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On a cold January day in 2017, about a dozen Queen’s faculty, staff, and students made their way to a meeting room inside the Kingston Community Health Centre in the city’s north end. The space was unremarkable – a few folding tables, plastic chairs, a coffee station with a weak brew – but the conversation that followed would prove anything but. Waiting for them were about a dozen others, mostly from the local Indigenous community, including the Katarokwi Grandmothers’ Council, a new circle of Indigenous women who had been building community through potlucks and other get-togethers around Kingston. That day, they all came ready to talk about what reconciliation with Queen’s could look like and how the university could make it real. 

Rahswahérha (Mark Green), a civil engineering professor, member of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte, and one of the co-chairs of Queen’s newly struck Truth and Reconciliation Commission Task Force, remembers that meeting like yesterday. “It really was one of the most rewarding moments of our entire process,” he says. By all accounts, it wasn’t an easy meeting. There were as many frustrations shared as hopes. But it was a start. And it was the first time the task force had sat down with local Indigenous folks. “There really was an openness to build something new with Queen’s if we could show we were serious about doing this work,” says Dr. Green. “It was inspiring.”

That meeting helped set the tone for the task force’s work, which led to the release later that year of Yakwanastahentéha Aankenjigemi, Extending the Rafters, a report with 25 recommendations for Queen’s to respond meaningfully to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) 94 calls to action, published two years earlier.

The report’s title was a metaphor from Haudenosaunee tradition. When a new family moved into the longhouse or the community grew, the rafters were extended to make room to welcome them. 

Queen’s has had its rafter extension plans in hand for eight years now. Ten years have passed since the release of the TRC’s final report and calls to action. All of it has spurred renewed reflection across campus and beyond about how Queen’s has responded to the horrific legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential School system. Speaking with Indigenous and non-Indigenous faculty, staff, and students for this story, it’s clear there isn’t always agreement on what Queen’s has and hasn’t done – and what it should do next. But they all say there’s no doubt serious progress has been made. It’s just that the more difficult work may lie ahead.

When the TRC’s final reportlanded in December 2015, it was obvious to Queen’s then-principal and vice--chancellor Daniel Woolf that the university had to act. “This was a major event in the history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in the country,” he says, “and it made very clear that educational institutions were going to have a major role in helping to fix things.” 

Three of the TRC’s 94 calls to action speak directly to post-secondary institutions. Call 16 urges colleges and universities to create programs in Indigenous languages. Call 24 directs medical and nursing schools to require all their students to take a course in Indigenous health issues. And call 28 pushes for law schools to require all their students to take a course in Indigenous Peoples and the law. There are also more indirect calls targeted to colleges and universities – like 62 (ii), which asks government to pay schools to educate teachers about how to bring Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into the classroom.    

At Queen’s, Dr. Woolf moved quickly, asking then-provost Alan Harrison to work with the university’s Indigenous Council to create a task force that would respond to the TRC’s report. Nobody wanted the status quo, remembers Dr. Woolf, now back to being a history professor at Queen’s. “There can be a common problem with some institutions of striking a task force, writing a report, applauding it, putting in on a shelf, and then 10 years later coming back and realizing how little you’ve actually done. We were determined that that was not going to be the case here – that there would be metrics, annual check-ins, accountability.”

Mark Green and Jill Scott, then vice-provost (teaching and learning), were asked to co-chair the task force. They gathered about 30 Indigenous and non-Indigenous faculty, staff, students, and community members, and got to work.

 Over the next five months, the task force held 18 consultation sessions with Indigenous and non--Indigenous students, staff, and faculty, as well as the Indigenous Council, Senate, Board of Trustees, student groups, and alumni. They also visited Indigenous communities to make sure those voices were reflected in the report.   

“Everyone had a voice in it,” rem-embers Kanonhsyonne (Janice Hill), then the director of Four Directions Indigenous Student Centre and a member of the task force. “It was very Haudenosaunee-centric in that way, because our way of decision--making is that everyone has a voice and everyone is respected and heard.”

Just before the final report was released in March 2017, Dr. Woolf spoke at a special Queen’s Senate meeting. “For too long, our country’s mistreatment and segregation of Indigenous Peoples has been hidden from view, only to perpetuate and contribute to their suffering,” he said. “To move forward in healing, we must acknowledge Queen’s own history as an institution that participated in a colonial tradition that caused great harm to Indigenous Peoples.” 

For Ms. Hill, a Clan mother of the Turtle Clan, Mohawk Nation at Tyendinaga, that moment was deeply meaningful. “It was powerful for the principal to use those words and commit the university to doing better,” she says. “As the head of the university, it was clear this was being taken very seriously. And action did follow quickly.” 

One of the first actions was the creation of the Office of Indigenous Initiatives (OII). With Ms. Hill as its inaugural director, the OII became a central voice for Indigenous perspectives within the university and a hub for building community, advancing reconciliation, and integrating Indigenous ways of knowing and being into the university. Not long after, Four Directions Indigenous Student Centre – a home away from home for Indigenous students at Queen’s – doubled in size, providing more workspaces and expanded areas for cultural programming. 

New gathering spaces also brought Indigenous presence to the heart of campus. The Outdoor Indigenous Gathering Space, for instance, created room for ceremony, teaching, and community. Mackintosh-Corry Hall’s “Kanonhweratónhtshera, G’di-mikwanim, The Welcoming Room” and the revitalized John Deutsch University Centre (JDUC), with new areas such as the Agora’s Seven Grand-father Teaching Stairs, added new spaces for reflection and learning. And across campus, Indigenous art found permanent homes, from the Queen’s Remembers plinth to Stauffer Library’s study rooms lined with works by Indigenous artists.

Numbers tell part of the story, too. The number of Queen’s students who self-identify as Indigenous has nearly doubled since the release of the task force’s report, growing from 445 students (1.6 per cent of total enrolment) in 2018 to 816 (2.9 per cent) in 2025. For faculty, the percentage has increased from 1.2 per cent in 2018 to 1.9 per cent in 2024, partly boosted in 2023 with the hiring of six Indigenous Queen’s National Scholars. Among staff, the proportion who self-identify as Indigenous has remained steady at 2.4 per cent over that same period.

Patrick Deane, who became Queen’s principal and vice-chancellor in 2019, has been struck by how these changes have altered the feel of campus. “We’ve made very good progress under what Jan Hill calls ‘faces, spaces, and places,’” he says. “Now ingrained in the institution is a deep respect for the Indigenous Peoples whose territory this is, and you can see Indigenous culture reflected here now in a way you couldn’t 10 years ago.” 

You can also see that culture reflected in the classroom. In the years since the task force released its report, Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing have increasingly been woven into the academic life of the university. One example is the growth of what’s now the Indigenous Knowledges and Perspectives program. What began as a minor has expanded into full major and joint honours options, drawing on courses from more than a dozen departments. The program gives students the chance to engage with Indigenous histories, cultures, and worldviews, and to understand how those perspectives can shape fields like law, policy, health, and education. 

Queen’s has also tried to respond to the TRC’s calls to action aimed directly at universities. Through the Certificate in Indigenous Languages and Cultures, all undergrads can now explore Indigenous world-views and even learn languages like Mohawk. In Queen’s Health Sciences, initiatives like the Office of Indigenous Health and the Queen’s-Weeneebayko Health Education Program have been part of growing efforts to weave Indigenous knowledge and cultural safety into health education. And in the Faculty of Law, a suite of new and evolving courses – led by Indigenous scholars and including the 2026 launch of the course Indigenous Peoples, Law, and Reconciliation for all first-year juris doctor students – is helping future lawyers ground their practice in reconciliation and Indigenous legal traditions. 

Philanthropic and alumni support has also been huge for some of these changes. The Outdoor Indigenous Gathering Space, for instance, beside Mackintosh-Corry Hall, was partly funded by an alumni gift. Donor funds have supported Indigenous-focused scholarships, bursaries, and research as well. And through programs like A Mile in Their Shoes: Truth, Empathy, and Reconciliation – an immersive, four-month learning program for Queen’s alumni – grads are deepening their own understanding of reconciliation.

Taken together, all these changes show that the university’s rafters have definitely expanded, says Principal Deane. But, he adds, as the late Murray Sinclair – Chancellor Emeritus and chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – often reminded people, reconciliation isn’t a finished process. “Murray was always quick to recognize what had been achieved, but he was also quick to remind you that you had a long way to go. And we still do.” 

Everyone within the Queen’s community spoken with for this story shares that view. And some, in fact, worry that momentum on the reconciliation front at the university has slowed in recent years. “We had pretty rapid progress in the first five years, but I don’t think there is the same focus there once was,” says Dr. Green, who is also now the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) scholar in residence for Indigenous collaboration at Queen’s. 

One of the earliest and most vital recommendations from the task force’s report was to strengthen Queen’s relationships with local Indigenous communities. Early efforts, such as the 2017 presentation of the friendship wampum belt to Queen’s by the Clan Mothers at Tyendinaga and the Katarokwi Grandmothers’ Council, helped build trust and new partnerships. Annual “Polishing the Chain” ceremonies helped renew those relationships for several years, but they haven’t happened since 2023. 

Dr. Green, Jan Hill, and Lisa Maracle – a member of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte who succeeded Ms. Hill as associate vice-principal (Indigenous Initiatives) in 2025 – say it’s time to rekindle ties like those as real, sustained collaborations, not symbolic gestures. “If we’re not engaging with community in a good and helpful and productive way, then those partners will step away from the table,” says Ms. Hill. “And they don’t want to be just rubber-stamping things. They want to be true partners, and they want to be heard.”

Curriculum change is another area that some say needs renewed energy. While Indigenous content is now woven into many programs, the task force’s vision was that every graduate leave Queen’s with a basic understanding of Indigenous knowledge systems relevant to their discipline. “We chose not to go the route of a mandatory course, as some universities have,” says
Dr. Green. “Instead, we asked each faculty to embed Indigenous-specific content in ways that made sense for them and that was linked to learning outcomes and degree-level expectations. More programs need to meet that bar.”  

Principal Deane agrees that the harder work ahead is less visible than the faces, spaces, and places efforts that Queen’s has largely focused on over the past decade. Now, it’s more about deeper, structural, epistemological shifts, he says. “The university is a European construct through and through. Many of the things that made education a tool in the colonization process are baked into the way it thinks, the way it reasons, and the way it rewards. And so that’s the difficult stuff – grappling with what it truly means to decolonize an institution like ours, rethinking what constitutes science, what constitutes knowledge.” 

That challenge, he adds, isn’t unique to Queen’s, but it’s one that can only be met through larger-scale transformation. In other words, a willingness to allow Indigenous ways of knowing to influence how the university teaches, researches, and governs itself. This spirit of transformation is echoed in Queen’s draft Bicentennial Vision, which is being led by the principal. It highlights Indigenization as a core part of the university as it approaches its 200th anniversary in 2041.

For Lisa Maracle, her priority as the new head of Indigenous Initiatives at Queen’s is to help “light the fire again.” Over her first year at the university, she has seen both opportunity and appetite for renewed focus. “A lot of great work has been done,” she says. “Now it’s about getting people thinking again – new ideas, new energy, new partnerships.” 

Part of that, she adds, means ensuring reconciliation continues to remain visible in the daily life of the university. And not only through faces, spaces, and places, but through how students learn and how the university engages with Indigenous communities. She also hopes to see more and larger Indigenous spaces on campus, as well as philanthropic support for initiatives that create meaningful connection. “We’ve got a strong foundation,” she says. “Now it’s time to build on it.” 

This sense of renewal feels familiar to Dr. Green, who still remembers the promise of that meeting in the north end of Kingston on that cold January day in 2017. “People from the local Indigenous community were keen to build a new and stronger relationship with Queen’s, and so were we with them,” he says. Nearly a decade later, that hope endures, he says, but it requires care and recommitment to grow. 

For Principal Deane, that’s what makes reconciliation both challenging and essential. “It’s a long-term project,” he says. “As Murray Sinclair famously said, ‘Education got us into this mess, and education will get us out of it.’ Misapplied, education can do terrible damage. But it can be a massive force for good, and that’s what gives me hope.”  

It’s a hope shared by Ms. Hill, who retired from Queen’s in 2024 after three decades at the university. What happens at Queen’s matters far beyond its limestone walls, she says. The university’s graduates go on to shape the country’s policy, business, education, and beyond. The more they understand this history and its impact, the more they can help make a difference in the lives of all Canadians, but especially the lives of Indigenous Peoples. “It’s like dropping a stone in the water,” she says. “The ripples can travel far.”

And so, the work continues at Queen’s. Sometimes quietly, sometimes slowly, sometimes with great momentum. The rafters, once extend-ed, keep reaching outward.

Read the Queen’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Task Force’s final report and annual progress update.