People tend to think of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action as being about apologies, monuments, and education. They are also, very specifically, about counting. The first five Calls to Action concern child welfare, and one of them is a measurement demand so direct that anyone who works in evaluation should feel addressed by it.
Call to Action 2 asks the federal government to publish annual reports on the number of Aboriginal children in care compared with non-Aboriginal children, the reasons they were apprehended, the total spent on prevention versus care, and the effectiveness of interventions. Read that again as an evaluator: it is a call for honest, disaggregated, public reporting on who is being served and who is being failed. Call to Action 1 asks governments to actually reduce the number of Aboriginal children in care. Call to Action 3 asks for the full implementation of Jordan's Principle. Call to Action 4, which asked for national child-welfare legislation affirming the right of Indigenous governments to run their own agencies, became Bill C-92.
If an evaluation cannot say who is being served and who is being failed, it is not yet doing what reconciliation asks of it.
The health-related Calls to Action, numbers 18 through 24, point the same direction. They call for closing the measurable gaps in health outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, for recognizing and valuing Indigenous healing practices, and for training health professionals in cultural competency. Each of those is, in part, a measurement commitment; you cannot close a gap you refuse to measure, and you cannot value a practice you have designed your instruments to ignore.
The lesson for the field is that measurement is not neutral bookkeeping here. To count honestly, to disaggregate the data, to report it publicly even when it is unflattering, and to build instruments that can see Indigenous knowledge rather than flatten it, these are not bureaucratic chores. They are, quite literally, Calls to Action, and the work of an evaluator in this space is to answer them rather than to add a sentence about them at the end.