October 10, 2016 Volume 20 Issue 20 | Henry Neufeld, right, spent a lifetime building positive relationships among Mennonite and indigenous peoples. He is pictured standing beside Pastor Jeremiah Ross from Cross Lake, Man., at a Conference of Mennonites in Canada (now Mennonite Church Canada) conference in Vancouver in 1981. In 1968, Neufeld was given permission to build a house and to live with the people of Little Grand Rapids. A letter signed by 49 residents of the community demonstrating support for this relationship is preserved in the Heritage Centre archives. At the opening of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation archive at the University of Manitoba, former grand chief Phil Fontaine said that in his 10-year residential school experience, he “encountered so many very committed, outstanding, generous people in the schools [he] attended.”
For more of Henry’s story, see “From ‘never a teacher’ to ‘why not?’”