The first thought that popped into my head when considering “history-related documents” — newspapers. Better yet, why not student newspapers for this assignment?
Fortunately, UBC Library offers a digital archive of The Ubyssey dating back to its very first issue in 1918. This archive is open to everyone — in fact, only about 250,000 of the collection’s total views came from within Canada!
You can start by jumping to a particular year and date, or you can do what I did and start feeding keywords into the search. Clicking on a result brings you directly to where the word was used in the paper.
THE QUESTION
Going into this, I really wanted to leverage this huge set of data to take “snapshots” over time and observe change — very general, sorry…
I knew that the content — ideas, themes — would deserve much attention. Additionally though, I also saw this as an opportunity to explore something like aesthetics or formatting.
Publications in the black and white days, for example, were definitely more text-heavy. Check out the ads in the November 3 1921 edition — simple, stylish, and effective, relying on nothing more than words and letters.
THE SEARCH
Warning — I am about to introduce some pseudo-scientific methods here…
I began my exercise by taking the 5 keywords provided — Indian, Indigienous, Aboriginal, First Nations, Native — and searching for them one by one within the collection.
In terms of scope, I went with a neat and tidy 100-year window. I applied two filters to each word — results between 1918 and 1968, and between 1969 and 2019 — to quickly compare usage between each half of the century.
| Search Term | Search A, # of Results (1918 to 1968) | Search B, # of Results (1969 to 2019) |
| Indian | 960 | 1263 |
| Indigenous* | 14 | 386 |
| Aboriginal | 32 | 506 |
| First Nations | 31 | 635 |
| Native | 729 | 1388 |
I took a look at these numbers, and decided to drill down into “Indigenous”. I tried not to interpret or make any judgments at this point — the figures simply showed that (1) there were barely any hits pre-1918 and (2) because 386 divided by 14 is almost 28, which means that the word was used almost 28 times more after 1968!
THE SELECTION
Moving on, the next step was to actually look through some of these publications.
Conscious of time, I decided to pick 2 items from Search A and 2 items from Search B for a total of 4. I sorted the search results by date, going from oldest to newest. I used the first result as Item 1, and the last result as Item 2 before repeating this pattern in Search B. This will make more sense when you look at the table below:
| Search A, 1918 – 1968 | Item 1: November 3 1921 Item 2: October 3 1967 |
| Search B, 1969 – 2019 | Item 3: January 31 1969 Item 4: December 4 2018 |
It was not until I put this all on paper that a flaw in the design immediately became apparent…
Item 2 and Item 3 came too close together, relatively — what I should have done was start from 1921 (the first time “Indigenous” appears in The Ubyssey) and look at articles in 25-year increments (1946, 1971, 1996, and 2021) for a more even snapshot across the 100 years.
THE FINDINGS
Item 1 featured an article titled “The Little Theatre”, which revolved around the drama scene (stage plays) in North America at the time. It concluded with an observation that:
“Vancouver people often lament their isolation from the good plays and other things seemingly indigenous to the “East”.
In Item 2, “indigenous” comes up in a piece defending The Georgia Straight. Without going into too much detail, my understanding is that the Straight was founded in 1967 (by a UBC student!) as an anti-establishment newspaper. It was quickly cracked down on, which led this Ubyssey writer to comment on how:
“The few oasis of true indigenous artistic attempts starve slowly to death — the Bunkhouse, the Bistro, the Bau-Xi Gallery. Art has nowhere to go but underground”
Item 3 brings us to a review of poetry:
”Dorothy Livesay’s book contain six poems. Four of them, as the title suggests, are long, narrative poems — documentaries. They were written in the ‘30’s and 40s to record major social phenomena occurring in our nation. They compose part of an indigenous Canadian form dating from Isabella Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie”
In Item 4, the word “Indigenous” shows up at least 10 times. I should note that it is capitalized now as well. Repeated mentions of the newly formed “Indigenous Engagement Committee” at the time certainly inflated some of these results, but there was also an article about chocolate:
”If we think about some of the key tree species, scientists are discovering what many Indigenous societies and cultures have long known”
THOUGHTS
It would be easy to jump to conclusions or point out low-hanging fruit at this juncture — or at least I did when I first started thinking about my findings…
My immediate reaction, for example, was finding irony in Items 1 and 2. I questioned how these writers could essentially complain about locals being unable to (1) access art / culture or (2) express themselves when Indigenous and minority groups still struggle to do so today.
Even Item 3 had me a little uncomfortable — can a form of poetry and writing which emerged only in the 30s and 40s really be considered “indigenous” to Canada?
Finding truth requires looking past skepticism and doubt — both of which are driven by hindsight, along with a tendency to immediately judge past actions by today’s expectations. “Indigenous” would not be the best word to use in those articles now, but that is due in part to years of ongoing reconciliation and recognition of history — with hopefully many more to come.
Rationally, I would probably need to read all of Dorothy Livesay’s work before I should even feel comfortable commenting on it. Even then, I would just be making interpretations of her writing — a one-sided affair where she is not around to provide context, explanation, or debate.
So I found myself turning more towards the present and future…
For example, I enjoyed learning more about the progress being made at UBC by the Indigenous Engagement Committee and its continued efforts to normalize and promote visibility of Indigenous groups — student residences named after Indigenous communities, physical markers and posts on campus, routine land acknowledgements, growing representation within the student and faculty bodies.
I also found out — barring any changes to plans — that July 2022 will feature the inaugural cohort of students for UBC’s Master of Education in Indigenous Education. This, apparently, will be the first program of its type in the province…
ON EDTECH
While I pointed out some positives above just now, I should stress that these reflect more relief than excitement. The work is nowhere near done, but at least there is hope that we can make things better through education — a field that I work in.
I went to UBC for 5 years as an undergrad. Not once did I ever read an issue of The Ubyssey — if I ever had a copy, it was probably used as a placemat or something. Fast forward a half decade and now, I can look at and search through any edition of this student newspaper whenever I want.
During this task, I even went down a rabbit hole of sorts — stumbling on articles about former UBC president Dr. Arvind Gupta and his sudden departure in 2015, when I was a student at the school!
I was reminded of how little I knew or cared about these things back then. Now that I am older and back at UBC as a staffer — not in a presidential role, of course — I have more of an interest and maybe even window into workplace politics and bureaucracy.
Thanks to digitization and the thing known as the internet, I was able to take learning into my own hands for this assignment. I feel like this sort of open and self-directed experience is something that all instructional designers should aim to facilitate in their work — even if it means that students may run off course and bend guidelines to accommodate their learning, which is probably what I did here…