Hello, fellow FEELers!
We are returning a little more slowly this year… the summer months brought many challenges, not least the catastrophic drought and the wildfires which were felt by all of us in this place, in different ways.
The late September rain was very welcome, and had me (as a settler here) contemplating one of the principles from the Syilx Nation Siwɬkʷ Declaration, that tells us: “siwɬkʷ comes from the sky and the highest places yet it never willfully rises above anything. It will always take the lowest path in its humility, yet of all the elements, it is the most powerful.” This Water Declaration also clearly underlines the gross mismanagement of water by settlers in this place. Drought and wildfire are just two of this mismanagement’s many related consequences.
The FEELed Lab hopes that our research and gatherings can continue offering a welcoming environment to hold these very challenging realities. While the issues could not be more serious, the Lab chooses to look them in the eye via various invitations to step playfully, generously and slightly awkwardly (!) beyond our comfort zones to try something new, in community. Our gambit is that this might help us build the muscles needed to keep working through the tougher things, together.
Cooling Down , the theme of our Welcome Back Craft-a-strophe event on Wednesday 18 April, will be this year’s first crack at this kind of muscle-making. Challenge your thermal normativity with some scrappy poetry and button-making!
The Lab has been slowly unfurling for about two years now, and this fall we are excited to have both new and returning research projects energizing this space. In addition to the Cultivating Environmental Attention project (with Astrida, Natalie Forssman, Daisy Pullman and Haida Gaede) on place-based pedagogies, Astrida and Natalie, along with our latest team member Emma Carey and faculty collaborators Rachelle Hole, Matt Rader and Jenica Frisque, are eager to dig into our new SSHRC-funded project on enhancing access and inclusion at environmental humanities research labs (like ours!). Stay tuned for more project updates over the year. Gabrielle Legault’s collaborative research on Urban Indigenous Wellbeing is also going strong, and will be hosting a major international conference on syilx territories this month.
We were moreover delighted to help convene a family-oriented professional development day for staff and faculty of UBCO’s Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies last month, where Hailey Causton, 4th year student in the UBCO Bachelors of Nsyilxcn Language Fluency Degree, gave us an amazing language lesson! Learning some words and phrases beneath the towering trees, with birds and chipmunks adding their two cents, was an incredible experience.
Lucky for us, Rina Garcia Chua, who was a key organizer of our two Fire + Water / Water + Fire symposia, is returning this year as a FEELed Lab Research Associate. Alongside working with Anita Girvan on the E-Race-Sures project (please look up Anita’s work for more information!), we are excited to announce that Rina will be organizing a workshop next term on “Sustainable Mentorship in Writing.” This workshop will centre experiences of Indigenous, Black, person of colour community members rising to the challenge of mentoring and be mentored by others in their writing practices, even when their tanks are running on empty.
Speaking of filling up each others’ tanks, we are also so delighted that the FEELed Lab has become a space where researchers can come together in loose, low-stakes community to progress their own practices while being held by this place and all of its human and more-than-human inhabitants; please check out Sierra and Erin’s respective FEELed Notes to read more about thinking and writing at the FEELed Lab through the summer months. (It is truly wonderful to read how deeply their posts consider responsibility to Land as an active practice, not just an academic question.)
If your research supports the principles of the FEELed Lab and you would like to be part of this community too, you can find out more here. This opportunity is available to student, faculty and community researchers.
And we are also so lucky to have Dani back for another year as the FEELed Lab Administrator (which barely describes all Dani gives to the Lab). She will also be offering some Very Important Meetings throughout the year, connected to her MA research on Métis rest as resistance. Read more about these “very important” workshops, and find out more about the first one in November, here.
Finally, while all kinds of other ideas are still in progress, one thing can already be put into your calendars: our (can we call it customary?) winter warming gathering will once again be happening on Friday 1 December! Details of this Fringe Natures reboot are in development, but you can count on some kind of participatory antics as we once again light up the firepit and welcome the dark…
See you soon!
Love, Astrida
The FEELed lab 