We Feel Before We Learn

At a recent Truth & Reconciliation Committee meeting, Knowledge Keeper Sandra Harris, from the Wet’suwet’en Nation of the Laksilyu (Little Frog Clan) and a member of the Witset First Nation, said something that has stayed with me.

"We feel before we learn."

She said it after — and in some ways, because of — something that had happened earlier this month. Knowledge Keeper and Elder Barbara Dumont-Hill, a First Nation Algonquin woman of Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, her husband, and a colleague had facilitated a Blanket Exercise for our organization.

If you haven't encountered it before, the Blanket Exercise is an experiential learning activity developed by KAIROS Canada. Blankets are spread across the floor to represent Indigenous lands. As facilitators walk participants through the history of colonization — the treaties, the legislation, the residential schools, the displacement — the blankets are folded, removed, crowded. People are asked to step off. The land shrinks. The history becomes spatial. It becomes something you stand on, or lose footing on, rather than simply read about.

The Exercise was held in a room filled predominantly with white participants. And what struck me most wasn't only the history it walked us through — it was the tenderness with which it was held.

The subject matter is heavy. Displacement. Loss. Erasure. Policy as violence.

And still, the facilitation was steady. Thoughtful. Spacious. No shaming. No spectacle. Just truth, offered with care.

I want to pause on that for a moment. Because that care was not incidental. It was labour.

Elder Barbara Dumont-Hill, her husband, and our colleague brought a room full of predominantly white people into contact with a history that Indigenous peoples carry in their bodies, their families, their communities — every day, without facilitation, without a debrief, without the option to step back onto the blanket. They did this with skill and with generosity. They created the conditions for something real to land.

That is not a small thing to ask of someone. And it is not a small thing to offer.

I had read about the Blanket Exercise before. I understood its purpose. I could have explained its mechanics.

But understanding it conceptually was different from standing on shrinking ground.

Blankets folded inward. Space compressed. Impacts named. People stepping off.

It wasn't dramatic. It was matter of fact.

And something in my body registered before my brain could organize it.

Later, in committee, Knowledge Keeper Sandra said, "We feel before we learn."

That line landed differently because I had just experienced it.

I have spent much of my life leading with thinking.

Thinking is structured. It is articulate. It gives me ground.

Feeling is less predictable. It softens edges. It can feel destabilizing.

If I'm honest, intellectualizing has often been a way to stay steady. If I can analyze something, I don't have to sit too long in the discomfort of it — or risk what might unravel if I did.

Organizations do this too. We reach for data before relationship, definitions before discomfort, policy before proximity, metrics before mourning.

We want to understand reconciliation. We want frameworks. We want action plans.

In our committee, Dr. Jae Ford, a Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer scholar and practitioner recently welcomed to the Office of the Chief Medical Officer at the First Nations Health Authority, offered a framing I haven't been able to let go of, “Reconcilia(c)tion.” The "(c)" is not decorative. It is an insistence — that reconciliation without action is just a word. That the work is in the doing, not the understanding.

But I'm realizing something else. Action that is not rooted in feeling risks becoming performance.

If EDI stays intellectual, it becomes compliance.

If reconciliation stays conceptual, it becomes symbolic.

I want to sit with something uncomfortable.

What opened up in me during the Blanket Exercise was not free. Someone created it. Someone held it. Elder Barbara, her husband, and my colleague absorbed the weight of a room full of people encountering — for the first time, or the first time in their bodies — what Indigenous peoples have carried for generations. They did that for us. Gently. Without making us feel guilty for needing it.

That's worth naming.

Not to induce shame — shame closes people down, turns inward, and returns us to the same self-protective distance I'm trying to move away from. Accountability is different. Accountability looks outward. It asks I received something. What do I owe in return?

And then the harder question what would it look like to answer that without centering myself again?

I don't know yet. I'm sitting with that too.

The Blanket Exercise doesn't start with information. It starts with experience. With spatial contraction. With a shift in ground. It asks the nervous system to register something before cognition can tidy it up.

And I'm beginning to understand why that matters — not just as pedagogy, but as ethics.

Because durable change doesn't come from understanding alone. It comes from allowing impact to land. And impact, real impact, is usually made possible by someone doing work we don't always see or name.

I am someone drawn to systems and evidence. To coherence and clarity. That won't change.

But I'm starting to question whether we sometimes try to educate before we allow people to encounter. Whether we ask people to "get it" before they've felt even a fraction of what they're being asked to understand. And whether our rush to solve is sometimes another way of avoiding what feeling might ask of us.

"We feel before we learn."

I'm still sitting with that.

Still noticing how quickly I move to analysis.

Still figuring out what comes next.

And in the meantime, I keep returning to a question I'd like to leave with you.

Who, in your life or your organization, has been doing the work of creating those conditions for you — quietly, consistently, at a cost you may not have named yet?