i've been trying to sort out my feelings of the place where i worked and experienced so much colonial violence is now getting an "Aboriginal Strategic Plan". i want to be very clear that i'm not calling out anyone that worked on spearheaded that the strat plan.

people and past professors i've had and look up to have worked on that plan, but i think we need to talk about the elephant in the room: this feels like using a squirt gun to put out a forest fire.

while i worked at this Large Public Post Secondary Educational Institutions located in British Columbia, i experienced some really wretched things. i struggled in that place and was given no softness or understanding.

basically entering the door, i was told to check my community knowledge and ways of being at the door: there was a way to be in community and there was a way to be at the institution, that if i wanted to be in those rooms and at those tables, i had to play that game.

i was told i was too radical to survive at the institution, and was reprimanded for pointing out some community understandings that weren't acknowledged or respected.

throughout all of this, i've just come to one conclusion: this work can't happen in these places until there's radical reform, until then, we are just putting bandaids on big wounds. we are making things kind of ok in one area, while the rest festers.

when we use the language on the institution to try and change the institution, what are we saying? who is being held and who is being left out of these conversations? and what forms of respectability politics are happening in the first place for these conversations to happen?

again, i want to be very clear: there are people who are doing amazing work in these places, and at my previous employer and i'm not saying that their work is invaluable or not important. the safety and opportunities they provide Indigenous students is powerful.

but at the core of this, what are we doing? what is the change we want? we want a strategic plan that what? puts in more policy that will be ignored? sorry if i sound bitter, but the institution only seeks to serve itself. i was not nor did i ever feel safe there.

the only times i felt safe in that place was when i got to be in the only indigenous centered space on the campus. the only time i felt like i could breathe as a student is when i was in that space with kin. as a staff, i don't think i ever stopped holding my breath.

i'm so sick and tired of folks thinking it's progress to be invited to the table at these places, when really, we are just being lied to. just because you're at the president's table doesn't mean that the president respects you.

i want my old bosses and the president to come to my kokum's table. sit down and drink a cup of tea with us, be offered the world of hospitality and warmness that we are never offered there, because that's what we do.

i'm so sick of strategic plans and well meaning policy. what does this serve? what do campus wide 'indigenous initiatives' serve in the long run? what happens at the end? what is the change that is happening? where is the community?

there are so many people i love and respect working hard in the university and none of this is about their work, but all of this is how their work is undervalued. how their worked to the bone, stressed and frustrated. burnt out and used by that place.

i was told in my first week at my job that there's me, and then there's the university, and when i'm at work i represent the university and i should be thankful because the university signs my paycheque and i chose to work there.

i wonder if that's in the strategic plan?

what parts of you are you giving up to survive in that institution?