Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the Vancouver Institute. Described by the Boston Globe as “the nation’s leading environmentalist,” Professor McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, and Deep Economy. A former staff writer for the New Yorker, he writes often for Harper’s, National Geographic, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications. He is the founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org, a global warming awareness campaign that in October 2009 coordinated what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
McKibben, B. (1989). The end of nature (1st ed.). New York: Random House.
Braasch, G., McKibben, B., & Ebrary Academic Complete (Canada) Subscription Collection. (2009). Earth under fire: How global warming is changing the world (1; 2 ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/j.ctt1ppfpm [Link]
McKibben, W. (1919). Irreconcilable conflict with the constitution. American Economist, 63, 308.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by St. John’s College. Vaclav Smil is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He completed his graduate studies at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Carolinum University in Prague and at the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of the Pennsylvania State University. His interdisciplinary research interests encompass a broad area of energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies, and he had also applied these approaches to energy, food and environmental affairs of China. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Science Academy) and the first non-American to receive the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology. He has been an invited speaker in more than 250 conferences and workshops in the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, has lectured at many universities in North America, Europe and East Asia and has worked as a consultant for many US, EU and international institutions.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
Smil, V. (2006; 2012). Energy: A beginner’s guide. Oxford: Oneworld. [Link]
Smil, V. (2004; 2003). China’s past, china’s future: Energy, food, environment. New York: RoutledgeCurzon. [Link]
Smil, V. (2008). Oil: A beginner’s guide. Oxford: Oneworld.
Smil, V. (2006). Transforming the twentieth century: Technical innovations and their consequences. New York; Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Smil, V. (2008). Global catastrophes and trends: The next 50 years. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. [Link]
Geoffrey Harpham is president and director of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, the only institute for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Kathleen Woodward is Professor of English at the University of Washington and has served as Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities since 2000. They speak on the subject of “Humanities From Here: A Dialogue about the Place of the Creative Arts and Humanities at UBC”. This is part of an exploratory initiative to discuss the possibility of developing a humanities centre at UBC. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Speaker Biographies
Geoffrey Harpham is president and director of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, the only institute for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. His longstanding scholarly interests include the role of ethics in literary study, the place of language in intellectual history, and the work of Joseph Conrad.
Kathleen Woodward, Lockwood Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English, has served as Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities since 2000. She has served on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (2009-2013), the Board of Directors of the National Humanities Alliance (2003-2009), and as Chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America, a broad-based network of scholars and leaders of cultural institutions devoted to fostering the development of campus-community partnerships (2000-2005).
Select Articles Available at UBC
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. (2012). The Posthuman: Without It, Nothing Else is Possible. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. 37(2). pp. 101-112 [Link]
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. (2011). Why We Need the 16, 772nd Book on Shakespeare. Qui Parle. 20(1). pp. 109-116. [Link]
Woodward, Kathleen. (2012). Work-Work Balance, Metrics, and Resetting the Balance. PMLA. 127.4. pp. 994-1000. [Link]
Woodward, Kathleen. (2009). Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Modern Language Quarterly (Seattle). 70(2). pp. 287-290. [Link]
The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and the Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Society (VAHMS) co-hosted a webcast of a nation-wide teleconference among Asian Heritage Month societies in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Toronto to share expert speakers’ experiences in integrating Asian-Canadian content into Canada’s education system. This Vancouver panel features Dr. Ray Hsu, Tetsuro Shigematsu, Anna Ling Kaye, Cara Kauhane, and Joyce Lam.
Speakers’ Biographies
Dr. Ray Hsu has over ten years of experience providing awesomeness to clients, including the CBC, UBC, the National Arts Council of Singapore, and the Banff Centre. He is the author of two award-winning books and his writing has been published in Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Chicago, Singapore, and London. Dr. Hsu has also given talks on creativity, education, and leadership for over ten years, including interviews on CBC Radio One, Chicago Public Radio, and the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business. His ideas take many forms: from writing books and headlining conferences to mentoring creative thinkers at retreats and seminars. He co-founded Art Song Lab, an interdisciplinary platform to create fusions across poetry, music, and performance. While teaching in a US prison for two years, he founded the Prison Writing Workshop, which showcased incarcerated writers and performers in print and on public radio.
Tetsuro Shigematsu is a Canadian radio broadcaster, comedian and filmmaker. He was the most recent host of CBC Radio One’s former afternoon series The Roundup, where he replaced Bill Richardson in 2004, making him the first visible minority to host a daily network radio program in Canada. The show completed its final episode on November 4, 2005. Prior to working for CBC Radio, he was a writer for the Canadian TV show This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
Anna Ling Kaye’s journalism has appeared in the International Herald Tribune and Caijing Magazine, amongst others. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies in Hong Kong and Vancouver. Having lived in more than ten cities including Beijing and Mumbai, she is now an enthusiastic Vancouver-ite.
Cara Kauhane graduated from Capilano University with an Associate of Arts in Creative Writing, and is currently a creative writing and anthropology student at UBC. She has been published in Capilano University’s magazine The Liar.
Joyce Lam is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre (VACT). She has produced over 40 productions with VACT and has recruited, developed and maintained a body of volunteers that has sustained its operations for 13 years. Joyce created VACT to showcase Asian Canadian actors, tell Asian Canadian stories and address their conspicuous absence on the Canadian stage.
Our featured B.C. place for this week is the northern most place we have featured yet: Atlin. The town of Atlin and Atlin Lake are located along Highway 7, not too far south of the border with Yukon. Atlin likes to be called “Switzerland of the North” because of its wintertime beauty and activities. The name Atlin is derived from the Tlingit word atlah which means “big water.” The town was founded in the late 19th century when gold was struck in the area, drawing thousands of settlers; today the population is around 450 people.
Our featured document is a photograph from our B.C. Historical Photograph Collection. It is an example of the importance of having access to the back (or verso) of some photographs, when they contain helpful inscriptions or stamps. The photograph was probably taken looking across Atlin Lake:
“Rift in the clouds”, Atlin B.C.
The title, “Rift in the clouds,” was inscribed on the back of the photograph, possibly by the photographer. By looking at the back, we can see the stamp of the photographer:
Verso of the photograph
The photographer was L.C. Read, who, according to the Camera Workers of B.C., was active in the Atlin area up until around 1919.
If it were not for the photographer’s stamp on the back of the photograph, we wouldn’t be able to say who the photographer was, and it would be unlikely that the location could be identified as Atlin.
To learn more about our historical photograph collections, consult our Photographs Research Guide. In the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, the Atlin Meeting Room is number 191, on the first floor.
It seems appropriate in our blog series about places in British Columbia used as room names in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre to address researching the origin of place names. There are a number of sources that are useful for researching place names, and one here at UBC is the Norman Ogg Place Name Collection (see the finding aid here). In 1979-1980, Norman Ogg undertook a study of the origins of place names in Canada (excepting Quebec) and Washington State. He received many letters from town and city clerks and archivists explaining the origin behind their city’s name, as well as a number of ephemeral items such as brochures.
The place we are examining this week is Keremeos. Keremeos is located in the Southern Interior of British Columbia and is in the Similkameen Valley. The aboriginal people of this area, the Sylix, are now part of theOkanagan Nation Alliance. Horticulture and agriculture are the main industries in Keremeos, and the area is also home to Cathedral Provincial Park. As Norman Ogg learned from the clerk of the Village of Keremeos in 1980, there are two theories behind the name Keremeos: it was believed to be derived from the Aboriginal language of the area to mean either “wind channel in the mountains” or “cut in two by water,” referring to the Similkameen River.
Letter to Norman Ogg from clerk of Village of Keremeos.
Village of Keremeos.
(Click on the image of the letter to see a larger version).
The earliest source for B.C. place names was written by Captain John Walbran, captain of the S.S. Quadra. This photograph is from the Chung Collection, which also contains a copy of Walbran’s book British Columbia Coast Names, and one of his chief officer’s logs.
Captain John Walbran, from the Chung Collection.
As described by the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Walbran’s Coast Names is “an amazing grab-bag of history, biography, and anecdote,” and a “rich mass of anecdotes and digressions.” It is a well-known and well-used source of British Columbia history.
In the Barber Centre, the Keremeos Lounge is on the second floor, adjacent to Ike’s Cafe on the south side of the building. A great place to have a cup of coffee and read up on B.C. place names!
This digital story is about Canadian senator Lillian Dyck’s family, her upbringing, and being of mixed Chinese and Native Canadian descent. Since 2010, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre has been working with community organizations on documenting and preservating Chinese Canadian-related family history projects. These groups span the country from Victoria, BC to St. John’s, New Foundland, for a total of nineteen projects that will be showcased along with the work created by the UBC Chinese Canadian Stories Uncommon Histories From a Common Past project.
The Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP) is a four program that provides federal government funding for community-based commemorative and educational projects that provide recognition of the experiences of ethno-cultural communities affected by historical wartime measures and/or immigration restrictions applied in Canada, and that promote these communities’ contributions to building Canada. Working alongside Professor of History Dr. Henry Yu, UBC Library has embarked on this project to document the stories of Chinese Canadians to enrich our understanding of a period history that has been largely untold and undocumented.
Interestingly, many of the group study rooms in the Irving K Barber Learning Centre are named after rivers in British Columbia. Room 416, a group study room on the fourth floor of the Barber Centre, is named after the Muskwa River, a river that runs 257 kilometres through northern British Columbia. The Muskwa River, a major tributary of the Fort Nelson River, flows east and north to merge with the Prophet River, before joining the Fort Nelson River.
Using some of the place name resources mentioned in the previous blog post on Keremeos, we are able to trace the different names that have been applied to the Muskwa River throughout the years; the “official” name of the river has changed a number of times since the beginning of the 20th century.
According to BC Geographical Names , on Gotfred Emile Jorgensen’s 1895 Map of the Province of British Columbia, it was labeled the “Sicannie River.” The Sikanni (Sekani) people, “dwellers of the rocks,” traded, hunted and lived near the river for hundreds of years. To read more about the history of the Sekani people of British Columbia, you may wish to read Sekani Indians of British Columbia, by Diamond Jenness.
However, what is now called the Muskwa River was labelled “Sikanni River” on BC Land’s map 1A, 1912 and then, in 1917, labeled the “Musqua River” on BC map 1H. It seems that there is some disagreement as to why the river was finally given the name Muskwa. According to George Philip Vernon and Helen Akrigg’sBritish Columbia Place Names,Muskwa is the Cree word for “bear.” Described by BC BookWorld as “self publishing pioneers”, the Akriggs first published their “landmark’ 1001 British Columbia Place Names in 1969; many editions followed through the years.
Other researchers believe that since the “custom apparently is for a separate band of the Sikanni Indians to hunt on [one and only one] of these rivers, […] the rivers receive the names of the leaders in each band…..thus Musquah’s River, Prophet’s River, Sikanni Chief’s River and Fantasque’s River” (BC Geographical Names http://archive.ilmb.gov.bc.ca/bcgn-bin/bcg10?name=8364).
Tracing the history of the name of the Muskwa River is a good reminder that one should consult multiple sources when doing research!
Friday February 27th at 12:00 noon in the Dodson Room of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
The Programme includes: “Adios Nonino” by Astor Piazzolla (David Bergeron, piano),
“Valses Poeticos” by Enrique Granados (Kunal Moorjani, piano), “The Garden of Eden” by
William Bolcom (Margit Juhasz, piano), selections from “Spanish Dances” and “Goyescas”
by Enrique Granados (Kathryn Schmitt, piano), and “Danzas Argentinas opus 2” by
Alberto Ginastera (Jared Miller, piano). The concert is directed by David Bergeron,
Artistic Co-Director of the Dodson Concert Series.
The Dodson Concert Series is a Friday noon-hour series organized and performed by
students of the UBC School of Music. For more information please contact Fiona Chow,
Artistic Co-Director at fionatchow@gmail.com
Geoffrey Harpham is president and director of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, the only institute for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Kathleen Woodward is Professor of English at the University of Washington and has served as Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities since 2000. They speak on the subject of “Humanities From Here: A Dialogue about the Place of the Creative Arts and Humanities at UBC”. This is part of an exploratory initiative to discuss the possibility of developing a humanities centre at UBC. Webcast hosted by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
