UBC's Indigenous Plan and Building Design
A focus on campus building design, renewal, and operations.
“The new Indigenous Strategic Plan acknowledges our responsibility toward the truth as an institution of knowledge and learning and how we need to collectively evolve to respond to the urgent need for meaningful reconciliation,” says Sheryl Lightfoot, plan co-lead and senior advisor to the president on Indigenous affairs at UBC and Canada research chair of global Indigenous rights and politics. [UBC Media Relations]
UBC introduced its new Indigenous Strategic Plan in September, 2020 in the early months of the pandemic. The virtual event highlighted the intended implications of the plan. Invited guests spoke about the plan’s uniqueness within the post secondary sector.
Former UBC President, Santa Ono interviewed Sheryl Lightfoot on his Blue and Goldcast radio show in September 2020. Sheryl was senior advisor on Indigenous concerns and the lead on the development of the plan. The plan is driven by the calls to action embedded in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action, and the calls for justice of Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Commission. Santa and Lightfoot talked about the importance of the plan and its implications for UBC and the post secondary sector.
In the three years since the plan’s announcement and endorsement by the UBC Board of Governors and Senates a lot of focus has been applied to research and teaching components. At the very least the public announcements and scrutiny has focussed on research, teaching, and student experience. This story shifts perspective to ask how the ISP is being implemented in the campus units charged with managing the physical plant of the campus.
In early March 2023 I met with John Metras (Interim Vice-President, Operations Associate Vice-President, Facilities) and Jennifer Sanguinetti ( Managing Director, Infrastructure Development). John and Jennifer are both trained as mechanical engineers. John has been at UBC continuously since 1999. Jennifer is coming up to nine years at UBC.
Putting the Plan into Action
I asked John and Jennifer to outline how they are implementing the Indigenous Strategic Plan in their units. John started the ball rolling by explaining the responsibilities of his portfolio which includes the infrastructure development group and all of UBC’s facilities operations groups.
[This includes], John told me, “building operations; our municipal services team, who look after the public realm; our energy and water services group, who manage the campus utilities; and our custodial services team. We have quite a large team, a little over 800 full time staff who plan, develop, operate, maintain university facilities, primarily responsible on the Vancouver campus, but we work with the Okanagan campus in the infrastructure development area supporting their capital planning and facilities planning and project development”.
The Indigenous Strategic Plan is extremely important to the facilities team. We've built it into our business plan as a priority … to ensure that our team has really strong awareness. We're undertaking training across our portfolio using the ISP toolkit to identify the action areas that we need to work on … to build within our culture the importance of the Indigenous partners that we work with.
“I think,” Jennifer said, “one of the really key pieces is that this is a journey for us. We are learning and we have prioritized figuring out how to get better. UBC has a history, way back, when we did harm to our relationships with our Indigenous partners. Now [we ask ourselves] how can we use the lens of the Indigenous Strategic Plan and the tools contained within it to help us, as one part of the UBC community, do better and build relationships and recognize how to indigenize our development process, bring Indigenous ways of thinking and knowing to our projects to do better for everyone.
I noted John had mentioned following the ISP self assessment tool and asked if they had “rolled that out to the entire 800 staff working through the unit? Or is it targeted to design, planning, administrative, management side” of the portfolio?
“Each of us,” Jennifer said, “who report into John, because our functions are so different, the gap analysis that you go through when you do the self assessment is radically different because the areas of focus are just [so different]. Each individual unit is figuring out how best we can address the opportunity within the ISP.”
“That's happening now,” John said. “We're going through the process. And the different units are utilizing the tool. Some are more advanced than others, but we're just working through that.”
UBC’s Indigenous Partners / Indigenous UBC Community
John and Jennifer both spoke about how their units are using the ISP to focus on, and improve, their partnerships with Musqueam (in Vancouver) and Sylix Okanagan Nation (in Kelowna). I asked them to talk about how they are working with the Indigenous community internal to UBC - Indigenous faculty, staff, and students.
Jennifer responded with an example about designing buildings to accommodate smudging.
“There are some communities the academic occupants of the Gateway Building work with where their tradition includes Smudging. … Figuring out how to accommodate everyone's needs [is important]. We pushed out the timeline on that project to make sure that there was time and space for folks with the expertise. Our role is to facilitate these projects coming forward at the optimal time, not the fastest time, the optimal time. We're creating that space for the conversations that need to happen, but then we're pushing the contractors on the build of it. The Smudging piece, for example, that was one where it required a lot of conversation. So, when the need was identified, we created space within the design process to facilitate those conversations led by others with the appropriate expertise to then inform the design needs as the Smudging protocol was worked through and developed in order to be able to optimize that design.”
“That's the really key part of taking the time up front to hear and understand and learn and listen to what the needs are so that we're able to make the buildings work for the people within them, not have the people have to work around the building. Our ultimate goal is to have the building support the functions as well as they possibly can and not the other way around. So those fire systems, they're there for a nominal overarching safety piece. Where that safety doesn't create cultural safety, we need to think differently and think about, okay, if we understand deeply what the needs are within the building, what are the other options? How can we make the right engineering decisions and architectural decisions that support the needs of the people within the building? So that's that piece, that's that development process piece of creating the time and the space and the opportunity for the right conversations to happen.”
The smudging example shared is premised upon meeting the needs of a non-Musqueam outside Indigenous partner. I mentioned the Indigenous plan also speaks to the Indigenous community -faculty/staff/students/residents- that is a part of UBC. I said “I appreciate it’s harder to think of, but beyond smudging how are you including the Indigenous community on campus as per the goals of the ISP?”
“I like to think, John said, “that we run quite an open process when we're working on campus projects, whether it's buildings or public realm, and that we try to invite and welcome a large group to the table to talk about these projects as we plan them to ensure that we're creating for the whole community. I guess the view would be that should be captured within that. But we probably have to think more deeply about that specific question of Musqueam partners versus [Indigenous] community members on campus who have a perspective on indigeneity and bring their own perspectives to it and be more maybe deliberate and specific about asking those questions. But we certainly try to draw on expertise that we have on campus because we know we have it. So when there's questions, and often there's conflicting views, we rely on expertise from our advisors on campus, indigenous advisors, and that's quite critical. That's come into play, I think, on many projects that we've done, we benefited from that advice and input.
“Like you said, Charles, this is new,” Jennifer added. Have we got there yet? No. Are we trying? Yes. Are we open to hearing and learning? Absolutely. And it's something that we really are committed to trying to figure out better ways to deal with all of the issues in a way that is respectful and inclusive and build a better campus community for everyone. Are we going to make mistakes along the way? I'm sure we are. It is taking the time to educate our staff and ourselves is the commitment [we are making].
Working to the Plan
The nuts and bolts of putting a high level strategic plan into action in the everyday operations of the university takes creativity and thought. Adding cultural sensitivity into an empirical design process might at first seem awkward. However, as Jennifer described the process for thinking about building design and smudging in the Gateway Building, the processes are as flexible as the designers allow them to be. As John notes the process is already fairly open and thus -in theory- is able to respond to the goals and action items in the ISP in a meaningful and measured way.