Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin holds his hands like he’s balancing a tray in front of him.

“Haichka,” he said, a respectful Coast Salish term used to welcome guests.

He’s addressing Songhees First Nation community members and elders after a burning ceremony to show respect for a 300-year-old ancestor who’s remains were disturbed during a city project.

The respectful greeting has become common practice among local politicians.

But it started with Fortin’s predecessor, Alan Lowe.

“We always started by giving thanks for First Nations allowing us to be on their territory,” Lowe said from his lofty Government Street office.

Lowe was mayor between 1999 and 2008. While he now runs his own architecture business, the First Nations’ community still gives him full credit for drafting the blueprint toward reconciling First Nations and non-First Nations differences.

“It’s all due to Alan Lowe,” said Songhees Chief Robert Sam.

The relationship is continuing to evolve. And while it’s painful for the First Nations’ community when ancestral remains are unearthed, it brings everyone together: the city, developers, First Nations councils, the province and homeowners. And some say, that could just be the platform needed to continue coming together.

When Lowe was first elected, the city had virtually no relationship with the First Nations community.

“I was the first mayor that actually invited the chiefs of both the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations to my office.”

Initially, he thought it could have been tense.

“But they were so excited to be invited because they had never been invited before,” Lowe said.

“It was part of a process where we started to be more co-operative as opposed to having a more antagonistic relationship of the past.”

Lowe said he knows other mayors weren’t successful in trying to build those relationships. Perhaps he was successful because he wasn’t white.

“The Chinese were also discriminated against and I still remember some of my friends that I would meet down in Chinatown, and one (First Nations) guy ... used to tell me, ‘we’re very close to the Chinese community because when no one else would allow us to go to the restaurants, we were welcome in Chinatown.’”

Recently, the city provided almost $10,000 to fund a burning ceremony to reconcile for work crews disturbing a First Nations burial site.

“I think Dean is still following up with what we’ve built up in the past,” Lowe said.

“We got off on a bad foot from initial contact,” Fortin said. “It’s not a very proud history of the past 150 years.”

As local governments start repairing those relationships, they can communicate more with First Nation’s on a “chief-to-chief” basis, he said.

“We’ve all gotten into a canoe together,” Fortin said. “We’re starting to paddle and we’re not sure where we’re going, but we’re all going there together.”

At the reburial ceremony on Dallas Road in December, Fortin and city councillors each laid a white rose on the grave marker.

The gesture was enough to make Songhees Coun. Ron Sam well up.

Even though he was crying, making no effort to hide or brush away the tears, a little piece of him seemed to be healing.

“It means something when you see councillors and a mayor pay their respects like that,” Sam said.

‘We’ve just never had that before.”

That sort of action comes from the premise that we’re on First Nation’s territory, Fortin said.

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