All images in this post are courtesy of Laura Ishiguro, and used with deep gratitude!
Early last week, on November 29th, the Free Speech Club at UBC placed a giant Mars symbol at the very top of the UBC Engineering cairn. The Mars symbol was selected as it is often used to represent men and masculinity, and was intended to allow the Free Speech Club to display their support for the official funding of a men’s rights group by the school’s student union.
It remains unclear whether or not the Free Speech Club was aware of this, but the cairn was intended to be the location for the annual 14 Not Forgotten Memorial Ceremony, to be held on November 30th. The ceremony is in honour of the 14 women who died in the Montreal Massacre and in honour of December 6th, the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women. The cairn is part of the engineering building’s Memorial Courtyard.
When three prominent student leaders, Veronica Knott, Jeanie Malone, and Carly Jones (all of whom are also current engineering students) spoke out against this, they were met with support, debate, and accusations of “overreacting.” The symbol has since been taken down and the cairn redecorated, as you can see in the photos above.
So on this December 6th, I want to take a moment to address the place that this day of remembrance and action holds in Canada and what it says about how we see ourselves as a nation. In this blog post, I’m going to talk about how we remember and how we forget, and the relationship between memory and history.
*And thank you to Elise Chenier for suggesting this topic!