Trailer, Season 4

11/04/22 • 1 min

Welcome to Don’t Call Me Resilient, where we tackle systemic racism head-on and figure out ways to deal with it. This season, we’ll be delving into everything from tokenism at work to how long COVID is hitting women of colour especially hard. And from how climate change is wreaking havoc on the most vulnerable to how most journalists have a lot to learn about telling Indigenous stories. In each of these upcoming episodes, our guests bring their expertise to challenge us to do better. So we’ll also be looking at solutions – and sharing reasons to be hopeful for our future. Join us for Season 4 of Don’t Call Me Resilient from The Conversation Canada. Follow us and listen, wherever you get your favourite podcasts.

Previous Episode

About the Queen, the Crown's crimes and how to talk about the unmourned

At Don’t Call Me Resilient, we’ve been busy planning season 4 of the podcast, which starts to roll out in November. We’re even starting to think about season 5. But we decided to stop production to talk about something we felt we couldn’t ignore.

We’ve watched this incredible spectacle around the Queen’s death and public outpouring of support and love for the British monarchy.

Here in Canada, Queen Elizabeth was the official head of state and her funeral this week was made a federal holiday. In Ontario, the Minister of Education directed schools to conduct a moment of silence “to recognize the profound impact of Queen Elizabeth II’s lifelong and unwavering devotion to public service.”

And yet next week, those same children will be exploring the history of Indian Residential Schools and the immense ongoing damage of that system — started and long supported by the Crown.

In the middle of this outpouring of love and grief for the Queen — and the monarchy she represented — not everyone is feeling it. Not everyone wants to mourn or honour her or what she represents.

And there are a lot of reasons why.

For example, the head of the Assembly of First Nations, RoseAnne Archibald told CTV News that the Royal Family should apologize for the failures of the Crown ...“particularly for the destructiveness of colonization on First Nations people.”
Another example came from Uju Anya, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who posted a tweet in which she identified the Queen as overseeing a “thieving raping genocidal empire.”

To explore these ideas further, we reached out to two scholars who are regular contributors to Don’t Call Me Resilient. Both say that the Queen’s death could be a uniting moment of dissent for people from current and former colonies.

Veldon Coburn is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Indigenous Research and Studies at the University of Ottawa where he teaches a class called Colonialism, Territory & Treaties. He is Anishinaabe, Algonquin from Pikwàkanagàn First Nation and the co-editor of Capitalism and Dispossession.

Cheryl Thompson is Assistant Professor of media and culture at the School of Performance and the Director of the Laboratory for Black Creativity at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is the author of Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty.

Next Episode

The unfairness of the climate crisis

Join us on this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient as we speak with researcher and migration expert Yvonne Su about climate-induced migration and the burden of care that is owed to displaced people.
Recently, there have been some troubling images coming out of Pakistan, where devastating floods have taken the lives of more than 1,500 people and displaced close to 8 million. The floods have also submerged farmlands and spread waterborne illnesses. In total, it is estimated that the floods have so far impacted over 33 million people.

So the picture is bleak.

And a lot of this suffering can be linked to human-induced climate change.

In other words, the global climate crisis has been driven by the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation by western states. Meanwhile, some populations continue to bear the brunt of the impact. Given this, do the United Nations and those states who have contributed most to the problem have the moral responsibility to protect and compensate those most harmed by climate change?

This month, leaders from over 190 countries gather in Egypt for COP27, the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Previous UN climate change summits have been criticized by Indigenous and environmental activists who say the so-called solutions coming out of them have done more harm than good.

Will this year be different? Will leaders be paying attention to real solutions for people in Pakistan that are being displaced right now?

Join us as we speak with Yvonne Su, Assistant Professor in the Department of Equity Studies at York University. Yvonne specializes in migration, including climate change-induced displacement both globally and in Canada. She has a PhD in Political Science and International Development from the University of Guelph and a Masters in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford.