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FOSTERING SAFE SPACES FOR DIALOGUE EMERGING LEADER DEVELOPS REPORT TO BRIDGE COMMUNICATION BETWEEN NEWCOMER AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
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s an international student completing his studies in Toronto and Winnipeg, Aliraza Alidina found that newcomers weren’t educated on the challenges Indigenous communities faced in Canada. “In the course of my studies, I came to know about something that I wasn't aware of,” says Alidina, who completed his bachelor’s degree in international development studies at York University, and is currently working on his master’s in development practice at the University of Winnipeg. “Living in Canada as an international student, never hearing about the history of Canada and the challenges Indigenous communities faced, I was really exposed to a new area, which I thought was quite important for me to know from the very beginning.” Alidina’s master’s program required two field placements: one locally and one internationally. He decided to do his local field placement with Immigration Partnership Winnipeg (IPW) to really look at Indigenous-newcomer relations. IPW had already done some work in this area which prompted Alidina to expand on IPW’s work. With this report and recognizing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action (with two actions relating to newcomers), he wondered where we stood as a city, in terms of relationship-building.
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“Winnipeg has an important dynamic because it has the largest urban Indigenous population, and it has a growing newcomer population,” Alidina says. “I thought this would be a really good case study as a lot of the findings on relationship-building here could be applied elsewhere and we could take the lead.” As co-author of Fostering Safe Spaces for Dialogue and Relationship-building Between Newcomers and Indigenous Peoples, Alidina, alongside Jenna Wirch and Darrien Morton, put together the report to discuss effective practices for building relationships between newcomers and Indigenous peoples and to provide recommendations for IPW’s orientation toolkit. With help from The Winnipeg Foundation’s Emerging Leaders Fellowship (ELF) program grant, Alidina had the capacity to work on the report content. The experience opened his eyes to alternative views, including through an Indigenous lens. Read more about ELF in the sidebar. “It was really touching because I got to see so many commonalities on a personal ground,” Alidina says. “We had an Indigenous worldview class with an Elder, using different methods, and I could really connect to those.” As a newcomer, Alidina found these shared commonalities were never discussed.
