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- Colonial Injustices and Current Realities: University of Victoria
As revered sites of power and knowledge, universities can address injustices.
For example, some universities have addressed Calls to Action in the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015). At UVic, responses have included:
Increased recruitment of Indigenous students, faculty, and staff
Physical changes including new Indigenous-centred and Indigenous-designed buildings
Structural changes like the creation of the Office of the Vice President Indigenous and various Indigenous programs, departments, or schools
Centering the protocols of local Indigenous nations
Universities can also address their complicity in the colonial injustices that created them
For example, Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) changed its name to address the role of its former namesake, Egerton Ryerson, in advocating the creation of residential schools. At least prior to the recent US presidential election, several institutions in that country were researching their entanglements with slavery and settler-colonial dispossession.
As for UVic, its many official and semi-official histories ignore the Indigenous nations on whose lands it stands. McGill Road still honours UVic's relationship with James McGill, a colonist whose financial contributions to the local institutions from which UVic emerged came from dispossessing Indigenous peoples; he also enslaved individual Black and Indigenous persons.
This pop-up exhibit asks questions about UVic's colonial foundations and the university's potential to address them.
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