Being Indigenous and having “reconciliation” in your job description – Waterloo News

Savanah Seaton wants to help employers create workplaces where Indigenous employees can feel a sense of belonging and fully contribute their untapped knowledge, skills and abilities.

Savanah Seaton had worked hard to build working relationships — and trust — between the governments of three First Nations and the City of Vancouver. So her heart sank when she got a call that workers had dug in the zone of an ancestral burial ground, again.

As the first Indigenous liaison and social planner for the city’s engineering department, Seaton had provided archeological and cultural competency training to almost 3,000 employees to ensure everyone knew exactly what to do before digging in protected lands. But that day, Seaton found herself standing over the hole trying to understand what went wrong.