Indigeneity, Technology, and Education
While there are many articles available focussing on what residential schools were and the pain and hardship encountered by the survivors, this article highlights what the Government’s goal was for Residential Schools and how they would achieve it. Having a view point from the government is important to providing a balanced view of Residential Schools.
http://www.megaphonemagazine.com/unceded_territory
Visited 24 October 2018
This 2016 article provides a helpful overview of some of the history and varying perspectives of land acknowledgements in Vancouver and Victoria. Okanagan Grand Chief Stewart Phillip offers a hopeful perspective saying, “Its [sic] encouraging to know we have made that kind of progress [to hear official acknowledgements . . . from Vancouver city council]. We’ve come a long way from the dark days of racist denial that existed when I first got involved” while Musqueam First Nations activist Audrey Siegl (sχɬemtəna:t) says these sorts of acknowledgements are “just tokenism, pretty but empty words, spoken so we will be pacified for at least a little bit longer.” Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps states, “It’s simple, really—it is their territory,” referring to the Songhees and Esquimalt people. However beyond a political platitude I wonder what it actually means to say that the city of Victoria “is their territory.”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/canadas-impossible-acknowledgment
Visited 4 October 2018
Stephen Marche argues that in the time since Justin Trudeau’s election with “great gusts of hope that we might finally confront the horror of our history . . . the process of reconciliation between Canada and its First Nations has stalled.” However land acknowledgements have spread from elementary schools to hockey arenas, and land “[acknowledgments force] individuals and institutions to ask a basic, nightmarish question: Whose land are we on?” Marche contests land acknowledgements because their wording is passive, useless, jargon written to “express a sentiment without . . . feeling it.”
https://students.ubc.ca/ubclife/what-land-acknowledgement
Visited 6 September 2018
This site introduces the land acknowledgement at UBC, stating that “this land acknowledgement has become common practice at University events, business meetings, and in official documents” but it is not “just a formality.” The site defines traditional, ancestral, and unceded, and what most strikes me about this statement is the acknowledgement of unceded—that UBC is built on “land that was not turned over to the Crown by a treaty or other agreement”—and the silence of anything else. It feels like a person standing before a judge saying, “Your Honour, I admit that the $2,000,000 piece of land on which I built my house I acquired from Bob without asking Bob for it.” There is no apology. There is no offer to give the land back or purchase it at a fair price. It is simply an acknowledgement of guilt: “Yep. I took it.” Is unceded a legal euphemism for stolen?