Wilfrid Laurier University's Centre for Indigegogy has permanently closed
CBC
Wilfrid Laurier University's Centre for Indigegogy closed for good on Tuesday.
The centre promoted Indigenous ways of knowing, teaching and learning, including a number of hands-on workshops that incorporated traditional medicines, circle work and ceremonies.
The centre's director, Kathy Absolon, has led the project since the very beginning. She says a lack of tenured positions is at the root of the issue.
"We have lost several faculty members and we haven't had positions replaced. We just don't have any more faculty positions to pick up the work of the centre," she said.
"A centre for Indigegogy is not simply a business. It was much more than that."
The closure was first announced by the centre in a post on Instagram on National Indigenous People's Day in June. Since then, Wilfrid Laurier University has deleted all pages related to the centre from its website.
CBC News reached out to the university for comment, but a spokesperson said it does not have any statement to share.
Absolon says since the announcement, many in the community have reached out to her to share their shock and disappointment at the news of the closure.
"People [spoke about] the degree to which they've been impacted by the centre. The transformations that people have undergone within their own personal lives and within their professional lives, how the centre has generated them to transform their teaching, to transform how they work and even the way they live."
Absolon says the decision to close the centre was made in March.
"It was a very difficult decision for us to make," she said. "But we had to make that decision ... in the reality of fiscal cutbacks and faculty cutbacks," she said.
Absolon says the idea to open the centre came to her when she was a mental health worker in the 1990s. She wanted to create a way to customize training with a more Indigenous lens.
"We would decolonize it, we would Indigenize it and make the training relevant to us," she said.
"That vision is still there. Does something like that belong [at the University]? I don't know about that. If it's not in the university doesn't mean it's not out there."
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