Solidarity in Action
World Refugee Day & Indigenous Peoples Day 2024
In events hosted across the country, SAHs have been involved in celebrating World Refugee Day, raising awareness. This year, the theme of World Refugee Day is: Solidarity with refugees– for a world where refugees are welcomed.
VIDEO: Roundtable: Walking Together: Strengthening Indigenous-Newcomer Allyship
According to the UNHCR, an unprecedented 120 million people have been forcibly displaced. The UNHCR’s Projected Global Resettlement Needs Assessment for 2024 indicates that over 2.4 million refugees will need resettlement, a 20 percent increase from 2023. As the UNHCR states:
"Refugees need our solidarity now more than ever. Solidarity means keeping our doors open, celebrating their strengths and achievements, and reflecting on the challenges they face.
Solidarity with people forced to flee also means finding solutions to their plight – ending conflicts so they can return home in safety, ensuring they have opportunities to thrive in the communities that have welcomed them, and providing countries with the resources they need to include and support refugees.”
The Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program exemplifies solidarity at its best, as it goes beyond talking about creating welcoming communities and puts welcome into action. In 2023, 27,600 privately sponsored refugees arrived in Canada; this is the highest number of PSR arrivals in Canada's recent history. SAHs, and the private sponsors they mobilize, walk with those they sponsor and provide wrap-around supports, all while creating and fostering more diverse and inclusive Canadian communities. This is the work at the very heart of solidarity.
To amplify the message of World Refugee Day, and encourage solidarity with refugees, see below for links to “We Were Here”, a Webby Award documentary series produced by UNHCR and YouTube. The three short films challenge stereotypes about refugees by focusing on what unites us rather than what sets us apart.
Speaking of what unites us rather then sets us apart, it’s apropos that June 21st, National Indigenous Peoples Day, should align so closely with World Refugee Day – indeed, refugee newcomers and Indigenous Peoples here on Turtle Island have plenty of fertile common ground in their shared lived experiences to be natural friends and allies to each other. Fostering and building these relationships is important work the entire settlement sector can be involved with.
But going beyond friends and allies, we encourage all SAHs and the private refugee sponsor sector, towards solidarity with Indigenous Peoples – and solidarity demands more of us than words and good intentions. In the same way that the SAH community puts welcome into action, we have to look at ways we can put reconciliation into action, while also considering what distinguishes a settler from a guest, and what obligations we have as settlers resettling settlers on stolen Indigenous lands. Considering these hard questions and looking at ways we can live out reconciliation through our work, is to work towards solidarity with Indigenous Peoples.
The SAH Association stands with you on World Refugee Day today, and on Indigenous Peoples day tomorrow, and every day we thank you for your service as we walk together in solidarity and support.
The "Must Read" List
Truth Before Reconciliation
Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk meticulously details the state-sponsored attack on Indigenous communities in Canada - the relentless catastrophe that persists to the present day.
The North-West is Our Mother by Jean Teillet tells the story of the Red River Metis Nation - known by the Cree as Otipemisiwak - The People Who Own Themselves - their ethnogenesis as a new Indigenous Nation, their culture of resistance, and how they came to be completely dispossessed of their land through the corrupt Scrip system to be known as the Road Allowance People.
The Reconciliation Manifesto by the late Indigenous leader and grassroots activist, Arthur Manuel, and Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson provides a road map to what reconciliation looks like for Indigenous People.
The Politics of Allyship with Indigenous Peoples in the Canadian Refugee-Serving Sector by Chizuru Nobe-Ghelani and Mbalu Lumor asks what it means for the refugee-serving sector to be an ally to Indigenous Peoples? The authors highlight the tensions that exist in allyship between Indigenous and refugee communities and discuss ways to work with those tensions.
