By Shelby LaFramboise, assistant professor in the Department of Studio Arts and a member of the Indigenous Research Group at MacEwan University. Originally published by the Edmonton Journal on September 29, 2026.

It has been three decades since I started my journey into Indigenous education, 12 years since I stood to honour my grandparents and parents at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission event in Edmonton, and five years since Canada’s first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. 

I shouldn’t have to write this.

But despite significant efforts, not only on behalf of all those who came before me in the field, but also in my current life’s work, racism is, sadly, a pointed reality for many Indigenous folks in Canada. Even when you’re passionate about anti-oppressive education and anti-racism in all public sectors, as I have been, it never really seems to disappear.

It doesn’t matter how many letters I have behind my name. It doesn’t matter how many rooms around the world I have found myself in, speaking as an expert on Indigenous education. It doesn’t matter how many courses I have developed on Indian Residential School experiences, Métis people or the Métis worldview with Stoney Nakoda and local land-based teachings.  

It doesn’t matter that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects my right to equality. Or that the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples says I have the right to be free from any kind of discrimination.  

My colour seems to give society permission to insult, humiliate and violate my human dignity. Security officers follow me around the grocery store. My elderly father is asked to wait outside the bus station. And my children – who I always told myself I was doing this difficult work for – see me experience racism. These kinds of things happen every single day.  

Being on the receiving end of a hate incident isn’t something you can erase from your memory. Time may move on, but these experiences accumulate. They impact our health and well-being.  

A new Indigenous anti-racism project led by the kihêw waciston Indigenous Centre at MacEwan University will illustrate what those experiences feel like through story – interviews with several Indigenous participants about their experiences with racism in Alberta and Canada.  

The project’s goals include addressing systemic racism through educational practices such as storytelling and research. Elevating Indigenous voices shifts the perspective of the lived reality of everyday discriminatory experiences in education, health care, housing, employment and public spaces.  

My role in the project is to help shape the discussion guides for students and community members to consider the legacy and impacts of Indigenous anti-racism led from an Indigenous-centred perspective. It’s heavy work. But it feels like talking about these experiences and the harms that accompany them is only becoming increasingly important.  

Creating meaningful partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, including not only current Canadian citizens of this settler-colonial state but the many newcomers we have welcomed over the past several years, is essential. We must work to ensure that safety and fair treatment exist in all spaces we occupy, to reduce historical harms. To accept that Indigenous anti-racism is everyone’s responsibility.   

I hope that I won’t have to continue counting the years it will take for real change to occur. That the work that began long before my more than 30 years in education will finally yield real results. That those changes will be made in honour of the warriors of truth and justice, like my grandparents, who never knew that what they suffered was not their fault and who never saw the restitution received by some. I raise my arms to them and embrace their memory.  

So, I and so many others will continue this work not only for ourselves, but mostly for our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and those yet to come.  

Shelby LaFramboise is an assistant professor in the Department of Studio Arts and a member of the Indigenous Research Group at MacEwan University.