Reconciling with our pasts: a conversation with Elder Larry Grant & Scott Steedman

This week on Friendless, I'm joined by two guests I've been genuinely honored to sit down with: Elder Larry Grant, Elder in Residence at the Justice Institute of BC and UBC's First Nations House of Learning, and an elder of both the Musqueam Indian Band and Vancouver's Chinese community — and his co-author Scott Steedman, writer, editor, and publishing professor at SFU.

Together they wrote Reconciling, a book that maps Elder Larry's life not chronologically but geographically — Chinatown, Strathcona, Musqueam, the Fraser Valley — letting each place pull its own stories loose.

We talk about growing up caught between two identities that were both, in different ways, denied to him. We talk about the specific, everyday mechanics of exclusion — the signs, the double standards, the small cruelties that build until they explode from somewhere inside you. We talk about his years of drinking and the two-beers-that-were-never-two-beers, and how getting sober became inseparable from learning to love and respect himself. And we talk about what reconciliation actually asks of a country that would rather it stayed on paper than stood as a monument you can't walk past.

Reconciling is out now — grab a copy at Book Warehouse.

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