a part of, or at the Reserve near wherever you live, and do your best to participate in something that will help you start building that relationship and learn a little bit more about how your local people have been affected by the shared history that you have in that place. 
And then you can go on to other forms of learning and other forms of relationship that might build a deeper and longer lasting understanding and ministry.

Thanks for letting me share my story.