I’ve worn many hats over the years — therapist, educator, facilitator — but today my work is firmly rooted in prevention. I now spend my days exploring how evidence-based prevention strategies can take root in the diverse communities of Northeastern Ontario.

My “non-day” job is my journey of unlearning, which began in 2007. What started then has grown into a lifelong process of questioning inherited stories, confronting colonial narratives, and reckoning with what it means to live as a settler descendant on Turtle Island. 

I was 32, had just left my husband, was raising two young children, and had recently been released from a psychiatric hospital in British Columbia after experiencing a psychotic episode. When I asked my family, “Now what?” their advice was to return to university and finish the undergraduate degree I had first started in 1994.

Enrolling at my local university, I ended up taking a few “Aboriginal” courses — and those opened my eyes to the realities hidden behind the myths I had grown up with. What I learned was in direct contradiction to what I had been taught as a child. That was the beginning of recognizing the true history of what is now called Canada, and of starting to understand my own conditioning.

A more recent turning point came when I made the connection that my great-uncle was a principal of a residential school. Until then, we had always referred to him simply as a missionary- never questionning what that meant. Reconciling that history — within my family and within myself — is ongoing. The more I learn, the more I realize how deliberately I was taught to think in a certain way — a way that serves colonial goals of “nation-building".

My first ancestors arrived in different parts of what is now Quebec between 1632 and 1672, to settle along the St. Lawrence River (Fleuve Saint-Laurent) around 13 to 15 generations ago. They came for their own reasons, but what they were told about this land — and what the truth actually was — were not the same. The history I was taught was equally distorted, designed not to illuminate but to reaffirm a narrative that served the purposes of colonization and the building of a nation on someone else’s land.

I am actively continuing to learn. I am learning the true history of the relationships between Europeans and the Original Peoples of Turtle Island, in their diverse nations and clans. And I am also reckoning with what that relationship looks like today, in 2025: a country now called Canada, and the Original Peoples of Turtle Island still forced to live within the boundaries and structures of the Canadian nation.

This site is a space where I share that ongoing journey — weaving together my professional insights, my personal reckonings, and the histories that continue to challenge and change me.

And I invite you to walk alongside me. I believe the onus is on Canadians of settler descent to take this journey. Genuine reconciliation cannot exist without genuine truth — and the dominant “truths” we cling to, often without question, are in fact harmful narratives. They drive division and will always remain a barrier to reconciliation unless we are willing to confront and unlearn them.

In kindness, 

Natalie Lebel, MA, RP