Research & Resources

Indigenous Initiatives has developed and collaborated on projects funded by various granting bodies at UBC (i.e. Equity Enhancement Fund, Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund, Centennial Projects Funds). We gratefully acknowledge the financial support contributed by these grants to our ongoing research and resource development.

The resources we develop and support are used in classrooms and other educational spaces to explore how knowledge gaps, social location and histories of place affect and inform learning. We are committed to collaborative, ethical, evidence-based, and reciprocal research and educational resource development informed through engagement with local Indigenous communities and scholars across different disciplines.

We utilize video and online platforms in many of our resources to make them accessible to a public audience. Please use and share the resources on this page; we only ask, when you do so, that you acknowledge the people and organizations who have contributed to and produced the work.

If you have an idea for a resource you would like to see developed, please contact us.

Online educational resources

Acknowledging Indigenous lands, rights, and peoples is a practice to inform where universities and institutions are situated. It is a starting point to understanding the long presence and histories of Indigenous peoples as well as our historical, social, and physical locations.

This resource was developed through a collaboration of non-Indigenous settlers who work and live on the traditional, unceded, lands of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking Musqueam people. It attempts to serve as a beginners guide to help better understand the importance of land acknowledgements and how to integrate them into teaching and learning practice, specific to UBC Point Grey campus.
Learn more >

Classrooms, especially classrooms at major institutions like UBC, are becoming increasingly diverse and require attention in order to have effective cross-cultural discussions. What I Learned in Class Today: Aboriginal Issues in the Classroom works to improve the conversations around politically and culturally sensitive issues in a classroom by asking: how does communication around identity, histories, power and privilege happen in a classroom, and how can it be better supported?

This project examines the classroom experiences of students, instructors, and administrators at UBC in order to make these problems visible, to better understand how difficulties arise, and to find ways for more professional and productive classroom discussions. The project clearly identified the complexities and challenges of classroom conversations involving contentious cross-cultural discussions and asks instructors and TA’s to reflect on their current teaching and think about ways that it supports a productive climate for all students; particularly when discussing Indigenous course content, lives, and perspectives.
Learn more >

Students enter university with differing levels of knowledge about Indigenous issues. This makes it difficult to have meaningful discussions on Aboriginal topics beyond an introductory level. Indigenous Foundations is a website project developed by the First Nations Studies Program. It provides an accessible starting point for instructors, researchers, and students in any discipline who want to learn more about Aboriginal cultures, politics, and histories.

The information presented is concise and easily digestible, while still conveying the depth and complexities of the topics. Indigenous Foundations incorporates learning tools such as video interviews and other multimedia outlets to create an engaging resource. Instructors draw on this resource to bridge prior knowledge gaps that might exist in their classes as well as build class activities, pre-reading assignments.
Learn more >

Time and Place at UBC: Our Histories and Relations documents UBC’s key historical moments with Aboriginal peoples, while locating these moments in broader contexts at institutional, provincial, and national levels (i.e., UBC, BC and Canada). Although the special focus of the timeline is on Aboriginal peoples, it is not only about them, nor is it only about the past. Rather, the timeline intends to speak to us all – Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples alike at UBC – to build a shared understanding of the specificities and complexity of the time and place that we share today.

Specifically, the timeline aims to:

  1. Develop our awareness of the history of this place at UBC, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people.
  2. Offer a historical lens through which we reflect on our relations at UBC by allowing us to embed ourselves in the multiple historical layers of this place.

The timeline is not a static and exhaustive list of historical events in Canada or of Aboriginal peoples, and it continues to be work in progress. We welcome your input and collaboration on the project.
Learn more >

The Canadian Parliament established the Berger Inquiry on March 21, 1974 to review plans to build an oil and gas pipeline down the Mackenzie Valley. This inquiry was commissioned by the Government of Canada to investigate the social, environmental, and economic impact of a proposed gas pipeline that would run through the Yukon and the Mackenzie River Valley of the Northwest Territories. This proposed pipeline became known as the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. The Berger Inquiry educational resource is an interactive new-media tool that offers learners hands-on experience examining the evidence to learn more about Indigenous rights, history, activism, consultation processes, economic development and resource management.
Learn more >

The Power of a Name is a film series that examines the contested history of naming practices at UBC’s first year student residence, Totem Park, and features stories of relationships between UBC and Indigenous communities. It encourages members of the university community to think critically about their relationships to the unceded lands of the Musqueam people on which we are privileged to study, work and live.
Learn more >

Where Are We in the World? is a series of short films developed to engage UBC students and the wider public with sites around the Lower Mainland shaped by histories of struggle and agency that are often ignored. The focus of this initiative is to provide a strong foundation to answer questions of “where” UBC and City of Vancouver are located. Two of the completed films in this series explore Vancouver’s Chinatown and the Komagata Maru Incident of 1914. The next piece, produced with the involvement of Musqueam youth, will explore Musqueam legal histories and relationships between Musqueam and UBC.
Learn more >