The Power of a Single Story
On September 30th, members of the UBC community along with workplaces and schools across the country, will pause to recognize the historical and ongoing effects of the Canadian residential school system.
This annual day of commemoration known as Orange Shirt Day and, as of this year, Truth and Reconciliation Day was born out of one woman’s advocacy in telling her story as a Residential School Survivor. Phyllis Webstand was six-years-old when she left her home in the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation to attend a Mission school where she was stripped of her favourite orange t-shirt. This shirt reminds Webstand of “how [her] feelings didn’t matter, how no one cared and how [she] felt like [she] was worth nothing” in the school; yet Webstand felt it was important to speak out “so that others may benefit and understand, and maybe other survivors will feel comfortable enough to share their stories.” The colour orange has since come to symbolize a global movement towards hope and reconciliation under the guiding principle that Every Child Matters.
The history of Orange Shirt Day shows the power of a single story to spark conversations and incite change. At UBC-Vancouver on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm peoples, we cannot discuss or attend to Orange Shirt Day without also considering the experiences of current Indigenous students on campus.
Student Voices of the Present
This academic year, the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology’s Indigenous Initiatives team invites the UBC community to engage with student voices in the latest iteration of the What I Learned in Class Today project: Student Perspectives. After exploring Faculty Perspectives on Indigenous engagement, curriculum, and support, the WILICT team is returning with a film and article series examining stories from interviews conducted with students taking Indigenous-focused courses at UBC-Vancouver. From the original to reboot projects, WILICT has provided a space for Indigenous students to voice their shared experiences of tokenization and racism in UBC classrooms. It is also a key platform in deepening the conversation around classroom- and campus-climate to create a better learning environment for all.
Why This Project Is Important Now
With the hybrid online and in-person classroom environment of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the University-wide move to respond to the calls of the 2020 Indigenous Strategic Plan, it is critical that students, staff, faculty, and community members acknowledge the lived experiences of Indigenous students on campus. Denali YoungWolfe is a PhD student and WILICT participant who was adopted and raised in accordance with Nehiyaw and Saulteaux law by her family from Muskowekwan, Saskatchewan, Treaty 4 Territory. YoungWolfe foregrounds the ever-pressing need for University-wide commitment to Indigenous representation and wellbeing in this context of hybrid learning:
“The focus right now is overwhelmingly on learning how to navigate the online environment, how to do synchronous and asynchronous learning in a covid pandemic, and I think that marginalized people are marginal issues to the institution. As marginal issues, we only receive attention and resources when there’s a surplus. And right now, I fear that there is neither the social, political, or fiscal surplus that would lead UBC to value Indigenous experiences in the classroom, or Black, LGBTQIA+, disabled, or any other marginalized group … I want to be wrong, but I don’t believe right now that we’re heading into a space of abundance for recognition and change.”
YoungWolfe’s concern about the fiscal instability of many initiatives on campus suggests that the move towards reconciliation is an ongoing process of healing, not a one-time apology, that demands a profound re-evaluation of resources at an institutional and national level. To create a future of “abundance for recognition and change” every member of the University community—students, staff, and faculty alike—are being called to educate themselves by listening to and attending to the calls of Indigenous students on campus and in classroom environments.
Continuing the Conversation from the Original to Renewed Projects
This comment on the limited resources for marginal groups on campus echoes sentiments shared by student participants in the original What I Learned in Class Today: Aboriginal Issues in the Classroom project in 2007. Karrmen Crey and Amy Perreault created the interview-based project as undergraduates in the First Nations Studies Program (FNSP now FNIS) after recognizing that their problematic encounters in the classroom were not isolated events but a troubling trend common to Indigenous students at the institution. Crey and Perreault conducted interviews with students—and in the following year, with faculty and staff—to create a twenty-minute video entitled Student Speaks. This film was paired with discussion topics and facilitation guides to be used as an educational resource within departments and classroom environments in order to spark conversations about Indigenous student experiences at UBC. The WILICT project went on to inform various initiatives at UBC such as the 2009 Aboriginal Strategic Plan; it inspired similar projects to pop up at post-secondary institutions across Canada including Carleton University and Université du Québec; and it remains a critical archive of student experiences that shapes teaching practices and institutional policies to this day.
Conversations in Society Impact Campus Climate
A central takeaway from the original project as well as its new iteration is that events and conversations happening in society directly impact student experiences of classroom content and campus climate. The renewed project, What I Learned in Class Today: Educational Experiences and Institutional Responses to Indigenous Engagement in Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Classroom Climate at the University of British Columbia, explicitly explores this relationship between society and the UBC environment in its central research question:
How has the campus and classroom climate related to Indigenous topics changed since the original project debuted?
In 2018, Amy Perreault received a grant within her position at the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology’s Indigenous Initiatives department to examine this critical question of whether Indigenous community members are feeling the changes laid out in various strategic initiatives reflected in their lived experiences at UBC. In other words, Perreault set out to see whether shifts in public awareness signalled by the increased media coverage of Idle No More, nation-wide events for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission proceedings, the opening of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, and UBC’s strategic Indigenous initiatives have impacted the experiences of Indigenous people on campus.
Update on WILICT Faculty Perspectives
The first phase of the renewed project released in Fall 2020 explores this question from Faculty Perspectives through two twenty-minute films and a six-part article series. These visual and written materials have been screened in advisory and departmental meetings across campus and are being used as resources in facilitating conversations around decolonizing and Indigenizing classroom environments. Of the six-articles ranging on topics from positionality to knowledge gaps, anti-oppressive learning environments to holding conversations with care, readers are especially encouraged to engage with the Indigenous Student Support article. This piece was co-written with representatives from various Indigenous-focused organizations on campus to highlight student, staff, and faculty commentary on areas of support needed to improve Indigenous student experiences on campus.
Stay Tuned
Over the following months, Indigenous Initiatives will continue to highlight student voices, the voices that have been at the heart of the WILICT project since 2007, in the slow release of the article series. The series will address the following key themes:
- Knowledge gaps and a lack of Indigenous content outside of Indigenous Studies
- The ‘Indigenous student as expert’ trope
- Indigenous student advocacy and resistance in the classroom
- The relationship between silence & power
- People & place: learning locally and relationship building
- Campus-wide impact of Indigenous initiatives
It is important that we showcase firstly the degree to which Indigenous students feel supported and represented on campus as well as non-Indigenous students’ interpretations of Indigenous-focused curricula and classes. WILICT weaves these interrelated stories together not to draw conclusions or to provide how-to-guides for the road to reconciliation, but to incite conversation, questioning, unlearning, and a collective movement towards a campus environment welcoming to Indigenous peoples and their knowledges, languages, and perspectives.
This Blog article has been made possible through the collective effort, stories and shared experiences of many including WILICT participants, campus and community partners, and the CTLT Indigenous Initiatives team.
Carousel Image by Harishan Kobalasingam on Unsplash