Transformers, 2007 – Tania Willard, Secwepémc and settler. Image used with permission from artist.
GEOG 346B – Geographies of Urban Indigeneity
Taught by Michael Fabris
This upper level course is open to all UBC students and can be applied to the Urban Studies Major upper level requirements.
This course examines the geographies of urban Indigenous communities.
While the course focuses on Urban Indigeneity within Canadian cities, we will also look at examples of urban Indigenous experience in other settler colonial contexts, such as the US and New Zealand/Aotearoa.
Course themes and topics include: the role of Canadian policy and law in the removal of Indigenous presence from urban centers in the 19th and 20th centuries; the increased migration of Indigenous peoples into Canadian cities from the 1950s up to the present; and contemporary practices of Indigenous resurgence and resistance within urban space.
Term 2 | Wednesdays & Fridays | 11:00am – 12:30pm
Dr. Michael Fabris is a Piikani (Blackfoot) scholar who joined UBC Geography as tenure-track faculty member in July of 2021. One of his key research areas is urban Indigeneity, with a special focus on the urban Indigenous community in East Vancouver.
“I have been an educator, both in and outside of university, for over 20 years, covering a range of difficult issues, such as Indigenous-settler relations. My classes aim to compel the students, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, to critically reflect on their own positionalities and relationships with the various Indigenous territories on which they live, study, work, and/or were raised prior to coming to UBC. I endeavor to create a teaching environment within which everyone feels safe to participate, while also reflecting on the pedagogical benefits of naming and sitting with the discomfort and tensions that can arise when we explicitly position ourselves within conversations around Indigenous territoriality and settler colonialism.”
