Dr. Mimi Gellman, 2020-2021 Indigenous Teaching Fellow

I am writing this message as an offering to the Emily Carr Community. This past year has been like no other. We have survived a fire, numerous snowstorms and storms of the head and heart. We have engaged with each other and debated in hallways and stairwells and classrooms, in labs and in crits and we have learned about each other’s subjectivities and the ways in which members of our community have been diminished and oppressed. And then there was covid with its attendant isolation, fears and anxieties and precarity about the future. All of this has contributed to an intensity of emotion and affect the likes of which our generation has never before experienced. We are all coping with grief and loss and the uncertainty that comes with the unknown…with not knowing what kind of new world will emerge.

And here is the magnificent opportunity that awaits us…we have the possibility of envisioning a new paradigm, a new world, a new way of being and doing.

The recent petition penned by an anonymous group of Emily Carr students and alumna under the mantle of the Anti-Racist Initiative has called in many places for the Indigenization of Emily Carr. I believe in the inexorable advancement of Indigenization and have dedicated much of my research, my energies and my engagements at ECU towards achieving this ambition. In my considered opinion, the tone and spirit of the petition did not realize its intended objective. I invite you to consider a different approach. If Emily Carr University is truly sincere in realizing this goal of Indigenization and not merely paying lip service, we are obliged individually and collectively to embody and express Indigenous values and ideals as we work together, envision, and plan a good way forward. The first Indigenous tenets to consider are respect and reciprocity, respect for our mother the earth, respect for our other than human relations, respect towards one another and respect towards our elders. The next Indigenous value is hospitality. This means that we meet each other and engage with each other with openness, with a generosity of spirit, in a spirit of hospitality. As Indigenous peoples we accept and embrace difference within our own communities, and this includes those that disagree with us, have different habits or different world views. We believe in the strength and the importance of building community, and understand that we only survive and flourish when our whole community is flourishing. We learn from each other through modelling right action and observing those knowledge keepers who have gained expertise through years and years of doing. We honour our knowledge keepers.

And this leads me to ask, what kind of world do we want to build? How do we want to engage with each other? How do we include each other …even the quiet ones, even the fearful, the humble, even the ones with no words. What is your vision for the world that you want to create, for the school that you want to learn within, teach within, for the ways that you long for?

This new world does not begin after our needs are met it begins with the quality of our intention, the nature of our engagement and the field of vision within which all things reside and from which all things emerge. It will take great self reflexivity “from all of us” in order not to replicate the colonial strategy of divide and conquer. We cannot afford to be divisive and punitive. There is no time for this if we want to move forward in a good way and begin to achieve our goals, now.

Let us begin by extending kindness and compassion towards each other and by demonstrating the ethos that we are seeking. I send this to you because I believe in us, I believe in this place of learning and most of all I believe that together we can create an extraordinary place for us to grow and flourish as human beings. We CAN be the change.

With respect,
Mimi

Dr. Mimi Gellman
Associate Professor, Faculty of Culture +Community
emily carr university of art + design