From the Provost's desk

A message from Ananya Mukherjee Reed, Provost and Vice-President, Academic, UBC Okanagan

Dear colleagues,

As I write to you today, the devastating discoveries of the unmarked graves near the sites of former residential schools that began in Kamloops in May and have continued throughout the country weigh heavily on our minds. We know that many new discoveries are forthcoming. We know that this news has caused grief, anger and sadness for many in the UBC community. As stated in UBC’s official statement, “universities, including UBC, bear part of the responsibility for this history, not only for having trained many of the policymakers and administrators who operated the residential school system, and doing so little to address the exclusion from higher education that the schools so effectively created, but also for tacitly accepting the silence surrounding it.” Following the 94 Calls to Action of the TRC, UBC’s Indigenous Strategic Plan, UBC Okanagan’s Declaration of Truth and Reconciliation Commitments and with the guidance of our Indigenous Elders and the Indigenous members of the UBC community, we must move with the determination to create a different present and future.

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