Category Archives: Decolonization
Knowing the Land Beneath Our Feet: UBC’s Indigenous Histories and Presence
Every day, thousands of UBC students pass by a totem pole that comes from the depths of Viner Sound near the former Ḵwiḵwa̱sut̓inux̱w village of Metap. Hockey players at Thunderbird Arena haul their gear past a duck depicted in mid takeoff, crafted with the copper-leafed remnants of an old Volvo car.
Clearing the Fog: A retrospective on lessons learned from campus activism
Trigger warning: sexual assault, violence, racism A Timeline of Violence, Sexism, and Student Activism at UBC Vancouver (2013): April 19th/2013: “Stranger in the dark” sexual assault reported on UBC Vancouver campus May 19th/2013: Another “stranger in the dark” sexual assault reported; goes unreported to the campus community Sept 7/2013: CBC News reports Sauder School of […]
Every Year is the Year of Feminism
A week ago today, The Terry Project hosted a BARTalk that sought to assess how feminism fared in 2014. Panelists Lucia Lorenzi (PhD candidate in the English Literature department), Jarrah Hodge (blogger at Gender Focus) and Scott Anderson (professor in the philosophy department) discussed the events that gave feminism major media coverage over the past […]
“Where there is a word, there’s a history”: Two-Spirited Community Organizer Harlan Pruden Comes to UBC
On Thursday, January 8, 2015, the Pride Collective at UBC hosted a fantastic presentation in Irving K. Barber, located on the traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. Harlan Pruden who is First Nations Cree, spoke to themes of sex, gender, sexuality, and the complexities of Two-Spirit identities within Indigenous contexts, both historical and contemporary. […]
Sexual Assault Awareness Month Launches at UBC
January is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) at UBC, an initiative spearheaded by the University and the AMS. Access & Diversity and the AMS Sexual Assault Support Centre (SASC) are taking the lead in organizing and running events during SAAM, in partnership with many other campus organizations. All throughout January, members of the UBC community […]
Social Justice Synonyms #12: Indigenous Identity and Terminology
In our first Social Justice Synonyms article of 2015, writer S.M. looks at what it means to use the terms “Indian”, “Aboriginal”, and “Indigenous/People[s].”
University wake-up call: petition demands closure of mining institute
Originally published at Stop the Institute. VANCOUVER, BC – Over 1000 individuals and civil society organizations are signatories to a letter petitioning coalition universities to dissolve the mining, oil, and gas think-tank headquartered at UBC. Among the signatories are professors Glen Coulthard (UBC), David Suzuki (UBC, emeritus), Stephen Collis (SFU), Stephen Brown (U. of Ottawa), […]
President Gupta Accepts Racist Christmas Challenge
Every year at Christmas, a bunch of celebrities get together to ponder whether or not the predominantly Christian continent of Africa is aware that it is the annual celebration of Christ’s birth*. More accurately, they get together to question whether their stereotypical Africa – the hopeless, starving, disease-ridden continent of uneducated people suffering from malaria, […]
UBC-hosted mining institute a threat: an open communiqué for directly affected communities
Introduction Critical analysis of the limited information that’s been released over the last year and a half from the Canadian International Resources and Development Institute (CIRDI), hosted at UBC in coordination with Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the École Polytechnique de Montréal (EPDM), leads to some damning conclusions. CIRDI is a mining, oil, and gas […]
violence on the land, violence on our (student) bodies
this redwood tree is wearing a protective covering because it was literally beaten to a pulp. on our campus. by ubc students. the tree, which stands on the north side of the first nations longhouse, is long known to some students as “the punching tree”. one blogger even advised the world wide web that, “you […]
