2014

Eakin Lecture -  Discussing Indigenous Agency
31 March  2014

Reparatory Justice, Human Rights, and Indigenous Feminisms by Professor Cheryl Suzack
Ruti Teitel’s important work Transitional Justice argues that “reparatory justice” as a form of redress within transitional justice movements obligates the state to balance a competing set of interests in redressing victims of state wrongs. Reparations, for Teitel, are both rituals of incorporation and social acknowledgements of wrongdoing, required to restore to the victim what has been taken from that person, a restoration that works at all levels of the social order: identity, status, material wealth, reputation, and public acknowledgement. Suzack argued that the ‘rituals of reparation’ that Teitel advances are complicated by their enactment in Western states that have not undergone regime change. Suzack argued that the rituals of reparation require the person or community who has suffered the loss to determine the form of reparation most appropriate to the harm inflicted. Suzack will suggest that Indigenous women’s activism shows this requirement. To illustrate this argument, Suzack focused on three case studies of Indigenous resistance movements in Canada that call into question the ideals of reparatory justice: the Sahtu Dene’s efforts to restore land polluted through uranium mining, Bella Bella resistance to the Northern Gateway Project, and Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Of Guardian and Wards: Tribal Sovereignty and the Limits of Legal Pluralism by Professor N. Bruce Duthu, Samson Occom Professor and Chair of Native American Studies, Dartmouth College, enrolled tribal member, United Houma Nation of Louisiana
The “peculiarization” of American Indians throughout large swaths of American history involved the recognition of social and cultural elements within tribal societies that served to justify, in the minds of the dominant society, the marginalization and suppression of Indian tribes.  This talk will considered how this strategy of peculiarization morphed from an ideological conceit into an instrumentality of law that became the underpinning for a radicalized plenary federal power and allowed the national government to empire at will over tribal nations and Indian people.  In particular, Duthu examined  how the US Supreme Court employed legal concepts like incorporation and dependency over the years to inhibit, if not totally suppress, the ethos of legal pluralism that characterized formative relations with Indian nations in the early American period.

Watch the video here.
View the photos here.

American Writers in Montreal: Reading and Discussion of Poetry and Prose
14 April 2014

Featured work from authors Cam Terwilliger (Yet Wilderness Grew in My Heart) and Dan Albergotti (Millennial Teeth).  These readings were followed by the launch of Canadian Content, the Canadian Studies Arts Undergraduate Student's journal. 

Global Excellence, Local Access: Opportunities and Challenges for the Public University in the 21st Century
April 16, 2014, California, USA

A conversation between former McGill Principal Emerita Heather Munroe-Blum and UC Berkeley Chancellor Emeritus Robert J. Birgeneau.

You can view video of the event here.

The Urban Night:  Issues of culture, security and inclusion - An interdisciplinary colloquium
La nuit urbaine:  culture, sécurité, inclusion - Un colloque interdisciplinaire

7 – 8 août, 2014, 10h à 17h  - August 7-8, 2014, 10 am to 5 pm, Montreal

The urban night has emerged recently as the object of rich, interdisciplinary scholarship.  At the same time, city governments, first in Europe but increasingly in the Americas, have established commissions of inquiry into night-time cultures or engaged in broad civic consultations over the appropriate frameworks for regulating night-time activity.  This is part of a broader tendency towards seeing differentiation in cities not simply in terms of their spatial divisions, but in relation to the occupation of municipal space by different populations at different times.

This symposium broughts together historians, city officials, urbanists, archivists and scholars of culture, for an interdisciplinary and international discussion of the urban night.

You can view photos of the colloquium here.

The MISC Celebrates its 20th Anniversary. "Canada Remix: A Public Symposium"
September 23, 2014, 1:30 p.m.

The MISC turned 20 this year, and we celebrated in style!

We were joined by old and new friends, and an exciting series of guests: Dominique Anglade, Bertrand Cesvet, John Ibbitson, Ken Lum, Naheed Nenshi (via Skype), André Pratte, the Honourable Bob Rae, Mary Simon and Nora Young, with moderators Antonia Maioni and Kenneth Whyte.

You can view video here.

You can view photos here.

The 2014 Cundill Lecture, by Anne Applebaum. "True Believers? the Nature of Collaboration and Opposition in Communist Regimes"
October 8, 2014, 5 p.m.

Photos can be viewed here.

The 2014 J.r. Mallory Lecture, by Dr. Cindy Blackstock. Reconciliation - the Children's Version
October 15, 2014, 5 p.m.

With each generation comes a chance to create a Canada worthy of all our children's dreams. This presentation showed how children and young people are leading the movement for culturally based equity for First Nations children and their families and uplifting the country in the process.

A member of the Gitskans Nastion, Dr. Blackstock has worked in the field of child and family services for over 20 years. Key interests include exploring the over-representation of Aboriginal children in child welfare, structural drivers of child maltreatment in First Nations communities, human rights, and the role of the voluntary sector in expanding the range of cuturally and community-based reponses to child maltreatment.

Photos can be viewed here.

A Montreal Launch in Celebration of Canadian Authors
November 4, 2014. 4 p.m.

Gordon Darroch, Michael Darroch, Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail, and Janine Marchessault spoke about their research and the challenges that shaped their books.

Polar Winds, by Danielle Metcalfe- Chenail, explores the history of air travel in the North, from the Klondike Gold Rush through to the end of the twentieth century. It presents a unique history told through the experiences of northerners on the ground and in the sky. Michael Darroch's Cartographies of Place, engages with different historical and contemporary currents in urban studies as the means for discerning the expressive nature of city spaces around the world. Situating early twentieth-century Canada within international historical population studies, the essays in Gordon Darroch's The Dawn of Canada’s Century provide new ways to understand individuals' lives and connect them to larger structural changes.

Photos can be viewed here.

The Fall 2014 Eakin Lecture, by Professor Michael Burgess, That More Perfect Union: Federalism and the Anti-Federalists in the USA, Canada and the European Union
December 2, 2014, 5 p.m.

Professor Burgess is a professor of political science and Director of the Centre for Federal Studies at the University of Kent. His original research and high-impact publications have earned him a national and international reputation as an expert on federalism, and a leading scholar in the area of comparative federalism and federal theory and practice. His most recent book, In Search of the Federal Spirit: New Theoretical and Empirical Perspective in Comparative Federalism, was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press and has since become a key publicationin the study of federalism.

Photos can be viewed here.

The 2014 Fulbright Lecture Counting on Care: Canada's Challenge in Reporting and Tracking Aboriginal Health Care, by Dr. Margaret P. Moss & MISC Indeigenous Studies undergraduate program launch

December 10, 2014.

View photos here.