Author Archive

Posts by John Harris:

“The First Decade:” A Talk by CNC’s Second Principal, Fred Speckeen

February 20, 2020

Fred Speckeen’s talk, part of CNC’s 50th birthday celebration, was a personalized, humorous, and necessarily abbreviated account of some rather complex history. That history started about a decade before Speckeen turned up at CNC, with UBC President John B. Macdonald’s 1962 report on post-secondary education in BC, a report that recommended the establishment of two…

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Cultural Appropriation and Misappropriation: An Impolite Enquiry, by Brian Fawcett

December 2, 2019

Fawcett’s “enquiry” is “impolite” in the sense that it attempts objectivity in a context that isn’t currently welcoming it. As he says, cultural appropriation and misappropriation is “a hot-button question.” However, it’s “a sub-issue of the cultural self-determination that every minority in a multicultural society has the right to pursue” and, as a sub-issue, “it…

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Tensions of Race in Liberal Spaces

December 20, 2018

Race” for the purposes of Dr Alexis Mootoo’s speech means Mootoo’s own ethnicity, African, described as “black (visible)” and studied in its interaction with the dominant colonialist ethnicity, which is European (Anglo-Saxon in the U.S. and Portugese in Brazil), described as “white.” “Tensions” are non-violent in the sense of attitudinal and institutionalized (“structural”). In liberal…

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Second Growth by Fabienne Calvert

December 27, 2017

Fabienne Calvert Filteau is in her late twenties and from an old Central BC family. Her great grandparents settled in Vanderhoof around the turn of the twentieth century. As the family expanded it spread across the country but centred itself on a cabin that the grandparents built in the late twenties near Fort St. James…

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POW Camp 132 Drawings

December 12, 2017

In the middle of October 2013, Viv and I received in the mail a file, sent by Bob Atkinson’s widow Karen Mackenzie. The file, Karen said, held drawings that Bob had told her, “were from some German prisoners of war in a camp near Medicine Hat.”   In the Autumn of 1971, Bob Atkinson, Paul…

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John Harris Introduces Launch of the Receiver

November 29, 2017

Welcome to the latest in Graham Pearce’s events, sponsored by the College of New Caledonia. I’m John Harris, and Graham asked me to introduce our readers tonight, Barry McKinnon, Sharon Thesen, and Greg Lainsbury. They’ll read in that order, and then again after a short break, and then take questions.   I’m here in my…

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