Confronting Colonialism and Racism in the Post-Pandemic City: Lessons for Educators

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused another wave of impacts on the health and well-being of Indigenous lands and people in Canada, in cities as elsewhere. How can cities address the harms of erasure and exclusion that have been embedded into their systems, stories and spaces? Drawing on her experiences as a Métis-Cree filmmaker, community planner, and educator in Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories (aka Vancouver), Kamala Todd shares her perspectives and learnings about truth-telling and building healthy relationships in order to transform how people understand, care for, and live on the (urbanized) land. And that raises another question: How can university educators support these conversations and efforts?

Kamala Todd is a Métis-Cree mother, community planner, filmmaker, and educator. She has a Masters degree in urban Geography from UBC. Kamala was the City of Vancouver’s first Indigenous Arts and Culture Planner and was also the City's Aboriginal Social Planner for several years. She is currently adjunct professor at UBC and SFU. This year, her SFU courses were Storyscapes: Decolonizing the city through arts and culture and Indigenous City: Story, teachings, and practise in decolonizing the city. Kamala's media production company is Indigenous City Media, where she writes, directs, and edits. Her film credits include Welcome to Our Homelands, Indigenous Plant Diva, Cedar and Bamboo, RELAW: Living Indigenous Laws, and Sharing our Stories: the Vancouver Dialogues Project. Kamala also writes for television, including Nehiyawetan and Coyote Science (APTN).

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Building Worlds in Uncertain Times: Power, Culture, Pedagogy: Recent events have rocked the ways in which we—as thinkers, creators, educators, humans—move through the world, interact and communicate with others, and envision a sustainable and just future. In response to the uncertainties wrought by evolving relationships with our cities and geographies, climate change, the pandemic, and global calls for racial justice, the 2019-2021 Green College Leading Scholars seek to think together how we understand and represent our lived environments and how to build (toward) a world that is both more equitable and less destructive. We invite you to rethink—with and against us—the relation between arts and space, structures of power, waste societies, pedagogical practices, and what it means to inhabit the world.

Learn more about the 2019-21 cohort of Leading Scholars, including individual biographies, here: https://greencollege.ubc.ca/leading-scholars-2019-21

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