The third Centennial Innovates Inclusive Excellence Breakfast Series event on March 6th titled Reimagining Healthier Relationships to Research ‘Sucess’ and ‘Innovation’ was a resounding success. Over 50 Centennial College leadership, staff, faculty, students and community members attended the inspirational and thought-provoking keynote and workshop led by Larissa Crawford, Founder and Managing Director at Future Ancestors Services Inc, an Indigenous and Black-owned, youth-led professional services social enterprise that advances climate justice and systemic barrier removal with lenses of anti-racism and ancestral accountability.
The event opened with Jonathan Hack, Dean, Centennial Innovates, who spoke about the department-wide commitment to establishing meaningful relationships and engagement opportunities with Indigenous groups and communities around future research initiatives. He introduced the event’s keynote speaker and facilitator Larissa Crawford, a published Indigenous, anti-racism, and climate justice researcher, policy advisor, and restorative circle keeper with over 15 years of experience.
Larissa captivated the audience the moment she stepped on the stage. She eloquently weaved in her lived experience as a queer, Indigenous and Black woman with a chronic disability, with the historical and ongoing impacts of colonization. She demonstrated how our research and innovation can either further perpetuate or actively resist them while writing a new narrative that empowers and considers Indigenous perspectives. Attendees learned about the nuances of the settler label, what specifically constitutes a colonial worldview, and poignant examples of when principles in Western 'science' instill a 'norm' that discredits Indigenous knowledge and cause significant harm to their communities - principles that still inform our policymaking today.
She then insightfully introduced decolonization and Indigenization as innovation - cultivating a new worldview that integrates Indigenous teachings, worldviews and that is deeply important to restore a healthy and sustainable relationship with Earth and each other. In this way, decolonization and Indigenization create space for new technologies and new applications of existing knowledge. She related this innovation to metrics of success, where oftentimes the tools to achieve success (i.e. amount raised, number of people reached, student grades, etc.) are positioned as the success criteria itself instead of deeper metrics such as the quality of relationships gained, the experience of the people impacted, the impact of the data collected and how it benefits the community from which the data was obtained. She challenged us to view the "success" relationally instead, focused on the longer-lasting sustainable changes that these metrics convey and the reasons they were sought for in the first place. Attendees took away thought-provoking questions to position themselves in decolonization through their own research and innovation work, such as thinking about whose knowledge and what kind of knowledge our research positions as valuable, what successful relationships look like during and after our research projects, and who is involved in defining success, amongst many others.
In the second half of the session, Larissa critically explored a tangible application of decolonization in her own work - Indigenizing her relationship to time and productivity. She explained the deep-rooted colonial history framing our relationship to time and productivity, how it has shaped today's urgency culture, and how we can reimagine rest as productivity – not the opposite. She emphasized the impact that our relationship to time has on our health, and prompted the audience to reflect on their own relationships to time and productivity. She then connected the themes by reinforcing how institutionally, we have the power to align the opportunities to reorient criteria for success and innovation in our research as a productive and valuable use of time.
A full video recording of the event is available here. Photos from the event can be found on our event summary LinkedIn post. We extend our sincere gratitude to Larissa for this engaging, impactful session and to all who joined us, and hope to see you next time!