Indigenous Migrants and Indigenous-Migrant Relations

This panel will discuss how migration and Indigeneity are connected, looking both at Indigenous peoples who migrate to other parts of the world and how newcomers think about Indigenous people and have an impact on questions of Indigenous sovereignty. Focusing on European settlers in different parts of the Americas in the 19th century, present-day international students in Canada, and Sherpa people from the Himalayas in different parts of North America, the panelists show how the lens of migration provides us with a way to go beyond the settler-Indigenous binary. The panelists share how migrants themselves, alongside the government and institutions, are part and parcel of settlement and dispossession. In the context of migration and Indigeneity, it is also important to consider the questions of how and why Indigenous peoples are becoming migrants.

Benjamin Bryce is an Assistant Professor of History at UBC who researches migration in the Americas. At UBC, he teaches courses on the Americas and global history. He is working on two SSHRC-funded projects. Healing the Nation examines the role of immigrant-run hospitals and mutual aid societies in providing healthcare in Buenos Aires. Grounds for Exclusion highlights the many ways that bureaucrats, politicians and nationalist agitators in Argentina developed both formal and informal methods to exclude a range of groups based in race, gender, health and ability. He is also a co-editor of the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association.

Pasang Yangjee Sherpa is an Assistant Professor of Lifeways in Indigenous Asia, jointly appointed to the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is a trained Sherpa anthropologist from Nepal. Her research, writing and pedagogy focuses on climate change and Indigeneity among Himalayan communities. She is currently involved in two collaborative projects. The first project, Transnational Sherpas, investigates what it means to be a Sherpa today. The second seeks just pathways for sustainable futures in the Anthropocene, along with geographers Ritodhi Chakraborty and Costanza Rampini, and includes critical reflections on how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can open up space for Indigenous peoples and local communities.

Ayaka Yoshimizu is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Asian Studies, and she also teach arts courses for the UBC-Ritsumeikan Academic Exchange Programs. Her research is concerned with transpacific migration and cultures, memories and senses, and performance ethnography. She teaches Japanese studies in Asian Studies, and Canadian and transpacific studies in the UBC-Rits Programs. Her position makes her curriculum development work uniquely multidisciplinary, as she constantly moves across national borders as she teaches two distinct audiences in the two programs. Her pedagogical projects are centred around decolonializing teaching and learning and promoting social justice in and beyond classroom.

Humanity has never been more mobile than it is today. Migration comes in many different shapes and forms, and it impacts those who move and those who stay put in multiple ways. Across roundtable and panel discussions, keynote talks and an edited book presentation, this Green College Leading Scholars Event Series adopts diverse multidisciplinary perspectives from cultural studies, medicine, history, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, political science and bioengineering to dissect and explore the meaning of fast-moving people in a fast-moving world and its implications for our personal and societal physical and mental well-being.

Series Conveners: Anna Blakney, Biomedical Engineering; Benjamin Bryce, History; Annie Ciernia, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; Megan Daniels, Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies; Friedrich Götz, Psychology; Manu Madhav, Biomedical Engineering; Matias Margulis, Public Policy and Global Affairs; Elise Stickles, English Language and Literatures; Daniel Vigo, Psychiatry, and Population and Public Health; Lydia Wytenbroek, Nursing; and Ayaka Yoshimizu, Asian Studies.