Irwin Oostindie
Public Lecture
October 26, 2017

Co-sponsored by SFU's Institute for the Humanities, BC Alliance for Arts + Culture , Heart of the City Festival, Coast Salish Cultural Network, and SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.

Irwin Oostindie suggests that "this place shall be merely the forever colonial wild west" unless cultural policy makes a shift. Genuine reconciliation and redress requires the policy changes to be made throughout culture sectors and include community, and cultural policy makers.

This is a talk looking to help decolonize settler and migrant cultural policy and to show a path forward. Funding statistics show the degree to which dominant mainstream arts and culture sectors structurally marginalize Coast Salish culture here in their lands and waters.

By inventorying and including a reconciliation and redress mandate in our individual and organisation's practice, we will move beyond tokenism and brief marquee appearances. Reconciliation shouldnt be a funding opportunity, it should be genuine and society-wide. This talk explores the dominant culture's roots of denial, and recent examples of Canada 150+.

SPEAKER

Irwin Oostindie is a Dutch settler, media artist, broadcaster, curator, and parent living in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. For three decades he has led local and international media, arts and social justice projects, and founded community radio, TV, print, web, and cultural space projects. Irwin has been a prolific independent curator as well as worked with Tsleil-Waututh Nation, W2, Gallery Gachet, Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre, North Vancouver Arts Council, and Under the Volcano. He has consulted to three levels of government on the intersection of economic development and cultural industries and has a passion for sharing his research. Irwin received an Honour's Post-Graduate Certificate in Media Arts from Capilano University and is a Graduate Researcher at the SFU School of Communications. In his curatorial and space-building work, Irwin brings an interest in crosscultural dialogue and redress, with a particular place-based approach working on longterm curating and cultural development initiatives in the unceded Coast Salish lands and waters.