Recently public comments by several University of Alberta administrators and faculty members have denounced awarding an honorary degree to Dr. David Suzuki.

Our colleagues are entitled to express their opinions. However, they do not represent the views of many of us who admire the lifetime of internationally respected environmental and science education work accomplished by Dr. Suzuki.

There is a telling silence in these recent public commentaries decrying this honorary degree. Missing is Dr. Suzuki’s vitally important human rights and anti-racist work. Nor is there any acknowledgment of Dr. Suzuki’s longstanding commitment to decolonizing Canada through his support of Indigenous peoples and his condemnation of their cultural genocide in the name of Canadian nation building.

Dr. Suzuki, a third-generation Japanese Canadian, experienced first-hand how the state can attempt to destroy racialized groups. In 1942, at six years of age, he was interned with his family for the duration of WWII along with 22,000 other Japanese Canadians – at the time, 90% of their population in Canada. Over the course of his life, Dr. Suzuki has demonstrated the remarkable resilience of our Japanese Canadian community and spoken out about the brutality of the WWII internment – what Dr. Suzuki calls “one of the shoddiest chapters in the tortuous history of democracy in North America.”

The scourge of racism continues to plague Canadian society. To honour Dr. David Suzuki is to celebrate his many achievements including his work as a public intellectual dedicated to anti-racist mentorship and education.

UofA President Turpin has supported the UofA honorary doctorate for Dr.Suzuki on the basis of academic freedom and the value of free intellectual debate: “Stifle controversy and you also stifle the pursuit of knowledge, the generation of ideas and the discovery of new truths,” Turpin said. “Take uncomfortable ideas, debate and conflict out of the university and its fundamental role in society disappears.”

Dr. Turpin also expands on the value of academic freedom and thinking beyond the limited confines of dominant discourse: “the university must give people the space and support they need to think independently without fear of external control or reprisal. Otherwise the constraint on the imagination and the intelligence will slow the speed of change and innovation, if not suppress it altogether. Our students will learn that conformity, rather than creativity and innovation, is the goal of learning and education.”

We celebrate the value of thinking beyond blinkered parochialism or the public relations protocols of Alberta’s oil elite.  Research tells us that diversity of thought and community contributes to creative innovation and change.

Likewise, imagine an Alberta where valuing our diversity of histories contributes to our intellectual life and the equitable distribution of faculty positions and resources.

Imagine aspiring to become a world that takes into account the lessons of Canadians like Dr. David Suzuki and his family in order to ensure the travesties of internment and residential schools are deeply understood and not repeated.

Imagine energy futures beyond our reliance on a single outmoded natural resource.

Imagine a Dean of Business or Engineering who champions diversity of thought and perspective beyond the bottom line.

That’s an Alberta we need to achieve.

At Edmonton City Hall, I go on strike for this March 8 morning, a kind of compromise with myself to not work. To sit among others to celebrate International Women’s Day. And my thoughts turn to yesterday at dawn –

Continue reading “vigilante city” →

https://storify.com/jwilliambao/jason-kenney-s-sketchy-summer-of-alberta-love

Belen Fernandez writes in “Orientalism with a surgical twist”:

For much of its contemporary history, Beirut has been characterised as the Paris of the Middle East, a cosmopolitan metropolis that misfortune has placed in the middle of a region otherwise hostile to the civilised pleasures of material excess, free-flowing alcohol and exposed female skin.

Of course, Beirut’s Parisian charm has tended to become less apparent during periods of mass sectarian slaughter. In the introduction to his seminal text Orientalism, the late Edward Said notes repercussions of civil conflict in Lebanon on the European consciousness:

“On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975-1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that ‘it had once seemed to belong to … the Orient of [18th- and 19th-century French Romantic writers] Chateaubriand and Nerval’. He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”

The terror attacks in Beirut, “Paris of the Middle East” and Paris, France – tragedies filled with laments for the dead and injured – inspire a predicatable response.

Edward’s Said wrote in his introduction

Beirut’s story is one of two suicide bombers. An explosion. A father and his young daughter are out for a walk.Adel Termos notices a second man approaching those who gathered after the first attack at the mosque a. And he acts. This man on the street throws himself on the second suicide bomber. He and his daughter die of course but dozens of other potential victims survive. The story barely surfaces and disappears with the name and number of the victims: 43 anonymous bodies in Beirut dead in the street and over two hundred wounded. But Beirut is so far away on the margins of the orient in “Lebanon, a small Mediterranean country with a history of civil war, [which] has seen deadly spillovers from the Syrian conflict.”

In Paris, three times as many people die and many are wounded in a meticulously executed multiple-site series of attacks. And there is unending international attention to this story. We are appalled over and over and over again as the maps fill up with explosive stars of red identifying the Cambodian cafe, the stadium, the concert stage, the street….

But the wreckage of these two narratives turn on who we recognize as deserving of elegies and our attention. Paris fills us with the romance of where we may have been, European romance and the short-cropped hair of Jean Seberg for those of us who remember, the streets of beloved museums and cafes. Simone de Beauvoir’s cigarette and the eye of Jean Paul Sartre. A bridge of love locks. A photograph of my mother in 1956, bleached blond hair, a beauty, standing in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Over the years, Paris remains the cobblestone destination honeymoon destination.

We don’t think about the suburbs of alienated youth, the police actions, the racist legacy of Le Pen and the father/daughter’s inheritance, the prohibition of Muslim dress for women. The will to bomb the Middle East. None of this justifies the attacks. But one of the everyday pivots of life in the city is inequality and non-fraternity along racial grounds.

Last week, I saw the opera Air India [Redacted] with a libretto based on Renee Saklikar’s brilliant poetry collection The Children of Air India (Nightwood, 2013). You can listen to her interview about the collaboration here.

Our new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks to the public in the aftermath of this catastrophe in measured tones. None of the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament patriarch who would have us ramping up military action. . Thank you for your measured commentary.

“I often side with the Palestinians because of all the hardship they are facing and because nothing is being re-built over there,” said Clyde River Mayor Jerry Natanine. And he mused about the NDP drumming him out of his candidacy: “[it] turns out whatever was in my social media was questionable, and didn’t fall well with the headquarters.”

The conversation about the marginalization of those candidates who criticize Israel and identify with Palestine sounds with the passions of diverse voices but only some of them count. Some are silenced and deemed irrelevant in the urgent sluice called “getting elected.”

To some Canadians the Palestinian issues register as “ours” versus “theirs”. To say this is here and that is (t)here is difficult if you are interconnected with familial, historical, religious, or regional ties both here and (t)here – the threads trace the rich histories of our lives. This conversation about whether the issue resonates with a Canadian voter invites us to think through ethnicity, identity, and racialization – and empathy. And we must  think through “all my relations” – an Indigenous concept that informs Mayor Natanine’s philosophy about Palestine. To decide to prioritize issues relevant to “here” in an election year is to cut off and exile those with strong ties to “here” as well as a particular elsewhere brought close through actual relations, blood or adopted, or through the imagined relations of knowledge, analysis and empathy.

Where there is no “diversity with equity” the shadow of racism falls. And we must speak out.

You don’t slice and dice justice in the interests of expediency. Why the silence on this ongoing purge of NDPs who have a conscience about Palestine. Not an important election issue? Tell that to the Muslim and Arab Canadians who have been exiled and demonized for the past decade and beyond. Or to anyone who works in solidarity with Indigenous issues and identifies with the Palestinians. Tell that to those concerned about Canada’s extremist foreign policy and uncritical support of Netanyahu’s Israel. Harper just bought Israeli Iron Dome missiles for Canada that were test driven in Gaza massacres last summer. Would a different government order more? 

Visiting my beautiful 86-year-old ailing mother a few days ago, she reminded me why we must speak out: “I gave birth to my voice in giving birth to you,” she said. And it is true. My birthdate in 1951 meant I grew up in an era informed by the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements where change informed actions. The ongoing efforts of the Women’s Liberation Movement made it possible for some women to struggle to speak out about injustice. And over the decades, it is clear that only some women benefitted from this noisy conversation. Many Indigenous peoples have been left behind as the 2012 report on NunavutHuman Development Index indicates.

Jerry Natanine’s words should be our own: “I often side with the Palestinians because of all the hardship they are facing and because nothing is being re-built over there.” Translate his sentence and you find yourself writing about “(t)here.”

— for a look at the telling 2012 Human Development Index report on Nunavut, look here: http://www.csls.ca/reports/csls2012-02.pdf

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/nunavut-ranks-below-estonia-on-human-development-index-1.1157776