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Living Libraries

Living Libraries: Updates

Join us for the online asynchronous offering of Living Libraries: blogs, to listen and learn from Coast Salish Elders and community members, and to engage with the Hulq'umi'num' language of this place.

Upcoming Offerings

Register to join an online journey of story-sharing, community, and introductory Hul'q'umi'num' language learning that invites your contributions, reflections and connections made to the knowledge shared. Engage with the modules over five weeks according to your own schedule. Registration closed on June 26. Join us next time!

Start Date June 27, 2022
Close Date August 3, 2022
Delivery Mode Online Asynchronous
Registration Deadline June 26, 2022

Email us with questions at livinglibraries@viu.ca

Language in the Library Presents: Living Libraries: blogs. LANGUAGE: With focus on listening carefully and breathing our voices into the precious Hul’q’umi’num language of this land. There will be times where we will be guided by honoured storytellers who generously share with us their gifts of story, lived experience, knowledge and history. RESPONSIBILITY: Awareness of and care for how we communicate, participate, and engage in this space is heightened in importance. Responsibility is shared by all learners as we receive gifts of knowledge, story, and language in the spirit of reciprocity by actively engaging and giving back to our community. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: The land, the diverse landscapes surrounding us are living libraries, from which Indigenous communities derive their language and know their stories. The land, language, and stories guide Indigenous peoples into being, becoming, and in all that is fundamental for life. LEARNING: Language expresses values and concepts that form the Coast Salish way of seeing and being in the world. Language and landscapes intertwine as vessels of cultural memory that activate people’s continual relationships and sense of belonging to place and culture. LAND Stories offer insight into the worldviews of Indigenous peoples. As the language originates from the land in relationship to Indigenous peoples belonging to this territory, so do the oral stories of this place. We can begin to understand the relationships of people to the land, place, and to one another by engaging with oral stories. SELF: The powerful act of self-identifying situates and strengthens us in belonging to our unique web of relationships including our families, homelands, communities, and to one another as we gather and share.

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