 So, good morning. Thanks for joining us for the CTLT spring Institute session on walking the talk sharing our practices engaging with Indigenous initiatives. My name is Jeannie Lou and I'm the senior educational consultant within Indigenous the Indigenous initiatives team at CTLT. And my co-hosts for today's session are Amy Perot, who's the senior strategist for Indigenous initiatives. Erin Yoon, who's the educational consultant for classroom and campus climate, and Sue Hampton, the educational consultant within our TLPD, our teaching, learning and professional development team. I'm joining this session from my living room in East Vancouver on the unceded and stolen lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Musqueam Squamish and Slewa Tooth First Nations. And I would also like to begin by acknowledging with gratitude and commitment, the relationship our CTLT Indigenous initiatives team has with the Musqueam First Nation, on whose lands the UBC Point Grade campus occupies. Our work benefits so much from this relationship and the guidance of Musqueam through, for instance, the participation of Musqueam community members on our Indigenous initiatives and classroom climate faculty advisory. And I'd also like to add that in appreciation of that relationship, it's important to honor and amplify the messages that Musqueam has shared with the UBC community over time. And one of those messages is that everyone has a responsibility to learn about Musqueam and Indigenous non-Indigenous relationships and truth and reconciliation. And that this responsibility is not just for Indigenous people to hold, but it is really for any one of us, including settlers to also carry, and especially for settlers, we cannot expect Indigenous people to teach us all the time. And I really was thinking about this in relation to date to today's panel and the themes of our session and discussion today. As a second generation Chinese-Canadian and a settler on these lands myself, it's been an ongoing learning and unlearning journey for me to understand my own relationships with settler colonialism and how to integrate decolonization and reconciliation into my practices within classrooms and also as an educational developer within the university. I'm also thinking a lot this week, and I'm sure many of you are as well, about recent events that have highlighted settler colonial violence. For example, the discovery of the remains of 215 children at the Kamloops, former Kamloops Indian residential school site, and the recognition that there are so many calls for additional inquiry into other sites, which are stories that have been shared by survivors for a long time and that these events are heavy. We also have had other acts of racial violence recently, including the murder of a family in London, Ontario this last week. And I feel as though these events are heavy in our hearts. And I just want to take a moment to acknowledge them at the start of our session today. I feel as though when you start to do this work and our panelists will talk about their commitments to doing this work in their teaching and learning. It can be really distressing and overwhelming. And yet it is trying to show up every day and hold each other up, but also taking moments like this to pause and reflect and feel what has happened and the why of why we do this work. So I just quickly want to introduce what the event will look like today we have a panel of three speakers, and these are three members of what we call the indigenous initiatives learning community. And the learning community is a group of folks who are actually people who have completed what we call the indigenous initiatives design series. When we started when I started my role at CTLT, there were increasing calls to indigenous curriculum. And one of the things that we eventually began to program was a series of workshops to support instructors who were interested in integrating indigenous content in their courses, but perhaps we're not experts centering their work on that those fields. And so we created this series and then afterward what we found is that people who took the series ended up taking it sometimes more than once. And we're looking for more ways to connect with one another. And so we created this learning community, which has been really a joy to work with over time. We all did our pivot to remote work last year due to COVID. There are lots of threads that were dropped and people sort of dispersed and, you know, we're working on their own things. But over the last year, we certainly have recognized that the need for this kind of work has not decreased, but the connections have been harder to come by. And over time we sort of slowly started to come back together. And we've learned about some of the work that Ben and Catherine and Leanne have done. And when it came time to think about spring institute sessions, what we decided to do was it would be great to highlight some of that work, and perhaps weave some of these threads together again, and hopefully find some light and inspiration in the stories that we have to share about this practice of continually walking the talk. I'm going to say one more thing about the panel before I turn it to my colleague Amy who's going to introduce the panelists. We're going to go through all three panelists who are going to share some stories with us. And as we do so, we're going to ask you to hold your questions for the Q&A until the end. So what we've done is we've created a padlet, and one of my colleagues hopefully will put that link into the chat. And what you can do is if you have a question for a specific panelists or a thought to contribute that you want to reflect to the panel that you just want to remember and you don't want to get distracted while you're listening to the other panelists, feel free to just click on the plus sign in the bottom right hand corner of that padlet. And you can just type your question for all of us so that we have a little bit of a note board at the end that we can look at and we can start our questions in that place. So, without further ado, I'm going to pass it on to my colleague Amy Perot who is going to introduce a little bit more about the panel and our panelists. Awesome. Thanks, Janie. Tanshi, Boma Ten. Good morning, everybody. Hello. I'm so glad you are here. Our panel today is about walking the talk as faculty who are engaging with Indigenous initiatives and their practices and I was thinking about my words this morning and how I'd love to introduce this amazing group of folks. I would also like to add to the mix showing up is probably another phrase that I would use to describe these colleagues. This amazing panel has been showing up over the years and it's been a pleasure to get to know each and every one of them. Catherine I met when I first started at CTLT and the Indigenous initiatives team was formed, and I met Catherine as part of when she was attending the classroom climate series and that was in the early days so like 2011, and she's been showing up ever since. And that's in 2013 when the TRC West Coast event was coming to Vancouver and I'm not sure if others in the room have been at UBC that long or have memories of that, that really pivotal time in UBC's history, where we canceled classes for the day. And we began thinking about how to engage in these issues in a meaningful way. And Leanne has been showing up ever since, whether that's through our programming the design series, or it's popping into the virtual coffees this past year and sharing her knowledge with other people in that space. And then Ben attended a number of our workshops, and I recall really getting to know Ben in one of the early iterations of the Indigenous initiatives design series in 2017. And since then I've had the chance to really connect with Ben, work with him. Then you've been just so generous and sharing about your work engaging with Indigenous students and their perspectives and how their experiences are being embedded and represented in your department. And so I'm really honored just to now go into the formal bio introductions everybody but I really wanted to provide those grounding words of how we've how we've crossed paths over the years and how you've continued to show up. We asked the panel to share a bit about themselves and that also includes a song that describes their last year of teaching in Indigenous initiatives we love songs and we're always using them to pump ourselves up for workshops. And so I wanted to just throw that extra layer of an intro to you all and have the panelists share in that way. Ben Chung is a lecturer and Indigenous initiatives coordinator in the Department of Psychology. And he says only been faculty for five years. That's a huge thing. But you've been a Ben has been at UBC through both undergrad and graduate school. And when I asked Ben about the song he said as for the song I'm going to go with instincts bye bye bye. I'm not the I loved you endlessly part but definitely the I know I can't take it anymore it ain't no lie. I want to see you out that door baby bye bye bye. Good riddance to this last year so thanks Ben for sharing that part in and welcome to the panel. Lian Chen is an educational leadership faculty in the Department of Zoology and botany. And she's been here for 12 years exclamation point. Definitely exclamation point. When asked about the song she said it's a difficult question. Her first thoughts were tub thumping by Chambawamba. I get knocked down but I get up again without all the alcohol of course. And then also the song going through the motions from Buffy the vampire slayer once more with feeling. Catherine Douglas is a session a lecture at the Vancouver School of Economics and has been teaching at UBC full time since 2008. The emphasis of her teaching research and community engagement is on the roots of change in the economy with a particular focus on sustainable development. This interest in in the deeper forces determining economic outcomes inspires her interest in the implications of colonial legacies, and the need to bring more inclusive and representative lens to the topics in her economics courses and we've definitely have those conversations over the years. Catherine's song has definitely that has definitely been an inspiration for her with caring on with teaching and everything this past year as strangers by city of color. So I invite you to put pop those into your playlist as well if you have your own playlist, but without further ado I'd love to turn things over to my esteemed panel to share to share your thoughts thank you so much everyone. And before I start I do want to recognize the hosts, especially, you know, Jenny, Aaron, Amy, and Sue, because I can't imagine having done any of this work without them and they've been very generous and gracious with their time and their energy, and their and their labor as well to help guide me and I'm sure everyone else on the panel through everything that we've that we've been learning over the last bunch of years. I saw I'll start off with the next slide to talk about just my my position in my my context within my department. I joined the department in summer of 2016. And the following year I adopted the, the indigenous initiatives coordinator service role in my department. And at that time it was, it was, it was a weird time for me because I was in one service position in the beginning. And then I felt like I wanted something a little. I wanted to do something something different. And, you know, when I first became a faculty member, I had asked my then supervisor because I did my graduate school in the same department. And I asked my, my then supervisor who was cool. And I was going to be teaching the same course to culture psychology of him and I said, you know, what kind of thing should I should I be looking out for as a new faculty. And he said, especially in teaching culture psychology and he said, well, you should probably, you should probably, you know, at least be a little well read in a bunch of different cultural and cultural environments and have some good understanding of different cultural ways of doing things, because the questions are going to be asked of you during during lectures and during classes and such. And in particular, I did ask him about indigenous cultures, and he said that, you know, he has had indigenous students ask him. You know, how do you how can you teach culture psychology in in Canada, without including indigenous cultures. And, you know, at the time, and I think over over time there's been more inclusion of that content in his classes certainly. I think at the time, it was, it was, it was more of just the idea that from the perspective of mainstream psychology, there's not a lot of mainstream work done that involves indigenous cultures outside of maybe a couple of specific individuals. And so it that that that question and that conversation with him really helped spur me on into thinking about so how do I actually do this, especially in a conscientious respectable way. How do I actually incorporate and integrate more indigenous content appropriately in my classes. And that's kind of the impetus for me seeking out the indigenous initiatives crew at CTLT. And that was when I attended my my my very first gateway workshop was when I attended this one workshop, given by Carlene Harvey, who's one of the indigenous arts advisors who gave a workshop on how to support the indigenous students in your classroom. And I actually really appreciated that I hadn't been to any other session that had that centered the the discussion and the focus on indigenous students. Obviously that would make sense for for that workshop but it was it was new to me. And it was, it was a session in which I learned a lot from someone who was starting at almost zero. I learned a lot in that session and it made me want to continue on and so I looked for more more more opportunities. And once I stepped into this role of indigenous initiatives coordinator, I started talking to different people, indigenous faculty, indigenous staff. And that's when I also learned that psychology has one of the larger cohorts of indigenous students in SS at least in the faculty of arts year to years improved relatively consistently. One of the larger groups of students. And yet it seems that as a department, we had no knowledge of this didn't seem like we recognize that that was the case, even though it seems like everyone else in the know knew that that was the case. So we highlighted sort of the disparity in terms of who is making up our, our student body and what we know about the student body I mean in the grand scheme of things. It was still a very, because of the size of the psychology student body, it was the number of indigenous students, ultimately was, you know, as a proportion very small. And I think it says something that across university across the university at the Vancouver campus that that, you know, among indigenous students, many of them choose to come and study psychology. So that's that's sort of the context around which I started doing this sort of doing this work. And over time I've been really appreciative, appreciative of all the all the connections that I've that I've made as well. And in working on these indigenous initiatives with the with the hosts with the CTLT and indigenous initiatives crew it's actually really helped me gain a sense of sort of like, not just connecting with the academic side of what I'm doing but to make sure that I also connect with the community side to really have that inform what it is that I do, which has led me to communicate with with a couple of community members that I've come to meet in various capacities, including Julian Andrews at the at the Mount Pleasant neighborhood house. So, I can talk to you a bit about one of the major projects and undertakings that that we've that we've done, or that we're still doing right now in the Department of Psychology. If you can go to the next slide please. So what's one of the things that we've been doing is we. So I created this little indigenous working group in our department and it was, it's full of students. It was funded, or the work that we're doing right now is funded by the peer grant the program for undergraduate research experience grant from a couple of years ago. And I say a couple of years ago, for reasons that I'll explain in a second. But this is, this is my, this is my team. We've had people come and go over the last couple of years because of, you know, life happen stands and a couple of people have now moved on to graduate work that which which I'm very proud of. So, in this group, we have majority indigenous students, it's one of the few phases in psychology where indigenous students can actually count themselves as being in the majority and from year to year, like I said, there's there's changing of people. But, you know, given the nature of the work that the group does, I've become very protective of the composition of the group. So the, the group is always at least half, if not more indigenous students. And we have, we have indigenous representation from various groups, including get send our dog first nations and and bond share Algonquin as well. And one thing that actually really worked out well for us in this pivot to online learning was our ability to extend our reach into UBC Okanagan as well so Alex wasn't able to give me a picture in time. But we were able to incorporate at least one, one member of the team from UBC Okanagan to participate in our work to help conduct interviews to help do analyses and to attend these are our team meetings are semi regular team meetings remotely from from from her campus. The so so so the this working group was originally created actually to to just like a discussion group amongst students who whether indigenous students or non indigenous students who are interested in exploring more about how how indigenous cultures and perspectives can be better integrated into psychology and to the psychology, psychology curriculum. And over time it's kind of evolved into doing more formal work in this way but over time we've over the last couple of years that this has been active. We've also done other work like we've done this this series of presentation for each other where we would go on our own we would figure out a topic. And then we would sort of do a mini presentation of that topic to to to each other to go to the group. And over so over the last couple of years we've done work on things like the Royal Proclamation, people have talked about the white paper, and that's been really helpful for, of course the non indigenous students but I think it was also really good discussion and some of the indigenous students actually said that they really because of the because of the research work that we're doing now we've sort of gone away from doing that and some of the indigenous students have said that you know when we move back into in person learning really want to start doing that again so that's definitely something that we're going to we're going to explore moving forward. One of the indigenous students in this group who had previously been reading not sure about their actual indigenous identity. They were just told through their mother side that they are indigenous but not through the father side, but wasn't really sure what exact identity. And then they said that you know through this group through being in this group and talking to other students it's been really helpful for them and has really inspired them to explore their indigenous ancestry and identity, more seriously as well, which which was which was nice to hear to. So, amongst this fantastic group of people, the upper left is Melissa and the, the third from the second from the right in the upper row. And the, the, the, the, the woman who's wearing the shirt strong resilient and indigenous. That is Carolyn, and both of them are now grad students at UNBC, one of them is in the counseling psych department is this is studying counseling psychology. I can't remember what the other person is what department the other person is is going to be in but they just got accepted so very, very happy and excited for for both of them. But the more formal work that the group has been doing is this project on understanding the experience of indigenous students in our department. And this really came about because of the conversations I was having with other staff and faculty indigenous staff and faculty in the department and at UBC, who all knew about what was happening with indigenous students in our department except for us. And I thought that's kind of absurd that we don't know anything. And, you know, we were, I was talking to, to one of the other faculty members, and one of the administrative members in a department. And, you know, I was saying things like, you know, we're also not getting a lot of indigenous students applying for a graduate program, either. And I'm not sure why and then, you know, they were coming up with all these hypotheses and I thought, you know, why not just ask them. So, I. So, so this team and I decided that this is what we're going to do for the next for the next. We were thinking year. And that was really, and we'll go to the next slide to really see what the timeline ended up looking like. So this is supposed to start in 2018, and it was supposed to take a year. But that was for me, thinking in my really sort of uninitiated mentality, coming from a research tradition where things happen very quickly. Because in a mainstream psychological research, what often happens is, you know, you work with a team, you come up with a design, you run the study, you collect data, you call, and then you analyze it, and then you write it up, right. And in many cases, these, these studies take maybe a year, maybe a little longer than a year. But I mean our directed studies project, for instance, may take, they take a year. And as a grad student, you know, my projects would take longer than a year but there were also these always these mini projects that would take no reading no more than a year. And then we would build on top of that to create a larger long term project. And so I was carrying the same mentality into into this into this project. And I very, very quickly realized that that's not the right mentality to have and that that kind of mentality just doesn't work in this kind of capacity in this kind of environment. And part of it was through, you know, learning within, within the environment of the indigenous initiatives that these kinds of things take time, and then a lot of it was also just organic learning as well where I, you know, I, going back onto my my tradition, my my academic tradition. I started started with the project started with coming up with a project working with the team, and creating a whole whole ethics application. And thinking about what the project would look like and Tara who was the, who was the project manager at the time Tara Lynn who was a project manager at the time before she had to, before she graduated and moved to UMBC for her graduate program. You know, I did what I had originally learned to do which was create the design, find participants, collect data, and then end of story. So that really didn't work because I learned through this process. And, you know, in hindsight, who really should have known better. So, so what we ended up needing to do was we created the design sure but we needed to establish all these relationships with all these members of the indigenous communities on campus to sort of be accepted by those members by those members. Before we could actually sort of get have the credibility to be asking indigenous students to speak with us. And, and, you know, I was very thankful during this process to have had the opportunity to talk to people like Dr. Sarah Lightfoot, and Dr. Dory Mason, and Karleen Harvey, and Maggie Moore faculty members, and indigenous students, and arts advisors. They've been really, they have been really fantastic in, you know, in answering our questions and giving us a lot of information about things to look out for. And I honestly, I felt, I felt, I felt bad part way through this process, not thinking to do this beforehand. But again, that was from a very sort of uninitiated kind of mindset of just, oh, that's how we're going to do things in psychology, this is how we will continue to do things are how I'll continue to do things in this group. So what was supposed to start in 2018 didn't happen into 2019 because of all this relationship building that I was learning that was was was important to do. And, you know, now, carrying this forward sort of become become second nature, but when doing this kind of work to to reach out to community as the first set as opposed to doing the research design as the first step. So over the over the next year and a half or so we look to do study data collection and transcription. We wanted to primarily focus on indigenous students and their experience but one thing we want to do was to to see what kind of what kinds of experience was specific in particular to indigenous students. And that was more general to psychology students at large. And so we also decided to talk to a small group of non indigenous students as well, just so so that there's that there's a basic comparison to see what different groups of students might have different experiences and might have, we might get different takeaways from different groups. So the data collection process when it actually went on into the earlier part of this year. And, and the, the, with the pivot to online learning and to doing everything remotely. And actually helped because we were able to speak with students. You know, previously we had to speak with students when they were on campus. And that's very specific period of time during particular days, but with going more remote students were happy to chat at other times as well and we're more accessible at other times as well. And so that actually made data collection a little easier. So we had, we had, we had group interviews, we had focus groups we had individual interviews as well with with people who couldn't attend the group sessions. So now we're at the stage where we are, we are actually we just finished collecting data we finished. We actually currently doing the last of the transcriptions of the conversations that we've been having with both the indigenous and the non indigenous students. So we're hoping to start doing some analyses later in the summer, and then be able to have a, have a mini report, so that we can give something back to the, to the people who gave us the grant. And to my department as well the department head has expressed interest in taking a look at what we've actually been doing the last couple of years when I originally told him this is this will take a year and then no sorry this will take a little longer. Next slide please. The ultimate goal of what we're trying to do here this project is to figure out what, like I said, what's what's going on with indigenous students in terms of like what's the experience both positive experiences and negative experiences as well. And to get a sense of how how indigenous students are doing in our department and the from from what we've seen so far, the themes that we've been seeing are things like they definitely feel a lack of connection and community. I'm just asking who, who are the other indigenous students and they'll hear about, you know, other indigenous students in psychology, but they don't know who they are. And so they don't really know who to reach out to. And sometimes they will talk about a lack of portrayal of indigenous people, you know, and sometimes they'll though though they'll mention in some classes it doesn't really matter. So, you know, things like, we're talking, talking behavioral neuroscience they, they don't mind so much that they don't talk about indigenous people, but in other classes like in developmental psych or in social psych or something like that. It's a little strange to, to not have any of those kinds of discussions either. And, you know, there's also this this this inappropriate portrayals where there's tends to be this this deficit centered discussion of you know why are they always talking about trauma there's more than that right what about the revitalization efforts and such. But they've also expressed appreciation for the fact that the faculty, the faculty members seem generally willing to engage with indigeneity. Be happy to talk to indigenous students about their identities when appropriate. And they've had very good experiences with with peers regarding their that their identities. I'll go to the next slide please. So the overarching goal of what we wanted to do is to create of our working group is to create a good positive environment for indigenous students within the psychology. So what we're really hoping in creating this group is to create a nice sustainable feedback mechanism and consultation mechanism with indigenous students moving forward where we're going to try to create right up right up this report so we'll try to figure out what kinds of what kinds of solutions can we have to enhance equity in our department as it pertains to indigenous students and then we'll go back to the students and ask you know how would you how do you feel about these kinds of things. You know how what would you do in this situation and try to implement some of these practices and changes within the department so that we can make this a more welcoming capacity for indigenous students. So that basically sums up the one of the bigger projects that we've been working on we have a few other projects that we are sort of imagining on our imaginary progress board of things that we want to do in the future but this is the primary one that I wanted to to show all of you. So I think I'm out as a function of my time in the, in this indigenous initiatives group. Thank you, and I'll pass it on to the next, the next panelist. Thanks very much. Well, that was very informative actually been I think we should meet afterward because I think this is something that many departments and schools are trying to find a pathway through in terms of integrating indigenous initiatives and in particular thinking about students and so I know the Vancouver School of Economics is doing the same thing. And so it'd be really good to talk about that. So what I'm, I'd like to speak to today is is, I mean that is a gap that Ben was speaking about but also some of the other gaps that I've come to recognize through my teaching over the years and particular as it relates to indigenous initiatives and and why the acknowledgement of those gaps has really spurred me forward in continuing to carry on with this work over the period of the pandemic and locked through lockdown and easing up and then and locking down partially and so on moving forward. So, I guess we can just go to the next slide but just thinking about gap mind the gap just we might recognize some of you might recognize the logo of that to sign and I've got the, the logo on each of the slides to keep that theme of the emphasis on that presentation being the acknowledgement of gaps and gaps in a variety of ways in relation to theoretical perspectives methodological approaches, content history in, in especially the focus here is in regard to indigenous perspectives. And so, just my story is to really talk about the pathway that I've been following in regard to thinking about indigenous initiatives and and how that came to be as I was asked to teach Canadian economic history. I came back in 2000 and then I went away and working on my PhD and came back in 2004 and so I actually was asked to teach the wealth and poverty of nations but I really came to then focus on thinking about those longer term forces of change which was my specialty economic history. And I understood in in in understanding why we have such disparities in terms of development outcomes and and so that's the pathway that led me to economic history so in that course on the wealth and poverty of nations it's really a global economic history course. And then my focus became along with that I teach quite a variety of different courses, and all of them I integrate at least some economic history perspective as part of that focus of thinking about roots. And so in 2008. I once again taught the Canadian Economic History course and have pretty much the faculty member, Professor Don Patterson who's retired professor. I took over from him and adopted the course and it was a pretty standard Canadian Economic History course. And so I followed the literature and there was a textbook that he had co authored with his, his colleague Bill Maher. But then what I've come to see over the years, in particular toward the end of the 2000s when we had the financial crisis and then there was a sub movements. 2008 2009 2010 leading up to the Olympics which was, I don't know more and then the context of the, the involvement in the four host nations in hosting the Olympics here in Vancouver so this period of time I was really beginning beginning to question the the emphasis of what I was teaching in my Canadian economic history class, observing this gap of, of, here's the story of really the colonizers, the settlers, economic history of Canada, and maybe some acknowledgement of the fact that there were indigenous people here previously, but not much representation indigenous voices and histories in that in the various textbooks and literature except for their involvement in the fur trade and, and it's not to say it was entirely absent but but really the overarching images of Canada's is kind of empty land. And it's been acknowledged in the literature of this, this view. During that. That period is changing now. So once I began to realize this really because of what's going out there going on out there in in the world and recognition of the absence of acknowledging colonial legacies. And then I began to determine that I really needed to open up that that box and and begin to, as I've put here on this slide integrate what seemed to be a hidden history, and so began to do that so. I know I'm going process so how did I do that that's what the story I'm going to be telling. So if maybe Chris you could you could change to the next slide. And part of the dance with this was to figure out well how can I buy a truth true to our disciplines focus and the more I'm very interested in ways of knowing and different perspectives and deeper forces as I've said and so first stop is to go like well what's the definition of economics and you can economists or the Greeks was to was about managing the home or the house or the place or whatever. It is that one could be determining is the focal point and could even think of that as the management of our environment or our planet. We have micro and macro economics. And so what has happened though is that this the discipline has developed and ways that has been influenced by different priorities in different periods and by different interests. And so what we've begin, you know, we can observe as these gaps in in relation to what's relevant. What's meaningful. What what is what what really should we be looking at in economics. In terms of subject matter theoretical frameworks as I was saying methods and practice and so if we look at the these questions today, they're even at the last week's Canadian Economic Association meetings I attended a session. Which was sponsored by the indigenous economic study group which is run by out of University of Victoria fantastic initiative that has run through the pandemic and kept that kind of connection going. Where there was a tension around well what defines economics who should we be listening to, should we some may think that nobody we should be listening to we should just be looking at the data. So, you know, this is the big question does our methodology defined the kinds of questions we look at others say no we should be listening and and and determining are we actually asking the right questions so. This is been part of this journey over this past decade but also in particular what has motivated me to keep moving forward so we can go to the next slide. This ties into the debates about well our discipline and the emphasis of our discipline here we have this Scottish white philosopher Adam Smith, who is seen to be the founder of our discipline. And so he wrote the wealth of nations where the focus is on competition self interest markets, what are the kinds of forces the rule of law in types of institutions that are important for ensuring that the markets are are unencumbered by government interests and so on. And so he, our discipline has tended to be focused on that but there's also the Adam Smith of his theory of moral sentiments in which he's proposing that human beings are influenced by our capacity to empathize with others, and to to consider those factors in in our decision and views of the world and so, but there's not really been so much of a clear reconciliation, you could say in regard to that but at the same time i'm going to i'm pointing you to these various factors that are influencing my journey over this past time period and and spurred me onward. And, and, and it's that question so i'm going to hopefully tie together these, you know, make some connections that help to bridge the gaps. So, as i'm you know for thinking about this period we've taken over this Canadian economic history class also the wealth of nations a global economic history course in this time period, the, you know, 2010 2011 12. I'm attending sessions here at the Center for teaching learning technology and classroom climate i'm starting to recognize there are some gaps in what i'm talking about and learning about you know teaching about and even learning about in my courses and. And so this is this recognition coming to the four and and how to then the question becomes how best to mend that gap so i'm minding the gap, as you know maybe some of you have been to the UK or London underground and there's the often voiced. Warning to mind the gap, and so this is what has come to my mind i'm trying to mind the gap, and even to see how that gap may be mended. And so next, next slide, please. There are various ways. Well, first of all, I'd like to point to what has motivated me to to want to do that a little bit more. And to be thinking about, of course, the importance of indigenous voices I cannot speak for indigenous people in terms of what their experiences but you know what I want to be able to do is to bring forward their voices. And so, and to listen. That is what I, you know, my first recognition was is that I needed to do a lot of listening and for the first few years I attended many of the sessions at CTLT. That's all I really did engage with people at the table. But a lot of it was about questions and and really a lot about listening and and as Ben was mentioning very thankful for the speakers that we had to many of these sessions the indigenous speakers. Who we were able to to learn from and hear from through this this the indigenous initiatives program and the development of the community of practice which I'm so great to see very happy to see that there there's so many people here today to join in the conversation. And so I've spoken about the Olympics and raising the profile and then 2013 the university in September of 2013. The campus was closed and we were very much encouraged to attend the Truth and Reconciliation Commission sessions in in in at the PNE. And so I did that I invited my students to come three showed up and that was such an impactful time for me it really was a turnaround in terms of what is motivating me is to hear that truth. And it's the truth and the reconciliation is having heard that truth to be a witness to the stories I can't even speak about some of the stories that I heard at that session that day but it is it is carried with me to this time. There are other kinds of influences field trips engaging with Musqueam First Nations community. We had a. I'm so thankful for the generosity of the Musqueam people and in sharing their history with us one or two of my classes, where we went to visit the reserve. And then also Kwantlen First Nations in Fort Langley. I've had many, many field trips out to that Hudson's Bay for trading post and gradually come to, you know, highlight the indigenous context of that fort. And where I want to just finish off, you know, time is short and so I'll maybe just this image here before Carissa moves to the next slide is just the house post, a capillano created by Brent Sparrow, looking out English Bay house sound up into the coastal areas as really a statement of this being the territory of the Musqueam people. And so it is through my collaboration with Janie Liu and other mainly Janie who brought this acknowledging place workshop that was meant to compliment Jordan Wilson's walking tour of Musqueam house posts which I had discovered in in my the previous year. So just maybe the next slide and so maybe I'll just skip forward a little bit but just to let you know that we've had this acknowledging place, the idea of this workshop is for students and myself I have also learned about the importance of positionality of place of considering where we come from. What are we bringing to any endeavor that we are engaging in, and to be considering what the absence of place and the disruption of place might mean in this context and the assertion of rights which is really what Jordan Wilson is highlighting I think that these house posts and totem poles from the North Coast perspective, but the house posts from Musqueam perspective that they're representing art forms they're actually statements of property rights of claims to the land that this land that we are very thankful to be situated on and to learn and study is their traditional ancestral and unceded land. And so that was a huge wake up call for me and something that I've continued to consider and to integrate as I've moved forward so I'll just stop there because I know we're short of time. All right. Thank you Catherine and then. So hi everyone. I'm Leanne I am. Yes. I'm here to talk about my personal experiences, my personal journey on indigenizing my content. So, so yeah, I joined UBC back in 2009 I was very happy to get the educational leadership faculty position in zoology and botany. Indigenizing my content was not really on my radar until a few years later in 2013 again with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, coming to Vancouver to record testimony of the Indian residential school survivors. So, UBC had suspended classes on September 18 to allow students to allow staff and students to attend events. And we were being asked to speak about Indian residential schools, and to add indigenous content to our classes. So now I teach cell and molecular biology classes. And my question was, well, what relevance does this have to the TRC and indigenous residential schools. And yet, I knew that I had to make find some way to make it relevant because that's what my students were going to be asking. They were going to be asking, why do we have this day off? Why are our classes suspended? And I wanted them to be able to treat this day with respect and pay proper attention to the exercises that they were being given. So this led me to consult with Amy Perot, who was an Aboriginal specialist at CTLT at the time. And next thing I knew, I found myself leading a discussion within the Faculty of Science with my colleagues, Shona Ellis and Pam Callis to brainstorm and share ideas of this very question. How do we address this day? How do we indigenize our content? And so ultimately, what I did was I linked Indian residential schools and the TRC to two items. The impact of traumatic stress and students should consider, you know, maybe the people around you could be struggling. And by the way, there are some resources to help you. And then the other issue is, well, we come to university with a lot of hidden assumptions. We also come to university to learn more about critical thinking. So we should use those critical thinking skills to evaluate the evidence to examine one's assumptions and to evaluate the evidence we have for those assumptions, and then to revise our world view for it. So we're all about the credible evidence here. So that's how I kind of used this. Next slide. So around the same time, I came across the Coast Salish wool dog in Ravelry of all places. So in case you don't know, Ravelry is basically social media for knitters. So I have dogs. I have spun and knit a sweater from one of my dogs. So I was really, so I was really interested in learning about this. So the first nations in this area used to breed and keep these white woolly dogs for their fiber, and they would incorporate this fiber in the beautiful woven blankets. And so I discovered there's genetic and protein evidence to support the witness accounts of these wool dogs. And so this was how I could bring some of the indigenous content into my cell biology class. And it was another way to, it was also a way to make the connection to indigenous cultures. And in subsequent years, I've also used this example to encourage students to say, visit the Museum of Anthropology and see an example of one of these beautiful woven blankets, and to learn more about First Nations culture in this area. Next. So this is how I got started. Now one thing about participating in these TRC events is that I knew that I, it could not be a token effort. It could not be a one off I had to keep at it. But at the same time, I was struggling to find ideas so it kind of sat incubating in the back of my mind. And I basically tried to attend any sort of useful seminar or workshop, mainly at the CTLC to try to develop ideas to see if ideas would spark. Amy Perot also kept touch with me in that time as she touched base that, you know, again kept that idea it's like, okay, I have to keep on going at this I have to I have responsibility here. And it was, so things finally kind of came together with the design series that Amy Perot talked about the exploring indigenous perspectives in teaching practice and learning design. So this was a three day workshop over three months. And it culminated in the development of a lecture outline that, you know, that we would get then get feedback on. At the same time, I had also been taking the try cancel policy ethics certificate for a separate project of mine. And they did have an example. They did have a case study involving indigenous research subjects so that was another idea that kind of helped develop the next lesson. So next. This led to elect a research ethics lecture that I did in my molecular biology lab course. So to do this lesson, I consulted heavily with Jamie Lou also of CTLC indigenous initiatives. And one thing about teaching and science. We're not really used to teaching the heavier controversial topics. I wanted to consult with her about how to cover potentially traumatic case studies. And I also it was also important not to like as Ben said, we don't want to as well as Ben students had said to him. We don't want to define indigenous peoples by their traumas either so there had to be examples like more hopeful examples as well so this lecture ended up highlighting three case studies so the two of them that were indigenous were the nutritional studies in residential school children that happened in the 1940s, and a UBC example out of medical genetics health health, well they were supposed to be health studies carried out on the new channel in the 1980s, and the researcher in question ended up using that data for migration studies instead. So I also included Henrietta Lax and HeLa cells, Henrietta Lax being African Americans so basically featuring marginalized groups in general. But moving. I also wanted to highlight moving forward so there's the statement of apology that Santa ono gave about like basically that we have to acknowledge our sins, as well as our achievements right it can't just all just be about national pride. We also have to have this national light nation light atonement. And I also talked about more positive research partnerships moving forward. So Laura Arbor also of UBC medical genetics have had has had this research partnership with the get send. So not just looking at the long QT syndrome, but working with the communities to disseminate the information and to help the community live with the diagnosis. And there's also this concept of DNA on loan that the communities retain ownership of their own genetic data and they get to decide what is done with it. So this was a lecture this lecture also helped me stress the importance of protecting marginalized groups, and also the importance of diversity and representation among those who do the research that determine the questions that get asked that determine how this research gets Yes, so, so this kind of so I was on a kind of on a roll at this point so I kept on finding more and more resources. So about this time I also found Kim tall bears book on Native American DNA. So Tim, Kim tall bear is indigenous. She's currently at the University of Alberta. And I also found a laundry Nelson's book the social life of DNA she's African American and the two books together. They make a nice counterpoint to each other. So the one talks about the conflation of DNA genetic testing with blood purity. And this idea of, you know, appropriation of identity, whereas the other also points out well hey DNA can be used for reparations and to reclaim identity. So these are, I mean, these two books alone could be an arts and science course on about DNA and identity around the same time. So this this allowed me to ask to ask questions of my my molecular genetics course. So who gets to ask these research questions. So the human genome has been completely sequenced. Well, who's the representative in that sequence, which groups got to be the default, which is the reference population. How does this lead to disparities in genome based medicine. Right. At the same time I found that there were projects to address some of those disparities. So there's h3 Africa, there's genome Asia, and closer to home we have the silent genomes project to help diversify the reference populations. So the silence genomes project. This is a project led by. It's led by Laura Arbor and wife Wasserman of medical genetics, genetics, as well as Nadine Karen, who is the First Nations Health Authority chair in cancer and wellness here at UBC. And so what they're doing is they're seeking to develop genome database based on the indigenous peoples of Canada. So this is another example of developing research relationships with indigenous communities and like Ben has said earlier. They talk about first of all they have to build the relationships with all the different communities. They're working out how this genetic data is going to be controlled and access so again this concept of DNA on loan. They're offering education and building research capacity within these communities by offering internships. So this is all good this is this is these are all good examples that I was able to include in my core in my course. Oh, so next. So yeah, so I can look back after this time, and it feels like I've come a long way but at the same time I'm still learning. For example, I've been doing land acknowledgments in my courses for a few years now, but it wasn't until last year that this whole idea of physician in place really clicked for me. So I've been doing, I've done this exercise before where you ask, okay, well, where do you come from, where do your parents come from where do your grandparents come from, and that was always kind of a fun exercise. But it wasn't until last year that was like, oh, we asked that because this is a way to consider where we're coming from. And where we come from determines our worldview and our values and that in turn determines what research questions we ask what research we conduct what what what importance we place on it how we interpret that data it's like. Oh, the other thing was the silent genomes project so I taught that for the first time just before the pandemic and it's like oh hey, you know, look how good we're doing. We're addressing some of these disparities in genomic research, but then the pandemic hit, and it's like, oh, we've missed something. Genomics does not replace the like basically there were more acute health needs that became much more apparent with the pandemic, like access to simply access to water to nutritious foods to healthcare are much more important determinants of overall health. So genomics, we still need to have appropriate representation, if you're going to do genomic research, but we can't lose sight of the bigger picture of health, either. So that was something else. The next time I taught this, I made sure to include that in the lecture. Continuing the journey. I'm still trying to keep track of all the different resources. I, there are so many resources that I'm trying to read find the time to read. So there's this concept of to I'd seeing. Basically, it's a way to try to combine indigenous and Western approaches to knowledge. There's there are. There's a lot of writing about decolonizing science. It's so apparent that, you know, from various conversations here and there for my colleagues that they've been up to stuff as well. So, and I, we're just not aware of what each other is doing. So this summer, we're going to have a discussion during our biology teaching retreat to share what we've been doing to learn to learn what everyone's been doing and to, you know, continue this discussion and perhaps spark new ideas and new resources. And I'm also continuing in this indigenous initiatives community of practice for the same I for the same reason to share ideas and and to hopefully spark new ones within the broader UBC community. And yeah, that's pretty much where I am currently in the journey. Looking, looking forward. Thank you. Thank you so much, Leanne and Catherine, and then for all of your stories and contributions on this panel.