Lisk , a political system that predated Canada by about 700 years and ensured peace between five nations — Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga and Oneida — and later a sixth, the Tuscarora. But as with many aspects of Indigenous culture, the Canadian government ignored the confederacy and imposed a colonial system of elected band councils.

“I thought if people could understand that we have our own system, that we see ourselves as a sovereign nation, that we have our own governance that worked for us for a thousand years,” says Lisk, “then maybe instead of just saying, ‘Indigenous people don’t vote,’ they might understand why.”

Lisk, a Turtle Clan member of the , grew up in Belleville, Ont., and didn’t speak Mohawk. Neither did her mother, who was raised in Toronto. In fact, many of Lisk’s relatives severed their roots, spoke English and hid their identities. That ends with Lisk.

Atia, a Systems and Computer Engineering professor at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, drives around the city looking for places where Global Positioning System (GPS) and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals are blocked by buildings, tunnels and other infrastructure.

Mohamed Atia

This telecommunications hiccup is not a big problem for human drivers: it could temporarily interfere with their ability to check Google Maps, or even — gasp! — force them to pull over and ask for directions. But the lack of GPS and GNSS is a critical gap to overcome for a world in which driverless cars will need to safely navigate amongst pedestrians, cyclists, stationary objects and other vehicles.

“Self-driving cars need to be able to precisely perceive their environments and determine their positioning and orientation,” says Atia, a sensor fusion expert who brings together data from multiple sources to identify a vehicle’s location in real time.

In his lab on the fourth floor of ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s Minto Centre for Advanced Studies in Engineering, Atia — part of a large contingent of researchers at the university who are working on the development of connected and autonomous vehicles — places a small satellite receiver on the windowsill to demonstrate the risks of relying on single type of technology for navigation.

Although there should be at least four satellites within range, due to urban interference, the screen connected to his receiver shows only one dot in the sky overhead. “Self-driving cars need to know where they are at all times,” says Atia. “This gives them ‘path control’ and determines how they behave in the next instant. If you don’t have an accurate calculation of your position and orientation, you won’t be able to avoid a collision or reach your destination.”

Davidson, who now works in the university’s Educational Development Centre, enrolled at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ through the Enriched Support Program, which helped her feel more confident about her studies and smoothed the transition from high school to post-secondary.

The Therapy Dogs program, which started as a pilot project in 2017 with a Great Dane/Pointer mix named Blue, gives students an opportunity to pet and play with trained dogs — a calming, therapeutic experience for students who might be away from home and family for the first time or stressed in some way about the challenges of university life.

Over the last two years, the program has expanded to include 15 dogs and their handlers, all ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ staff or faculty who bring their own dogs to campus, which distinguishes the program from other universities where external volunteers visit with their pets.

Davidson regularly ran into Blue and his owner, Shannon Noonan, a mental health outreach manager in ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s Office of Student Affairs and founder of the Therapy Dog program, and knew she had to get involved.

“The only problem,” says Davidson, “was that I didn’t have a dog.”

Enter Murphy.

Davidson — already a horse owner dedicated to studying the psychology of animal-human relationships, which she believes has a bearing on the instructor-student dynamic — got the jet black Golden Mountain mix puppy in January 2018 and he immediately began to display the right stuff: a good temperament, a willingness to learn and a talent for affection.

The instrument’s roots pre-date the amalgamation of Dominion United Church and Chalmers United Church. In 1955, smoke and humidity during a fire at Chalmers significantly damaged the organ. “Playing in chords,” the music director at the time, William France, said about the fire’s impact, “has taken on the sound of marching armies.”

The cost of restoration was prohibitively expensive, so the instrument remained unattended until after the 1961 fire that destroyed the Dominion church and led to the union of the two congregations. Enriched by the insurance payout funds received by Dominion, the newly amalgamated church chose the battered organ as its first major project.

Two established firms submitted bids: Quebec-based (which had built the original Chalmers organ in 1928) and England’s William Hill & Son & Norman & Beard Limited. While the English manufacturer recommended a restoration, Casavant proposed a complete replacement.

Faced with two costly options, the church sought advice. A Royal Conservatory of Music organist thundered that the Hill, Norman and Beard organ he had recently played was “the worst instrument I have ever experienced.” A musician in Kingston called Casavant’s building techniques “wasteful” and “sinful.”

France was outspoken about his preference: “Frankly I mistrust a rebuild on an organ that has been tried by fire and water. There is the parallel of rebuilding a 1928 car!”

These passionate responses provide a snapshot of the organ reform movement, which started in early 20th-century Germany. Both the construction and timbre of organs had radically changed in the previous decades in concert with technological developments and musical taste, transforming a predominantly ecclesiastical instrument into an imitator of the orchestra within theatres and fairs.

Musicians and builders in the 1920s sought to re-create organs capable of playing the contrapuntal masterpieces of the past, and this “neo- classical” aesthetic spread to North America after World War II, when organists on duty with military forces had visited the historic organs of Europe.

The gallery was hosting (WWOS), a commemorative art installation that honoured the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people.

Kara Louttit (Photo by Robert Proulx)

The installation was made up of more than 1,000 moccasin vamps — the intricate, decorated tops of moccasins — laid out on deep red cloth. Visitors walked along a path of red, with the vamps symbolizing those who were missing.

As a member of the WWOS national collective, I was at CUAG to provide logistical and emotional support to local organizers. It never occurred to me that I would be walking back onto campus three years later as a student.

Growing up in Thunder Bay and Val d’Or, Que., the importance of education was imparted to my siblings and me as children, although I didn’t take that message seriously in my younger years.

I was fortunate to be part of the first generation in my family that wasn’t forced to attend residential school. My father, and his father before him, are both residential school survivors who went on to post-secondary education. My own route to higher education wasn’t quite so linear.

High school was tough. In fact, I never finished it. Struggling with my queer Indigenous identity, along with family dysfunction, began when I was a teenager and fuelled addictions throughout my 20s. Today, I can clearly see how intergenerational trauma impacted my life in ways that I was unable to cope with as a young adult.

In spite of my addictions, I understood that I had to work twice as hard as others to compensate for my lack of education. I had a knack for finding unique jobs. I worked for software companies, political organizations, Indigenous art associations and non-profit community groups. Which is how, after hitting rock bottom, fresh out of a treatment program, rebuilding my life, I found myself in Thunder Bay working within the criminal justice system.

Nobel Prize Winner Gerhard Herzberg, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s Former Chancellor, on Scientific vs. Humanistic Thinking

Most scientists have found in their non-scientist friends a lack of understanding of even the most elementary concepts of scientific thought and I am sure humanists have had a corresponding experience in their relations with scientists. This “gulf of mutual incomprehension” is clearly understandable since both the scientist and the humanist pursue their studies with the same aim of achieving a better understanding of man and his world — the scientist by his efforts to interpret the physical world and the humanist by creative works that try to understand the human mind.

There is, of course, a fundamental difference between scientific and humanistic knowledge. This difference becomes particularly apparent when we look at the relations of each group to the masters of the past. To understand mechanics or astronomy it is not necessary to read Newton in the original; to understand present-day nuclear physics it is not necessary to read the original papers of Rutherford, one of its great pioneers.

Once a scientific discovery has been made it ceases to be personal to the discoverer and becomes part of the university body of scientific knowledge. Except for historical reasons, the original papers are quickly superseded by superior accounts that are rapidly provided by teaching experience and didactic skills. But the writings of a great critic or historian — and even more those of poets and other artistic creators — are part of their own message and to paraphrase the argument would be to destroy the effect.

Knowledge and insight here are private and personal and the message can be obtained only by constant reference to the original work. In spite of this fundamental difference in their attitude to the past there is no intrinsic reason why a scientist should not have some knowledge and appreciation of art, literature and music, or why a humanist (or lawyer or politician) should not have some knowledge and appreciation of science and mathematics.

The lack of understanding between scientists and non-scientists is positively dangerous at a time when the applications of science determine more and more of our lives, when indeed the survival of the human race is dependent on our ability to apply our scientific knowledge to overcome the undesirable effects of technology and to remove the great disparity in standard of living between the developed and developing countries.

From ’s installation speech when he became in November 1973, published in : Selections from the Speeches, Essays and Articles of G. Herzberg (Queen’s University School of Policy Studies, 2019), edited by Agnes Herzberg and Paul Dufour.

Rage Against Injustice

Fatima Meer was one of the most prominent, and yet most under-recognized, voices in South African academia in the twentieth century. She epitomized the public sociologist, described by Michael Burawoy as one who “brings sociology into conversation with publics, understood as people who are themselves in conversation.”

She was driven by an activist sociology for a common society, by a rage against injustice and by  a profound belief in the value and capacity of research to convince the powerful of the consequences of their choices. An intense humanism overlay all of her writing. Ideas about human freedom, equality, sociability and progress run through her work.

In numerous books and essays, she offers a set of ideas that ran counter to those of the colonial and apartheid state, and at times counter to the theories of other engaged scholars on the left. Where her colleagues foregrounded, and indeed privileged, class in their analysis, she focused on uncovering the life experiences of subaltern groups in ways that understood human life as a complex encounter between structure and agency. This led her to consider race as determinant of life chances, and as a form of power to be exposed in every manifestation.

From (HSRC Press, 2019), by Shireen Hassim, the Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´.

Neurons Firing

Imagine a jar of peanut butter. When you do this, you’re creating, in your mind, something that doesn’t exist — even if you’re imagining the jar you actually have in your cupboard, you’re creating something new. There’s the actual jar of peanut butter, and then there is a separate thing in your mind: a representation of the jar, here and now, not where and when the physical thing actually is.

The actual jar of peanut butter is made of plastic and peanut butter. The thing in your head, the “imagining,” is some pattern of neurons firing in your brain. Even when you use your imagination to remember something that actually happened to you, you’re creating a simulation of a time and place that no longer exists.

This is the essence of imagination: the creation of ideas in your head, composed from ideas, beliefs, and memories. Often, they are not simple ideas, but complex structures. The most spectacular use of imagination is in creativity, but this book isn’t about creativity, which requires the generation of something new and effective in some way.

Acts of imagination need not be new or useful. Imagination also has great uses in more mundane tasks we do every day, such as planning the day. When you think of what route you want to use to get home, or you go through the logistics of where to park your bike, or figure out what order you should run your errands in, you’re thinking of possible realities that do not yet exist.

From (Pegasus Books, 2019), by Jim Davies, a professor in ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s Institute of Cognitive Science.

Dylan In Lagos

Although I do not recollect the exact date I encountered Bob Dylan’s work in Lagos, Nigeria’s densely populated commercial and cultural capital city, I remember the circumstances that brought the inimitable artist into my consciousness. I had graduated from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s premier university, and had moved to Lagos to pursue a career in journalism and creative writing.

It was in the early 1990s and Lagos — like other cities that serve as cultural hubs (such as New York, San Francisco, Paris, Dublin, and London) — was the dream site for young people determined to “make it big” in life….

Like Dylan’s New York, Lagos was the metropolitan beast where artists armed only with their talents and dreams struggled to find the muse and direction in life. It was not difficult, therefore, to see why Dylan cast a spell on our small Lagos group.

Besides Dylan’s artistic ingenuity and counter- cultural disposition, our group was drawn to artists whose rebellious and anti-establishment personae advertised the kind of fierce creative temperament that we aspired to possess. Nigeria in the late 1980s and 1990s writhed in the death pangs of military dictatorship and a torturous process of transition to democratic governance.

Writers, journalists, activists were jailed for their work. The writer and environmental rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, was gruesomely executed by hanging within this period. So, more than ever before, writers found therapy in their art, while some sought escape through liquor or fled into exile.

From (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), edited by Nduka Otiono — a professor in ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s Institute of African Studies — and Josh Toth.

Sleeping Problems

In the spring of 1971, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) fought the courts for the right to sleep on the National Mall as part of their weeklong demonstration, Dewey Canyon III. When the courts denied their petition, veterans decided to break the law by sleeping anyway.

Turning good rest into a form of dissent, hundreds of veterans fell asleep, wondering whether or not they would be arrested by daybreak. Clearly, sleep played a part in the movement to stop the U.S. war in Vietnam.

Still, I wondered, why did the government see fit to let veterans stay overnight on the Mall — singing, talking, even lying down — while refusing to let them fall asleep there? Why did veterans decide to sleep and risk arrest?

This book began as my effort to understand what was at stake in this contest, and, from there, my story grew, traversing the fields of military and mainstream psychiatry, popular and institutional  film, documentary sound technology, methods of brain warfare, and the tactics of postwar social movements to arrive back at the scene of soldiers sleeping soundly in the public square.

The VVAW sleep-in speaks powerfully in no small part because it flies in the face of a clinical and cultural record of war trauma that is rife with scenes of troubled sleep: the sleepless soldier and the insomniac veteran are protagonists of an evolving narrative of trauma and its aftermath that spans the course of the twentieth century.

From (Verso, 2019), by Franny Nudelman, a professor in ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s Department of English Language and Literature.

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Raven Magazine