Tag Archives: UBC

POST 5 – Classroom Climate: Territory Acknowledgment – David Loti

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LApHrjFPFp4

Visited 21 November 2018

 

Drs. Lisa Nathan and Liisa Holsti, UBC faculty members, discuss land acknowledgement practices as a way to understand the place and history of the UBC community. Nathan indicates that professions rooted in knowledge management have been complicit in colonization and that the land acknowledgement can be a piece in changing that trajectory. She also recognizes that by itself a territory acknowledgement does little, but it can be the start of a meaningful conversation.

Post 2 – Indigenous Literatures Matter: A Talk With Daniel Heath Justice – David Loti

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AttZD8LVqA

Visited 9 November 2018

Responding to the observation that non-Indigenous people often view Indigenous people as insignificant and lacking, UBC Professor of First Nations & Indigenous Studies and Director of the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies Daniel Heath Justice speaks about the hardest book he has ever written: Why Indigenous Literatures Matter and why he agrees with Craig Womack’s important statement that the American canon is part of the Indigenous canon as opposed to the reverse. Justice maintains a posture of hope in the midst and history of conflict, misunderstanding, and oppression in Indigenous communities.

POST 5 – Blue & Goldcast – Episode 1: Indigenous Ways of Knowing – David Loti

http://blueandgoldcast.com/

Visited 19 September 2018

President Ono’s inaugural podcast to tell UBC’s story is on the topic of Indigeneity and UBC.

Some of the interesting highlights are:

“We are fortunate to be on this land. Uh, we owe it to the Musqueam people, uh the Musqueam people have been wonderful uh working with us and so we also as an institution need to give back to the Musqueam.” — President Ono

“We are all Indigenous people from somewhere.” — Eduardo Jovel

“How can we as a university recognize different types of of knowledge product?” — Jennifer Gardy

It was interesting that originally the land acknowledgement in the episode description was as follows:

“We’d like to acknowledge that the UBC campus sits on the traditional, ancestral, and unseeded [sic] territory of the Musqueam people.” Unseeded was corrected on 20 September 2018, but it is perhaps indicative that unceded is a term that few people understand.

POST 4 – Musqueam & UBC – Aboriginal Portal – David Loti

http://aboriginal.ubc.ca/community-youth/%20musqueam-and-ubc/?login

Visited 6 September 2018

Speaking on the land acknowledgement of the Musqueam Territory, Linc Kessler says, “People don’t always understand why we do this and some have indicated a concern that this acknowledgement may be more nominal than indicative of a deeper commitment.” Who are the parties expressing this concern?

 

POST 3 – What is a land acknowledgement? – David Loti

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?