The Paueru Gai Dialogues #6

Reconsidering Land, History and Belonging 

Date: June 26, 2021

Time: 1PM – 3PM PST / 4PM – 6PM EST

Free admission. Registration Required. 

How can we fight against the dominant frameworks of capitalism and settler colonialism to conjure different futures? What does it mean to imagine new relationships to place? How can we acknowledge the complexity and complicity in our own lives and within Japanese Canadian communities and beyond?  

Guest host Sho and panelists Nicole Yakashiro, Mahlikah Awe:ri Enml’ga’t Saqama’sgw and Paulette Moreno will reflect on how art, community organizing and storytelling can serve as maps for generating collective practices of liberation. Participants will be invited into breakout groups to share their perspectives with one another. To wrap up the event, everyone will reconvene to offer questions and debrief together. 

Sho’s creative practice is grounded in a diasporic shimanchu (islander) consciousness. He is committed to cultivating space to tell difficult and complicated stories in hopes of dismantling the separation and stagnation that inform the world he was born into. 

Nicole Yakashiro is a yonsei settler of Japanese, German, and Russian descent, born and raised on occupied and unceded Stó:lō territory. She is a PhD student in History at UBC where she researches farming and property-ownership among non-Indigenous people of colour as they relate to settler colonialism in BC. She is a member of PSF’s Advocacy and Outreach Committee. 

Haudenosaunee Kanien’kéhà:ka & Mi’kmaw L’sitkuk, Canadian Poet Of Honor, Mahlikah Awe:ri is an Afro-Indigenous Artist For Social Change, “Shifting paradigms through Indigenized ways of knowing and being; while reimagining what it means to be “In-Relation”, to the Land and to each other”. Awe:ri is an acclaimed Spoken Word Artist, Arts Educator, Musician, Land Defender, Water Protector, Public Speaker, Performance Artist, Curator, Futurist Writer & Digital Artist. 

Paulette Moreno, Tkl Un’ Yeik, is a Women of Tlingit Grandmothers. She is the Granddaughter of Japanese and Hispanic Grandfathers. Paulette lives in Alaska and has been sharing her compelling personal experience of how we can collectively challenge our perception of inner war and find soulful peacefulness.

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