Sm’oogyit, Smgigyet, Lik’agyigyet,
Sigidmana’ax. My name is Charles Menzies, I am a member of Gitxaała Nation and
a faculty member at UBC. I will be chairing today’s meeting in place
of committee Chair Celeste Haldane who is travelling today and unable to join
us by phone.
I would like to open the meeting
by acknowledging we are meeting on the traditional, ancestral and unceded
territory of the Musqueam People.
I look forward to the day when
such land acknowledgements reflect an actual decolonized world and trust that
some small part of the work we do today will bring us closer to that day.
UBC is built upon Indigenous
lands and a great deal of its research, teaching and learning, has been made
possible by that fact. UBC has been coming to the realization that
there is an important relationship to build and maintain with Indigenous
peoples in BC, Canada, and more globally. Shaping UBC’s Next Century,
the University’s strategic plan expresses the University’s commitments to this
relationship.
Canada, like other settler
nations, has had a difficult time coming to terms with its current colonial
practices and it’s colonial legacies. Universities, as centers of learning,
free thinking, and social transformation, must take their place in
participating in moving our societies forward. As Santa Ono noted in his
apology a very short while ago, acknowledging our institutional culpability in
the colonial process is a critical first step toward decolonization. The next
step is actually doing something to make it happen.
The Indigenous Strategic Plan
provides the framework through which the University will start to make things
happen.
