Wall Catalyst Program | March 16

The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and the UBC Emeritus College have assembled a cohort of Emeriti to participate in the 2022-23 PWIAS Catalyst Program.

The Wall Catalyst Emeriti cohort will meet monthly to share research experience and engage with guest lecturers on the topic of the "Climate and Nature Emergency".

For more information on this program and the list of participating Emeriti click here.

Members of the Emeritus College are invited to attend speaker lectures throughout the year. 

Indigenous Worldviews, Indigenous Law Revitalization & Self-Determination as Critical Responses to Climate and Nature Emergency

Panel Discussion with Dr. Robert Clifford, Allard Law School and Dr. Jocelyn Stacey, Allard Law School
Moderated by Dr. Jo-ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem, Emeritus College Cohort

Robert Clifford will highlight how the project of Indigenous law revitalization and the reality of climate crisis necessarily interact, so that Indigenous theories and methodologies for Indigenous law revitalization and diagnoses and approaches to climate crisis mitigation are intricately intertwined and mutually reflective. Guiding this project are W̱SÁNEĆ understandings of place and relationship with the more-than-human world, which is a valuable source of wisdom and practice in re-imagining relationships and place within the world, and alternatives to the ‘Anthropocene’.

Jocelyn Stacey will discuss the critical connection between the climate emergency-disaster response-and Indigenous self-determination through sharing the story of her research with the Tsilhqot’in National Government, which emerged from the 2017 wildfires that at the time broke wildfire records in BC. That wildfire response highlighted how provincial and federal responses to emergencies fail to recognize and support the exercise of Indigenous jurisdiction. This story emphasizes how and why Indigenous self-determination needs to lead responses to the climate and nature emergency.

laws and seeks to relate the ways in which those laws reflect and generate out of the values, philosophies, lands, and worldviews of his people. His work is community focused and draws upon W̱SÁNEĆ law in relation to pressing problems throughout W̱SÁNEĆ territory.

She researches environmental crises and the visible and invisible ways in which law creates, regulates and prevents these events. Her work focuses on environmental assessment law, disaster law, climate change, emergency powers and the rule of law. Her current research project, The Law of Disaster Exceptionalism, investigates how law regulates disasters as disconnected and exceptional events, contrary to the experiences of those made most vulnerable to disaster and in spite of our current era of climate disruption.

Prof. Stacey works closely with BC First Nations, advancing the implementation of First Nations’ inherent jurisdiction through and beyond disaster. With the Tŝilhqot’in National Government, she has co-authored two reports on Tŝilhqot’in jurisdiction in the 2017 wildfires and the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

FORMAT: IN-PERSON AND ON ZOOM

Members of the UBC Emeritus College and the general public are invited to attend a lecture by the guest speaker. There will be a question period following the presentation.

Co-sponsors 

Emeritus College and Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies