By Bernard Perley, President of CASCA

Kwey Psiw te wen.  Tan kakw?  Liwiso Bernard Perley.  Wolastokwi naka wabanakiw nil.  Greetings everyone.  My name is Bernard Perley.  I am Maliseet from Tobique First Nation, New Brunswick, Canada.  I have the honour of being the current President for the Canadian Anthropology Society/Société Canadienne d’Anthropologie and I am deeply grateful for all the previous officers of CASCA who served in leadership roles in the long fifty years of the organization’s history.  Over those fifty years the organization has developed into a beloved gathering of like-minded scholars and community partners who see the sharing of knowledge and advocacies for understanding as a fundamental aspect of our professional commitments.  The CASCA conference in Kelowna was one of those community moments where we gathered to share ideas, concerns, and inspiration with one another.  Ostensibly, the Kelowna conference was a celebration of the past fifty years of CASCA; we even had posters and stickers to commemorate our past as well as a jigsaw puzzle!  There was a sense of relief that we were back to in-person smaller conferences following four years of upheaval and uncertainty due to the pandemic isolation, restriction, and lingering emotional distress and the joint CASCA/AAA conference in Toronto.  The smiles, laughter, and close conversations were reassuring embodiments of things returning to normal.  Yet, as an Indigenous person in one of the highest at-risk populations to covid health threats, I could not, cannot, be complacent in a world where the threat of death by contagion circulates in every public space.  Also, as an Indigenous person living in ancestral landscapes that have become alien to the first peoples of these lands, a return to what is imagined as “normal” before the pandemic is not a “normal” that many Indigenous communities want to return to; especially, as daily reminders of colonial erasures of our languages, stories, and knowledges are perpetuated without notice or remediation.  

In anticipation of the celebration of CASCA’s past fifty years, the CASCA Executive asked to hold a series of visioning exercises to imagine the next fifty years of CASCA.  We are grateful to the Local Organizing Committee for making space for these critical conversations and I am grateful for the organization and support that Francophone Member-at-Large Emmanuelle Bouchard-Bastien and CASCA Treasurer Jason Ellsworth provided to facilitate one of the futures conversations and I am deeply grateful for the participation of Past President Emma Varley, Anglophone Member-at-Large Rine Vieth, and CASCA Secretary Daniel Salas for their invaluable contributions to the conversations in the additional panels and sessions.  There were three separate conversations that were well attended.  The conversations were celebratory of the organizations’ vitality over the past fifty years but there were concerns for the next fifty years.  Among the concerns were the precarity of our young scholars in a changing academic market, a concern for the lack of diverse representation in CASCA, and a degree of helplessness regarding the geopolitics of hate, aggression, and intolerance.  What can CASCA do in these fraught times?  The visioning sessions allowed members to brainstorm out loud with one another and, in doing so, affirmed our collective commitment to ensuring CASCA continues to be a vital source for ideas, initiatives, and a supportive community for all our members.

There is much work to do and we are starting from a foundation of strength and vision for the future.  We cannot know how things will play out but we can do our best to potentiate positive outcomes for our respective communities and constituencies.  Some concrete initiatives we are taking include a) making space and time for our underrepresented members and their communities, identifying a wider constituency of potential members who find themselves doing the critical work of anthropology in non-anthropology and nonacademic spaces, b) rethinking what forms of representation and scholarly activities will count toward merit in promotion and tenure cases, c) identifying ways CASCA can promote greater accessibility (broadly interpreted) for our members who have diverse needs across our membership, and making a concerted effort to take seriously CASCA’s transformative potential in addressing truth and reconciliation on these occupied Indigenous traditional, ancestral, and (often) unceded lands.  

Thank you for joining me on the start of this journey of mutual discovery and actualizing our collective future.

Wisoki woliwon psiw te wen ciw psiw te kekew!

Bernie

Photo caption: Bernie and the Cree Bears