It was Métis Days at Klahowya Village in Stanley Park. A man in a crisp white shirt and woven blue belt took the stage, fiddle in hand. His skin was caramel, his hair dark, and his eyes a cool blue. As he brought the fiddle to his chin, two young dancers, one in a dress and moccasins and the other in pants and cowboy boots, dragged a sheet of plywood across the uneven ground and dropped their “dance floor” in front of the stage.

The caller, an elder with a buckskin shirt and 10-gallon hat, invited Métis audience members who didn’t know how to jig to come up for a lesson. My aunt Marion, a reasonable jigger and active member of Vancouver’s Métis community, gave me a shove toward the stage. “Her!” she yelled to the caller. “She’s Métis and she doesn’t know how to jig!”

My aunt is my link to Vancouver’s Métis community. She is the keeper of our family history, the one who gathered genealogical records to prove our lineage back to Duck Lake in 1885 and what the community calls the Resistance, not a rebellion. After I won my Vision Vancouver park board nomination in June, Aunt Marion offered to introduce me to community members. That is how I found myself dancing on a piece of plywood in Stanley Park one hot day this past July.

“This is my niece, Trish Kelly,” she said to each elder. “She’s running for park board with Vision Vancouver, and if she wins, she’ll be the first person of aboriginal descent to ever sit on the park board.”

It was this same aunt who called me, full of anger, when media began reporting that I had withdrawn my candidacy for the park board. Though the city has taken significant steps toward attempting to heal the relationship between Vancouver and our original people, for my aunt and aboriginal people in Vancouver, this was a loss.

There are reasons to be hopeful. In 2008, Ken Clement, from the Ktunaxa First Nation in the Kootenays, was elected to the Vancouver school board. A residential-school survivor, Clement was the first person of aboriginal descent to be elected to municipal office in Vancouver. In 2013, Vancouver partnered with Reconciliation Canada to declare a Year of Reconciliation for the city, which peaked with a Walk for Reconciliation that saw thousands of people take to the streets in support of healing and understanding. This June, city council passed a motion to formally recognize that Vancouver exists on unceded land, a motion that is now being interpreted in interesting ways at Oppenheimer Park. And COPE announced recently that Cease Wyss, a Squamish ethnobotanist and food-security advocate, had joined its park-board slate.

As my aunt introduced me to Métis elders, I heard optimism that this time, maybe there would be someone who, compelled by blood and family, might listen. I did listen, and I developed some planks for the Vision Vancouver platform, ideas that I hoped could continue the healing and recognize the aboriginal foundation upon which this city is built.

Stanley Park was home to many important First Nations sites, including villages for all three local First Nations: Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil Waututh. Until the 1880s, when the city declared it a park, First Nations people lived there and it was home to a longhouse that was 60 metres by 20 metres. A Longhouse of Reconciliation in the park could be a place of dialogue and learning linking the park’s history with the city’s commitment to reconciliation. This idea has been spoken of in Vancouver for many years; perhaps now that officials have suggested becoming a city of reconciliation we may have the political will to make it a reality.

The park itself is a significant piece of Vancouver’s urban forest, containing more than 300 hectares of temperate rainforest. Although the park board and city council have begun work on an urban forestry strategy, at this point there is no official advisory role given to local First Nations, whose tenure and expertise with this rainforest sustained them for thousands of years before European settlement. Not only is formal First Nations advice on this plan a natural improvement on the process, it provides a powerful opportunity for partnership.

I share these ideas here in hopes that Vision or other political parties might take up these planks and help build not just their platform but a bridge between this city and aboriginal people.

Reconciliation is not an apologetic handshake before parting but a future imagined together.