Week 11

It was great to read texts that specifically dealt with Canada and colonial struggles and racism. Both texts on Canada made me think of a geography class I took last semester on Latin America with Juanita Sundberg where we had a guest speaker tell stories of racism against illegal workers in Canada. The guest speaker told a story of an illegal Mexican worker who cut his finger while working and did not get any attention from his boss and did not go to the hospital even though he needed it. Some time later the boss got a much minor accident at work and got immediate medical attention. There was also a story of racism from the police against a Mexican illegal worker in Surrey. The point of the stories was to show that even though Canada is perceived as advanced and liberal, especially over the U.S, racism occurs in exactly the same way. The speaker asked the class where we thought these cases had occurred and the first answer was the U.S. Maybe because Canada is seen as being the opposite of the U.S.A in many respects, for example gun control and health care, I think this helps Canada be perceived as an open and liberal society. Also you see stories of police brutality against Afro-Americans in the U.S and almost none in Canada. This reputation of Canada helps bury the history of repression and violent acts against indigenous peoples that have been many since Europeans settled and evidently racism still exists today. Canada is no exception to racism.

The texts on Canada also made me think of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and how I was exposed to it. When I first came to Canada I was put in Totem Park, Humlesum house. The UBC website about the Totem Park residences says that the names “honor some of British Columbia’s Indigenous peoples”. From my experience living there I never saw a plaque saying why the residences had been named that way or anything showing the repression of Indigenous people in Canada. I remember thinking how this all seemed so superficial and how ridiculous it was that people thought that by naming some university residences after Indigenous peoples tribes would somehow make up for years of violent repression. It’s interesting to think about why this was my first reaction upon reading it. Maybe it’s the brief mention. Or maybe it’s the language used that says the names resemble “some” Indigenous people and there is no backstory as to why. From the beginning something just said to me that this was a ploy to bury history and show how advanced Canada has become, and that by creating a truth commission and “honoring” tribes in this manner would create a feeling that everything was good now and all bad feelings were in the past. This is similar to Sara Ahmed’s paper in which she says that the word diversity in organizations has become about image management, generating the “right image”. She specifically uses her experience from working with universities. Ahmed says that the appeal of diversity is about looking and feeling good. It is clearly a marketing appeal and it obscures inequalities. I liked the connection of diversity and marketing image in university as obscuring a rotten core with a shiny coat. I related this to my experience in UBC with finding residences named after Indigenous peoples tribes. It’s all so superficial and has no genuine intentions apart from bettering one’s image while also playing down the real issues.