IEN Statement Re: UT & RBC Partnership
As members of the IEN Leadership, we recognize our responsibilities to work in collaboration and good relation as we align with the principles of the Dish With One Spoon Treaty Agreement. As such, we would like to remind our colleagues of the ݮƵ’s stated commitment to a “climate-positive environment,” and ݮƵ’s express commitment to “remember and enact the tenets of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant and help to embed responsibility for climate justice and climate action into our individual and collective work at ݮƵ.”
On June 8th 2022, with the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), in the form of RBC Scholarships for Diversity and Innovation in Technology.
The celebratory tone and willful ignorance of this announcement are unfathomable to us and we absolutely denounce this alliance between the U of T and the largest funder of fossil fuels in Canada. This partnership is a blatant betrayal of the university’s ݮƵ 2021 announcement of a commitment to
RBC funds both the and Enbridge Line 3 pipeline projects, neither of which have free, prior and informed consent to proceed from the Indigenous peoples within whose territories the projects are located. Worldwide, RBC is the and the Stunningly, RBC has in recent years, providing more than 200 billion dollars in fossil fuel financing since the Paris Climate Agreement. How perverse of vice-president research and innovation, and strategic initiatives (Leah Cowen) to describe RBC as “an early champion of the innovation ecosystem at the ݮƵ”!
We note the neoliberal mobilization of “diversity,” and token financial support for “women and other equity-deserving groups, including Black and Indigenous students” while RBC is killing us all through financing the destruction of the planet. RBC is directly complicit in the genocidal, colonial invasion of Indigenous territories in the interests of corporate capital. RBC and the fossil fuel companies it finances are responsible for daily acts of violence towards Indigenous land and peoples, for invasive man camps that , for terrorizing and . Especially as Black, Indigenous, and Black-Indigenous people and women we are ashamed of U of T for pursuing this “renewed partnership.” This is NOT what decolonizing a university looks like.
Signed,
Dr. Jennifer Brant, IEN Faculty Co-Chair; Assistant Professor, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, ݮƵ, ݮƵ
Dr. rosalind hampton, IEN Faculty Co-Chair; Assistant Professor of Black Studies, Department of Social Justice Education, ݮƵ, ݮƵ
Dr. Jeffrey Ansloos, Previous IEN Faculty Co-Chair; Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair, Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, ݮƵ, ݮƵ
Faculty Co-Signatories:
- Dr. Chandni Desai, New College, ݮƵ
- Dr. Kristen Bos, Historical Studies and Women and Gender Studies Institute, ݮƵ
- Dr. Fikile Nxumalo, Dept. of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, ݮƵ
- Dr. Whitneé Garrett-Walker, Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education, ݮƵ
- Dr. Jeff Bale, Associate Professor, Language and Literacies Education, CTL/ݮƵ; Vice-President, University and External Affairs, UTFA
- Dr. Rinaldo Walcott, Professor, Women and Gender Studies Institute, ݮƵ
- Dr. Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, ݮƵ, ݮƵ
- Dr. Stephanie J. Waterman, Department of Leadership, Higher & Adult Education, ݮƵ
- Dr. Uahikea Maile, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, ݮƵ
- Dr. Kathy Bickmore, Professor of Curriculum & Pedagogy and Comparative International & Development Education, ݮƵ
- Dr. Beverly Bain, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Department of Historical Studies, ݮƵ
- Dr. Eve Tuck, Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies, Dept. of Social Justice Education, ݮƵ, ݮƵ