Hi everyone! I’m Nimrit and I wanted to acknowledge that I am learning and living on the Indigenous lands of the Musqueam People and I was born on the Indigenous lands of the Okanagan First Nations People in Oliver BC.

Due to this week’s themes, I decided to name my presentation UBC’s Approach to Indigenous “Inclusion”.

The Object I have chosen to analyze is The Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre. I included this quote by Sara Ahmed which will reveal its importance as we get into talking about the centre. As included on the handout, I wanted to talk about what is going on around the centre and what it means.

So when I visited the centre I realized that the location is important to talk about. It is technically central but is below IKB. It is quite hidden when walking along Main Mall. There was no one inside the centre but there were lots of people sitting on the grass hill outside socializing and eating. There wasn’t much inside the building as well. There was not a lot of art work on the walls and just two sets of Ipads and headphones. The building’s structure is beautiful and there was so much around it but just not inside it.

This leads me into the Ubyssey article titled ‘Not a trophy for UBC”. Five  months after the grand opening of the centre the article states that it is understaffed, under supported and mostly empty.  There was a lot promised for this centre, we will get into that later in the presentation, that isn’t present at the space. The article discusses how they were promised records that included histories, documents and testimonies that are a part of the Indian Residential School System but they haven’t seen those records yet. They are only able to access public records. Staff also discussed how they were thrown into this position with a small set of resources. The article states that instead of operating successfully the centre is a trophy sitting pretty on campus making UBC look really good for this amazing act of reconciliation.

This brings me into some quotes that really stood out to me in the readings. First quote : “Although the discourses and guidelines surrounding diversity are not completely ineffective, nonetheless they do not necessarily lead to the effects they name and promise, but are still perceived as performative” (Dhawan). I thought this was really relevant to the centre because there was so much promised for it and so much publicized, even in Santa Ono’ speech, which I will discuss later. There is so much content available about the process of developing the centre on the UBC website but now that the centre has opened there’s nothing to show for it. Like the article states, it sits there as a trophy.

Second quote: “Having an institutional aim to make diversity a goal can be a sign that diversity is not an institutional goal” (Ahmed, 2012, p. 23). With this quote I thought about how the centre was publicized to be an amazing act of reconciliation but it now seems that it’s not in the institutions interest to make sure the centre is accessible and successful.

Third Quote: “… for Indigenous inclusion on behalf of both the college and the university, it ultimately sought to add Indigenous people into pre-existing university structures, inserting them into departments where they are likely to be the only Indigenous scholars in their respective unit” (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018, p. 219). This Quote by Gaudry and Lorenz made me think about how the centre was supposed to be for indigenous staff, students and people in general to have a space to access information, and to learn and build relationships but there isn’t even enough staff to keep it running. It seems UBC was ignorant to the fact that it would take hard work to sustain the centre and hiring indigenous staff and students would not be enough.

Activity: For my group activity I wanted to analyze a section of Santa Ono’s speech that was given at the opening of the centre. You can find the entire speech on the UBC website. So this speech was supposed to be given in September of last year but was moved to the opening of the centre months later.

Take a minute to look at the text, I have bolded some things that stood out to me. Discuss with someone beside you or write down something that stood out to you. Feel free to share what struck you about this or any thoughts you had.