 Good morning My name is Sarah Jane Finley and I'm the associate vice president for equity and inclusion Welcome to this keynote talk today, which I think we're all very excited about I'd like to acknowledge that we are on the traditional ancestral and unseated territory of the hunk of medium speaking Musqueam people. I want to add a bit of context to that as well About how important the work of indigenous scholars both here in Canada, but also internationally Has been for the equity and inclusion office in challenging the way we think about inclusion As not letting us take a nice soft approach to inclusion But having us question how we do that work on this campus particularly on this campus but with our community more generally And it really is the work of these scholars that has I think brought our thinking forward in a much more critical kind of way And I want to acknowledge that so thank you Off to me. Okay My name is Christina Hendricks. I'm the academic director of the center for teaching learning and technology here at uvc and I wanted to say that Thank you to the provost office for sponsoring celebrate learning week and this event And celebrate learning week started about 11 years ago in 2008 It's a week where the campus comes together to Present events from the center for teaching learning and technology but also around the campus So units across the campus are invited to include their events on teaching and learning and celebrate learning week and each year We also have a day like today where we will have a keynote speaker a poster session And also another event later, which I'll tell you about in a moment Yeah, we have 21 events this year for celebrate learning week. So this is what just one of those many events Back to you for a moment. Yes So very fittingly from my perspective The theme for celebrate learning week this year has been inclusion And as many of you will know recently in ubc's new strategic plan shaping the next century Inclusion has been called out as a priority along with innovation and collaboration UBC does have a significant history in working in the area of equity and diversity And I think We are now moving to Thinking more about inclusion As well as equity and diversity And this kind of requires us to go beyond thinking about equity and diversity as something nice to do or something that perhaps We're mandated to do to something that takes hard work and individual and institutional responsibility And I and I think when we think about inclusion and the work that we're doing here in whether it's teaching research or service We want to be keeping in mind That the people who should be at the center of our work when we're doing that are those people who have been the most marginalized or excluded in our community Those who have been historically and persistently systemically marginalized And so I would like to offer you a bit of a challenge as you think about your work and the and What you do in terms of teaching and research and service To be keeping Those people at the center of the work that you're doing to be considering inclusion Not as the friendly soft nice stuff that we all like to do But rather as the hard work that we do to have to create a much more inclusive inclusive community Thank you And I will just before we introduce our speaker I just wanted to say a little bit more about what's happening the rest of today So we invite you to participate in in multiple events today. We have a keynote speaker We also after the keynote from 11 30 to 130 you may have seen them setting up Teaching and learning enhancement fund showcase. So these are posters from the teaching and learning enhancement fund grant program So the projects that have been funded many of them have provided posters. There will be food So enjoy some food and check out some posters Then later today at 130 in this room. We have a faculty panel on inclusive teaching and learning We had a student panel on inclusive teaching and learning yesterday Where the students were talking about how they have experienced inclusion or Not so well in the classroom, which was really productive We're going to be bringing some of those thoughts into the faculty panel today The faculty panel brings across faculty from many different disciplines and teaching contexts talking about How they are working towards inclusion particularly again as as sarah was mentioning People have been persistently consistently and systemically marginalized Sarah jane, I apologize Also at the faculty panel will be introducing a new set a new program of equity and inclusion scholars Which is operated through the equity inclusion office So a group of people who are doing projects and coming together as a cohort around equity and inclusion in teaching Kevin will be joining our panel as well this afternoon the faculty panel The keynote will be followed by question and answer if you would like to ask a question via twitter We have a hashtag clw 2019 Or you can also raise your hands and ask a question We will have mics going around and just so you know this Session is being live streamed to the ubco and recorded, but it is only The camera is only facing the front so That means us that means us So I have to say it is my extreme pleasure and privilege to be able to introduce to you today's keynote speaker Kevin lemuru is a faculty member at the university of winnipeg and a well-known public speaker He has served as associate vice president for the university of winnipeg education lead for the national center for truth and reconciliation And as a scholar in residence for several school divisions Kevin is an award-winning scholar with an impressive publication and research grant record and has consulted for governments organizations and institutions across canada His most recent book contribution the insoling our schools with dr. Jennifer katz is being used by educators across canada Working to create inclusive spaces for all students He has been seen on tv in documentaries in print and in the media more than anything Kevin is committed to reconciliation and contributing to an even better canada for all children to grow up in Please join me in welcoming him to the stage So there's something very strange happening here that we should acknowledge how somebody from a lowly Regional mid-sized university ends up speaking to such a lofty group of folks from the impressive UBC U-15 university is is beyond me. This is very strange So if you're wondering what I could possibly say to such a magnificent group as this I'm wondering the same thing myself. So we're we're kind of all in this together I have no idea what to say to you. So we may end up just talking about how much better the winnipeg jets are than the Canucks for the next Hours so Oh, don't don't groan at me. Don't groan at me You didn't even make it to the playoffs and at least winnipeg doesn't burn our city down when we got knocked out of the playoff. So we've We've at least got that going for us. You're probably wondering Where does somebody from winnipeg get off making fun of vancouver? I'm enjoying this very much. I have to tell you this is Is just fine by me. I was uh, I was talking to somebody before I came in this morning They're asking if I get nervous, you know speaking to such an impressive and I'm not being facetious when I say that I'm so impressed by the group of people that I know are gathered here Do I get nervous speaking to a new group of people and I can tell you honestly that I don't and I'm not I don't get nervous public speaking. I I I love what I do. I'm one of those people that ended up doing in life Exactly what I want to be doing And I know that I'm surrounded by good people and that makes it easier But part of the reason why I'm not nervous is because I know within five minutes Most of you aren't going to be listening anyway, so it takes the pressure off me in terms Okay, hold on. So I got some groans there. Let me sort of back this up with some research Let's get into my first study here as soon as I stood up. You knew I was a nerd I I own that in my in my old age. I've accepted who and what I am and being a nerd I like studies So I'll share with you a study that was done way back in the 1970s You'd never get this through an ethics board today, but for some reason this was acceptable in 1970s looking at what Audiences are actually thinking about when they should be listening to their speaker So let me set it up for you imagine a big lecture theater 300 students crammed in nerdy little professor upfront blathering away Can you understand what I'm saying? That's that's probably more of a ubc thing than a u of w thing But you know what I'm talking about if I say that So some researcher comes to the lecture hall and at the door to the lecture hall fires a starter pistol And you know what that sounds like it sounds like a gun It would scare the heck out of you if you weren't expecting it So everyone drops their pencils or whatever you use to take notes in the 70s rock and chisel Whatever it was to take notes back in the 70s Researcher comes in and comes to the front of room and says i'm sorry for so rudely interrupting your presentation But if you wouldn't mind writing down exactly what you were thinking about at the moment of interruption We're doing a bit of a survey So let me turn this over to you. This is about teaching and learning. Let's think about this for a second What do you think your students are thinking about? When they should be listening to a lecture Lunch okay, so we know where some people's mind is at already lunch absolutely I'll save you the suspense. So here's the data that came out of this crazy research study at any point in time We've got about 55 percent So at any moment we've got about just over half of the audience Remember these are people that are paying to be there that are actively engaged with the lecture or the presentation We're batting just over 500 at any point in time. So what about the other 45 percent? Well, some we're thinking about food some we're thinking about their to-do list Some we're thinking about Memories reliving memories some were playing out fantasies for me. That would be picturing myself as a Jedi Knight obviously, you know fantasies You'll appreciate this being good humor and from Vancouver a full 10 percent A full 10 percent admitted that they were actively involved with romantic fantasies when they were interrupted Oh, he got a sense of who they were in the room right away So I know no matter how badly I do today At least a handful you'd be smiling anyways and I can live with that truth be told so So I'm not nervous. I I feel totally at home here If you'll forgive me if you'll humor me for a moment, I'm going to start by uh by offering this Uh My name is Kevin Lamero. My spirit name is uh teacher wolf or leader wolf which places me at the eastern door into the fire I'm of the eagle clan and it's a pleasure to be here with all of you good people And I want to acknowledge and express gratitude to all of my relations I'm going to be talking about that idea of all of my relationships moving forward and how profoundly that Uh affects my teaching and learning. Uh, it's a really really beautiful day It's an honor to be here in unceded territory with all of the complexities and all of the Responsibilities that come with that. I intend to conduct myself with respect while on the space I come from Winnipeg and coming from Winnipeg the change of season. You'll understand This is quite dramatic and we're we're slowly moving into spring. I'm told that it was raining in Winnipeg So oddly it's uh rainier in Winnipeg than it is in Vancouver figure that one out But being that we're moving into spring. It's time for me to sort of dust off the The mountain bike and and all of my outdoor equipment and start thinking about getting this rusty old man body outside And getting active again. I like riding a bike in the summertime in Winnipeg I'm not very good at it, but I like to ride it And so my family knows that whenever I start to go out to ride my mountain bike in the spring time It's it's it's also seasoned for me to start coming home with cuts and scrapes and bruises and knocks on the Nog and all the things that come with being uncoordinated but enjoying to be outside In fact, my daughter who's six years old has gotten used to this and she's already She looks just like her mother when she says this and it drives me nuts It drives me crazy when she says that it's this mixture of like pity and frustration when I come in all battered and bruised And she's like, oh daddy Oh daddy So I'll come in and being in in Winnipeg and spending as much time falling off my bike as riding on my bike I have this experience where every year I end up inevitably getting poison ivy It's just part of that happens when you're mountain biking in Winnipeg And so when I come home and I've got my cuts and bruises and my poison ivy for whatever part of me hit the ground that day My daughter will say oh daddy With that mixture of frustration and pity and then she'll say did you put jewel weed On before you came home Now where this comes from is actually my daughter and I spend a lot of time outside I'm trying to raise my daughter with values That were actually taken from my family because of colonization. I'm adopted. Lamarue was a Unadopted last name for me. I wasn't born in Lamarue So I you know this beautiful lovely on france say french canadian may tea name was something that was given to me when I was nine years old But being raised away from my ojibwe family my father's family Oh, there's a lot of teachings that i'm trying to return to that i'm trying to build into my daughter's life So that they're as normal and automatic for her as anything else And one of them is spending as much time outside with medea ki kind-hearted mother earth as we possibly can And we were outside one day and and she was by a body of water We have beautiful lakes in manitoba. We were on our knees looking into the water and she found a little frog Ogomaki frog in ojibwe and I was telling her about ogomaki because I know that when we're learning language It's one thing to transfer a word to somebody else but to put it in cultural context is so important And so I said I want to tell you a story about ogomaki If you watch ogomaki and you watch this little frog hopping in the canadian Wilderness, there's all kinds of predators around that want to eat ogomaki And so what'll happen is ogomaki will hop away and she'll actually go into a patch of poison ivy And if you watch her she'll jump into that poison ivy and start jumping around and do a crazy dance And my daughter loved that because she likes when she sees animals doing crazy funny things And she'll say but doesn't that make the ogomaki itchy like it does for us and I say absolutely But if you watch what happens if that snake is slithering around trying to get her that snake knows that that poison ivy is dangerous as well And the snake wants no part of that And so for the period of time that ogomaki is in the poison ivy. She's okay And so what happens is eventually that snake will give up and go and search for easier prey that isn't as dangerous Is going into the poison ivy to get that little froggy And then what happens is that ogomaki will hop away as soon as she knows that it's safe And she'll go and find the nearest patch of jewelweed which grows wild across the prairies And roll her little body in that because jewelweed is a natural antidote to the poisons of poison ivy And so she Sacrifices short-term pain and discomfort for the ability to stay alive and to protect herself moving forward And so when I come in with my cuts and bruises and my Scrapes and my my knocks on the noggin and I've got poison ivy all over my body My daughter knows to ask did you put Jewelweed on your body before you came home so that the effects were lessened Now I get invited oftentimes to speak for many many different people people that are in post-secondary people that are in Public education and we start to have this question. How do we begin to incorporate? Indigenous knowledge into business as usual We know that we've inherited these systems and we know that we're trying to make this move towards being more inclusive to a point of view But there's something very very curious that happens when we start to think about this idea of geek hand dissuant or knowledge and indigenous knowledge If I'm invited into a space where I'm asked to speak about Geek hand dissuant indigenous knowledge If I provide for you toxological reports about the effects of jewelweed and I'm able to provide you with some peer reviewed Random controlled trial studies about the efficacy of jewelweed and treating poison ivy. We've got no problem But if I write a paper and in my citations I cite a frog Are we prepared to accommodate this epistemology that places The responsibility for teaching us how to survive and thrive On the surface of midaaki to kind-hearted mother earth Are we prepared to engage with an epistemology a worldview that assumes that as human beings born into the space Into the space of our kind mother and we look at her as mother as our own mother To be able to recognize that we believe that there are teachings in the world around us from the living world that allow us to thrive in this context It's a difficult conversation And so this idea of geek hand dissuant is something that I want to explore a little bit better But let me let me set this aside for a couple of minutes. I'm going to talk about three things I'm going to talk about knowledge. I'm going to talk about healing and I'm going to talk about Belonging or community as we move forward. So let me talk about this idea of healing for a second this idea of nujimo iwan nujimo iwan is an egyptian word that speaks to healing And I think a big part of what we're trying to do in post-secondary when we're thinking about reconciliation is create spaces of healing Now that may seem very very strange and a little bit intangible But I'm going to try to make this realistic And I'm going to try to make this practical for us And I'm going to try to explain why I've committed my entire career to this idea That universities post-secondaries can be places of healing Why I believe that absolutely I'm going to try to to share this with you and sort of give that some context I'm going to tell you a story. I think we should choose a starting point. I'm going to share with you a story Now I like stories I come from a storytelling people and without knowing anything about you So do you and I happen to know as a fact that through pedagogical sciences that we learn best through stories Our human minds are designed to learn most appropriately through storytelling So I like to share stories. I like to hear stories. I'm hoping afterwards some of you will tell and share your stories with me And I thought I would start with a happy story. Now if we're talking about healing We're going to have to talk about things that are a little bit uncomfortable So let's start with something a little bit more Lighthearted and a little bit happier if you will so that we set a nice tone for our time together I'm going to tell you the story of one of the best days I've ever had in my life Now if I were to go to around the room and we were to have a little bit of a conversation a back and forth And you were to share with me the best days of your lives There's certain answers that I can count on that are kind of typical for an audience So maybe for many of us it's going to be what the day we got married and if that's the case congratulations mauseltov for that But I'm also of an age. I'm also of a demographic where maybe the best day of your life was a day you got divorced And if that's the case congratulations for that too fantastic Power to you Maybe it's a day your kids were born and I get that I'm the daddy pretty amazing day I'm also told it's a pretty great day when your kids finally move out If they ever move out, maybe that's the best day of your life Well, I got to enjoy one of the best days of my life very very recently was actually june 2nd 2015 I got to be in ottawa ontario for this for the release of the final report of the truth and reconciliation commission I got to be there for that Now I knew that this was going to be historically important and that's why I made my way there But I didn't understand the impact it was going to have on me at this level Do you understand what I'm saying until I was there until I was in that space Now if you were there or if you followed on tv, you know that there was a public reading in the hotel And then everyone went outside to a public square and there were just as many non-indigenous people Or as I sometimes jokingly say indigenous impaired Indigenous non-indigenous people as there were indigenous And it didn't matter It didn't matter what background people came from it didn't matter what language they spoke It didn't matter how they prayed if they prayed who they prayed to All that mattered was that canadians had come together with the spirit of leaving behind something better than what we inherited And I got to hear the booming voice of our leader our warrior justice mary sinclair when he talked about canada healing from its difficult past And I got to hear wab canoe the honorable wab canoe who spoke at that event for a full five minutes Influent in ishinaabe mohen the ajibe language And after speaking to this mixed audience in his father's language He said I offer you these words as a statement That when Duncan Campbell Scott tried to kill our languages He failed And I filled with a sense of strength and the sense of resiliency and the sense of love and beauty And I got to see people dancing in celebration at that event to the sound of the drum And I got to hear the drum and I got to hear the singing And I had this feeling come over me and I know that this isn't literally true So don't panic, but I had this feeling come over me that my grandparents Cookham and machomas Who long since passed away who were both survivors? I had this feeling that they were there with me And they got to hear these beautiful things and see these beautiful things And one of the things that we know about trauma and we are gonna have to talk about trauma if we're talking about healing in post-secondary one of the first symptoms of trauma And we actually learned this after world war two during the nuremberg trials One of the first symptoms of trauma for people who have gone through hardship, of course is silence We don't talk about that And we try not to look at it. We try not to think about it. We try to pretend that it isn't there anymore haunting us And yet on that beautiful day in that space there were people that were wearing bright red t-shirts that said survivor And there was no shame And there was no fear and there was no there was just a sense of hope and optimism It was one of the best days of my life And what we were given that day was a gift Now I want to be very clear about who I mean when I say we so that there's no misunderstandings as academics We tend to over intellectualize things sometimes. Who do I mean when I say we? It's a small room and I can look each of you in the eyes as brothers and sisters as fellow canadiens as People that share this land and I'm saying to you that we were given a gift And the gift that we were given that day by my estimation are the 94 calls to action of the truth and reconciliation commission these 94 calls to action that I've been referring to ever since as Our roadmap home This is our way back to the country that should have been our birthright This is our way back to the country that we would want to leave behind for our children and so very quickly I'm going to share with you. I'm asking all canadiens and I'm asking this of you as well To think about two questions go back and read the calls to action if you've already read them I'm assuming most of you have if you haven't please read the 94 calls to action You can find them for free. They're online if you can't find them You email me and I will make sure you get a copy before the end of today But read them and as you read through the calls to action think about two very simple questions They're simple without being simplistic. There's a lot going on here First question is this very simply Why is this being asked of us? Why is this being asked of us if you can answer that question for all 94? I think that that will serve as the truth part of truth and reconciliation Now, I don't know if this is true for you or not. So please don't take offense I don't mean this to be hurtful, but I think that for many of us This is going to expose us to stories about Canada that we didn't grow up with Now if that's true, I want you to understand that that is not your fault There is a very good reason why most of us didn't grow up hearing any of these stories about what it means to be Canadian And we're going to talk about that and we're going to talk about how we can address that at UBC So that that doesn't happen for future generations But if you do hear these stories for the first time there may be many moments where you feel very sad Or very angry And honoring those feelings processing those feelings are as much a part of truth and reconciliation as anything else This is sometimes hard for us in academia, but this isn't just a journey of the intellect It's a journey of the heart and you're entitled to those feelings and you're entitled to process those things I'll give you an example One that you'll all be aware of let's go with call to action number three reads like this We call upon all levels of government to fully implement Jordan's principle Now if we were going to ask that question for that call to action We would have to know what Jordan's principle is We would have to know who Jordan river anderson was and what happened to him when he was born in 1999 in a small community Called norway house in manitoba north side of lake winnipeg born very ill and airlifted from that community to winnipeg Where I live to the children's hospital Stabilized brought to a point where he could return home if he was to receive ongoing care in his community A service that would be provided for any one of us almost immediately But because he was first nation living in a first nations community and because our brothers and sisters and communities Are governed by the same healthcare system as you and I their federal were provincial the government couldn't decide on who was going to pay the bill for that Federal government said we're not paying for that Providence said not our responsibility norway house said we literally can't afford this and it went around and around and around For five years For five years this kid lay in a hospital bed waiting to go home ready to go home Watching other kids come in and out of that hospital who were allowed to go home because they were born a different race in Canada I'm not talking about the 1800s. This was 2000 to 2005 Until he died And he died never getting to step foot on his home territory never getting to see the family They couldn't afford to fly and come and see him never getting to pet the family dog put his feet in the lake Where his community is and after he died every level of government took a look at that with shame and said We screwed up Canada is supposed to be better than this if you can send a kid home you send them home We worry about who pays the bill afterwards and they called this commitment Jordan's principle Except then we would have to learn that our federal government has failed to live up to Jordan's principle on almost every opportunity It's had to do so. There's literally a community on the east coast You can look this up if you don't believe me that literally bankrupted itself taking the government to court to fight for something That was already promised to them And then you would have to find out that our federal government today spends more money Litigating against first nations and any other group on the face of the planet Including corporations that poison our water and destroy our land If you hear that for the first time my friends, there may be many moments where you feel very sad You feel very angry But I think it's probably healthy for us to hear Jordan's story all of us I'll frame this another way. I'll frame this from the perspective of post-secondary I come from the University of Winnipeg and you know this you've probably heard this The u of w was the first institution in all of Canada It was us in lakehead at the same time to implement what we're calling the indigenous course requirement You're going to graduate from the u of w you have to take at least one course of indigenous content Now trust me being the administrative lead of that Initiative i'm that guy i'm the guy that's responsible for that. I faced all the tough questions All of the debates that you've probably heard about that I've heard too and they've come at me from all different kinds of Angles oddly enough some of the institutions that criticize me publicly for that actually reached out to me in quiet Afterwards and asked how they could do the same thing, but i'm leaving that one aside I was the administrative lead of that initiative for two and a half years Now i'm not going to tell you that you should have a course requirement or not have a course requirement I'm just going to share with you my experience for two and a half years being the administrative lead of that Initiative I faced all the tough questions and i'm going to share with you the toughest question that I've had to face From our students 88 percent of whom are non-indigenous Who were and watch what i'm doing here forced to learn about indigenous people? All right, and i'm going to be honest and i'm going to make myself vulnerable The toughest question i've had to face is this Why Why is this the first time that i'm learning about this? Are you kidding me? I made it all the way through high school and no one said anything about this I would have lived differently. I would have behaved differently. I wouldn't have said things that I've said I feel shame. I feel hurt. I feel robbed And i've had students who have broken down weeping in my office because they feel so Violated as canadians that this truth was kept from them when they could have been participating differently okay So i'm inviting us into a journey where we may be introduced to stories that we're Maybe not prepared for and that's to be honored and that's part of the process Now the second question that i'm going to ask you to think about is this Would our community would vancouver would british columbia would canada be better or worse off if this call to action were fulfilled Would we be better off if we were to implement Now you could probably guess That I have a certain bias in this regard I'm not going to try to shove an opinion down your throat Instead i'm going to invite you to consider your own truth Because if you feel like we would be better for these efforts, then we have an opportunity If you feel that we would be a better society if no kid ever laid in a hospital bed for five years waiting to go home Denied the right to do so because of his race Taking into account all the budgetary consequences all the legislative changes Then we have an opportunity And the opportunity that we have is this Even though we didn't create the problem And listen to me no one in this room is responsible for any of this We have an opportunity and the opportunity that we have is to be part of the solution even though we didn't create the problem That's the gift that's been given to us Now I want to say something about that idea of this being a gift And and i'm going to share with you my belief and you're not going to i'm not going to waver on this belief I firmly believe That we wouldn't be talking about reconciliation in canada at all Whether it's a buzzword or not whether it's overused whether it's become to mean something meaningless Whatever we believe about it. We wouldn't even be having those conversations if it wasn't for the courage The dignity and the strength of residential school survivors If it hadn't been for residential school survivors holding the government to account for that history I don't think we would have just come to these conversations as a nation I think it would still be just as invisible today as it was 10 years ago But because of that strength Because as children these people experience the very worst that canada has been guilty of Somehow founded inside of their culture and their identity inside of themselves to grow to be the kind of people That could extend their hand in friendship back to canada We have this opportunity to talk about reconciliation and decide whether it's a buzzword or not That's thanks to them And the second thing I want to say about reconciliation is this Um reconciliation is not something that we are doing not we in this room, but we collectively ubc or canada is doing out of pity for indigenous people I don't think that that's accurate at all I think that reconciliation is a gift given to ubc in canada so that we can heal our own institution And our own society. That's what I believe. I believe this is an opportunity for canada. Maybe the last one I don't know to be able to live up to our full potential as a nation So I want to share with you one of these calls to action and sort of frame it in terms of teaching and learning I'm going to share with you 62.2 now. You may not see the immediate Relevancy of this but I want to share this with you and and I'm going to read it to you if you've ever taken toast masters You know, it's bad practice to read from your slides. I understand that I know But I also recognize that some of you are going to have eyes like me so out of as an act of mercy I'm going to read this to you We call upon the federal provincial and territorial governments in consultation and collaboration with survivors Aboriginal peoples and educators to provide the necessary funding to post-secondary institutions to educate teachers On how to integrate indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into the classroom Well, let's let's think about I know that not all of you are training teachers But I'm going to argue that this rings true for us across the institution Why is this being asked of us? I think that a big part of the reason why this is being asked of us is because very simply cultural wounds require cultural healing Education was the main weapon used against indigenous people in terms of genocide in this country Where schools were once used as weapons against children what we're trying to empower our institutions of learning Including higher learning where we can allow for healing to take place And I believe that cultural wounds require cultural healing And so what we're being asked to engage with in this call to action as academics as professionals As good human beings with kind hearts Is to begin to explore a worldview and an epistemology that maybe stretches beyond business as usual And find a way to consolidate that into our policies and practice in a way that makes sense Without having to feel like we're sacrificing any of our own integrity I don't believe that reconciliation is a zero-sum game if indigenous people win other people lose that's absurd If we're doing this the right way there shouldn't be any watering down of content There shouldn't be any loss of academic integrity. This should only be a strengthening This should only be us moving towards our full potential not just as a post-secondary but as a nation Because I think we have a beautiful opportunity to to pursue something really meaningful for our students But if we're thinking about this idea of cultural wounds require cultural cultural healing What we're talking about is this idea of healing in post-secondary and if we're going to talk about healing I want to frame this in terms of responding to trauma and trauma-informed care and practice This is something that I guarantee almost all of you will have heard about before But it's something that I have really wanted to ground my career in because I'm seeing just how deeply All of us in this room have been affected by trauma without even maybe realizing it Not necessarily our own traumas although sometimes I think it's easiest for us to relate through our vulnerabilities as human beings But certainly interfacing with people who are carrying traumas and maybe some of the traumas created by this institution and inflicted on the community that surrounds us And not just this institution, but all post-secondaries And so I want to think about this idea of trauma-informed practice at a university Now if we're going to talk about this we should get on the same page as to what we mean when we say trauma And then be a lot of misunderstandings If we were to choose a starting point for sort of a general conversation, what would be the most recognizable example of trauma In society I suppose the one that gets the most airplay in the media would be what probably PTSD is that that sounds fair So if we were to use PTSD as sort of a starting point and begin to explore what we know or understand about PTSD What do we conjure up in our minds? It's too big a room to have a full conversation, but I'm going to ask you to think about what you know about PTSD If this was a smaller workshop, I would ask you and you would probably yell things out like flashbacks But sometimes what happens with PTSD is this incredible experience where people are brought back Consciously to a space where they're entirely vulnerable once again and potentially victimized by that experience all over again All right, we might talk about depression And then I would pause and I would say what do we know about depression? And you might talk to me about oversleeping or not sleeping sleeplessness insomnia We might talk about physical pain. We might talk about uh desire to withdraw. We might talk about things like Uh An inability to focus We might talk about things like emotional outbursts in terms of PTSD We might talk about things like anxiety And then I would ask you to pause and think about if you or anyone you know has ever been involved with a panic attack Is if you have you know that that's living hell We might talk about all of the ways that PTSD begins to affect people and how those symptoms then might interact with the world around them And how society without realizing it without any ill intent Is creating circumstances where those symptoms bound up against policies and rules and practices That maybe cause further harm and cause this individual that's suffering to begin with to spiral downward Does that make sense? I want to share with you a case study. This is a story of the young man I'm going to share with you by the name of scott ostrom. This comes out of the united states It's a photo story and i'm sharing this with you because he made it public He came back from having served two tours of duty in iraq with the american military Was diagnosed with PTSD on coming home the second time And a journalist in denver actually reached out and spent some time living with young scott to document what it's like living with PTSD Now I don't want you to think that i'm exploiting his story He wants this to be shared and the only reason I share this with you Is to put a human face on what we're talking about and here's a picture of scott Now if a picture tells us thousand words, this is scott before his first tour of duty You can get a sense of a lot of things going on in this picture That's his little brother there in that picture and you get a sense of a man that feels like he's maybe Doing his duty for his country. Do you get a sense of that you get a Sense of somebody that feels proud of of what they're they're taking part in Now again, if a picture does tell a thousand words, this is a picture of what scott ostrom looks like and lives like today Now again, you get a sense I think in this picture of somebody who's withdrawn from the world the light is outside I'm in the darkness inside and I'm watching the world go by and there's loneliness An isolation This is a photo of scott in the middle of a panic attack and again if you've ever lived through that experience you have my empathy It's hell and you can almost get a sense in this still shot of of his chest rising and falling in desperation trying to catch His breath as he tries to calm himself down This is a photo of scott finding out that his partner his girlfriend isn't able to live with these symptoms anymore It's very difficult to live with somebody and sometimes interact with somebody who has PTSD this isn't easy This is a very complex illness an injury And so he's finding out that she's not able to walk this journey with him anymore and he's being left alone and he's reacting to this It's a photo of scott and this one's powerful for me in a medical office in a doctor's office waiting for an appointment And even in this place of learning he's in the middle of another panic attack Even in this place of wellness you can see his chest rising and falling in the emotion and the desperation It's a photo of scott in the middle of the night now this one requires a bit of a story If anyone's ever wrestled with insomnia or if anyone has ever had anxiety You know how impossible it can be sometimes to fall asleep And this young man was spent that time trying to fall asleep trying to do The breathing that he was taught to do and trying to calm himself and try to get his thoughts regulated and try to push Out the negative thoughts and try to be at peace and calm and apparently he had just dozed off to sleep And a dog barked in the neighborhood and woke him up And this is a picture of him in that desperation trying to reach out for help on his cell phone There's a picture of his home Because sometimes PTSD and trauma can come with emotional outbursts sometimes it can be ugly to witness And because of these emotional outbursts and because of this trauma one of the things that's often comorbid with this is addiction Now I come from the school of thought I agree with gabor maté who says that addiction is rooted in trauma I believe that to be 100% true and here's this young man trying to medicate himself through through addiction trying to Provide some relief for himself. He went to a bar and got into a fight And because he got into a fight that were charges brought against him This is him going to court Do you get a sense of these symptoms budding up against the system that doesn't have the capacity to respond to trauma? And it's causing a spiraling. Do you see that? Now because he has criminal charges very difficult to get a job with criminal charges This is a photo of him putting on a tie so that he can apply for a job at the cheesecake factory Now I don't know if any of you have ever worked in the service industry But it's not the best place for somebody suffering from PTSD. Let's just put that out there Now because he is a very stressful job and because he has these these injuries He wasn't able to keep the job He ends up losing the job and this is a photo of him finding out that he's being evicted from his apartment Because he can't afford to pay the rent Now the next photo is the most upsetting at all and I I'm going to apologize in advance and I Warning you that this is upsetting and I don't mean it to be I don't mean to harm anyone in this room But I am trying to maybe inspire a little bit of A humanization of this story This is a photo of his self-inflicted wounds because oftentimes when people find themselves in crisis without a safe harbor to turn to Sometimes this feels like the only way out Now if we can recognize PTSD as trauma what I'm going to suggest to you is that trauma is in fact a range of experience PTSD is maybe a far end of a continuum But I'm going to invite you to think about the possibility that there is a range Of experiences that can be trauma and can cause trauma I'm going to suggest that some of your students this term have been affected by things in their lives today That are traumatic for them that are causing these students to have to live through and cope with Symptoms that may be identical or very similar to PTSD There's this concept that comes out of the united states. It actually comes from the center for disease control It talks about complex or continuous traumatic stress disorder This study was looking at the experiences of young people growing up in the inner city of winnipeg. I'm not winnipeg inner city of american cities These are neighborhoods that you would typically you know get stereotyped as the ghetto or the hood if you're with me And what they found is that young people growing up in these communities oftentimes are displaying symptoms Identical to PTSD As a function of living in communities where there is Enforced poverty social exclusion the threat of violence the threat of exploitation gangs drugs and all of these threats They're displaying symptoms identical to PTSD And yet we can't call this post traumatic stress. Can we? Because what does post imply That it's over and nothing's over about this for these kids And so we have this sort of growing understanding that there are children living under circumstances that can cause them There are students living under circumstances that can cause them to have to fight through symptoms identical to PTSD While pursuing a post-secondary degree Now taking this a little bit further. I want to give this a canadian example here. How many people know who this this woman is Yeah, I see people light up as soon as they see your people that know her for those that don't this is cindy black stock If you don't know who cindy black stock is i'm going to encourage you to learn about her She's my personal hero in my opinion. She's one of the most important canadians alive today And one of the things that she was involved in is 12 years ago. She filed a human rights complaint with the canadian human rights tribunal against the government of canada And what she argued is that through family services and other aspects of the indian act canada is violating the human rights of first nations children This case went on for nine years And you have to hear her tell the story of what it was like living through that experience The harassment the monitoring the just an incredible story But at the end of nine years the tribunal came back with a decision and guess what they said In fact canada is violating the basic human rights of first nations children Through family services and other aspects of the indian act So i want to ask you what i want to ask you is this do you think it's potentially traumatic To grow up in a country where your human rights are being violated i'm asking you to think about that honestly is it potentially traumatic to grow up in a country where your basic human rights are being violated And this leads us to a conversation about what we refer to as intergenerational trauma An intergenerational trauma is a concept that has a very very simple route all it means is this It's a simple truth that all of us will be able to relate to What we don't transform We will transmit What we don't transform we will transmit How many people have ever been in this experience? This is an awful experience if it's ever happened to you so prepare yourself Let's do a little experiment here How many people have ever been speaking to kids? Maybe your kids or somebody else's kids And you all of a sudden you hear yourself speaking have you ever had this moment? And you hear yourself and you're like oh i sound like my mom How many people have ever had that experience i sound like my dad now maybe for you that's good for me I was horrifying it was like oh man i swore i would never become this very thing Well we don't transform we will transmit how many people have ever heard psychology 101 those kids who are battered are statistically more likely To batter their own children as one of the reasons why i waited to become a parent as long as i did Was fear people are not statistics, but these statistics still seem to hold true across populations right well We don't transform we will transmit right and this idea of intergenerational trauma What it speaks to is that the injuries received perhaps in residential schools for example Can carry across generations Now we used to believe that that happened through observation that if a child is in a home where an individual is suffering from Symptoms created by injuries by trauma that they pick up on that and begin to emulate it What we're actually finding is that it goes a lot deeper than that There's an area of study that's just emerging and still very complex looking at epigenetics It actually has its roots in World war two and survivors of the holocaust, but what it suggests is that not our genetic Structure our genetics don't change, but our genetic expression can adapt to our environment There can be instances where children actually begin to display symptoms identical to their parents Even if they've never met their parents For indigenous people we refer to this as blood memory The idea that we carry in us the story of our ancestors going back seven generations right if we want to give that a Academic context we would call that epigenetics Right and what we know about intergenerational trauma is that for each generation that isn't able to do its healing work It actually picks up momentum from one generation to the next It doesn't just go away intergenerational trauma would suggest That it can actually get worse so that if i'm not able to do my healing work The dysfunction in my daughter's life might be measurably worse than it is for me It doesn't just go away and all of this story Comes with students into ubc into our classrooms and you begin to interact with it And i'm going to remind us to think about this idea of scott ostrom's Example of having symptoms interacting with a system that has no mechanism to be able to accommodate that causing a spiraling downwards Now i'm going to extend this a little bit further and i'm going to suggest that trauma has been caused by universities As people who live and work in universities one of the realities that we live in is that we are a part of institutions That were historically 100 complicit in the exercise of colonization Many of the decisions that became policies of assimilation and colonization Many of the policies that led to cases like forced sterilization Of women uh that were based in models of the intellect and intelligence that were iq based and therefore have their origins in the american slave trade Many of the policies that saw women taken into hospitals and forcibly sterilized against their will many of the policies that became Residential school policies including that policy to do Nutrition experience experiments on kids that saw some children starved to see what would happen are given different kinds of supplements to see the effects on their bodies Until their teeth rotted out of their mouth Some of the policies that led to things like the forced removal of people from certain areas happened were published were funded Were grants that began at a university In manitoba the university of manitoba has a former home economics Department that actually apprehended children from first nations communities as part of the 60s scoop so that they could be studied by people preparing for careers in home economics That's part of the legacy Now it's not that I want anyone in this room to be ashamed of that. That's not what I'm asking you to to Be burdened with but what I am suggesting is that we as canadiens and especially those of us in post secondary Have inherited the wreckage of broken relationships And where schools and institutions and higher learning were once used as weapons against communities Our institution should be about a place of healing is what i'm suggesting for us So going back to this idea of healing. There's a couple of things I want to say about this First off in terms of how we begin to uh respond to this as faculty members as people that care I'm not asking you to become a clinician I'm not asking you to go out and pursue professional training that's beyond your wheelhouse or your scope I'm not asking you to be anything than what you already are As faculty is in the university of british columbia You already have everything that you need to begin to respond in terms of trauma informed practice and really at its beginning It begins with kindness I think that there should still be a place for kindness in post secondary Now that may sound like an oversimplification. You may be listening to me saying well, of course But you know what everything I heard from the students yesterday that was summarized for me suggested that kindness isn't an automatic thing in universities That's what I heard And maybe if we can give any sort of credibility to the experience of people that are speaking for themselves If we can give that any sort of weight whatsoever what we want to recognize is that kindness is not guaranteed But it's one of the fundamental things that can make a huge difference in terms of somebody's sense of belonging All right. The second idea here is flexibility and adaptability I can't help but think of how much different scott austram's story would have played out if there could have been some flexibility and some adaptability Now, I know that we already have mechanisms for accommodation and extensions and Situations beyond our control in universities. I probably have an office that deals with that. I understand that But sometimes these sort of interactions come into a place where we have to sort of weigh this idea of accountability and and stringency With flexibility. All right. We've all heard of this idea of the the dead grandma syndrome Right, we've all heard this idea that that family members tend to die at around exam time. We've all sort of encountered this idea It's interesting though, but my my aunt who helped raise me when my I'm a phd student right now at the university of manitoba. My aunt passed away About two weeks ago right in the middle of me writing my family My final papers for one of my courses and I had to reach out to my prof and I had to say you know like I am a prof. I understand this. I'm a faculty member and I know the dead grandma syndrome But I really need some flexibility here because this woman who raised me Has just passed away and I want to celebrate her life All right, and so we have this idea of flexibility that sometimes really pits us against our own expectations And what we consider businesses normal in schools and then we have this sort of sometimes pithy sometimes it's kind of Triterate seems superficial this difference between equality and equity But for me it still has profound meaning and I still think it's an important discussion to have that Equality is the idea that we treat all of our students the same because we have expectations and standards And what I'm going to suggest is that that is not going to allow us to accomplish what we need to All right instead what we want to recognize is that not all of our students are starting from the same place And this is that idea of equity and it's not that our students need pity That's not what I'm talking about particularly indigenous students Don't need pity and don't give them pity because that's not what we're asking for Instead what we want is people that can look past the struggles to recognize the potential that's there And to be able to allow for an even playing field so that that potential can be fully expressed New jamo away when goes back to this idea of healing and this idea that we can maybe begin to employ Practices in our our university that are grounded in this idea of wellness and healing Right and it goes back to this idea that cultural wounds require cultural solutions How many people have ever heard of the term indigenization before? Okay, can anyone explain to me what it is because I Let's talk about indigenization for a second Years ago the University of Winnipeg committed to indigenization It's actually one of the five strategic pillars of the u of w that was done before I came into administration at the U of w so when I applied for my job to become associate vice president I knew I was going to have to say something intelligent about indigenization Problem I had is that I I don't know what it is. I have no idea. So there's my challenge. I get it It's a western term. It's a verb. It implies we're trying to accomplish something We're doing something that hasn't been done before I grasp all of that But in terms of actual practice, I couldn't give you a concrete definition of indigenization So I was in trouble. I had to reach out for help And so I reached out to help from knowledge keepers and elders and leaders Some of whom you would recognize the names if I shared them with you and I asked my passive tobacco and I'd say Can you help me understand? indigenization And I usually got a snicker and then I got a response and I had the response I got I'm going to share with you and it was the same for everyone I talked to you I swear to you same response from everyone I talked to was this Whatever indigenization is it has to involve safety It has to involve safety All right, and I really had to think about that because do we mean uh safe from violence? Well, that's kind of the damn bare minimum, isn't it? Of course, we have safe and respectful workplace environments. We expect that but that's not entirely what we mean when we say safety We also mean that every student on our campus should be allowed to come to this campus and be visibly Who and what they are without facing discrimination And if they do face discrimination to know that somebody with power and decision making authority Is going to stand up on their behalf so that they don't have to worry about fighting that fight while they're trying to study It means safety of cultural expression it means safety of Indigenous knowledge to know that indigenous knowledge isn't going to be exploited or appropriated or misused that it can be Honored in fact in this campus that we can honor the knowledge of knowledge keepers equal to phd without needing to filter one through the other It means safety of grief I'm going to tell you something that I can guess and I saw it reflected if not articulated this way in the student comments Oftentimes the first time that indigenous people begin to have the opportunity to learn Why things are the way that they are Why there's so much struggle in their communities is out of university And I remember moments at the u of w learning why my family wasn't able to raise me And having to go and find a place in the library where I could go and cry because I felt embarrassed All right safety of grief Not just for indigenous students, but for non-indigenous students who begin to have the sensation of why I wasn't I told about this To know that they are engaged and being invited into reconciliation without guilt or shame that safety as well And so we're asking to think about this idea of healing and wellness on campus now one more thing I want to share with you is this idea of of community aqua aqua be a wag aqua be a wag aqua be a wag this idea of Belonging being a part of being a part of the group belonging community I want to share a photo with you and I want you to take a couple of seconds just to to look at it And I'm going to ask you to consider What it is you experience and what it is that you're feeling and what it is that you're thinking when you when you see this photo Are you with me and then we're thinking about this in terms of community. I want you to take a look at this Does anyone recognize this photo Where's this photo from? Yeah, we're so attend this is a photo of your province This is the protests at unistotten in we're so attend the protests around the pipelines Right, and so, you know, there's a number of things that we would want to consider when we look at a photo like this It's the idea here of a couple of things and I'm just going to move quickly through this How would you feel if it was your family that was in this photo? We're involved with this. How would we feel if Your family was in the camp That's on the opposite end of this photo that isn't reflected here. How would we feel if Your family's income depended on oil and gas does that change the conversation if your ability to make your mortgage payment Depends on that pipeline. Does that change the conversation? Does it change if you truly believe that you that pipeline was an assault on medea key that literally this is A violation of your own mother. Does that change the conversation? Does it change? Do you feel that you know as canadians we've been given enough information to fully interpret that photo in that situation? Or do you find that a lot of canadians are making decisions based on partial information or knee-jerk reactions? Does it change again? Is there a consequence to forming decisions and thinking about this based upon incomplete information? All right, because my guess with photos like that is that that is a deeply deeply troubling experience in terms of community and what I'm going to suggest is that UBC doesn't become a community just because we throw up beautiful Buildings in a beautiful ground and invite students into this campus. That's not a community That's just a place where a bunch of strangers are are pursuing an education Community doesn't begin to be constructed until we begin to address some of the barriers to community that exists And I think that one of the most profound barriers that we face in terms of community building is building is what I refer to as otherness This idea of challenging and deconstructing otherness So for me when I think about prejudice, I think about this term otherness for me. It's it's the root of prejudice So who or what is other? This is really easy to understand. Who's other? You know who I'm talking about when I'm talking about that other group of people, right? them You know who I mean, right? not us them Wherever I draw that line between us and them Them potentially becomes my other right so Of course, we're talking about diversity, but diversity is not the problem or at least it shouldn't be I'm going to argue that diversity is a good thing for UBC But if I perceive diversity and I begin to dehumanize because of that that's otherness. Does that make sense? I'm making a distinction. It's the dehumanization. So sometimes it sounds like this And I know you've never hear this in Vancouver, but sometimes in Winnipeg we hear this You know, I'm not racist, but Which means you're about to hear something racist Listen, you know, I'm not sexist, but which means you're about to hear something sexist But for me, whether it's a joke or whether it's a microaggression or a deliberate attempt to Discriminate whether it's a policy to keep somebody's drinking from the same water fountain as me Whether it's a policy to remove people's kids from their families or whether it's a final solution through holocaust For me, it's all part of this continuum pushing some other group of people further and further and further away Right otherness if I have another what do you think is the likelihood that my daughter begins to pick up on some of that? 100 percent or 110 percent Right because those are the only two options as far as I can see and I'm going to argue that historically indigenous people have been canada's other Not exclusively this isn't an us or them thing, but I think it would be absurd to suggest otherwise And so I think that for many Canadians and even for many newcomers to this line the only thing that they've ever heard about indigenous people Has been from their parents Or from the media or from incomplete textbooks That set up the breeding ground for this idea of otherness. Does that make sense? So in thinking about this idea of otherness, has anyone ever tried to challenge prejudice? Have you ever tried to talk to somebody who's prejudiced? Have you ever had that experience? Is that fun? Is that a nice way to spend time? Do you enjoy that? What's it like? It's like banging your head against the wall. I have an uncle on my father's side of the family I mother no on my mother's side of the family. My father's side of the family is Ojibwe from treaty 2 My father's side of the family is ukrainian and I have an ukrainian uncle. His other unfortunately is natives Makes it really awkward at dinner time, you know, because he knows what I do is he knows who I am and what I do for a living And I can give my uncle 100 arguments of why he should change his mind And what do you think he's going to do? He's going to give me 101 arguments of why I should go to hell Unless he really gets backed into a corner in which case, you know, he just tells me an off and that's the end of another Things giving dinner we try again next year Here's the thing about my uncle He's a good man You would like him and he would like you if you met him And he's only ever grown up hearing one side of the story about indigenous people Now the worst thing that I can do in terms of responding to my uncle is to Approach him with disrespect And with anger in my heart can't solve a problem with the same mindset that created it So let me ask you this Why did I spend so much time in this conversation joking with you teasing at the beginning and telling you stories about my family? Because you think I don't have enough material to fill a morning Have I given anyone the impression that this is my first time doing this? Have I given anyone the impression? I don't know what I'm doing I do it because I want to create a relationship of safety and respect so that maybe we can feel vulnerable enough with each other To be honest about our own ideas And so deconstructing other begins with respect and I think that if we invite people into our classrooms and begin to ask Critical questions we have to expect that otherness might come out And when otherness comes out as it's our students articulated yesterday It could be very uncomfortable And so we have to be proactive in terms of creating spaces where we can deconstruct otherness And I do believe it begins with that relationships Why it's so important to be able to include indigenous people in this journey of reconciliation I'm going to save these other points for the end of the conversation because I've gotten ahead of myself here But we'll talk about deconstructing otherness as we move forward in the questions and answers if you're interested I want to wrap up by bringing it back home to this I said I was going to close by talking about Gikendiswin and knowledge All right I want to bring it back to this idea about bringing indigenous knowledge and its place in universities There's a concept that comes from Ojibwe tradition. I'm not sure if it Exists here, but I'm suspicious that it would although. I don't know the name for it And maybe we can begin to explore this together But there's a concept that comes from Ojibwe tradition called Minopah Matzwin And Minopah Matzwin is this idea of Minopah Matzwin Nagidao Are you living in a good way? Are you living in a good way? Are you living the good life? Now when I think about Minopah Matzwin, I think about a good life I can't help but think about Well, I have western ideas of what a good life is like I'm really excited for my Tim Horton's coffee later this morning I think about upgrading my seat for the flight home so I can stretch out my legs I think about spa time or me time on the weekend. Good living, right? None of that is Minopah Matzwin Minopah Matzwin living the good life has everything to do with being the you that you were meant to be Minopah Matzwin Nagidao are you the you that you were meant to be? That's it's a heavy heavy question with all kinds of consequences And I would argue that that's the point of higher education Minopah Matzwin to empower our students to be the them that they were meant to be Right and from indigenous perspectives to wrap this up. There is no you without midaaki kind-hearted earth Going back to the teachings of Ogama key of mother To be able to survive and balance and good harmony with the living world so that maybe we can continue to exist past this generation That maybe this is our last opportunity to sort of write the direction of our trajectory to survive as a species right Maybe there's something in that this exploration to be able to learn from our indigenous brothers and sisters about what it means to be in Good relationship with midaaki And i'm going to close with this story and then i'm done A couple years ago. Um, well it was actually many many years ago. I told you I was adopted My birth family the randvils. Um, when I after I was adopted and taken away for my birth family I'm very lucky my family my indigenous family Every year would try to reach out and find me wherever I might be and have a relationship with me I'm very grateful for that I'm very grateful for that because at around the age of 16. I had some really confusing ideas about what it meant to be indigenous I I use the word indian at the time now forgive me I know that's historically inaccurate and I understand all of that but i'm also an old man So we have to put this into context Growing up we were indians when we were happy and natives when we were angry So that's the language that we used and I had these confusing ideas about what it meant to be indian because as an Anxity teenager growing up I began to identify with people like denis banks and russell means who were the creators of the american Indian movement my politics of the time were blow it up burn it down don't care which let's make it happen And so I had these messed up ideas and my uncles reached out to me and said Will you um They wanted to take me hunting Because they were worried that I was going to forget how to be indian That's what they said to my adopted family to the laminos And so I was all for this because I thought holy smokes now We're going to go out and do something really manly and I had these twisted ideas of what it meant to be a man I was raised by people who had really twisted ideas about masculinity But I knew I was going to get a gun and I was going to go out and shoot things and I was like heck Yeah, let's do this So they came and picked me up. It was november I know this because it was hunting season They took me out to go and do this to go and do hunting and I was all Excited to be an indian and to be a manly indian and all these twisted ideas that I had as a young child Now, I don't know if you've ever spent any time with indigenous people But we like to tease We like to tease a lot. In fact, if you're not used to it It might actually come across as being kind of mean But trust me the more you're being teased the more you're being accepted That's kind of the way it works in a lot of indigenous communities And so my uncles began to tease me pretty heavy pretty hard right off out of the gates And I'm not gonna lie. It's tongue. It's tongue I'm not gonna lie But there was no way I was going to let on that it was hurting my feelings because again I was trying to prove something So we got to where we were going and they gave me lessons on how to hold this rifle They gave me a 30 odd six which is ridiculous because I was a skinny teenager Knocked me off my feet as soon as I pulled the trigger And they taught me how to, you know, keep the muzzle pointed away from other human beings And to be aware of where I'm stepping And I was all excited. My heart was pumping to go out and do hunting Now I don't know if any of you have ever been hunting But the defining characteristic is not excitement It's actually incredibly boring And so by the end of the morning after lunch, all that was happening was I was getting cold fingers and irritable And so I was out there and I was thinking Jesus is not the experience I wanted to have I was leaning against a tree in about 200 250 yards out I saw a little flicker of motion out of my peripherals And I looked and I focused and sure enough there was a deer And I got all excited and I slowly pulled the rifle off my shoulder And raised it up and looked through the scope and all of a sudden this animal It was just a little blur of brown out there Through the scope was right here And I thought holy smokes, this is a beautiful creature I don't know if you've ever seen a deer through a scope up close like that But if you've ever heard the saying doe like eyes, there's a reason for that She had big beautiful black eyes and I could see them glistening And I could see the steam from her nostrils and sure ear was flicking as she was listening and she was eating Leaves and dried grass off the fall ground And I could see the muscles under her hide rippling from running through midaaki through the woods She was strong And it dawned on me as I was admiring this beautiful animal I was just totally mesmerized never seen anything like this. I'm supposed to shoot this creature So I went through the process that I was taught that morning of Inhaling because if you are going to shoot you pull the trigger on the exhale And I got all the way through the exhale and I I couldn't pull the trigger I was still mesmerized by this animal And now I started to feel afraid that I was going to make get made fun of and so I I was doing that self-talk you're an idiot. You're weak. You're soft They're not going to invite you out and I'm being harsh on myself and I raised the gun again I took my breath began to exhale And I couldn't pull the trigger Even now I started to feel trapped. I didn't want to I didn't want to harm this creature I just wanted to look at her and admire how beautiful she was But I got really afraid and really ashamed. I'm letting down my uncles. I'm letting down my heritage. I'm letting down Everybody and so I decided this third time no matter what I'm pulling the trigger And I actually I started my breath and I closed my eyes So I didn't have to watch and I started the exhale and then sure enough I heard the clap of a screenshot It wasn't me that pulled the trigger. It was my uncle had saw the same animal from a distance And I looked open the eyes and looked through the scope and I saw the animal's body rock And I saw her begin to stumble on her front legs And she collapsed to the ground and my uncle called us and we all went running over And as I was running over I started to cry And I started to cry uncontrollably because I had this feeling of just desperate loss and this tragedy of this beautiful animal That is dying so that we can have food I just I got there and I got down on my knees and I put my hand on her body It was still warm and I began to cry uncontrollably because I had this terrible feeling Desperate loss and just tragedy and there's nothing I could do to take away the fact that she was about to die And it dawns on me now it didn't dawn on me at the time That for all the teasing that went on that morning No one teased me for crying for that animal It dawns on me now not at the time that that was the indian that they were trying to Remind me to be To be able to have that kind of a relationship with the living world that if an animal has to give its life for me to survive to weep To put the tobacco down and sing a song for its spirit and gratitude to dance for it And I can't help but think about what our lives might be like if we had that relationship with the living world As opposed I supposed to going and getting a ground to be from the corner store To have that kind of relationship with the living world What do we be better or worse off? I don't know But I think about that animal a lot And I think about this profound gift that we've been given through reconciliation for us to be able to reach our potential as a nation And I feel hopeful and I feel optimistic. So I say, thank you my apologies for going over here. Here's my contact information I wish you all the best in your career Say thank you very much kevin for Incredibly inspiring talk which for which I took many notes to think about for the future So we have a few minutes for questions I'll first ask for questions from the room and then see if there are any questions online What's your name and what's your question? Thank you. My name is uh, jennifer and my question when you were talking a fair bit about the idea of post Post traumatic stress and then you juxtaposed it with ongoing Do you Do you really think we're living in a post colonial world? And further to that Some of the criticisms of the trc was positioning all of this in the past And moving forward and i'm really wondering your take on the direction and we're done Are we really? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I was actually saying to the folks I I had the pleasure of having dinner with last night that sometimes the academy drives me that say Sometimes I just want to pull my hair out when I see some of the things that go on in universities But our ability to deconstruct language and really think about semantics is actually something I celebrate and this question about post colonial society The accuracy does it reflect? The responsibility that we've inherited that wreckage of the broken past that we've talked about I think is profound And I think it would be absurd to think about this in terms of of being over Um, you know, one of the things that will often hear people say is why don't they just get over? All right, why don't they just get over which of course in and itself is a symptom of a very unhealthy society? Right, um, but one of the best responses to that statement that I've ever heard was uh given by justice mary sinclair when he said Why don't we just get over it because our government won't let us Right, um, if you're going to heal from the source of an injury It's necessary to remove the source of the injury if you're going to heal from the splinter you have to remove the splinter Unfortunately, the indian act still exists until still dictates every aspect of life for first nations people living in communities Will never be the nation that we were meant to be without beginning to address that Now i'm very curious about you know the position or the criticism of trc. I don't i'm not going to try to belittle those conversations I'm curious about them And I would never challenge anyone's right to their own truth But when I look at the content of the 94 calls to action It's about responding to a lot of things that are currently going on In fact, I see it as a roadmap moving forward And when the commission sets the un declaration of the rights of indigenous people as the framework for Reconciliation that doesn't seem in the past for me. That seems like a rights-based nation-to-nation relationship moving forward And the fact that canada was the only uh was one of four countries that voted against undripped in 2007 And that we're now considering Implementing through bill c262 romeo shogunash's private members bill Suggest to me that we are trying to look towards a a better relationship as being the necessary framework for Reconciliation so I would never deny anyone's right to the truth of their interpretation of the trc, but it's simply not the way I see it Thank you your name Hi, my name is uh kevin ward and Good name. Yeah, thank you for having that name and elevating it First of all, I just wanted to say thank you very much for that beautiful presentation and um and closing with the story you did My first year, uh, I used a peep site so I didn't have the opportunity to see as closely as you did I might not have pulled the trigger but um You ended with this slide here at the un declaration And but you didn't touch on it in your presentation. I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit Relative to your topic and absolutely. Um, yeah So I I use this graphic for the end of all of my presentations because this for me is profoundly important to our well-being as a nation Um, and the un declaration of the rights of indigenous people. I already told you 2007 Four countries on earth voted against it. You already know who they are but take a guess The united states Australia, new zealand and canada now canada removed its objector status in 2016 But between 2016 and current day the current government said that there's difficulties in implementing because it's inconsistent with our constitution What's curious about that is that the declaration describes itself as being the bare minimum Standards for the survival of indigenous people So if it's inconsistent with our constitution what that suggests to me is that our constitution Is inconsistent with the survival of indigenous people with the bare minimum for the survival of indigenous people Without this my feeling is that we're not yet talking about reconciliation Right, we're not yet talking about moving forward We're just trying to allow for the basic survival of indigenous people in the context of canada Now that private members bill there's a number of major bills that are sitting in senate right now Um that have to be considered before the election I'm hoping that the undripped bill c262 is one of the ones that gets passed And gets royal assent But we don't know but without that I think that we're still talking about the very basic Survival of indigenous people because the one that it lays out for us is a rights-based relationship with indigenous People in canada. What's interesting about this is that if I do do a presentation on undripped I'll typically show people articles from that and inevitably somebody will raise their hand and say kevin These are just basic human rights And I have to say yes, and we're trying to include indigenous people in that Human experience as well because prior to that Colonial experience hasn't been allowing for that unfortunately All right So the thing with the u.n declaration on the rights of indigenous people Being the framework for reconciliation Is this a lot of this is going to seem to fall on the integrity of the crown But rest assured this is going to transform business as usual for ubc when if and when passed Because it talks about a rights-based relationship And in every instance where an institution as powerful and prestigious as ubc begins to interface with indigenous sovereignty There's going to be consequences because of this So I think that this is going to be one of those conversations that we will have to have in terms of pragmatics moving forward Because the institutions that fail to be aware of that rights-based relationship are going to find themselves Legging behind in terms of efficacy and relevancy in a modern economy, and that's all contingent on it being passed Yes, sir. Thank you. Kevin. Thank you. I really appreciate the very rich and insightful sharing and very inspiring My name is my colleague I totally appreciate what you've been sharing in terms of the post traumatic experience In particular you talk about the um the complex trauma syndrome that you're talking about as well Bringing further pushing your notion if I can further, please I see University as an institution Keep continuing and creating trauma experience to our students Just merely by the fact that how this institution being Constructed And I will push further in terms of like that have a profound impact on our students well being As well as mental health as well So Kevin, I want to kind of pick your brain and hear some of your insight along this line as well. Yeah You know what I think sir is that you've articulated a very very important point and I I don't want to I I would like us to just sort of consider what you've said for a second And and what I heard or what I saw around the room I I saw some nods of acknowledgement and I heard people acknowledging I don't think you're alone in that observation We're having some of these conversations ahead of time when people are talking about their journey through their undergrad or their Masters or their phd. And one of the common themes that I heard was suffering Discomfort and almost like you're running a gauntlet It doesn't sound like menopamacillin to me. It doesn't sound like Um flourishing if you will it sounds like business as usual But it doesn't sound like flourishing and sometimes I think it's healthy for us to sort of pause and reflect upon that idea that um, I think sometimes Accountability and excellence doesn't need to be measured through suffering and sacrifice and hardship That maybe it can be measured through vibrancy So I don't know if I have much more to really add to that except that I think it's a profound invitation for you to Or for us to consider what you said because I think it's a very keen observation. It's maybe resonating with a lot of people Good morning. Thank you so much. It was hands down one of the best talks I've been to felt like was at a ted talk conference. So it was a really the highest praise I can think of as an academic I was really interested in how you advocated for a mandatory course And it's something I believe in but I get all all the pushback from indigenous and non-indigenous So I'm just interested to hear more about that. Yeah, that's uh, that's a really interesting conversation to have because it was Quite a journey at the University of Winnipeg and again, I'm never I want to be clear about this I'm never going to push another university to have or not have but I think it's a question to ask I've been I've been told by Grand chief wilton little child who is one of the commissioners who authored the calls to action that from his perspective of the 94 72 of them are about education and awareness Education and awareness and what that suggests to me is that whatever reconciliation is it's going to be about Education and awareness Which would place an institution like uBC whose business is education? At the front lines of reconciliation And so I think there's an invitation for us to think about what our role is going to be if not a mandatory course because that Doesn't make sense for our reality than what? I think we have to make a decision I had said that we have this opportunity where even though we didn't create the problem We do have to make a decision What I always try to remind people of and thank you for giving me the opportunity to do so Doing nothing tomorrow is a decision Because the consequences of this are a desperate reality for many students in many communities Returning to business as usual is is a decision And so we have to think about what that responsibility is going to be now Is it right to mandate education about indigenous people? I don't know is it right to mandate anything that we we mandate Is it something that students are going to walk away feeling like they resentful that they didn't learn If we're not providing opportunities for people citizens future citizens to engage Current citizens that are entering into the workforce as You know part of the workforce Are we doing them a disservice by not providing this if it's not us? Where are they going to be guaranteed to find that education? Right are we just sort of assuming that they're going to pick it up along the way Or do we have the mechanisms to provide a desperate? An education that's desperately needed because we have the framework to be able to do that These are all questions that we want to consider But in terms of advocating it through the university the way that we approached it is that It actually originally came from emotion from students So the media wanted to tell the story about the evil left-leaning university Trying to shove something down the throats of our poor helpless students And I am sure the media in british columbia would be much more responsible than that And i'm not going to name names, so i'm not going to talk about cjob radio and winnipeg, but i will say this I will say this I was very pleased when they came and they found that it wasn't us forcing it to our students It was our students that demanded it of us and what it began with was sort of an evaluation We're a mid-sized regional university. We're not ubc. We're not a u15 And what we found is that across the departments there were pre-existing courses that could meet an indigenous course requirement We had the course Content in place to be able to offer it to be able to structure an indigenous course requirement And so what we did is took pre-existing courses This is the short truncated version and turned them into a suite of options that were made available So that somebody could choose which one they wanted to take to meet the indigenous course requirement Some of the other questions that we sort of wrestled with were um First off who teaches them should it be an indigenous or a non-indigenous person There's a maxim that comes out of research protocol OCAP ownership control access and possession which is a key concept for research that anyone doing research should be aware of Another talk for another day perhaps But basically what it comes down to is this nothing about us without us All right No reconciliation without including us and it's not say don't try to do great things do great things But use it as an opportunity to build relationship with people who can walk with you on that journey. It's a good thing It's an empowering thing nothing without us and nothing about us without us But should it be indigenous people teaching mandatory? indigenous education courses That's an interesting one There are some people that believe that it should always be allies that teach it because you're never going to force indigenous people to Be retraumatized by the experience of entering into a space where they're faced not only with Discrimination but people that are already resentful because they're forced to be there is an unrealistic burden to place upon indigenous people And then there's other people that feel like it should be indigenous people So that's one of those questions that we had to wrestle with my feeling is that allies should always be involved with this Is my feeling the other thing that we had to wrestle with was getting it through senate And so at the first time it was brought to senate It was almost shot down because the concern was not about indigenous education The problem was about relinquishing formal control of curriculum That is usually the domain of of senate curriculum review And so what we had to really sort of assure and negotiate is that this requirement was something that wasn't going to be a A disempowering of senate but something that was going to be done in partnership with senate So instead of having the senate alone responsible for determining indigenous icr courses There was a dual process of our indigenous advisory circle speaking to the course content in an advisory or in a collaborative way So that professors were building the best possible course they could Which then returned back to senate for final decision when we got through that sort of gateway of senate control It was one of the most touching things you could ever imagine when the motion was made to implement the indigenous course requirement I want you to think about this for a second. Those of you that had no anything about university governance The motion was passed unanimously And so it was this incredible moment where Yeah, I think that the entire community stood behind our responsibility as educators To help make a contribution to reconciliation because it's the best way for us to ensure Canada has the brightest future we can So We are nearly out of time and I don't know if there's any questions online and I forgot to forgot to Reannounce the The hashtag So I think one more question and then time to To move out. Yes Hello Hi, I'm my name is christin and I'm a visiting researcher from norway And we we are now going through this Truth and reconciliation process also in norway very much inspired by canada. Wow. Wow But I wanted to I think comment on the last things you talked about because we have that in in norway as well This idea of kind of mainstreaming indigenous perspectives in education both in what you call k to 12 education but also higher education Teacher education where I work Um, but what I see because um Very often there's non indigenous peoples teaching the history and culture and the goals are very ambitious And sometimes I think that um The practice and the the construction of knowledge is doing more harm than good in a way That it's like I see it through my own research that it's kind of reproducing stereotypes and epistemic violence more than Challenging. Wow. So I I think that's I don't know if it's a question or a comment, but I I think it's a huge challenge to have this Big ambitions, but what does it mean in practice and like How is knowledge? Constructed, you know, and thank you for that and I'm fascinated to learn more about what's going on in your country I appreciate being able to hear a little bit about this All I'll I'll say to that in for the sake of time and because it is such a big conversation to have is this I I don't think that we can begin to explore Indigenous knowledge through a strictly western enlightenment lens of content delivery I think that this is inviting us to maybe step outside of our own pedagogical practice to consider different epistemologies I mean this to be inclusive and I mean this to be an invitation And I mean this to be empowering and I hope that everyone is walking away with a sense that I'm hoping that we can all do this together One place where I draw a hard line and I do draw a hard line here personally And I I would offer this to you personally professionally and we can talk about this is that In terms of culture and cultural practice That should be the strict domain of indigenous people exclusively full stop I don't think that there is a any sort of a justification for non-indigenous people to be transmitting indigenous cultural practice in a formal setting That's just my my belief on that subject and we can debate that if you like, but I think that that's one of those places where I'm unwavering in that regard Thank you Okay, please join me