Season 7 Episode 9: When Systems Fracture Identity: A Métis Perspective on Belonging and Accountability

Systems Change
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About This Episode

Systems don’t just “break” on their own. They do what they were designed to do, and too often that means extracting money, labor, and dignity while claiming to keep us safe. 

In this episode, David and Ruth sit down with Trisha McOrmond, a Red River Métis systems thinker, to explore what it means to navigate belonging when it’s been fractured by family separation, colonisation, and institutions. They talk about the tension of feeling responsible to advocate, serve, and tell the truth without speaking for an entire community. They dig into why speaking from “I” and lived experience isn’t selfish, it’s accountable, and how the “royal we” can obscure harm in leadership, training, and professional spaces.

Trisha shares what decolonising thinking means to her: shifting from a scarcity worldview—where you “arrive here wanting” and must prove your worth—to a relational one, where you “arrive here wanted,” and community organises around care, children, elders, and basic needs. That shift reshapes how we understand capitalism, business as service, and the subtle ways institutions protect capital, property, and liability over people.

They also connect these ideas to domestic violence and child welfare systems. David, Ruth, and Trisha explore how deficit-based frameworks get weaponised against victims and targeted communities, how DARVO shows up at scale, and why asking “what will make this better?” can sometimes open doors that “what will make you safer?” closes.

If you care about systems change, targeted communities, First Nations perspectives, institutional trust, and building safety through relationships, this conversation is for you.

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Additional Resources

Next

Season 7 Episode 8: Shifting Domestic Violence Practice in Japan with Professor Kanako Masui