The Public Humanities Hub – Okanagan (PHH-O) stands in solidarity with Black people around the world who have experienced historic, systemic, and ongoing police violence and brutality. We stand with those indirectly and directly impacted by recent violence against Indigenous, Black, and Peoples of Colour (IBPOC) communities. The PHH-O denounces the continued negative impacts of racism and systemic inequities faced by IBPOC and acknowledges the privileges others benefit from every day.
The PHH-O wants to acknowledge its connection to the ancestral and unceded territory of the Syilx and Okanagan peoples. We recognize their rightful claims to these lands since time immemorial that we occupy, live, and work on. The intersecting dynamics of violence, inequality, colonialism, racism, and privilege are systemic. The burden to address and fight against these dynamics have been disproportionally put on IBPOC peoples within the academe and among the publics. The violence may not be new, but neither is resistance to it.
As the PHH-O takes shape within and because of these diverse peoples and communities, we are committed to providing avenues to stand together against racism. The Hub stands in solidarity through research and community engaged projects that seek to mitigate communal gaps and offers representation of important initiatives by IBPOC and others to continue the fight against inequality, racism, and privilege. The PHH-O seeks to bolster community relations and connections by providing a platform to raise awareness and consciousness about the systems put in place that do not act for us all. By promoting research collectives and collaboration we hope to support and promote calls for justice to be heard and transformation to be realized.
We identify the following objectives within the Public Humanities Hub – Okanagan:
- Financial, human, and infrastructural resources to support and enhance IBPOC community members’ research and community engagement in the Okanagan;
- Grants and other forms of support for IBPOC undergraduate and graduate students to allocate financial resources to support IBPOC-led university and community initiatives;
- Promotion of research related to racial justice and to struggles against racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy in systemic, institutional, and everyday manifestations;
- Promotion of scholarship, teaching and creative work of IBPOC as foundational to feminist, queer, anti-racist and decolonial histories, knowledges, and futures;
These solidarities and objectives inform our work and intersectional approaches to social justice and ongoing public practices to which we belong.
In solidarity,
The Public Humanities Hub – Okanagan