Objectives and Goals

This project does not aspire to offer a singular and/or complete narrative account of the university’s history. Instead, this project challenges and supports the university to cultivate an academic environment where students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members are all empowered and encouraged to have difficult conversations about UVic’s emergence and enrichment through injustice, exploitation, and dispossession on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. How do we grapple with a situation where programs are funded through questionable means? Why does a road on campus commemorate a man who enslaved Black and Indigenous peoples and whose wealth contributed to the founding of this university? How did the university acquire its land holdings? What is the process and thinking behind making ethical decisions and determinations? These are questions that are indeed layered and difficult to answer. They are questions, however, that lead to conversations that the project strives to normalize and encourage. The project does not endeavour to intervene in conversations held within and between Indigenous Nations. Facing towards the university and university community, and with respect to land issues, we orient our research and work towards unpacking UVic’s entanglements with settler-colonial ideas, claims, and legal systems that rely on hard boundaries, exclusive claims, and private-property logics. As much as we anchor this project to the experiences on and alongside the lands currently occupied by the university, we strive to situate UVic within regional and global contexts, practices, systems, and experiences of racism, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.