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Also, don't forget to check out this year's editorials, and participate in our interactive activities!
1:30 - 2:45 The Lost & Found project began as a group exhibition featuring the work of Judy Chartrand, Wayde Compton and Haruko Okano. Through an artistic residency with Powell Street Festival Society and Access Artist Run Centre, they were asked to consider lost & forgotten histories that both linger & disappear within the context of the DTES. Using those same themes, Powell Street Festival & UTV have collaborated on this panel workshop which will hear dialogue and analysis around the DTES as a place of intersecting & overlapping social & cultural histories, specifically of the Japanese Canadian, African Canadian and First Nations communities. Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project The Hogan's Alley Memorial is dedicated to memorializing Vancouver’s historic black neighbourhood and the wider Vancouver black experience. For this workshop, member Karina Vernon will represent HAMP. Karina is finishing her Ph.D in English at UVIC (her dissertation focuses on black writers on the Canadian prairies) and she is co-founder and editor of Commodore Books, the first and only black literary press in Western Canada. Grace Eeiko Thomson Grace Eiko Thomson spent her earliest childhood in Vancouver until her family was interned to the interior of BC in 1942. She has a Masters degree in Social History of Art, from the University of Leeds, and has taught and curated art for more than twenty years. Between 1999 and 2002 she was the Executive Director of the Japanese Canadian National Museum, curating three exhibitions relating to the history of Japanese Canadians. She is currently President of the National Association of Japanese Canadians. Kamala Todd Kamala Todd is a Metis-Cree/German writer, filmmaker, community planner, and mother who has a Masters degree in Urban Geography and worked as the Aboriginal Social Planner for the City of Vancouver 2000-2006. She is creator and director of Storyscapes, a community arts project that creates opportunities for Aboriginal people to tell their stories. In 2006 she was the recipient of the Greater Vancouver Urban Aboriginal Strategy Award for Community Leadership. She is also creator and director of Indigenous City—a multimedia project that affirms the important place of Aboriginal people in the city. Kamala has written for such publications as brunt, Mix, Vancouver Sun, Redwire, and Society and Space. Cease Wyss T'Uty'Tanat-Cease Wyss is from the Squamish village of Ela7an, in North Vancouver. She has been creating Media Art for close to fifteen years, and has dedicated many years to Outreach Training with many communities throughout BC. She currently resides in the village of Sunaq', with her daughter Senaqwila, who is an art student entering Windermere High School’s Athena Arts program. She has resided in the downtown eastside for a number of years, and continues to learn more about its rich history, with the many communities who have co-existed over the past century together. Facilitator: Cease Wyss Sponsored by...
Land & Freedom: How People’s Movements Fight For Political & Cultural Autonomy 3:00-4:00 Olmeca Olmeca is a Xicano hip hop MC & activist from Los Angeles. For this workshop, he will discuss Xicano nationalism as a prevalent tool of resistance in the earlier stages of Xicano struggle and will highlight the Zapatista movement and its call Ya Basta! Read his full bio here. Khaled Barakat Khaled is a Palestinian community activist who was born in Rammallah. He is the editor of Al-Shorouq, a monthly newspaper that serves the Arab-Canadian community in B.C. He is also a member of Al-Awda-Palestine Right to Return Coalition. Al-Awda is a broad-based, non-partisan, democratic, and charitable organization of grassroots activists committed to comprehensive public education on the rights of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands of origin, and to full restitution of all their confiscated and destroyed property in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International law and the numerous United Nations Resolutions upholding such rights. Kanahus Pellkey (Native Youth Movement- Secwepemc) Kanahus Pellkey, a Secwepemc and Ktnuxa Warrior has been captured and imprisoned several times by the kkkanadian government for fighting for her homeland and her Peoples rights for Land and Freedom. Native Youth Movement is a Warriors Society and Movement to take back Indian land from Alaska to Argentina. Secwepemc NYM is currently on a warpath against Sun Peaks Resort and the 2010 Winter Olympics, which will destroy even more untouched alpine mountains and the heart of our cultural and physical existence: WATER. "Canada is only a free country to those canadians that have occupied and invaded Indian Territories and Nations, while Indian Peoples continue to die, bleed and get thrown in jail fighting for our Freedom. Tourism or Terrorism? Canadians or Invaders? Freedom on the backs of who? We will Never Surrender!! The Indian Wars are Not Over. See you in 2010! Riot 2010 -- BC is not for sale!" Facilitator: Claudia Medina No-One is Illegal! New World Borders, Immigration Reform & The Struggle of Migrant Workers 4:15 - 5:30 Cecily Nicholson Cecily Nicholson is a member of the No One Is Illegal and Vancouver Status of Women Collectives. She is a writer and facilitator as well as student, researcher and instructor with Women and Gender Studies at UBC. Naava Smolash Naava Smolash is a member of No One Is Illegal-Vancouver, a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University examining racialization in Canada's national newspapers, and a realist. She will be exploring how media coverage of "national security" in the post 9/11 climate incites and perpetuates systems of racism and nationalism. Rosalinda Guillen A widely recognized farm worker and rural justice leader, Guillen is the oldest of eight children who was born in Texas. In 1960, her family migrated to LaConner Washington where she began working in the fields of Skagit County at the age of ten. In 1995 she built a farm worker organization and directed a national boycott and worker organizing campaign that won the first-ever union contract for farm workers in Washington State. Guillén has worked in the U.S. labor movement with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers of America and has represented farm workers at the local, State, National and International levels. She is the Executive Director of De Comunidad a Comunidad, an organization whose central projects are the Food Justice Alliance (developing collaborative strategies that unite family farmers and farm workers in creating self sustaining food systems with social equity) and the Águila del Norte Immigrant Justice Project, which has been at the forefront of opposing the MinutemanProject, supporting
immigrant families impacted by unjust immigration laws in the U.S., and calling attention to the regional Detention Center in Tacoma that can be rightly called a modern day legal concentration camp. SIiKLAB-British Columbia Formed in 1995, SIKLAB-BC fights for the rights and welfare of migrant workers in Canada and the Philippines and offers education, support and advocacy, and leadership training for their members (in order to help Filipino migrant workers and their families achieve genuine development in Canada).SIKLAB-BC is a part of SIKLAB-Canada, a national alliance of Filipino migrant workers' organizations that carry several political campaigns including the campaign to "Scrap the Live-in Caregiver Program" and the campaign for a "Moratorium on the Deportation of Filipino Live-in Caregivers from Canada". They will be sharing the group's understanding of the global situation of forced migration from countries like the Philippines and their particular experience as a community with the Live-in Caregiver Program - Canada's blueprint for its Temporary Foreign Workers' Program. Facilitator: Cecily Nicholson Repressive Regimes & Media Cheerleaders: The Silencing of Journalists, Activists & Dissidents 5:45-7:00 Philippines-canada Task Force On Human Rights A grassroots national coalition formed in 2006 in response to the Filipino people's growing calls for support and solidarity in the face of intensifying state repression. Since 2001, over 850 cases of extra-judicial killings and 200 cases of forced disappearances have been documented. Under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's counter- insurgency program (Operation Freedom Watch) the people have been living under a reign of state terror. The PCTFHR conducted a fact-finding mission on the human rights situation in the Philippines in November 2006. They also sent observers to the Permanent People’s Tribunal Second Session on the Philippines, which tried and found guilty the Arroyo regime and the US government of serious human rights violations and crimes against humanity for the extra-judicial killings, mainly perpetrated by government intelligence and military forces. The group continues to lobby Canadian parliamentarians to pressure the Philippine government to respect international human rights covenants and agreements and to review Canadian foreign policy and aid. Raul Gatica A Mixteco activist, grassroots organizer, professor, and writer has dedicated his life to fight for the rights of Indigenous peoples, recuperation of lands, distribution of water, constructions of roads, preservation of forests, building of schools, clinics, the rights of women and conflict resolution in his homeland of Oaxaca, Mexico and now continues his work here in Canada. National Voices of Burma Iinitiative Deanna Scott spent a year in Thailand, working with migrants and refugees in schools based in Mae Sot. She did participatory action research on empowerment techniques among children though art. Voices of Burma is a national collective aimed at creating awareness about various issues in Burma through art created by children and adult migrants and refugees. The money raised through donations and the purchase of art goes to educational initiatives along the Thai-Burma border, the individual artists and the Migrant Children's Art Project. Gibril Koroma Originally from Sierra Leone in West Africa Koroma came to Canada in 2000 after working for almost 20 years as a newspaper and magazine editor in Sierra Leone and Ghana. He's worked for Reporters Sans Frontieres of France as their correspondent in Sierra Leone and contributed to the BBC French Service and Radio France Internationale. In addition to journalism, Gibril also worked as a volunteer for Amnesty International while living and working in Ghana. He is editor and publisher of Afri-Can Magazine (a new magazine targeted at African-Canadians) and an online newspaper for Sierra Leoneans in the diaspora called the Patriotic Vanguard. Facilitator: Claudia Medina |
