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New Vancouver Island University chancellor hopes to continue reconciliation work

NANAIMO – Aboriginal treaty rights lawyer Louise Mandell installed a new chancellor at VIU.
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Shawn A-in-chut Atleo

Louise Mandell is hoping to continue Vancouver Island University's tradition of addressing reconciliation.

Mandell, officially installed as new chancellor at the university's late-January convocation ceremonies, is impressed with its track record in dealing with the damage the residential school system has done to aboriginal peoples.

She said the university's aboriginal education component is a beautiful example of reconciliation, not only in the programs it offers, but also in the educational component, where to achieve reconciliation via education is an obvious part of the university's platform.

“There's also the beautiful tuition waiver program, where aboriginal kids in care who find their way there, are welcomed into the university to study and it's a beautiful way that the university's acknowledging the past, the problems of colonization and doing [its] part to address them, where every student matters.

“Where you can change the world by changing somebody's life and I found the emphasis on wanting to make change positively in this direction to be wonderful,” said Mandell.

Mandell said she feels honoured to be succeeding Shawn Atleo, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, as chancellor, and while her background is in aboriginal treaty rights law, she is happy to be getting out of the “purely adversarial dialogue” involved in litigation.

“One of the things I'm really pleased about is to be able to move the dialogue into a more peaceful discourse, where it's not about against, it's about moving in the direction of educating people towards seeing the beauty of our interconnectedness and understanding that we are all so interconnected.

“That's not in an adversarial context. It's in a 'getting to live with one another in a better way' state,” Mandell said.

She hopes to further the work the university is doing in its efforts to teach about reconciliation and bring peace to that issue for the next generation.

Mandell will serve a three-year term as chancellor.



Karl Yu

About the Author: Karl Yu

After interning at Vancouver Metro free daily newspaper, I joined Black Press in 2010.
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