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A trailblazer throughout her career,
Paulette Regan is now celebrating her
achievement as the first student to complete
a doctorate in UVic’s indigenous
governance program.
“I was looking for an innovative program
that would challenge my thinking,
give me a better understanding of indigenous
perspectives and provide practical
strategies for confronting some of the challenges
we face,” she says. “The program
was all of this. It was demanding, but
tremendously enriching, both personally
and professionally.”
A non-indigenous person, Regan
became interested in conflict resolution
while working as a policy director for a
First Nations organization. From 2002 to
2004, she worked for the federal government
on Indian residential school claims,
drawn by the promise of reconciliation.
“Working with residential school
survivors forced to me to confront headon
the ugly history of colonialism that
Canadians want to deny,” she says.
Regan was honoured to be involved
in a Gitxsan apology feast—a ceremonial
potlatch held to welcome residential school
survivors back into the traditions that they
were removed from as children.
“The experience made me realize that
what we think of as reconciliation in
Western terms is seriously flawed,” she
says. “We have to rethink this process,
making space for indigenous history, law
and peacemaking practices.”
Regan’s reflections evolved into her
PhD dissertation, “Unsettling the Settler
Within: Canada’s Peacemaker Myth, Reconciliation,
and Transformative Pathways
to Decolonization,” which explores the
wrongs perpetrated by colonization and
the restorative power of restitution and
apology.
“Until we face the painful truth of our
own history as colonizers, there can be no
just reconciliation,” she says.
Now Regan, who will participate in
UVic’s first Indigenous Leadership Forum
this summer, aims to develop practical
teaching tools based on her research.
“Canadians need to understand why
we have denied the history of indigenous
peoples for so long, and how we can
work to change this. Respect, recognition
and responsibility, that’s a good place to
start.”
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