Act Five Journeys toward Reconciliation

In October, Act Five students spent a day at Six Nations as part of an On-the-Land Learning experience. It was a day filled with stories, teachings, and encounters that rooted their learning in the soil of real places and real relationships. Act Five is a gap-year program in Hamilton, Ont. Lena Scholman, academic lead at Act Five, said, “Students who participate in Act Five spend the year living, learning, and adventuring together.”

Scholman added, “At Act Five, a quote that guides much of our educational philosophy is ‘We care for only what we love. We love only what we know. We truly know only what we experience’ (Steven Bouma-Prediger). It is important to first fall in love with the gift of Indigenous peoples, and no one falls in love theoretically. It begins with relationships, and relationships start when you go to the source to learn. While citizens can become desensitized to the news stories of the injustices Indigenous people have suffered, when students walk the land and see the scars of gypsum mining and the cracked foundations of people's homes, injustice becomes tangible. On the land, students can see both the beauty of a native garden and the stark boil-water advisory only 45 minutes away from the city. When citizens are told to engage in reconciliation but they have never visited a residential school or listened to the personal stories of Indigenous people, they may feel guilt, shame, resentment, or confusion, which rarely motivate reconciliation. When students walk the land alongside an elder, who smiles through his tears and doesn’t shy away from hard truths, students feel the harm that both the person and the land they have come to love have suffered, and the desire for reconciliation comes from knowledge and experience.” 

As Adrian Jacobs, senior leader for Indigenous justice and reconciliation, shared, “The main reason to bring people to the land in Indigenous communities is to tell them the story of the land under their feet and for them to hear it from the people of the land. At Six Nations they see the Doctrine of Discovery as it applies today. In Caledonia they hear the struggle for our lands in the courts and the story of our protectors who remain on the land. At the Mohawk Institute they walk the halls where the Policy of Assimilation was brutally applied to our Indigenous children. In the maple sugar bush we learn about the trees we gather the pails of sap from, about the Carolinian forest, and about Indigenous teachings from elders. Our times on the land are deeply impacting—with alumni of our events speaking about it a year or more later.”

The visit to Six Nations is part of a broader, long-term partnership between Act Five and the Christian Reformed Church’s Canadian Justice Ministry team. Over the past five years, Jacobs and Cindy Stover, justice mobilizer with the CRC in Canada, have journeyed alongside the Act Five community. They journey with them in reconciliation, discipleship, and place-based education.

Act Five’s Place, Home, and Land course invites young people to discover who they are in Christ and how they might live faithfully in the world. Stover said that, early on, Act Five connected with the Canadian Indigenous Ministries Committee (CIMC) to talk about the land and hear about it from an Indigenous perspective. It started with a Blanket Exercise and conversations about cross-cultural relationships back in 2019. Act Five students have also participated in some Hearts Exchanged learning.

Today that engagement includes multiple layers of learning in the students’ fall semester. Students begin with an introduction from Jacobs, who shares about wampum belts and the Thanksgiving Address, grounding the conversation in Haudenosaunee teachings. They then spend a day on the land at Six Nations, visit local Indigenous businesses, and learn about land reclamation. In subsequent weeks they screen documentaries like Doctrine of Discovery, visit the Woodland Cultural Centre’s new residential school exhibit, and travel to Manitoulin Island to meet Indigenous communities and Resonate missionaries.

Stover said, “Act Five doesn’t want students to think Indigenous reconciliation is just a module you move on from. They want students to understand what it means to be treaty people, and to integrate that identity into all of their learning.”

For Stover and Jacobs, this ongoing relationship with Act Five reflects a shared commitment to discipleship that holds faith and justice together. “We know that young people are the next generation who will be taking action in the world of justice,” Stover said. “We want to support and equip them from a young age to better understand biblical perspectives on doing justice and what it means to be ministers of reconciliation. We support Act Five not only because they’re closely connected to the CRC but also because we really believe in what they do. They disciple people in the way of Jesus with a strong justice lens that helps them navigate a world deeply in need of reconciliation.”

Over the years, Act Five has also become a testing ground for new discipleship resources. “One of the interesting things for us,” Stover said, “is that Act Five has given us the chance to pilot resources with a small group of students before we take them to a wider audience. For example, we did that with Sacred Pause, an activity inviting reflection on how creation reveals God as our Creator. It was written by Indigenous partners at KAIROS, and we first tried it with Act Five students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Later we adopted it for adults and used it in Hearts Exchanged and at the 2023 Canadian National Gathering.”

This kind of mutual learning between Indigenous partners, ministry leaders, and young people is at the heart of why the Canadian Justice Ministries continue to invest in this relationship. “We desire to invest in young people, knowing that when their imaginations are transformed at a young age, when they understand their relationship to God, to one another, and to the land, it makes a huge difference for the rest of their lives,” said Stover. “If we can support young people to be shalom seekers, we know they’ll have a reverberating effect in all of the places they go.”

Reflecting on the lasting impact of these experiences, Scholman said, “Students leave Act Five with their hearts full of stories, not theories, that they can take back home with them. Adrian has reminded us over the years that reconciliation begins around a table—not with arguments, but with stories, which move us to action. While students acquire facts and can articulate the subtleties of treaties and wampum belts, elected band councils and traditional chiefs, their education is not about accumulating facts but about growing in compassion. As they continue their education as curious and wise teachers, farmers, politicians, artists, social workers, and business owners, they go forward with a desire to partner in the reconciling work that Jesus has been doing in the world all along.”