WESTLOCK – Westlock teacher Heather Beaver is sharing her journey to reconciliation in her new book, Cowboy Coffee: A Reconciliation Conversation.
The first-time author held a book launch and signing at the Westlock Library Dec. 15, where she met with guests and book enthusiasts, as well as signed copies and read a chapter while engaging with residents about the book and its message.
Cowboy Coffee is an educational memoir, which describes Beaver’s journey towards reconciliation as a Caucasian mother of two half-Métis children.
“I started to go through my own understanding of what I was really missing when it came to reconciliation,” said Beaver. “It’s been a process for me to go through what reconciliation means and finding out truth and reconciling it with what I understand to be the Indigenous experience and realizing that the things that I foundationally understand about Indigenous people in Canada is just not true,” she said, pointing to the book’s research and facts about the Indigenous experience.
While speaking at a school division event about the land acknowledgement, prior to the pandemic, people connected with her and her perspective, what she spoke about and encouraged her to write a book, which in the end took about six months to write during the spring and summer of 2020. The book was published this August.
“COVID-19 happened and I ended up at home. I thought let’s just do it, so I did, I wrote a book,” she said, noting her role as a mother to Indigenous children also played a factor in her decision to learn more about reconciliation and write the book.
“That’s where the passion came from — the mama bear in me came out and I just wanted a better place for my kids and wanted to make change for them. I started to realize what they were experiencing.”
Originally from Calgary, Beaver lived and worked as a teacher in a northern Alberta Indigenous community for the first half of her career and has lived in Westlock since 2007. She wants to share an important message about the missing pieces of the Indigenous experience for Caucasians and people of other ethnicities, to help their understanding of reconciliation.
“We have a foundational understanding of Indigenous peoples, their relationship and our society, and a lot of it is misinformation,” said Beaver. “We tend to look at reconciliation from a certain perspective because of that non-Indigenous foundation that we come from — we don’t really get it. We don’t get a lot of the Indigenous experience because we can’t relate to it and we don’t really understand those pieces that we’re missing.”
Beaver said she is excited to see the book finally released and have an opportunity to share it with others.
“I’ve had great feedback and that’s encouraging me. To get (the book) out there, talk to people about it and start the conversations,” she said. “And hopefully give people even one thing to think about a little bit differently and question what they understand.”
Cowboy Coffee: A Reconciliation Conversation is available on Amazon and via Beaver’s blog.
