Indigenous Women Weaving Resistance and Memory - from Canada to Colombia
Jill Harris (Snumithiya) and Pilar Riano-Alcala
January 19th 12:30 -2:00 pm.
First Nations House of Learning UBC
Coffee and tea will be served. Feel free to bring your own lunch.
Jill Harris (Snumithiya) is an elder of the Penelakut First Nation, British Columbia. She was one of the 'Women of Courage', a Kairos international delegation of women leaders from Indigenous, migrant justice and gender justice groups that recently met with women’s and Indigenous groups in Colombia. Jill participated in the Women and People's Summit of the Americas against Militarization, which included a large protest in front of one of the new US ‘bases’ in Colombia. A member of the Women's Interchurch Council of Canada's national governing board, she is also a Family Visitor with the InterTribal Health Authority's Maternal Child Health Program and works in her own community on Penelakut Island. She is a grandmother of six and an extension student with the Vancouver School of Theology in the Masters of Divinity Program.
Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, PhD in Anthropology from UBC (2000), is an associate professor at the School of Social Work and Faculty Fellow at the Liu Institute for Global Issues. Her research interests include the lived experience of violence, displacement and exile, the politics and practices of memory in societies divided by armed conflict and local strategies of social reconstruction and repair. Interested in the exercise of public pedagogy and the practice of research as collaborative process of knowledge construction, she also explores the development of conceptual and methodological approaches for participatory and community based research. Pilar is a member of the Colombian Historical Memory Commission and was the Special Rapporteur for the Commission’s recent report on a massacre specifically aimed at Indigenous women. She will discuss how the survivors resisted and fought for justice, and how this official report opened space for the community's agenda to return to their land that they were forced to flee and in their search for justice.
This event is co-sponsored by the Interfaith Institute for Justice, Peace and Social Movements SFU, the Transitional Justice Network based at the Liu Institute at UBC,, and the Centre for Race, Autobiography, Gender and Age (RAGA) at UBC.
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