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Date: 2015-06-14 20:10 (UTC)
recessional: a photo image of feet in sparkly red shoes (0)
From: [personal profile] recessional
"Little Britain" ≠ so much the UK now as (if you look at the downtown architecture, the Empress, etc) "little Britain of 1900". It's also undergoing a shift into a more modern gourmand thing.

BC has a very particular history with First Peoples that has a LOT to do with most of the province being unsuitable for mega-farming but hugely in demand for the fur, fishery and timber trades all the way up to the middle of the last century. One of the things that means is that people intermarried a lot more, and settled in Large Groups of White People a lot less (and even when we did the latter, it tended to be in cities: cf Vancouver, Victoria, etc): it was more "fort or timber camp or cannery or mine of white people in interaction and intermingling with surrounding FN peoples". We were also one of the much later provinces even settled at all, which means by the time we were getting things like institutions of higher learning and museums and such (even UBC is just this year a hundred years old, and UVic was founded in 1963) there was less (not no, BY ANY MEANS, but as compared to much of the rest of the country LESS) entrenched actively racist/eugenicist mindset in those institutions etc etc.

We were a frontier a lot more recently, too. I mean, the province's first Governor was black and his wife was FN. You wouldn't KNOW this unless you looked it up, because subsequent generations CLEARED THEIR THROATS and sort of obscured this, but we were the kind of frontier society where that kind of thing COULD happen less than a hundred and fifty years ago; over on the eastern sides of the country, the last time that kind of frontier existed was in the 1700s.

Which means our universities do things like acknowledge traditional land ownership as a ceremonial matter of course, as much because it's What's Done as any active ideology*: like, the police society thing to do at any university graduation ceremony is invite an Elder or other representative of the nation whose land the university is on to open the ceremony etc.

When you get up to where I grew up, which is basically the most northerly imperialism-as-major-settled-agriculture ever got, it's much more similar to the models of the rest of Canada and some parts of the states: big clumps of white settlement, reserves way out of town on land nobody else wanted, etc. (I went back six years after I'd left and discovered that there were actual FN support services IN TOWN now, and it was a Huge Step.)

. . . .AND THIS HAS BEEN YOUR DROP IN EDUCATIONAL MOMENT, hi, I did my degree in Vic and if I have my choice I will probably settle there someday.

*do not take any of this as me saying that the BC Coast does not have racism and specifically anti-Aboriginal-even-more-than-everything-else racism problems up the wazoo, because I'm NOT; I'm just saying, our context is different in these ways for these reasons and it really IS way different from other places in Canada and the US.

ETA: Effectively - I think my province has a SHITLOAD of work to do on this topic. And then I go to any other province [can't speak to the Territories] or to the US and while I STILL think my province has all that work to do, I am still going OH GOD I WANT TO GO HOME.
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