Reconciling Through Our Stories

​Who is Julie Bothwell? What is her story?

The Alderville First Nation band councillor, social worker, daughter, granddaughter, mother guided a room full of people at October’s Community 101 along some of the paths her life’s journey has taken, the First Nation teachings that inspire her and the lessons she continues to learn.

“I share my life so you can take a piece of this and understand our ways... What I’ve been taught is that what I am sharing is because these are the things that helped me on my healing journey. I have to be able to say, ‘I try hard to walk this way, to remind myself of who I am.’ I try to remember where I come from.”

As a young girl, her life was thrown into chaos by her mother’s loss of status on marriage to a non-Aboriginal man and her family’s forced removal from the First Nation, their extended family and home.

As a teenager who was keenly aware that her half Ojibwa, half Scottish skin tone allowed her to pass in and out of a native/non native identity, she heard “all the comments” and questioned where she was accepted, where she fit in.

As a mother and wife, she has confronted the trauma of residential schools that her partner’s parents attended, and how that legacy infiltrated their family’s and children’s lives.  

And as a social worker and band councillor, she feels compelled to wrap herself tightly in her community, “eating, drinking and sleeping” its all-too-frequent pain.

In spite of all of this, or possibly because of it, Julie Bothwell, in Anishinaabe, is “Strong Buffalo Woman.”

As she spoke of the healing properties of the Four Sacred Medicines – tobacco, cedar, sweet grass and sage – to unite mind, body and spirit and their teachings to direct people toward goodness, away from destructive forces like substance abuse; as she described the actions of Alderville First Nation to address past injustices including defining who will be considered a member of their community in cases of intermarriage and how their children will be taught in the public school system; and as each person in the room rolled a handful of dry tobacco leaves in their palm, trying to connect with the meaning of this first Sacred Medicine as an offering or prayer for help and guidance, the glimmer of a new understanding of reconciliation seemed to emerge.  

“When we share, we find connections, common ground,” she said. “It is these connections we need to make with one another.”