Our Story

We are a group of faculty and librarians, students, and staff who are committed to emergent, transdisciplinary, and relational research focusing on historical injustice, particularly in relation to settler colonialism. Through a 2019 UVic Strategic Framework Impact Grant, “Historical Injustices and Current Realities,” we imagined our deeply inter- and multidisciplinary group as a kind of research umbrella structure. At the same time we sought understanding and common direction by meeting regularly, creating our own workshops utilizing varying discussion frameworks, and learning about each other and about our respective research, positionalities, and commitments. Our approach to collaboration prioritized building relationships of trust, respect, and reciprocity. We reserved time at the start of our meetings to share food and talk casually. From the start, we discussed and navigated the messiness and complexities of relationships and kinds of belonging, acknowledging the importance of not fleeing from discomfort in difficult work and conversations.

At a pivotal early meeting, we started to reimagine our collective not as a research umbrella for diverse individual projects but as a more integrated team focusing on historical injustices and historical justice in the local context of Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. We reflected on the limitations of routinized university and other institutional approaches to engaging historical injustice and historical justice in relation to these territories, asking, “Where do we go from here? How can we do better? How does this project need to change if we are to engage with local Indigenous communities?”

Since this time, we have been meeting with other UVic colleagues to learn from/with them and consulting and collaborating with other offices and entities including the Office of the Vice President Indigenous and UVic Libraries and Archives.

This digital platform is addressed to the UVic community and to anyone interested in historical justice in higher-education settings. It will inform you about some of our core activities and research findings. We hope to keep expanding the resources available here so that we can all better understand the layered history of UVic and to help those who actively want to do their own work in supporting continued education for past, current, and future members of the university community. Our aim in all of this is to work towards better collective learning and better collective practice in engaging the responsibilities of truth, reconciliation, and accountability in relation to UVic.