Vernon Museum & Archive's Reading for Reconciliation program will share Okanagan Women’s Voices

Photo: Contributed

The Vernon Museum & Archives is Reading for Reconciliation as part of the museum's ongoing Learn + Connect online program.

Learn + Connect began in January with the theme Toward Truth & Reconciliation.

“We’ve facilitated sessions on the Doctrine of Discovery, UNDRIP, and the #LandBack movement, each with distinguished local Syilx guests to speak toward these issues,” said Amy Timleck, museum programming and marketing co-ordinator,.

Reading for Reconciliation uses the book Okanagan Women’s Voices: Syilx and Settler Writing and Relations 1870s-1960s as a guide.

Online discussions will be facilitated by local author, Laisha Rosnau, who is also museum curator.

“This recently released book really feels like the perfect place to start,” says Rosnau.
“The immigration of non-Indigenous people to this region is relatively recent – it’s only been the last 150 years, or less, really. Okanagan Women’s Voices gives us a glimpse into those first points of contact between cultures, and between women from very different cultures living alongside each other in the Okanagan. I’m learning so much about how Syilx and settler cultures came together in this area.”

The book collects Syilx and settler women’s writing and storytelling, much of it discovered in local archives and not previously published.

It includes life writings, such as correspondence, journals and memoirs, as well as translations of Syilx captik?? (traditional stories), popular history, poetry, drama and fiction.
The Learn + Connect: Reading for Reconciliation will have monthly online discussions focusing on each of the three parts of Okanagan Women’s Voices in April, May and June.

Participants can join in the online discussion for one or all of the months.

Got to the museum's website for more information and to register.