Models for Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Property from First Nations, Canada
February 8, 2022 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | Online
Speakers: Sabrina C. Agarwal, Louis Lesage, Lou-ann Neel, Michelle Washington
How can repatriation be built from mutual respect, cooperation and trust? North American museums and institutions have historically engaged in the collection and categorization of Indigenous cultural property and knowledge without the consent or active involvement of Indigenous people. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was enacted in 1990 to return Native American "cultural items" to lineal descendants and culturally affiliated American Indian tribes, Alaska Native villages, and Native Hawaiian organizations. Despite this and further state legislation, many institutions including the University of California, have obfuscated or denied repatriation claims. Across the border, the Canadian government does not currently have legislation addressing the repatriation of Indigenous Ancestors and cultural heritage, but is working to create national support for repatriation through legislation Bill C-391. Some Canadian provinces have passed repatriation acts or provincial museum polices that have facilitated the return of ancestors and belongings. This panel discussion seeks to learn from what is being done in Canada. What is the cultural and nuanced work that builds successful repatriations? How can repatriation and indigenizing the institution from within preserve and strengthen tribal cultural heritage?
Join Sabrina Agarwal (Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the UCB NAGPRA Advisory Committee) in conversation with Louis Lesage (Nionwentsïo Bureau, Huron-Wendat Nation), Lou-ann Neel (Curator and Acting Head of Indigenous Collections and Repatriation Department, Royal BC Museum), and Michelle Washington (Repatriation Specialist, Royal BC Museum) to explore these questions and hear about their experiences in repatriation.
Legal and Constitutional Protections for Free Speech in Academia in the US, UK and Canada
February 11, 2022 | 10 - 11:30 a.m. | Online
Speakers: Eric Kaufmann, Nadine Strossen, Erwin Chemerinsky, Keith Whittington
The Public Law and Policy Program and the Anglo-American Law and Policy Program at the UC Berkeley School of Law will present a webinar on Legal and Constitutional Protections for Free Speech in Academia in the US, UK, and Canada.
Professor Eric Kaufmann of the University of London, will be participating from London. He will discuss his research on freedom of speech in academia in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada as well as proposed legislation in the U.K. parliament to protect free speech in colleges and universities in the UK.
Professor Nadine Strossen of the New York School of Law and former head of the ACLU will join us from New York. She will comment on Professor Kaufmann's findings, her own work on this subject, and legal and policy implications of the proposed legislation.
Professor Keith Whittington of Princeton University and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UC Berkeley School of Law will participate from Berkeley. They will also comment on Professor Kaufmann's research and recommendations for legislation.
Hildebrand Graduate Research Showcase
March 15, 2022 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | 223 Moses Hall
Speakers: Mindy Price, Aaron Gregory
Learn about the research Canadian Studies funds through our Edward Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowships, as recipients present short overviews of their projects. This panel will have a special focus on the environment, development, and Indigenous resource sovereignty.
"New Agrarian Frontiers: Power, Sovereignty, and Public-Nonprofit Partnerships in the Northwest Territories, Canada"
Mindy Price, Ph.D. candidate, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
Now more than 1º Celsius warmer than a century ago and warming at three times the global average, the Arctic and Subarctic are being reimagined as a new frontier for food production. Despite a growing body of evidence that climate change will enable new possibilities for agriculture in the North, much research remains agnostic about how northern agricultural development will affect communities and landscapes and the relations between them. Mindy uses archival research and ethnography in three extended case studies to examine the implications of agriculture development on the social relations of production and consumption in the Northwest Territories, Canada.
"Kinship Infrastructures: Indigenous Energy Autonomy and Regulatory Sea Change in Beecher Bay"
Aaron Gregory, Ph.D. student, City and Regional Planning
Aaron's research explores the social, technical, and regulatory impacts of a renewable energy system developed by a First Nations community in Beecher Bay, British Columbia. He examines this project as an emergent approach to Indigenous environmental governance, an infrastructural solution responding to the problem of Indigenous energy sovereignty, and a regulatory provocation designed to challenge a provincial monopoly on energy production and distribution. His work analyzes new "kinship infrastructures" articulated through the social, technological, and environmental elements of Indigenous energy sovereignty, anticipating the decolonization and decarbonization of energy production and distribution in British Columbia.
"Practically American": What a Canadian Schoolteacher's Fight Against California's Anti-Alien Laws Reveals About the Boundaries of American Identity
April 28, 2022 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | 223 Moses Hall
Speaker: Brendan Shanahan, Yale Unversity
Former Hildebrand Fellow Brendan Shanahan explores the case of Katharine Short, a Canadian immigrant to California who challenged early 20th-century anti-immigrant laws. In 1915, Short found her job as a California schoolteacher at risk when the state began enforcing a law barring non-citizens from public employment. She responded with a vigorous legal, public relations, political, and diplomatic campaign to save her job and those of other non-citizen schoolteachers in the state. Shanahan will discuss what the case shows about the disparate impact of the state's anti-alien hiring laws, comparing the experiences of favorably portrayed immigrants (like white, middle-class Canadians) vs. less favored non-citizens (such as Mexican blue-collar laborers).
Brendan Shanahan is a socio-legal historian focusing on (North) American immigration and citizenship policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. from UC Berkeley, received a Hildebrand Fellowship for work in Canadian Studies, and won the 2019 Outstanding Dissertation Award of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. He is currently a postdoctoral associate at the MacMillan Center and visiting lecturer in the Yale Department of History.
Do Appeals to Human Rights or Canadian Values Change Canadian Public Opinion? Race, Legal Status and the Framing of Positive and Negative Rights
September 21, 2022 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | 201 Moses Hall
Speaker: Irene Bloemraad, UC Berkeley
Who should be granted state protection? Advocates often deploy appeals to human rights or shared national values when advocating on behalf of immigrant noncitizens. But do these approaches actually work? Few studies have empirically tested strategies for persuading dominant majorities to extend social benefits and civil rights to vulnerable minority outgroups. This lecture will draw on newly-published survey data from Canada, a democratic country often portrayed as highly tolerant, diverse, and inclusive, to reveal the limits of rights-based appeals, and the degree to which categorical inequality informs public views of who is “deserving” of these benefits.
Irene Bloemraad is a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley and director of the Canadian Studies Program. She studies how immigrants become incorporated into political communities and the consequences of their presence on politics and understandings of membership. Bloemraad holds the Class of 1951 Chair in Sociology and the Thomas Garden Barnes Chair in Canadian Studies, and is the founding Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI). Beyond campus, she serves as the co-director of the Boundaries, Membership and Belonging program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Book Talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945
October 19, 2022 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | 223 Moses Hall
Speaker: Andrea Geiger, Simon Fraser University
Andrea Geiger will discuss her new book, Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Making a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history through its examination of the northernmost stretches of the U.S.-Canada border, the book highlights the role that the North Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship on both sides of the international border from 1867, when the United States acquired Russia’s interests in Alaska, through the end of World War II. Imperial, national, provincial, territorial, reserve, and municipal borders worked together to create a dynamic legal landscape that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people negotiated in myriad ways as they traversed these borderlands. Adventurers, prospectors, laborers, and settlers from Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America, and Asia made and remade themselves as they crossed from one jurisdiction to another.
Within this broader framework, Geiger pays particular attention to the ways in which Japanese migrants and the Indigenous people who had made this borderlands region their home for millennia negotiated the web of intersecting boundaries that emerged over time, charting the ways in which they infused these reconfigured national, provincial, and territorial spaces with new meanings. To see the North Pacific borderlands only as a remote outpost that marked the westernmost edges of the U.S. or British empire, is to miss not only the central place it occupied in the lives of the Indigenous peoples whose home it continues to be, but the extent to which it functioned, in the eyes of Japanese entrepreneurs, as an economic hinterland for an expanding Japanese empire, as well as the role it played in shaping wartime policy with regard to citizens and subjects of Japanese ancestry in both Canada and the United States.
Andrea Geiger is professor emerita of history at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include transpacific and borderlands history, race, migration, and legal history. She received a J.D. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington, and is the author of the award-winning Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928.
Panel: Constructing Canadian Identity From Abroad
November 9, 2022 | 2:30 - 4 p.m. | 223 Moses Hall
Celebrate 40 years of Canadian Studies at Berkeley with a lively discussion on how Canadian expatriates think about their home country, and contribute to Canada's perception of itself. The conversation will feature contributors to the recently-published book The Construction of Canadian Identity from Abroad, a collection of essays that explores the topic from both a theoretical and personal perspective.
The panel will be moderated by the volume's editor, Christopher Kirkey, director of the Center for the Study of Canada and Institute on Québec Studies at the SUNY Plattsburgh. Panelists will include Berkeley Canadian Studies Program director Irene Bloemraad; Richard Nimijean, Undergraduate Supervisor of Canadian Studies at Carleton University; Julie Burelle, an expert on Indigenous, Quebec, and performance studies at UC San Diego. Also joining the panel will be Berkeley Canadian Studies Advisory Board chair David Stewart, who recently published his own memoir, True North, Down South: Tales of a Professional Canadian in America.
COVID-19 and Delayed Political Polarization in Canada
December 3, 2022 | 2:30 - 4 p.m. | 223 Moses Hall
Speaker: Peter Loewen, University of Toronto
The COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with large degrees of deep partisan polarization. In the US case, partisanship rapidly became associated with differences in the willingness to practice social distancing, to wear a mask, and eventually to get vaccinated. It was also associated with different risk perceptions about COVID and different relationships between COVID concern and evaluation of incumbents. The Canadian case is different. Partisan differences in evaluations of COVID and behavioural responses to it were small through the first year of the pandemic, but then began to widen. Drawing on more than 100,000 survey interviews with Canadians, we explore why political polarization over COVID was delayed.
Peter Loewen is the director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He is also the director of the Policy, Elections & Representation Lab (PEARL), associate director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute, a Senior Fellow at Massey College, and a fellow with the Public Policy Forum. He received his B.A. from Mount Allison University and his Ph.D. from l’Université de Montréal. Professor Loewen's work has been published in numerous journals, and he is a regular contributor to the media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Globe & Mail, Toronto Star and National Post.