In many traditional Indigenous beliefs, the spirits of missing and murdered women are lost and trying to find their way back home.
Every year, candlelight vigils are held across Canada for these Indigenous women and girls, on—or as near as possible to—October 4. Vancouver Island University’s Student Union hosted this year’s ceremony at Shq’apthut (the Gathering Place) on October 3. This is the seventh year in a row that VIUSU has organized it.
Sherry Mattice, VIU’s Indigenous Education Navigator from the Powell River campus, emceed the ceremony. She began by introducing Elder ...
The webisodic 5-10, created by stand-up comedian Peter Hudson and Raymond Knight, owner of Knight Studios, is growing in popularity on Facebook. The first episode released on August 19, 2018, and has over 80k views while the second episode released on September 21, 2018, has over 30k views.
5-10 follows Peter Hudson as the character 5-10 as he navigates the urban setting of Nanaimo and readjusts to society after a stint in Nanaimo Correctional Facility. The character usually dresses in a “Straight Outta Harewood” t-shirt with a bike chain necklace, jeans, and prison tattoos that ...
October 17 brings a new wave of rules and regulations to the country as cannabis becomes legal nationwide. Before you start to partake, read over the policies in place for Canada, BC, Nanaimo, and Vancouver Island University.
National policy
The Cannabis Act is Canada’s guideline for policy nationwide. This legal framework deals with production, distribution, sale, and possession across the country. The legal age for consumption and interaction with cannabis has been set at 18 years old nationwide. This may vary from province to province, however in BC legal age will be ...
Nanaimo Spoken Word is an open mic poetry night at The Buzz Coffee House in Nanaimo, hosted by Jess Wilson, a creative writing student at Vancouver Island University. It’s held every third Thursday of the month and there is a $5 cover charge at the door.
All funds collected go toward paying The Buzz Coffee House rent for the space, funding writing workshops, and bringing in feature performers from Victoria and the mainland.
Wilson began Nanaimo Spoken Word because Nanaimo lacked a place where poets could gather and share their art. Zantraya Heyward, a friend of Wilson, assists in ...
After six months, the fate of Nanaimo’s Discontent City remains in flux.
A BC Supreme Court decision from Justice Ronald Skolrood on September 21 ruled that Discontent City residents would have to leave the camp by midnight October 12 or risk being removed by the RCMP.
Despite recognizing that tent cities provide a sense of safety and community for their residents, Justice Skolrood ruled that the health and safety risk of maintaining Discontent City was too great to let the camp remain. Justice Skolrood said that residents of the camp could seek refuge in Nanaimo shelters, as ...
The idea that a university student dragged an Instant Pot to dorms has gotten a chuckle here and there; but I am quickly learning the power of the multi-function unit. Nothing beats setting food on the slow-cooker function and then heading to a six-hour time block knowing that supper will be ready for me when I stagger back home. Nothing is more money saving than coming home from a hectic day, throwing some ingredients in, and putting on the pressure cooker function for 10 minutes. Dominoes misses me, but my bank account doesn’t miss them.
With cold weather on the way, it’s time for ...
For me, seventh grade was the first year of middle school. I had no idea what middle school would be like, and being new in Kelowna, I had no idea who I’d be going to school with. As the school year progressed I found my place, but I noticed something I’d never seen before. Guys were constantly going around and slapping girls asses or groping them in some way. It seemed like I was the only one not doing it. A friend of mine told me that girls like guys that are assholes, so I became an asshole.
Looking back at my own life, I can pick out multiple times where something I thought was ...
A cannabis-focused curriculum has been making its way into post-secondary institutions across Canada in the wake of the October 17 country-wide legalization. Course topics vary from applied sciences to legal and agriculture.
The Nav interviewed Glynis Steen, Dean of Trades and Applied Technology at VIU about some of the cannabis educational opportunities. VIU’s nine-month-long Horticultural Technician Foundation program is designed to provide students with a thorough understanding of horticulture principles and practices. Skills learned include plant propagation techniques, greenhouse ...
Don’t bury me in a cemetery
below the pockmarked blocks
that romanticize the forgotten.
Bury me next to an abandoned school
where memories of younger days
mix with decay.
Bury me next to a lighthouse
wherein the dark
light can still be seen.
Bury me next to a waterfall
where what has fallen
still continues forward.
Bury me where a gravestone
is not the only sight
worth seeing.
Question:
Aside from one-to-one counselling available to students, what does VIU offer to support students struggling with their mental health and to educate the student population about mental health and illness?
Answer:
Thank you for this very important and relevant question. As a society, we are still learning how to build and maintain our mental health, to prevent and recover from mental illness, and to support each other. VIU is committed to fostering well-being in the campus community. Here are some of the supports available to students:
Groups: Several ongoing groups to ...
To my naïve generation,
yielding,
too inexperienced for truth.
Politics, panic, purgatory yet untouched.
We hardly know
love from lust.
To my gullible generation,
unthinking,
with media’s unending hiss.
Bidders buy young minds.
Convinced to believe anything
we don’t believe in ourselves.
To my angry generation,
rebelling,
with misplaced red rage.
Misdirected feelings lash.
Who should we blame?
Because we’re fighting ourselves.
To my apathetic generation,
unfeeling,
with stilled hearts,
ignored into atrophy.
Not caring,
nor caring to know.
To my despondent ...
With the VIU Mariners Women’s Soccer season in full swing and playoffs forthcoming, we chatted with newly appointed Apprentice Coach Zoe Grace in order to get to know her even better. Coach Grace was among 12 candidates chosen for the 2018-19 Female Apprentice Coach Program established by the CCAA in 2004. Kevin Lindo, Head Coach of the Mariners Women’s team will serve as Zoe’s primary mentor during the 2018-19 season. Grace has five years of first-hand experience as a Mariners player, winning two provincial titles, and appearing in a pair of CCAA Nationals in her time as a player. That ...
A new academic year presents opportunities for ways education can be more affordable and accessible to students. With tuition costs ever increasing and an ongoing lack of funding from the BC government, creative approaches to addressing student debt must be pursued.
One avenue is in exploring Open Educational Resources (OER), which is supported by BCcampus and the BC Federation of Students’ #textbookbroke campaign, calls on the government to fund the creation or revision of low-cost digital textbooks. In turn, faculty in post-secondary institutions need to adopt these open-access ...
I am sick of my friends dying from preventable opioid overdoses.
Opioid use disorder is a medical condition and should be treated as such. We don’t force people with diabetes to buy contaminated insulin off the street, so why do we force people with opioid use disorder to buy fentanyl-contaminated opioids off the street?
According to the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC), from January to June of this year, 742 people have died in BC from unintentional illicit overdoses. Of those 742 overdose deaths, 81 percent involved fentanyl, an opioid that is 100 times stronger than ...
The first ghost story I remember hearing came from my Irish-descended grandfather. I was about seven years old at the time, and we were sitting around the kitchen table on the farm. The conversation was amongst adults and I just happened to be in the room. Some neighbours, he said, had just buried their father. After they’d left the cemetery they went home for the wake. A short while later, the dead man walked in through the front door and stared at everyone for a long moment before vanishing.
“He looked as real as you or me,” my grandfather said. “Even the priest saw him.”
I ...
In Part 1 of this series, I discussed my general ambivalence toward “fad diets” and the factors that led up to my decision to cave to keto. I outlined the basics, boasted about bacon, and even went a little “Bill-Nye” for anyone interested in the science. As promised, this section provides an account of my personal journey with the famed high-fat diet.
The first week: When pigs fry
I woke up early and excited to start my new diet with bacon, eggs, and a lot of butter. This basic breakfast had satisfied me for years, except this time I didn’t pat the grease off with a paper towel. ...
It is always the time to think about the impacts of colonialism on Indigenous communities, but we have the opportunity to come together, as a community, to do so for the annual Sisters in Spirit vigils.
In 2005, in response to mounting evidence that hundreds of Indigenous women had gone missing or been murdered, many women and human rights groups advocated for a comprehensive action to investigation into the violence and its causes. In partnership with the federal government, Sisters in Spirit was initiated as a database of murdered and missing Indigenous women—however, federal ...
Despite a long history of student participation in activism and government, the youth vote in Canada and the province has been undervalued for years. This has resulted in party platforms not including vital student issues and concerns. Even with the NDP-Green coalition, which was greeted with much hope for reform to social issues, little has been done thus far to support the needs of students, as seen through the 2018 BC Budget. This means students are returning to university and colleges across the province with higher tuition fees and looming interest on loans.
However, this could ...
The first issue of the Navigator was released October 16, 1969. (Technically, yes, that is only 49 years ago, however, the Navigator is currently in its 50th volume, which makes this year our 50 year anniversary). Since then, much about the Navigator, and the university it represents, have changed.
The Navigator was originally the student newspaper of Malaspina College, Vancouver Island University’s official title in 1969. The school later became Malaspina University College in 1995, and then Vancouver Island University in 2008. The Navigator was formed as “The Navigator Newspaper ...
On September 7, rapper and producer Mac Miller (whose real name was Malcolm McCormick) died of a suspected overdose. He was only twenty-six years old.
Throughout my addiction, I listened to his music. It was therapeutic. I was lonely, depressed, and couldn’t stop using substances, and his words touched on each of those subjects with a rawness that gave me both comfort and goosebumps. Putting on a Mac Miller track was like talking to a close friend who was dealing with the same issues that I was. After several stays in treatment centres, I am now five years sober.
A few hours after ...
Nanaimo’s Discontent City has been a hot-button issue for residents of Nanaimo since the camp was formed in May of 2018. Discontent City is a tent city set up by Nanaimo’s homeless population as a safe place for them to live, as well as raise awareness about homelessness in the city. A tent city was briefly formed at City Hall as a protest over lack of affordable housing, and shortly after that, Discontent City was illegally formed illegally on private City property. Some citizens of Nanaimo have come out in support of Discontent City and its residents, and others have come out against ...
According to BC Coroners Service, 1,449 people died from illicit-substance overdoses in British Columbia in 2017. Compare that to the average of 206 people per year from 2000 to 2010.
Despite the province announcing a public health emergency in response, stigma regarding substance use remains at an all-time high. Here are two Facebook comments on a recent CBC Vancouver story about rising overdose deaths:
“I wish the addicts would all just die so we can get on with spending money where it needs to be prioritized.”
“Survival of the fittest, thinning the herd.”
Sadly, comments ...
VIU students have been contributing to The Nav for 50 years now. During that time, they’ve also submitted to Omniverse, Stump, Shorelines, Atrevida, The Malaspina Review, and Portal. Some have even been published off campus—usually the result of entering a writing contest.
The Vancouver Island University—then named Malaspina College—Creative Writing program was established in 1989 with the mandate to “train the writers of the future [to] make significant contributions to culture.” Since then, waves of CREW students have graduated from VIU—but where are these “culture-contributing” ...
2018 was BC's second worst wildfire season in history, following 2017 as the worst fire season on record. Over 600 wildfires burned simultaneously up and down the province this year. The provincial government was forced to declare a state of emergency to combat the threat.
Smoke from the BC fires has floated across the country, making it as far as the Maritime provinces. BC had the overall worst air quality in North America in August 2018, and some of the communities hardest hit by wildfires experienced weeks of thick black smoke that blotted out the sun.
Wildfires in the Nanaimo ...
