Brenda Chisholm-Beaton & Karen Bernard on Reconciliation, Women’s Leadership and Grandmothers

A Conversation About Reconciliation, Leadership, and Grandmothers

This Friends United interview brings together Mayor Brenda Chisholm-Beaton and Mi’kmaq author and advocate Karen Bernard for a conversation about reconciliation as a lived relationship. Speaking with Nancy Regan at the Friends United International Convention Centre in Unama’ki, Cape Breton, they reflect on how trust, inclusion, respect, and shared action can create bridges between communities.

Reconciliation Through Relationship

The conversation begins with the story of how Karen and Brenda met through women’s leadership work in Cape Breton and Eastern Nova Scotia. What started as a discussion about local campaign school and women’s participation in leadership grew into a wider movement around empowerment, mentorship, reconciliation, and the reawakening of matriarchal knowledge.

Women’s Leadership Beyond Politics

Karen and Brenda describe leadership as something broader than a formal title or elected position. Their work shows how grandmothers, advocates, artists, organizers, caregivers, and community members can all hold leadership roles when their knowledge, experience, and voices are recognized.

Grandmothers, Language, and Cultural Reconnection

Karen speaks about language loss, residential school impacts in her family, cultural reconnection, public speaking, advocacy, and the importance of Grandmothers Gatherings. She reflects on grandmothers as knowledge keepers and on the process of reconnecting with Mi’kmaq language, ceremony, the drum, smudging, and Mother Earth.

Friends United as a Place for Dialogue

Together, Brenda and Karen describe the Friends United International Convention Centre as a place where art, memory, relationships, and reconciliation meet. Surrounded by Indigenous art, the conversation points to the value of reverence, not only acceptance, and to the power of gathering people in a space built for respectful dialogue.