Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre
presentation to the Board.
During the November 17, 2025 meeting of the Board’s Indigenous Engagement the committee received an update on the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, including its mandate, recent initiatives, and alignment with UBC’s Indigenous and institutional priorities. The presentation outlined future directions and highlighted opportunities for deeper engagement with Indigenous communities.
The following are my remarks as Chair of the committee and a summary of the presentation.
At the opening of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre on April 9, 2018 UBC officially apologized for this university’s complicity in the Indian Residential School system and its support of the colonial marginalization of First Nations.
A lot of the work behind the scenes that made this apology and the centre possible was accomplished by our retired colleague Linc Kesler. Linc was hired from Oregon State University in 2003 to take up the leadership of UBC’s then new First Nations Studies Program. In 2009 he became the Director of the First Nations House of Learning and senior advisor to the President. Working with the small group of First Nations faculty across the university Linc and colleagues, like Dr. Jo-ann Archibald from Education, sparked a transformation in how things are done at UBC.
Before I turn the floor over to our Provost, Gage Avril, who will introduce Johnny Mack, let me quote from the apology a portion that strikes me as particularly important.
“Universities bear part of the responsibility for this history, not only for having trained many of the policy makers 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. In years past, even after the signing of human rights declarations and ethics agreements that followed World War II, university professors conducted research on the residential schools that exploited their deplorable conditions without attempting to change them.
In modern times, the continuing failure to address this history has meant that the previous ways of thinking – or of not thinking – about the residential school system have remained largely intact. Failing to confront a heinous history, even if it is one that we did not cause, is to become complicit in its perpetuation. This is not a result that we, as a university, can accept.”
Executive Summary from Board documents.
The Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre (IRSHDC) at UBC addresses the colonial impacts of Residential Schools and other policies imposed by the Canadian government on Indigenous Peoples, and ensures that this history is acknowledged, examined, and understood within the UBC community. The Centre helps provide access to records and information for Survivors and Intergenerational Survivors of the Residential School system. We also work with partners at UBC and beyond to encourage dialogue about the Residential School system and the on-going repercussions of colonialism in Canada.
Professor Johnny Mack was appointed Academic Director at the IRSHDC for a three-year term effective May 1, 2025. With this transition in the Centre’s academic leadership, this presentation is an opportunity to brief the Board of Governors on IRSHDC’s mandate and portfolio, its alignment with UBC’s Indigenous Strategic Plan and the university’s refreshed Strategic Plan, as well as recent activities at the IRSHDC – including key projects from 2024 to now, opportunities to strengthen partnership with and support for the Indigenous communities while advancing the academic mission, and a look ahead at the Centre’s future priorities.
A copy of the presentation slides can be found here.
Following the presentation members of the Board committee asked a series of clarifying questions. I noted that having grown up in Prince Rupert I had heard many stories about the ‘TB’ hospital at Mill Bay, which was part of the Indian Hospital system. Professor Mack explained they were working with community groups to expand on the collection of stories related to these hospitals.
Professor Mack highlighted the Centre’s focus on survivance -not trauma- as a core principle.
Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry”. [Gerald] Vizenor makes the term, which is deliberately imprecise, the cornerstone of his analysis of contemporary Native American literature, culture and politics.