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Sam VanSchie
In a world with a vast spectrum of ideas and experiences, creating space for critical conversations is important to foster diversity. This is why the second Indigenous and Diversity Research Forum featured speakers whose work sharing minority views has found a place in an academic setting.
On Feb.12 and 13, some 200 students, faculty, staff and community members engaged in discussions about work currently being done here. Presenters ranged from undergraduate students to tenured professors and Indigenous elders, all speaking freely about the challenges they’ve encountered and the experience they have gathered working on diversity issues.
Geoff McKee, a biochemistry undergrad, is one of many students who rediscovered their Indigenous heritage through university. In his third year he joined he LE,NONET project on campus and through their resources became interested in ethics surrounding Indigenous populations, something he thinks all students should learn about.
“We need courses at an undergraduate level that address ethics in a culturally diverse perspective,” McKee said, noting that this could be one of the few places students learn about ethics that relate specifically to diversity issues. Some granting agencies offer guidelines, but they aren’t enforceable, according to McKee. “There remain significant gaps [in ethics] that can only be filled through appropriate communication between governing bodies and Aboriginal communities.”
Aboriginal elders like Skip Dick from the Songhees Nation stressed that ethics come from within, but strong teachers can guide students on a good course. Indeed, there are many inspiring faculty members that have made their careers working on diversity issues.
Christine Welsh, a Métis filmmaker, was hired in 1996 to teach in the Department of Women’s Studies, because the department saw her work documenting Native women’s lives as a form of feminist scholarship. This broadening of the definition of academic work is what several speakers said was necessary to use more culturally appropriate research methods.
For her work, Welsh has never qualified for academic funding, she said, because her work is outside of the traditional academic framework.
“I couldn’t come up with a list of questions a year and a half in advance, if I wanted to do a funding proposal,” explained Welsh. Instead, for her films including Finding Dawn and Women in the Shadows, Welsh relied on funding through the National Film Board of Canada and took terms off from teaching to do the filming because she didn’t qualify for course releases.
Even in the Faculty of Fine Arts, says film professor Maureen Bradley, people struggle to see how artistic work is also academic.
Like all scholars, artists in an academic setting need to create or perish. Bradley has directed over 40 short films, which she says all explicitly deal with diversity issues of sexuality, gender or class. Her main interest is how media construct identity.
“Growing up as a young queer woman in a working-class environment, I never saw myself portrayed on TV—let alone in a positive, respectful or even intelligent way,” she said. But through her work she changed that and in 1996 she was a writer/director on CBC’s Road Movies. “I believe I was the first person to come out as queer on a major national TV series in Canada, long before Ellen.”
“Art and literature fit into the definition of research as the creation of new knowledge,” Bradley explained. “They help us understand human experience.”
Both Bradley and Welsh believe this is where academic resources are best used to make a positive difference.
“There are some very real injustices that are affecting people’s lives here and now all around us,” Welsh said. “These are life and death issues, and if we don’t speak from the privileged position we can enjoy here at an institution like this . . . then who will speak? We have that obligation.”
Diversity forum video shared on line
Making academic information relevant and accessible to diverse communities was more than just the topic of several discussions at the Indigenous and Diversity Research Forum, it was in practice as the Virtual Learning Lodge hosted live-screening of the whole conference on their website.
This allowed North Island Indigenous communities, and anybody else who clicked on the site, to view the discussions from home.
UVic students also video recorded the entire conference. Their video will be posted on web.uvic.ca/vpac/diversity. The website for the Virtual Learning Lodge where future conferences will be streamed live is http://vll.myavalon.ca/.
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