The Paueru Gai Dialogues #5

The Changing Environment and Humanity

Date: May 22, 2021
Time: 1PM – 3PM PST / 4PM – 6PM EST
Free admission. Registration Required.

Global warming and environmental protection are big inaccessible topics that point to news headlines, oil companies, pipelines and government policy.

Guest host Haruko Okano will facilitate a discussion with panelists Jen Sungshine, Rita Wong, and T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss, who will provide insight into their daily lives, art practices and activism. Through houseplants, the food we eat, words we use, and lessons from Indigenous knowledge keepers, we can deepen our understanding of how we live in the world today, and how that contributes to the future of all beings.

Participants will be invited into breakout groups to share their experiences and thoughts about how we can work together across communities to fight for justice and social change. To wrap up the event, everyone will reconvene to offer generative questions as catalysts for actions in solidarity.

We are grateful to Hapa Collaborative, SFU’s David Lam Centre, The Bulletin (JCCA), ElementIQ, The Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council and City of Vancouver for financial and in-kind support.

Haruko Okano, a Sansei generation, Japanese Canadian was born in Toronto but now lives in Vancouver, BC. She was raised by Caucasian foster parents in several different locations, through the Ontario Children’s Aid Society.

Jen Sungshine is a queer Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary & multi-hyphenate artist/activist, community facilitator, and cultural producer based in Vancouver, BC. She is the Co-Artistic Director and Co-founder of Love Intersections, a media arts collective producing intergenerational + intersectional QTBIPOC stories through documentary film. Her most recent works include “Yellow Peril: Queer Destiny” (2019), winner of the Gerry Brunet Memorial Award for best BC Short; and visual arts exhibit, “Yellow Peril; Celestial Elements” (2020) at the SUM Gallery. She is a co-producer of CURRENT: Feminist Electronic Art Symposium and currently serves on the board of Vancouver Artists Labour Union Cooperative (VALU CO-OP). www.jensungshine.com

Rita Wong lives and works on unceded Coast Salish territories, also known as Vancouver. Dedicated to questions of water justice, decolonization, and ecology, she is the author of monkeypuzzle, forage, sybil unrest (with Larissa Lai), undercurrent, perpetual (with Cindy Mochizuki), and beholden (with Fred Wah), as well as the co-editor of downstream: reimagining water (with Dorothy Christian). See 1308trees.ca for what she has recently been working on.

T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss works range over 30 years and have always focused on sustainability, permaculture techniques, Coast Salish Cultural elements and have included themes of ethnobotany, indigenous language revival, Salish weaving and digital media technology.