#Code of Conduct and Inclusion and Diversity Statement | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

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C A R N I V A L

C O R P O R A T I O N & P L C

Section 1: Introduction

The United Kingdom’s Modern Slavery Act 2015 and Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018 require

companies like ours to disclose information regarding their efforts to combat slavery and human

trafficking in their supply chain and within their business operations. We take this responsibility

very seriously and are proud of the measures we have taken in this regard. We acknowledge the

need to continue and build upon this important work.

This statement sets out the action taken by Carnival Corporation & plc to combat slavery and

human trafficking within our internal operations and in our supply chains and covers over the

fiscal year ending 30 November 2022 (“the reporting period”).

For the purposes of this statement, the reporting entity is Carnival plc. However, given the

structure of our business (outlined in Section 2 below), many of the policies, procedures and

initiatives are applied across both Carnival plc and Carnival Corporation.

a - Our commitment to respecting human rights

At Carnival Corporation & plc, our mission and purpose is to deliver unforgettable happiness to

our guests by providing extraordinary cruise vacations, while honouring the integrity of every

ocean we sail, place we visit and life we touch.

We are committed to living up to the highest standards of ethical behaviour and integrity and

recognise that it takes commitment from every one of our people to create a stronger, more

inclusive culture. We therefore created our Culture Essentials which are the non-negotiable

beliefs and behaviours that define who we are, what we stand for, and how we operate. They

connect us to each other and the organization and serve as guiding principles that all of our

employees, at all levels, shipboard and shoreside, must embrace and model to help us deliver

our mission & purpose.

Respecting human rights in accordance with internationally recognised standards is an integral

part of our global commitment to responsible business. Our Human Rights Policy is an expression

of our commitment to promote and foster human rights, in line with the principles set out in the

United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and summarizes our key areas of focus as

we strive to live up to this commitment. Some of our Human Rights Policy’s focus areas include:

• Our People: Providing a safe and healthy environment and working conditions for our

employees, and all others, including third parties working for us or on our behalf, is at the

core of what we do every day.

• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: We welcome and celebrate diversity of differences in gender,

age, race, ethnicity, and national origin, range of abilities, sexual orientation, gender identity,

financial means, education, and political perspective.

• Training and Capability Building on Human Rights throughout the organization and

beyond, via our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics.

• Health, Environment, Safety and Security: Focusing on detection, prevention,

implementation, feedback and improvement.

• Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking: We condemn all forms of exploitation and

forced labour.

• Our Environment and Communities Having access to a healthy environment is a

fundamental human right – and one of our top priorities.

As a global leader in the cruise sector, we work together with a wide range of stakeholders to

identify challenges and implement effective solutions across our operations and supply chain.

We seek to advance human rights through our business activities and are committed to ongoing

human rights due diligence in support of these efforts. This statement details how we are

progressing our journey to globally identify, assess and mitigate ongoing risks relating to human

rights across our business and supply chain.

We are committed to respecting the rights of all workers and communities throughout our supply

chain, and to ensuring we are in the best position to prevent, identify, and address actual or

potential human rights and environmental impacts caused by or linked to our business

operations.

b- Modern Slavery

Modern slavery remains one of the most severe global human rights challenges facing society.

Over 40 million men, women and children are in some form of modern slavery. At least 16 million

are victims of forced labour in the private sector (International Labour Organization). Human

rights abuses of any kind are unacceptable, and as one of the world’s leading cruise companies,

we have a clear responsibility to respect human rights throughout our business and our supply

chain. We also recognise that everyone has a role to play in tackling it and we actively encourage

those we do business with to prevent, mitigate and address adverse impacts on human rights,

including modern slavery.

The insidious nature of modern slavery presents challenges to effectively stamp out and

eliminate this practice. While our work is ongoing, the actions we have taken to address the risks

of modern slavery across our operations and in our supply chains includes:

• Codes and policies for our people and Business Partners;

• Business Partner due diligence;

• Monitoring of Business Partners;

• Robust recruitment practices;

• Maintaining a Compliance Reporting Hotline;

• Training and awareness building.

These efforts are described more fully in the relevant sections of this statement.

Section 2: Our structure, business model and supply chain

a- Our structure and business model

Structure

Carnival plc, together with Carnival Corporation, operate a dual listed company, whereby the

businesses of Carnival Corporation & Carnival plc are combined through a number of contracts

and through provisions in Carnival Corporation’s Articles of Incorporation and By-Laws and

Carnival plc’s Articles of Association. The two companies operate as if they are a single economic

enterprise with a single senior executive management team and identical Boards of Directors,

but each has retained its separate legal identity. Carnival Corporation & Carnival plc are both

public companies with separate stock exchange listings and their own shareholders. Carnival

Corporation was incorporated in Panama in 1974 and Carnival plc was incorporated in England

and Wales in 2000.

More information on the structure of Carnival Corporation & plc, including a full list of Carnival

Corporation & plc’s subsidiaries, can be found in our Annual Report (Form 10-K) available here

on our website. Carnival Corporation and Carnival plc are referred to collectively throughout this

statement as “our”, “we” and “us”.

Operations

We are one of the world’s largest leisure travel companies with operations in North America,

Europe, Australia and Asia. We operate a portfolio of leading global, regional and national cruise

brands that sell tailored cruise products, services and vacation experiences. Our portfolio of

cruise line brands includes:

• Carnival Cruise Line

• Princess Cruises

• Holland America Line

• Seabourn

• P&O Cruises (Australia)

• Costa Cruises

• AIDA Cruises

• P&O Cruises (UK)

• Cunard

Together, these brands have a fleet of over 90 cruise ships (as at 30th November 2022) visiting

over 700 ports around the world.

We operate in Australia and the United Kingdom through the Carnival plc arm of Carnival

Corporation & plc. Carnival plc is registered in England with its registered office at Carnival House,

100 Harbour Parade, Southampton, SO15 1ST United Kingdom and is a registered foreign

company in Australia with an Australian branch office located at 465 Victoria Ave, Chatswood,

NSW 2067. Carnival plc’s UK operation represents group cruise brands in the UK and European

markets, including Carnival Cruise Line, Cunard, Holland America Line, P&O Cruises (UK), Princess

Cruises and Seabourn. Carnival plc’s Australian office represents seven cruise brands in the

Australian and New Zealand market, including Carnival Cruise Line, Cunard, Holland America Line,

P&O Cruises (Australia), P&O Cruises (UK), Princess Cruises and Seabourn.

b- Our supply chain

To provide unforgettable holiday experiences for our guests, we source significant quantities of

goods and services from a vast global supply base. We currently work with over 20,000 suppliers,

vendors, distributors, consultants, agents and any other third parties who do business with us or

on our behalf (”Business Partners”) worldwide. Our supply base is diverse and many of our

Business Partners provide goods and services across multiple brands within our portfolio of cruise

brands.

Our global operations can be classified into three key areas:

1. People: Guests, Shore side (Offices and staff), Cruise Ships (Seafarers/ Crew).

Managed at local cruise brand level.

2. Maritime: Fuel, Shipbuilding, Industry Compliance, Technology.

Managed by Carnival Corporation & plc and at the local cruise brand level.

3. Hospitality, Travel and Leisure: Food & Beverage, Hotel Supplies, Ship Furnishings, Travel

Services, Entertainment, Tour Operations.

Managed by Carnival Corporation & plc and at the local cruise brand level.

We are progressively developing a more comprehensive map of our supply chains, including the

categories of products and services sourced and their geographic locations. During the reporting

period we began a global mapping exercise which has provided us with additional visibility of our

supply chain and this process will continue to be rolled out to additional Business Partners in

2023 and beyond.

Section 3: Our Code and Policies on modern slavery and human

trafficking

We have a comprehensive set of policies and procedures in place that demonstrate our

commitment to ethical conduct and respecting human rights. Our policies and procedures apply

to all subsidiaries of Carnival Corporation & plc.

Our policies also play an integral role in our work to embed respect for human rights throughout

our supply chain. They help us set clear expectations for our Business Partners, and they also

establish a framework that helps us monitor compliance with our standards. We have established

a series of core policies for our Business Partners that outline our commitment to human rights

and explicitly prohibit the use of forced labour, child labour, and human trafficking in our supply

chain. These are described in detail below.

Code of Business Conduct:

Our employees are subject to, and expected to follow, our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics

(“Code of Conduct”). Our Code of Conduct requires employees to act with the utmost integrity

when dealing with fellow employees, guests, global communities, government agencies,

vendors, contractors, service providers, agents and other Business Partners. Our Code of Conduct

explicitly condemns all forms of child exploitation and forced labour and sets out our

commitment to complying with the international network of regulations intended to help

prevent modern slavery and human trafficking. Any employee that has witnessed or has

information regarding the exploitation of children, forced labour or human trafficking is required

to report the situation immediately. Further information on reporting can be found in Section 6

below.

Our Code of Conduct, which is available to our employees on our intranet sites and publicly on

our external websites, is provided to all new employees during the on-boarding process and is

regularly promoted in emails and news articles posted on our intranet sites. In addition, our

employees are required to complete a computer-based training course on our Code of Conduct

every two years and pass the corresponding knowledge check.

Our Code of Conduct and the corresponding training course explicitly affirm our support for

protecting human rights.

Business Partner Code of Business Conduct:

Our Business Partner Code of Business Conduct and Ethics (“Business Partner Code”) applies to

all Business Partners. We expect our Business Partners to respect and follow applicable laws

and regulations and to promote ethical decisions in all aspects of their business. Our Business

Partner Code also recognizes the importance of maintaining and promoting fundamental human

rights and serves as the foundation of our human rights commitments. It is available publicly on

our cruise brands’ websites and our online Business Partner portals, as well as being

communicated in contracts and standard terms and conditions with Business Partners.

Our Business Partner Code explicitly affirms our support for protecting human rights and

reiterates our expectation on Business Partners to uphold our requirements.

Our contracts and standard terms and conditions require our Business Partners to comply with

all applicable anti-slavery and human trafficking laws and codes. We also include a link to our

Modern Slavery Act Statement and incorporate an obligation on our Business Partners to commit

to adopting practices that support the principles outlined therein.

Human Rights Policy:

We publish a global Human Rights Policy, in line with international law, agreements and

guidelines including: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Guiding Principles on

Business and Human Rights, the International Bill of Human Rights, and the ILO’s Core Labour

Standards as codified in the eight core conventions.

Our Human Rights Policy is approved by our Board of Directors and embeds the responsibility to

respect human rights throughout our operations and clarifies the responsibility of colleagues,

ship and shore, to uphold our commitments to respect human rights, and outlines the core

human rights standards we expect our Business Partners to uphold. It also outlines our due

diligence procedures. Our Human Rights Policy is embedded into our Business Partner Code and

is also incorporated in our Responsible and Sustainable Sourcing Policy (described below).

Our Human Rights Policy has been reviewed and revised alongside preparation of this statement

to ensure alignment with regulatory developments and internationally recognized best practices.

Responsible and Sustainable Sourcing Policy:

During the reporting period we have developed our global Responsible and Sustainable Sourcing

Policy (“RSSP”) which provides guidelines and recommendations to help Business Partners meet

our mandatory minimum requirements for compliance and progress towards industry best

practice.

Each principle covered in the RSSP is supported by a separate detailed Supplier Standard

(“Standard”) outlining our approach to supply chain due diligence and describing how Business

Partners are expected to put our minimum requirements into practice. The Standard on Labour

and Human Rights outlines the principles we expect our Business Partners to meet, including:

prohibiting human trafficking, forced and child labour; reinforcing the right to freedom of

association; ensuring non-discrimination, lawful working hours and wages; ensuring safety and

security of the working environment; and adopting appropriate grievance mechanisms.

The RSSP is also complemented by a Health and Safety Standard and an Environmental Protection

Standard which further reinforce our commitments to human rights and our expectations of

Business Partners.

The RSSP and associated Standards will be rolled out across our global operations in 2023 and

beyond.

Section 4: Our approach to due diligence process

Due Diligence Questionnaire:

We take a risk-based approach to carrying out due diligence with new and existing Business

Partners. If we detect any potential risks or non-compliance through the process, we may require

the Business Partner to implement a remediation plan, or, in certain circumstances, we may

suspend or terminate the business relationship and any related contracts.

Our due diligence questionnaire incorporates questions on compliance with modern slavery laws.

Our Global Sourcing and Global Supplier Maintenance teams are working to implement a new

vendor management system which will be capable of hosting our enhanced due diligence

questionnaires to enable us to more effectively deploy our due diligence across our supply chain.

This will be progressed during 2023 and will improve our visibility of potential modern slavery

and human rights issues within our supply chain.

Building on Carnival UK’s 2021 adoption of the Sedex platform, the world’s largest data

platform for supply chain assessment, we extended our membership in 2022 to cover our global

operations. This extended membership facilitates collaborative work with our Business Partners

to address modern slavery risk. We will combine our own internal due diligence process with the

Sedex platform to store, analyse, share, and report on our global Business Partners’ sustainability

practices with respect to Human Rights.

The results of our due diligence efforts will inform updates to our policies and procedures in 2023

and beyond to further strengthen our approach to respecting human rights and addressing

modern slavery risks.

Addressing recruitment risks:

In order to address modern slavery risks in our shipboard recruitment activities, we require

Business Partners who provide crew recruitment and resourcing services (referred to as global

talent partners) to be certified in line with the Maritime Labour Convention 2006 (“MLC”). The

MLC establishes standards regarding the minimum working and living conditions of seafarers

including:

 minimum requirements for seafarers to work on a ship, including minimum age

requirements;

 conditions of employment;

 accommodation, recreational facilities, food and catering;

 health protection, medical care, welfare; and

 social security protection.

We also perform our own audits of these Business Partners on a regular basis, monitoring their

job assignment processes, recordkeeping, pre-employment screening and post-employment

follow-up. Detailed crew employment records are maintained in local recruiting offices and at

our headquarters.

The minimum age of employment within our fleet is 21, with the exception of cadets in training

who must be 18 or over.

Addressing fraudulent employment offer risks:

Although fraudulent employment practices are not part of our operations or our supply chain,

we have taken a number of steps in an effort to reduce the risks of modern slavery and human

trafficking associated with them. In particular, we have:

 Reported the activity to the relevant law enforcement agencies where appropriate

and advised individuals to report to authorities in their home jurisdictions

 Reported the activity to the relevant regulators responsible for scams

 Worked with Facebook to expedite removal of fraudulent pages referencing our

brands

 Created posts for brand careers social media sites to alert candidates to the risk of

fraudulent adverts or job offers

 Placed notices on our ‘careers’ web pages advising that we do not send out unsolicited

offers of employment and advising individuals not to respond to any emails or offers

of this nature

 Reported or sought to deregister any email addresses or domains we believe are

involved in distributing fraudulent employment offers

 Sent cease and desist notices to the email accounts associated with the fraudulent

offers

 Advised affected individuals who have contacted us in relation to these fraudulent offers on

how to report and respond to them.

Section 5: Risk assessment and management

a- Our own operations

Our shipboard and shoreside employees are sourced from over 100 countries. In the reporting

period we had an annual average of approximately 60,000 employees onboard the ships we

operated and approximately 10,000 employees and contractors across our shoreside operations.

We comply with the requirements of the MLC from the International Labour Organisation (”ILO”)

which sets minimum international standards for working and living conditions of seafarers. A

complete overview of the applicable MLC standards in the cruise industry as well as specific

standards across Carnival Corporation & plc can be found in our current sustainability report

available here on our website. We also maintain good relationships with relevant unions and

work in partnership to ensure we comply with relevant national employment law requirements.

The recruitment of officers and crew for our shipboard positions presents the risk of modern

slavery practices occurring and continues to be challenging due to intense competition for skilled

labour in the maritime industry. To recruit strong candidates, we often partner with global talent

partners to help us find the best talent, hiring the majority of our crew members through these

employment agencies that act on our behalf. Though many nationalities are represented among

our crew, we have worked with the same primary employment agencies in a number of countries

including Indonesia, India, Vanuatu, and the Philippines for several decades.

We recognise that modern slavery risks are high in the jurisdictions from which our crew are

recruited and are particularly conscious of the risks of human trafficking, child labour and other

coercive practices in relation to the recruitment of individuals. We work closely with our global

talent partners to reiterate and reinforce our requirements of Business Partners and our

expectation of ethics and integrity.

We are aware of instances of unauthorised and fraudulent employment offers being made to

individuals for positions onboard our ships via unconnected third parties. This involves

unsolicited offers of employment, purportedly on behalf of our cruise brands, being published or

circulated via email falsely advertising shipboard roles. In our experience, these emails or

advertisements are generally directed towards jurisdictions with high unemployment rates and

a prevalence of vulnerable workers. We are mindful that such fraudulent employment practices

can be vehicles for human trafficking, servitude, or other exploitative practices. We are aware of

some instances where individuals have been instructed to provide their passport and to pay an

upfront ‘fee’ to the fraudulent recruiter. We continue to monitor this situation very closely and

work with our employment agencies to address any issues that arise and highlight the risks to

potential crew via our websites and social media pages.

b- Our supply chain

In the reporting period, we have built on the identification of the risks associated with the top

spend Business Partners we identified previously and have extended our risk assessment process

to wider sections of our global supply chain. We have enhanced our methodology to identify the

parts of our global supply chain where human rights risks are highest and our approach will be

further enhanced in 2023.

As we roll out the RSSP and the Standards, we plan to encourage our Business Partners to register

on the Sedex online platform as it will enable them to share data and demonstrate their ethical

business practices. When available, we will use information provided by Business Partners in the

Sedex platform to inform our risk assessment and prioritise where to take action.

Section 6: Actions taken to prevent modern slavery and human

trafficking

a- Own operations

Reinforcing reporting channels and obligations:

We have an independently administered Compliance Hotline and website available 24 hours a

day, 7 days a week, which is regularly promoted to our employees. All reports to the Compliance

Hotline are reviewed, with investigations and corrective actions being undertaken where

appropriate. Compliance Hotline data is also analysed for trends, which give the company

visibility and oversight of high frequency or systemic issues.

Our employees are required to report any violation of law or non-compliance with our Code of

Conduct immediately to their local management team, our Global Ethics & Compliance

Department, or through our Compliance Hotline. Reports can be made anonymously and we do

not tolerate retaliation of any kind against those who make reports.

During the reporting period, we promoted the Compliance Hotline through the following

activities:

• Displaying posters onboard our ships and in our corporate offices showing the Compliance

Hotline telephone number and website and encouraging individuals to report concerns.

• Sending awareness messages to employees reminding them to speak up and report concerns

through the Compliance Hotline (or other appropriate channels).

• Conducting regular testing to ensure the Compliance Hotline is functioning and can be

reached from our ships and our offices.

• Introducing a new mobile ‘QR Code’ route to enable mobile reporting.

b- Our supply chain

We are aware that risks and impacts will vary across our global operations and associated supply

chains. We expect that risks could include issues such as forced labour and human trafficking,

amongst other social injustices. Additionally, that risk will also be influenced by a variety of

factors, for example: location, industry, and culture. Given the size of our business, it is impossible

to completely eradicate the risk of modern slavery. In order to be effective, we apply a risk based

approach. We continue to develop our understanding of potential risks through education and

due diligence, and by defining the most common and highest areas of risk within our global

operations in order to focus next phases of activity where we can have the most impact.

Depending on risk profile, we use a number of different methods. Audits are one tool we have

introduced in the reporting period to understand selected Business Partners’ business practices,

how they treat workers, and to verify compliance to legal requirements and our RSSP. We have

adopted Sedex’s audit methodology, SMETA, which is the most widely used social auditing

methodology in the world, but also accept similar alternative protocols that Business Partners

have gone through. Our ongoing adoption of audits will help us to see where issues are more

serious and should be addressed first.

We understand that modern slavery and human rights issues are a complex challenge in global

supply chains and that many issues are systemic in nature and cannot be addressed alone.

Consequently, we encourage Business Partners to proactively disclose to us where they are

having challenges meeting required standards, so we can work together to address issues,

strengthen management systems and implement remediation solutions.

We encourage anyone in our supply chain and communities we interact with, who becomes

aware of any actual or potential violation by any Business Partner of our RSSP, associated

Standards, or our Business Partner Code, or any applicable law, or other misconduct, to

immediately report such conduct using our Compliance Hotline. We take steps to communicate

details of our Compliance Hotline to Business Partners and reiterate our expectation that

individuals should ‘Speak Up’ to report concerns.

During the reporting period, we have also made available to all our Suppliers the email address

[email protected] to raise any concern they may have in relation to the implementation of our

RRSP and its associated Standards.

Equally, we encourage our Business Partners to provide a grievance mechanism via which

affected workers or rightsholders can raise complaints or concerns.

Should it become apparent at any point that we have caused or contributed to a human rights

violation, in our operations or via a Business Partner, an investigation will be conducted, and

remediation processes implemented. Our Global Ethics & Compliance Department will monitor

the investigation and remediation process.

Section 7: Training and awareness on modern slavery and human

trafficking

Carnival wide training:

All employees are required to complete ethics training courses to help them understand our

expectations, and the importance of conducting business in an ethical and responsible manner.

This training incorporates specific education on modern slavery risks and directs employees and

crew on how to identify and raise concerns

In addition to the training module referenced, we also publish materials to educate employees

on how to report concerns of wrongdoing, and to reiterate the support that will be provided to

those who do raise concerns.

Procurement training:

We continue to support our supply chain and procurement teams to understand the risks of

modern slavery in our supply chain. We are currently reviewing our training approach for our

supply chain and procurement teams in order to support the roll out of our RSSP and associated

Standards. We intend to deliver targeted training on modern slavery risk and human rights

protection as part of our future training programme.

Business Partner Training:

In order to build on supplier engagement activities undertaken by Carnival UK previously, we plan

to develop a training approach that will ensure our Business Partners are aware of their role in

supporting us to deliver our commitments to ensure protection of human rights and to combat

modern slavery in our operations and our supply chains. The information and insights gained

though our risk assessment and auditing program will be used to help inform the development

of further human rights guidance for our Business Partners and training interventions if relevant.

We are committed to complement our ethical audits program with capability building to support

our Business Partners with continuous improvement focus on human rights, in support of the roll

out of our RSSP and associated Standards.

Section 8: Our effectiveness and performance indicators

We are committed to the continuous improvement of our response to modern slavery risks in

our operations and supply chains. We recognise the importance of measuring and assessing the

effectiveness of our actions to enable us to continue to revise and refine our approach to such

risks.

Analysing trends in our reporting channels:

We regularly analyse and report on trends in our hotline reporting data to provide visibility of

high frequency or systemic issues. During the reporting period, we reported no complaints

related to modern slavery practices or concerns within our operations or supply chains.

Monitoring training completion:

We regularly monitor and track our completion rates of ethics training courses assigned to our

workforce. This training is essential in maintaining our strong culture of ethics and compliance.

Our Board of Directors is provided with a regular overview of training completion rates.

Auditing our employment agencies:

During the reporting period, we performed several audits on our employment agencies to assess

their compliance with job assignment processes, record keeping, pre-employment screening and

post-employment follow-up.

Tracking our due diligence processes:

As we continue to enhance our due diligence, audit and remediation processes, we intend to

develop a more structured approach to measuring effectiveness of these programs. We

anticipate our abilities to track the progress of these programs will mature over time, in particular

through our global membership of SEDEX which will enable us to utilise their tools and insight to

support our approach as outlined above.

Section 9: Looking ahead to 2023

In 2023, we will continue to implement our human rights and modern slavery program globally.

We will collaborate with external expert organizations to identify ways our company can advance

its contributions to combating modern slavery and work with the broader tourism industry on

efforts to address human rights issues within our shared supply chain. We will also continue to

evaluate the effectiveness of our policies, operating procedures and Business Partner guidelines

to comply with all relevant laws.

Section 10: Governance and stakeholders’ engagement

This Statement has been made on behalf of Carnival plc in consultation with Carnival Corporation

& plc’s corporate headquarters based in Miami, United States, and stakeholders across

accountable business areas.

It has been reviewed and approved by our President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Climate

Officer on 19 April 2023 and Carnival Corporation & plc’s Board of Directors on 19 April 2023.

Signed by Josh Weinstein:

President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Climate Officer

Carnival Corporation & plc

19 April 2023

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poshadvo · 2 years ago

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The #MeToo Movement: Catalyst for Change in Workplace Harassment Policies

The #MeToo movement, which gained momentum in recent years, has become a powerful force for change, igniting conversations globally about workplace harassment. This movement has brought to the forefront the prevalence of harassment, empowered survivors to share their experiences, and prompted organizations to reevaluate and strengthen their approach to addressing workplace misconduct. This article explores the impact of the #MeToo movement on reporting mechanisms, organizational culture, and the implementation of policies under the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, and Redressal) Act, 2013 (POSH Act).

Amplified Reporting Mechanisms: The #MeToo movement has had a profound impact on reporting mechanisms within organizations. Survivors of harassment have found a collective voice on social media platforms, leading to increased awareness about the importance of reporting incidents. Organizations are responding by enhancing their reporting systems, providing clear channels for reporting harassment, and ensuring confidentiality to encourage survivors to come forward.

Cultural Shifts in Organizational Dynamics: The movement has spurred a cultural shift within organizations, forcing a reckoning with ingrained power imbalances and fostering a more transparent, equitable, and accountable workplace culture. Companies are recognizing the need for a fundamental shift in power dynamics, emphasizing inclusivity and diversity, and actively dismantling structures that perpetuate harassment.

Examination of Organizational Cultures: #MeToo has prompted organizations to critically examine their cultures and address systemic issues that contribute to harassment. There is an increased focus on creating an environment that promotes respectful behavior, inclusion, and zero tolerance for harassment. Employers are revisiting their values, codes of conduct, and mission statements to ensure alignment with the principles of the POSH Act.

Implementation of POSH Policies: The movement has underscored the significance of implementing and enforcing robust policies under the POSH Act. Companies are updating their policies to reflect changing norms and expectations, incorporating clearer definitions of harassment, and providing guidance on appropriate workplace behavior. The emphasis is on creating a comprehensive framework that aligns with the legal requirements and addresses nuances in the evolving understanding of harassment.

Heightened Focus on Prevention and Education: Prevention and education are now at the forefront of organizational strategies to combat workplace harassment. Organizations are investing in awareness campaigns, training programs, and workshops that educate employees about their rights and responsibilities under the POSH Act. This proactive approach aims to create a workplace where harassment is not only addressed but actively prevented.

Increased Accountability at Leadership Levels: The #MeToo movement has heightened accountability, especially among leadership figures. High-profile cases have underscored the importance of holding leaders accountable for their actions and fostering a culture where reporting harassment by any employee, regardless of their position, is met with a thorough and unbiased investigation. Conclusion: The #MeToo movement has undeniably become a catalyst for change, sparking a global conversation about workplace harassment and its impact on individuals and organizational cultures. Organizations are recognizing the urgency of addressing these issues, not only to comply with legal obligations under the POSH Act but to create workplaces that are safe, respectful, and inclusive for all. The ongoing impact of the #MeToo movement is a testament to the resilience of survivors and the collective demand for a workplace free from harassment. As discussions continue, organizations must remain committed to implementing and continually evolving policies that reflect the changing landscape of expectations and norms in the workplace.

#posh act 2013 #posh training in india #best posh lawyers in india #posh lawyers in india #posh law services in india #certified posh trainer in india #posh act

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johnlloyd020725 · 2 years ago

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America is one of the most culturally diverse countries, with residents representing nearly every region in the world. Learn more about American culture, values, and more.America is home to people from all around the world, so when you study at a US university, you’ll likely encounter unique cultures, traditions, arts, sports, and more. Over time, these many multicultural traditions have blended and adapted to become the face of culture in the USA.

If you are planning to study in the US, it helps to know what to expect when you arrive, and also to prepare for culture shock. Read on to learn more about culture in the USA and what you can expect as an international student living in America.

American Culture

Described as a “melting pot” of cultures, the US is the third-largest country in the world, with residents representing different ethnic groups such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Indigenous Americans, and Latin Americans. As a result, US culture may at once seem both familiar and different, whether its shared values, food portions, driving, fashion, and even slang. Learning about American culture in advance can give you a sense of what to expect while studying in the US!

Values

Every country has its own set of values and principles, and this is also true for America. Speaking generally, people in the USA align with the values stated in our Declaration of Independence: that all are created equal, with unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let’s take a closer look at what this means from a cultural values perspective.

Independence

From a young age, Americans are taught to be self-sufficient and independent. The importance of a person being able to mold their own identity and future via their own choices, abilities, and efforts is heavily emphasized in American culture, education, and institutions. Americans value taking care of themselves and having the freedom to pursue their own definition of happiness. This extends to university life, where students are in charge of selecting their own major and pursuing the degree program that best aligns with their personal goals.

For international students who come from a culture where everything is done collectively as one unit/family, this emphasis on individualism and autonomy could take some getting used to. Focusing on independence does not mean you are alone, however, as there are many communities, advisors, and support services in the US you can rely on in times of need.

Equality

For Americans, equality means everyone is born equal and no one is inferior or superior to the other. US universities take equality seriously, and will often include statements affirming equal rights in their charter, annual reports, and student and staff codes of conduct. Additionally, anti-discrimination policies are often in place and enforced for admissions, hiring, events, etc.

If you attend a US university, you can expect to live and study in an equitable and inclusive campus environment, where everyone can learn and freely pursue their goals.

Individualism

Similar to valuing independence, culture in America places a great deal of importance on individualism. Individualism usually refers to being self-sufficient, with community and/or government assistance as a last resort. This means people are free to pursue their goals, often on their own terms, within the context of US laws.

Americans hold the ideals of freedom and order in high regard, and individualism is a key component — everyone in the US is entitled to their personal beliefs. The ability to express your individual views and opinions is considered part of this freedom.

Materialism

America has the largest economy in the world, built off the principles of capitalism. As a result, culture in the USA often places a strong importance on materialism.

Competition and capital accumulation encourage businesses to maximize efficiency, allowing investors to profit from growth while customers benefit from cheaper pricing on a broader selection of goods. Equally, consumers are incentivized to purchase goods and services to feed back into the economy, and many financial systems in the US are designed around encouraging spending.

Due to America’s strong economic position and capitalist economy, people can sometimes be encouraged to assess their wealth based on personal possessions and compare material possessions with others. This materialism plays an important role in explaining inequities in America, but can depend on many factors such as your personal community, city, or the state where you live.

Religion

With its many multicultural communities, US states and cities tend to be home to a variety of different religious denominations. According to a 2021 study, Americans identify as:

63% — Christian (40% Protestant, 21% Catholic, 2% other)

25.1% — Unaffiliated with any religion

2% — Jewish

1% — Buddhist

1% — Hindu

1% — Muslim

Even though the majority of Americans practice Christianity, the United States does not have an official state-endorsed religion. This is a foundation of the US Constitution: Everyone has the freedom to follow and observe whichever religion they wish.

REFERENCE:

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kyannetwork · 2 years ago

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Navigating Cultural Barriers and Communication Challenges in Organizational Settings

In the fast-paced landscape of modern organizations, effective communication plays a pivotal role in fostering a healthy and productive environment. However, language barriers and differing cultural perspectives can sometimes create significant challenges that demand open dialogue and careful consideration.

During a recent meeting held on July 28, 2023, two individuals engaged in a candid conversation about the complex interplay of language, culture, and communication within an organization. The dialogue revealed the intricate dynamics that can arise when individuals with diverse backgrounds interact within a shared space.

Participant 1 (C1) questioned the use of strong language during discussions, prompting Participant 2 (C2) to defend its necessity. C2 pointed out that some individuals exploit their privilege as a form of leverage, requiring equally strong responses for balance. The conversation then shifted towards examining whether this privilege was an inherent advantage or more of an aesthetic choice.

The dialogue took an interesting turn when C2 highlighted the inherent diversity of English dialects. They discussed how the majority of individuals speak in a way that reflects their unique linguistic backgrounds. However, they expressed frustration that, despite the diverse linguistic landscape, organizations fail to address the issue effectively. Instead, the organization seemed to sidestep the challenge, leading to a communicative despondency.

The meeting further delved into the broader implications of this communication breakdown. C1 questioned whether it was worth the effort to change the behavior of the individuals in question. C2, while acknowledging the complexity of the issue, emphasized the necessity of addressing these issues head-on rather than resorting to avoidance.

As the conversation continued, the focus shifted towards the operational structure of the organization. C2 pointed out that some business practices were exploiting the less privileged. C1 chimed in, questioning the grammatical correctness of a statement, to which C2 responded with a strong rejoinder. This highlighted the fine line between assertiveness and aggression in communication styles.

C2 defended their use of strong language, emphasizing the significance of authenticity and representation. They believed that accurate expression and representation were crucial for effective communication and change.

The discussion then revolved around utilizing artificial intelligence for generating reports and conducting research. The participants agreed that despite its convenience, AI-generated content might not always capture the nuances required for effective communication. They moved on to discuss the organization's lack of a structured approach, violations of health codes, and an attitude of indifference towards fulfilling obligations.

Summarizing the Discussion

In this meeting, the participants engaged in a candid exploration of the challenges associated with language, culture, and communication in a diverse organizational context. The dialogue highlighted the need for sensitivity, open dialogue, and a clear operational structure.

The interaction showcased the intricate balance between asserting one's thoughts with strong language and maintaining an environment conducive to productive discourse. The participants emphasized the importance of embracing authenticity while still adhering to respectful communication norms.

Ultimately, the conversation underscored the need for organizations to address language and cultural barriers head-on, as well as to adopt a transparent operational structure that aligns with their values and objectives. By fostering an environment of inclusivity and meaningful communication, organizations can navigate these challenges and create a more harmonious and productive workspace.

Translation 1:

Crackin' the Code: Uniting Languages and Cultures in the Hustle

When you're runnin' the game in any solid organization, communication is the key that unlocks success. But when homies from different blocks come together, each with their own flow, it's a whole new level of challenge that needs real talk and understanding.

Rollin' Deep: July 28, 2023

In a recent powwow on July 28, 2023, two players chopped it up about how language, culture, and communication play out in an organization's hustle. They dug deep into the ways different crews mix it up and how it all goes down.

One player (C1) straight-up asked, "Was all that cussin' really necessary?" The other (C2) was like, "Hell yeah, fam. Some peeps use their status to flex, so we gotta flex back just as hard to level the field." They got into it about whether this "status" was cap or no cap.

Then they started gettin' into the different ways people talk English. C2 pointed out that faces usually talk how they were raised talkin', but the organization ain't doin' jack to handle it right. It’s got people feeling a certain type of way.

The convo switched to bigger picture vibes about how this talk game affects everything. C1 was wonderin' if it's even worth tryna change how players move, and C2 was preachin' that it's way smarter to face the issue head-on instead of dodgin' it.

They started gettin' real about the organization's moves too. C2 was like, some of their plays be messin' with the folks who ain't sittin' on stacks. Then C1 dropped a line that didn't sit well with C2, and things heated up quick, showin' how easy it is to go from talk to straight-up disrespect.

C2 held it down, keepin' that raw energy and sayin' it's crucial to keep it real and stay true. They believed that's how the message gets out right and change goes down.

Then the talk switched to how they're usin' tech for reports and research. They both agreed that while it's easy, it ain't catchin' all the angles like real talk can. Later, they kicked it about how the organization's rollin' without a clear game plan, breakin' health rules left and right, and actin' like they don't gotta back up their word.

Breakin' it Down:

This chat let everyone peep the challenges that come with different languages and cultures mixin' it up in an organization's hustle. It showed that we gotta have open, honest talk and respect for each other's ways.

The realness here is findin' that sweet spot between standin' up for ourselves and keepin' things iced for solid conversations. The bottom line? Organizations need to go straight at the challenges of language and culture, makin' moves that match their beliefs and show their true colors.

By keepin' it one hundred and lettin' everyone's voice shine, organizations can come together in a blaze of diversity, elevate, and build a hustle that's unbreakable and united.

Translation 2:

Harmony Amidst Diversity: Navigating Language and Culture in Organizational Conversations

In the intricate dance of organizational dynamics, effective communication serves as the orchestra conductor, orchestrating success. When individuals from different backgrounds gather, each with their own unique rhythm, the challenge lies in conducting a symphony of understanding through open dialogue.

Conversation Snapshot: July 28, 2023

During a recent dialogue on July 28, 2023, two participants engaged in a thoughtful exchange about the delicate balance of language, culture, and communication within organizational realms. This discourse revealed the artistry involved in weaving together various cultural threads into a cohesive tapestry.

Participant 1 (C1) raised the question of the necessity of strong language, prompting Participant 2 (C2) to emphasize its value. C2 expressed that certain individuals leverage their status as a form of power, necessitating a proportional response to maintain equilibrium. The conversation then deepened to explore the authenticity of this "status" as either genuine or merely a facade.

The discourse gracefully transitioned to discuss the diversity of English dialects employed within the organization. C2 eloquently pointed out that newcomers often express themselves in ways reflective of their upbringing. Yet, the organization's approach to addressing this diversity appeared lacking, resulting in a sense of disconnection among individuals.

As the conversation evolved, it encompassed the broader implications of these communication nuances. C1 pondered whether embarking on the path of behavioral change was worth the effort, while C2 advocated for confronting issues directly, illuminating the path of proactive resolution over evasion.

The dialogue then flowed into an exploration of the organization's operational strategies. C2 eloquently shed light on practices that may disproportionately impact those less privileged. Subsequently, a comment made by C1 prompted a nuanced reaction from C2, emphasizing the delicate balance between assertiveness and respect in communication.

C2 conveyed the significance of their choice of language, highlighting the importance of authentic representation. They underscored that genuine expression plays a pivotal role in both effective communication and catalyzing positive change.

The dialogue gracefully pivoted to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for generating reports and conducting research. Both participants shared a consensus that while AI was convenient, it may not capture the subtleties present in human discourse. The discussion culminated in an exploration of the organization's operational deficiencies, health code violations, and its approach to commitments.

In Essence:

This conversation offered insights into the intricate landscape of language and cultural diversity within an organizational context. It underscored the significance of inclusive dialogue, mutual respect, and embracing differences.

The discourse encapsulated the delicate equilibrium between forthright self-expression and fostering a congenial atmosphere for constructive interactions. The key takeaway? Organizations should address the complexities of language and culture head-on, anchoring their endeavors in transparent structures that mirror their core values.

By fostering an environment of authenticity and inclusivity, organizations can celebrate diversity, elevate communication, and cultivate a workspace that resonates with unity and strength.

*****

The Conversation Transcript;

C1: That was a whole lot of profanity, are you sure that was absolutely necessary?

C2: Yes, it was. These people use their privilege as a weapon.

C1: Is it privilege or aesthetic?

C2: Based on the status of the initial environment, it does not matter how much privilege they think they have.

C1: Fair point, however…

C2: Listen, there are more than one dialects of English. The majority of the kids coming through speak that way in varying degrees. If they are going to flip the script and play games instead of addressing the issue, the outcome is still the same.

C1: Is it though?

C2: I mean…that’s the whole problem. Asking people to change. Look, they started the conversation by welcoming the “recruit” to the family. WTF is that that shit.

C1: I honestly can’t defend that…it’s weird.

C2: Look. All I am saying is that, predatory business tactics are the norm not the exception. This organization did not meet the minimum standard for hygiene. They received a report and a reasonable request for supplies; may I add, under the terms of the advertisement, they were responsible for...

C1: You can add it, but I am not sure it is grammatically correct.

C2: Shut the fuck up.

C1: That is hostile.

C2: Passive aggressive is hostile and you are an example. When you are done bullshitting and want to address actual issues…snap the fuck out of it.

C1: You are literally more articulate that I am, do you have to express yourself in that manner?

C2: Cap, representation matters…keep it it real.

C1: Based on the reports you drafted….using AI…because you are lazy…along with the research and evidence you compiled. I feel like….ultimately, it would have been a toxic environment because there was not a codified operation structure, chain of command; and of course they were in violation of all health code practices and viewed the request to maintain a standard as a “gesture of goodwill”; and the request to fulfill the contractual obligations as a “reward”.

C2: I agree with your assessment.

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f1 · 2 years ago

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FIA says 'due process followed' in employee exit after sexism allegations against president

Mohammed Ben Sulayem was elected president of the FIA in December 2021 The FIA says "due process was followed" in the departure of a former employee after sexism allegations emerged against its president. Shaila-Ann Rao wrote a letter accusing president Mohammed Ben Sulayem of sexist behaviour before her departure last December, the Telegraph reported. Rao was the FIA's former interim secretary general for motorsport, who left after just six months in the role. An FIA spokesperson said Rao left following an "amicable discussion". BBC Sport has been told by a senior source that the letter does exist. Any investigation into whether the president of motorsport's governing body has been guilty of a breach of its code of ethics has to be reviewed by the organisation's Senate, according to the FIA's statutes. Responding to a series of questions from BBC Sport about the specific allegations and Ben Sulayem's wider behaviour arising from the report, the FIA said in a statement: "Due process was followed, with an amicable negotiation conducted by the president of the senate and, as such, no referrals were made to the ethics committee. "As previously stated, both parties agreed she would leave her position in November 2022 and mutual privacy terms were agreed, as is common business practice." Referring to wider allegations of bullying and abusive behaviour by Ben Sulayem, the statement said: "There have been no complaints received against the president." The statement added: "The FIA takes allegations of abuse very seriously and addresses all complaints using robust and clear procedures. "As part of this, the FIA has an anti-harassment policy, an anonymous whistleblowing facility and an investigation procedure and all staff are made aware of these through an induction and regular training." The allegations reported about Rao are the latest in a series of controversies to embroil Ben Sulayem since he became FIA president in December 2021. His first full year in office saw him anger teams and commercial rights holder F1 with his approach to a series of regulatory issues, including blocking for six months a plan to raise the number of 'sprint' events for 2023, and a ban on drivers wearing jewellery which many saw as a targeted attack on Lewis Hamilton. Over the winter, his comments on the value of F1 following a report about a potential sale of the sport led to him receiving a 'cease and desist' letter from F1's lawyers, emphasising that he had no power to intervene in commercial issues and threatening legal action. He was also forced to back-track on a new rule that prevented drivers from speaking out on sensitive issues. And there was widespread outrage in the sport when historic sexist comments emerged from an old website in which Ben Sulayem said he did "not like women who think they are smarter than men… for they are not in truth". The FIA said at that time that the remarks did not reflect his current beliefs. In the wake of the controversies, Ben Sulayem announced that he was stepping back from day-to-day involvement in F1, and set up a new management structure to oversee the FIA's blue-riband category. Ben Sulayem has appointed the FIA's first chief executive officer, Natalie Robyn, a former automotive industry executive, and its first equality, diversity and inclusion advisor, Ukrainian Tanya Kutsenko. The FIA statement added: "As part of the restructuring of the FIA that was initiated by the President and under the leadership of our new CEO, we are actively reviewing the entirety of the FIA organisation with a deliberate and sustained effort to create an excellent culture that fosters collaboration, empowerment, and purpose among our employees. "Should the FIA ethics committee or compliance officer receive any complaint from a member of staff it will be dealt with in a comprehensive manner by our panel of independent elected ethics committee members which has been in place since 2012." via BBC Sport - Formula 1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/

#F1 #FIA says 'due process followed' in employee exit after sexism allegations against president #Formula 1

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strugglinguist · 2 years ago

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Disclaimer: It should go without saying, but all the views here are my own and do not represent any other person or my institution. We're just having a bit of fun and talking about Linguistics and Academia. Also, cannabis is legal both recreationally and medicinally where I live in New York State. I am also not physically at work nor will I be including identifying information of anyone involved [Please include any and all caveats you can think of here. I checked the university code of conduct and everything.]

Hey, Internet! Welcome to Episode 1 of High Linguistics with Taylor, which is when I... Taylor talk about the linguistics I am doing that day. I've got 3 big things going on professionally at this time. Let's talk about the first one: The Campus Visit. *cue dramatic music*

I have an upcoming campus visit after which I may or may not receive word that I have been hired as a tenure track (TT) faculty member of Linguistics and TESOL at my current institution. I have worked there for the past 5 years but as a Visiting Assistant Professor, which is a temporary year-to-year contract and makes approximately 10-15k fewer dollars a year. I teach 4 classes a semester (often times 2-3 of those classes that semester are instances of the same course: Introduction to Linguistics. The other 1-2 are upper-level electives like Syntactic Structure of English; Articulatory Phonetics; one of our core linguistics courses about phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, or semantics; or fieldwork/investigation of an unfamiliar language. I COULD essentially be let go at the end of every August unless they renew my contract. They like me, but also... they could take it away. So a TT position would mean I have job security, more money, support for my research, and maybe even opportunities to write off courses and teach a little less. I even qualify for teaching sabbaticals where I would just write papers and books and focus on achieving promotion/tenure for a semester or even a year.

At this point, I have applied with a portfolio earlier in mid-April. This consisted of a three page cover letter and a diversity statement (which is way less than for other jobs I've applied to). The cover letter addresses my research program, teaching philosophy, status in the field of linguistics, and how I am prepared to teach both linguistics and TESOL classes even though my formal training is in theoretical linguistics only. My diversity statement is a one page summary of how my research and teaching contribute to the overall diversity of the institution but also what I see the role of professional academics is in promoting diversity and inclusion in and out of their classroom.

Then, just last week, I sat for a 45 min Zoom interview. At this point, I was likely in the top 12 applicants. Most institutions will receive approximately 100 applicants for a tenure track position. Typically these applications open in the fall, however. In fact, most of those tenure lines are decided by this time in the year. So ours is late in the cycle. I honestly hope that gives me a better chances because there may be fewer applicants overall. Or... I've hurt myself? I don't know.

The campus visit is taking place May 30-June 1. This is the final round interview for the TT position. There are likely 2-3 candidates. I don't know. They legally probably cannot even tell me. Even though I've been there 5 years, the search has to legally be a national open search. So I could have worked there for 5 years, apply for this, interview, and STILL not get it. 🙃 At this point, this means I am hireable, but they need to decide who is the best fit for the department and university as a whole.

I have not received the official agenda/schedule yet, but on the evening of Wednesday May 30th, I will likely have dinner with the faculty search members. There are four on the committee. I met them on Zoom, and I know two of them VERY well because I have worked closely with them for the 5 years. Then on the 1st, I will have individual interviews/meetings with interested faculty, the dean, and maybe a provost. I'll have lunch with people who are interested. Then I'll give a job talk in the afternoon. This covers my research program and is geared towards an audience of Education/Curriculum & Instruction Department people (the tenure home for the position). Does everyone know what a tenure line is? Maybe that should be in another post.

Anyway, I need to do several things to prepare over the next 11 days including today. This is just a bit of what I need to do:

I need to draft and practice that job talk. I'll need to talk through the process and what I include in that.

I need to purchase a professional suit. I haven't needed one since early 2020 pre-pandemic, so I definitely don't fit anything old. I need to feel like a hundred bucks. I need it to give "bow down bitches." I need to feel pumped up and ready to take on the world.

I want to experiment with new makeup stuff, so that means I need to stop at Sephora.

I need new shoes that are both professional and comfortable that match the new suit.

And I need to prepare some questions/things to mention to have with me for all those individual interviews.

Okay, I need to go because we are ordering Chipotle for "lunch." I eat breakfast at like 10 or whenever I get up, we eat together at like 3/4, watch TV until 5/6, and then play a video game, putz around, or whatever want after that. Summer break routine is GREAT! I will be doing my prep between having a GREAT TIME! I don't want to burn myself out on the way to needing to be at top form.

#professional academic #high linguistics #linguistics #ask me anything #I will answer #uhhhhhhh have a good afternoon

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yegarts · 3 years ago

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Yorath House Artist Residency Blog Post 5: Treaties and Settlement History

By Adriana A. Davies Yorath House Artist-in-Residence

A sketch of the buildings at Fort Edmonton done by Dr. A. Whiteside, 1880, City of Edmonton Archives EA-10-1178.

Sitting in Yorath House next to the North Saskatchewan River doing online research on homestead records, and also reading newspaper accounts from the end of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, I come face-to-face with racism. The accounts are written from the settler perspective. The City of Edmonton Archives on its website has posted the following statement:

The City of Edmonton Archives (CoE A) has developed this statement regarding the language used in archival descriptions to meaningfully integrate equity and reconciliation work into the City’s archival practice. The changes reflect the staff’s on-going efforts to acknowledge known instances of discrimination that appear in archival records.

Archivists have been working on identifying and contextualizing problematic content, language and imagery found in our collections since 2017. This was partly in response to the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) Commission’s Calls to Action, specifically those aimed at cultural and heritage institutions. Further work is on-going in alignment with the City of Edmonton’s commitments to inclusion and respect for diversity and the work of various groups in the City and, specifically, of the Anti-Racism Committee of City Council, as well as the Association of Canadian Archivists’ Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

While the statement deals with the language in historic documents, there is a larger issue. The Government of Canada was intent on colonizing traditional Indigenous lands. The territories that became Canada initially attracted the attention of the British and French because of the bounty of fur-bearing animals. The fur of beavers, in particular, was used to create felt for hat making. Fur trading companies were the first major commercial enterprises (Hudson’s Bay Company and North-West Company) and were followed by others to harvest other natural resources including fish and stands of timber.

The interior of Fort Edmonton within the palisades showing the warehouse, Chief Factor’s House and Clerks’ quarters, 1894, City of Edmonton Archives EA-10-88.

With the signing of Treaty No. 6 on August 23, 1876 at Fort Carlton and on September 9, at Fort Pitt, the federal government was ready to unite the country “from sea to shining sea” through the building of a railway. The territory in question covered most of the central portions of what became, in 1905, the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. The signatories were representatives of the Canadian Crown and the Cree, Chipewyan and Stoney nations.

Front and back of large medal presented to the Chiefs and councillors who signed treaties 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. It shows a relief portrait of Queen Victoria and the representative of the Crown shaking hands with one of the Chiefs. Libraries and Archives Canada, Accession number: 1971-205 NPC.

Treaty 6 was mid-way in the 11 numbered treaties; Treaties 6, 7 and 8 cover most of Alberta. At the Fort Carlton meeting, on the part of First Nations, Chief Mistawasis (Big Child) and Chief Ahtahkakoop (Star Blanket) represented the Carlton Cree. On the part of the Crown, principal negotiators were Alexander Morris, Lieutenant Governor of the North-West Territories; James McKay, a Metis fur trader, and Minister of Agriculture for Manitoba; and W. J. Christie, Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Chiefs at Fort Pitt trading with Hudson’s Bay Company representatives, autumn 1884, unknown photographer. L-R: Four Sky Thunder; Sky Bird (or King Bird), the third son of Mistahimaskwa (Big Bear); Moose (seated); Naposis; Mistahimaskwa; Angus McKay; Mr. Dufresne; Louis Goulet; Stanley Simpson; Constable G. W. Rowley (seated); Alex McDonald (in back); Corporal R. B. Sleigh; Mr. Edmund; and Henry Dufresne. There is a difference of opinion as to the names of the two corporals: some sources claim it is Corporal Sleigh and Billy Anderson, while others claim it is Patsy Carroll and H. A. Edmonds. Library and Archives Canada, Ernest Brown Fonds/e011303100-020_s1.

When Treaty negotiations began at Fort Pitt, on September 5, Cree Chief Mistahimaskwa (Big Bear) was away and therefore did not participate. Chief Weekaskookwasayin (Sweet Grass) led the discussions and appeared to accept that the terms of the Treaty would be beneficial; he was likely influenced by Chiefs Mistawasis and Ahtahkakoop. When Chief Mistahimaskwa returned, he was surprised that the other chiefs had not waited for him to return before signing. He had some important news to share: he had spoken to some of the signatories of previous Treaties and they had told him that they had been disappointed with the outcomes. Historian Hugh Dempsey has written that, if the Chief had been there, Treaty 6 may not have been signed. The entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia notes:

When Mistahimaskwa returned to Fort Pitt, he brought discouraging news with him from the Indigenous peoples on the prairies who had already signed Treaties 1 to 5: the treaties had not amounted to everything that the people had hoped. However, he was too late; the treaty had already been signed. Mistahimaskwa was frustrated and surprised that the other chiefs had not waited for him to return before concluding the negotiations. According to the notes of the commission’s secretary, M.G. Dickieson, Mistahimaskwa referred to the treaty as a dreaded “rope to be about my neck.” Mistahimaskwa was not referring to a literal hanging (which is what some government officials had believed), but to the loss of his and his people’s freedom, and Indigenous loss of control over land and resources. Dempsey argues that if Mistahimaskwa had been present at the negotiations, the treaty commissioners would have likely had a more difficult time acquiring Indigenous approval of Treaty 6. Mistahimaskwa was not the only chief who initially refused to sign the treaty. Chief Minahikosis (Little Pine) and other Cree leaders of the Saskatchewan District were also opposed to the terms, arguing that the treaty provided little protections for their people. Fearing starvation and unrest, many of the initially hesitant chiefs signed adhesions to the treaty in the years to come, including Minahikosis (who signed in July 1879) and Mistahimaskwa (who signed on 8 December 1882 at Fort Walsh).1

The “adhesions” involved the adding of signatories from other areas including Edmonton in 1877, Blackfoot Crossing in 1877, Sounding Lake in 1879, and Rocky Mountain House in 1944 and 1950. Treaty 6 encompasses 17 First Nations in central Alberta including the Dene Suliné, Cree, Nakota Sioux and Saulteaux peoples. The Edmonton adhesion was signed on August 21, 1877 on the land that would become the site of the Alberta Legislature. The site was a sacred gathering place for the Indigenous People of Alberta.

While the Treaties outline the rights, benefits and obligations to each other of the signing parties, there is no doubt that they were intended to enable a “land grab”: the Government of Canada wanted to open up the land for settlement. Indigenous People were to be confined to “reserves” and the remaining lands were to be made available. In 1869, Canada had purchased extensive parts of Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company but the Company, because of its historic role in the fur trade, retained extensive tracts of land. When the federal government gave the Canadian Pacific Railway a monopoly to build the railway through the prairies they were also given extensive lands not only for laying of tracks and building of stations but also for establishing town sites and farms.

As sovereign peoples, why would Indigenous People in what became Alberta and Saskatchewan want to sign Treaties? They came to the negotiations in good faith expecting that the Government of Canada would protect their lands from outsiders including white settlers, surveyors and the Métis. By the mid-nineteenth century, buffalo herds had declined, as had deer and other big game, and they faced starvation; in addition, various smallpox epidemics were decimating their population and that is why they negotiated the “medicine chest” provision in Treaty 6; it was literally to be housed with the Indian agent. In addition, the Government promised to assist the signatories in farming initiatives by providing various types of equipment.

With respect to the Metis or “mixed blood” peoples who were the result of marriages between fur traders and Indigenous women, the Government of Canada devised Métis scrip, which was a one-time payment whether in money or land that “extinguished” the individual’s land rights. Whether the recipients understood this is open to question. The certificate or warrant was issued by the Department of the Interior and printed by the Canadian Bank Note Company. Money scrip came in $20, $80, $160 and $240 increments. Land scrip came in allotments of 80, 160 and 240 acre (32, 65 and 97 hectare) increments. This allowed the Canadian government to acquire Métis rights to the land. As Robert Houle writes:

To the detriment of the Métis, who at the time did not fully comprehend the foreign system, traders like McDougall and Secord began to venture away from mercantilism. Through continued exploitation of the Crown system, McDougall and Secord were able to become “Edmonton’s First Millionaire Teachers”. The Scrip system allowed those with resources to purchase a certificate for face value or perhaps a marginal increase, then redeem the certificate on behalf, sometimes through fraud, of the original holder and re-sell for profit. Once a sale was undertaken, unbeknownst to Métis, their claims and rights would be extinguished in the eyes of the Crown.2

Métis Scrip for 30 acres issued March 20, 1901. Image Courtesy of the City of Edmonton archives MS-46 File 38.

In order for the land to be settled, it needed to be surveyed. This work had begun in 1871 after Manitoba became a province, and the North-West Territories was established as a result of the purchase of Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Dominion Land Survey covered about 800,000 square kilometres and began with Manitoba and then continued West. In 1869, the first meridian was chosen at 97°27′28.4″ west longitude. The survey excluded First Nations’ reserves and federal parks. The Hudson’s Bay received Section 8 and most of Section 26.

The surveys were done in three stages: 1871-1879: southern Manitoba and a little of Saskatchewan; 1880: small areas of Saskatchewan; and 1881: the largest survey that includes what became Alberta. There was a sense of urgency about finishing the survey because the Government of Canada feared US encroachment into Canada. Over 27 million quarter sections were surveyed by 1883; maps and plans were given to the provinces. Townships were composed of 36 sections, and sections comprised 4 quarter sections or 16 subdivisions.

After Hudson’s Bay Company railway right of ways and school sections were carved out, the remainder became available for homesteads. The federal and provincial governments and municipalities advertised land availability for settlement. A homesteader had to pay a $10 fee to register a quarter-section and, within a term of three years, had to cultivate 30 acres (12 hectares) and build a house to gain title to the land. The bulk of prairie settlement occurred in the period 1885 to 1914.

With respect to the surveying of the land at Fort Edmonton, W. F. King did an initial survey for the Government of Canada in 1878. The formal survey was done in 1882 and adhered to the river lot pattern that the largely Métis population had established. This was based on the system used in Quebec. Because many of the Métis at Fort Edmonton and St. Albert had begun to settle the land and their small farms and landholdings adhered to the river lot system, this was grandfathered in.

The Hudson’s Bay Company had an extensive tract of land to the West of the downtown centred on Jasper Avenue (the Hudson’s Bay Reserve). The survey established 44 lots covering both sides of the North Saskatchewan River. These were East of the HBC reserve lands. By and large, these were Métis owned with the remainder purchased from the Company by current and former employees. The lots on the northern side of the River were even-numbered and the lots on the south side were odd-numbered. Among the former HBC employees were Malcom Groat, Colin Fraser, John Sinclair, Donald McLeod, James and William Rowland, Kenneth Macdonald, James Kirkness, John Fraser and James and George Gullion. Métis homesteaders included Joseph McDonald (River Lot 11), Laurent Garneau (River Lot 7), some of whom had also worked for the Company.3 These lots were by and large farmland until the communities of Edmonton and Strathcona began to expand quickly becoming towns and cities in the period from 1890 to 1914 when a worldwide economic recession and the First World War put an end to development.

Connor Thompson in “Edmonton’s River Lots: A Layer in Our History,” writes:

As the area’s fur trade was winding down, farming began to take on a greater importance in the lives of the people around Fort Edmonton. Many began staking claims to land in the Fort’s immediate vicinity, farming in a river lot fashion. A staple of Métis culture, this style of farming allowed for access to the river, wooded areas, cultivated land, and provided space for hay lands as well. While a rough (and unapproved) survey was undertaken by government surveyor W. F. King 1878, a more thorough government-approved survey in 1882 formalized the division of the land in terms of a river lot pattern, which is what the predominantly Métis population in the area at the time desired. The survey created 44 large lots across the banks of the North Saskatchewan, most of which stretched east of the Hudson’s Bay Company reserve lands. In many ways, the early history of these river lots is a history of the Métis and their kinship networks – marriage between the area’s families was common, as were friendship and support systems.

Other south side families faced struggles relating to their Indigenous identities, especially with the pressures of Métis scrip and the 1885 rebellion – Métis scrip was a one-time payment of either money or land that, in the eyes of the Canadian government, extinguished the person’s Indigenous land rights. Scrip was notorious for its convoluted process and unethical nature. Many families on these south-side river lot farms, including the family of William Meaver on River Lot 15 (bounded by present-day 99th St. to 101 St.), Charles Gauthier and his son on River Lot 17 south (99th St. and Mill Creek Ravine), George Donald and Betsy Brass of River Lot 21 (91st to 95th St., in the present-day Bonnie Doon neighborhood), took scrip. Some of the families that were members of the Papaschase band either took scrip (as Brass herself, who was a woman of mixed Cree/Saulteaux ancestry did), or joined the Enoch band, as William Ward’s family (of River Lot 13) did. As settlement increased, many Métis families of this period would leave to places such as St. Paul des Métis, St. Albert, Tofield, and Cooking Lake.

As the largely British towns of Edmonton and Strathcona grew, the Indigenous origins of the land were erased and the rights of Indigenous Peoples violated.

Edmonton Settlement showing the river lots, ca. 1882. City of Edmonton Archives EAM-85.

Interpreting History

In August 1951, my Mother Estera, older sister Rosa and my brother Giuseppe and I joined our Father, Raffaele Albi in Edmonton. He had left Italy in 1949 and made his way to Edmonton and begun work for an Italian-owned company, New West Construction. The company was helping to finish the Imperial Oil Refinery in Strathcona. In 1953, my parents purchased an old house on 127 Street and 109A Avenue in the Westmount area. That September, we went to school at St. Andrew’s Elementary School across from the Charles Camsell Hospital. That is when I encountered racism personally: as a dark and thin southern-Italian kid, I became the target of “half-breed” jokes. I knew who these people were because daily I watched the dark-skinned children looking at me through the chain-link fence that surrounded the Hospital. They looked sad and I felt that they were jealous watching us play our care-free games in the school yard. There were some Métis children in my school and I quickly made friends with members of the L’Hirondelle, Mercier and Majeau families not realizing that for some of my school mates this was not done.

It came as a surprise to me that Italians were considered a “visible minority” and therefore the butt of jokes, many about the Mafia, DPs, Wops or other pejorative terms. I was thus sensitized to “being different.” When I was in junior high, I decided that I wanted to be a journalist and, in 1962, became a student at the University of Alberta with an English major and French minor. I volunteered with the student newspaper, The Gateway, and the summer of 1964 was a student intern at The Edmonton Journal.

Two traumatic experiences occurred that summer that helped to shape my thinking and influenced my life and career. A friendly journalist told me that there was a bet on at the Greenbriar Lounge, where the largely male staff went to drink, as to who would get me into bed (nobody did!). The other occurred when on weekend duty I was assigned to cover a story on a northern reserve. Weekend duty was assigned to younger staff and the carrot was that you got to do a photo essay for the Sunday newspaper. A young photographer and I drove up to the reserve and I remember arriving in a tiny, tiny community (it wasn’t large enough to be described as a town) and going to what looked like the community hall. Dave and I entered an extremely smoky room where all the men were talking animatedly. When we introduced ourselves, they were extremely kind and I began the interviews. I discovered that they were discussing Treaty rights and that the Government of Canada was not honouring these. I was captivated. On our return to the Journal offices late that evening (Saturday), I wrote the article telling their story. I was delighted with the two-page spread that included David’s photographs of the Chiefs and Elders. The following Thursday at the weekly Editorial meeting, Editor Andrew Snaddon tore strips off me for having “lost my objectivity” and only told the “Indian” side of the story. From that day forward, I knew that I wanted to continue to tell those stories.

The first opportunity came in January 1987 when I started work as the executive director of the Alberta Museums Association. I took a call in the first week from someone wanting to know what “ICOM Resolution 11” was. I didn’t know so I called the Canadian Museums Association and learned that the International Council of Museums at its General Assembly in 1986 in Buenos Aires, Argentina had passed a resolution that was to guide museums in dealing with living Indigenous communities. It stated:

Resolution No. 11: Participation of Ethnic Groups in Museum Activities

Whereas there are increasing concerns on the part of ethnic groups regarding the ways in which they and their cultures are portrayed in museum exhibitions and programmes, The 15th General Assembly of ICOM, meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 4 November 1986, Recommends that: 1. Museums which are engaged in activities relating to living ethnic groups, should, whenever possible, consult with the appropriate members of those groups, and 2. Such museums should avoid using ethnic materials in any way which might be detrimental to the group that produced them; their usage should be in keeping with the spirit of the ICOM Code of Professional Ethics, with particular reference to paragraphs 2.8 and 6.7.

The resolution enshrined consultation on all Indigenous exhibits and programs that has become a practice with Canadian museums. When I called back and gave the mystery caller this information, I asked who they represented and learned that it was the Lubicon Cree. This northern Alberta First Nation had been left out of Treaty 8 negotiations. They had filed a claim with the federal government as early as 1933, for their own reserve but nothing had been done to resolve the matter. Pressures on their traditional way of life resulting from the number of oil companies drilling on the contested territory had accelerated their need for a settlement. Under a new, young Chief, Bernard Ominayak, the cause received renewed impetus and he sought the help of professionals.

American human rights activist Fred Lennarson became his chief advisor in 1979. His consulting company, Mirmir Corporation, had already done work for the Indian Association of Alberta (under Harold Cardinal). Ominayak and Lennarson aimed to get a $1 billion settlement from the federal government and, to do this, organized an aggressive letter writing and media campaign. By 1983, they were mailing information about the land claim dispute to over 600 organizations and individuals around the world and had been successful in obtaining the support of the World Council of Churches and the European Parliament. Knowing that they would need the support of Indigenous organizations, they had extensive meetings and, among the first to come on board were the Assembly of First Nations, the Indian Association of Alberta, the Métis Association of Alberta and the Grand Council of Quebec Cree.

Subsequently, when the Glenbow Museum launched its exhibit, curated by Julia Harrison, titled “The Spirits Sings,” as part of the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988, there were protestors there indicating the museum had violated ICOM Resolution 11 and also attacking the display of “False Face” sacred masks that were on display. In fact, Harrison had had an Indigenous advisory committee and the masks had previously been on display in Ontario museums as well as in the Canadian Embassy in London, England, without objections. This event galvanized museum personnel to undertake some serious reflection on the way in which they represented Indigenous history and artifacts.

The Canadian Museums Association with the Assembly of First Nations undertook the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples and I was delighted to take part in this work which was led on the museum side by Morris Flewwelling, the CMA President at the time. With the support of the Board of the Alberta Museums Association, we created three symposia held in 1988, 1989 and 1990 to address the relationship between museums and First Peoples, repatriation of ceremonial and sacred objects, and the topic “Re-inventing the Museum in Native Terms.” For this last, I invited representatives from the Ak-Chin Eco-Museum in Arizona. The community, which was established in 1912 as a reservation, was plagued by poverty and scarcity of resources until it declared itself an “ecomuseum” and focused on preservation of its language and culture to promote economic development.

As a result of information gathered through our symposia and meetings with representatives from various Indigenous communities (both within and outside of Alberta), I was delighted to provide advice to a number of Indigenous museum projects. I could not have done this work without the help of some prominent individuals, who championed Indigenous history and were chiefs, elders and ceremonialists. The most important were Russell Wright and wife Julia; Leo Pretty Young Man Senior and wife Alma; and Reg Crowshoe and wife Rose. They participated willingly in the Alberta Museums Association Indigenous symposia and in other planning and advisory work.

Russell struggled to maintain a museum in the old Residential School at Blackfoot Crossing on the Bow River East of Calgary. In the 1970s, he had helped to develop a Blackfoot studies program for the Old Sun College on the reserve. He was troubled by the high rate of student suicides on the reserve and firmly believed that it was only through the renewal of the Blackfoot culture and language that this trend could be halted. I did my best in advising him as to how to go about fundraising for a new museum, which had been his dream since the 1977 centenary celebrations of the signing of Treaty 7 (Prince Charles attended the ceremonies). With Leo Pretty Young Man Senior and wife Alma as well as other Elders and their wives, he envisioned an appropriate building that would house cultural artifacts and function as an education centre.

The Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park is a legacy to their vision. In 1989, six square kilometres of land were set aside but funding would not become available until 2003 to initiate construction. Neither Russell nor Leo lived to see the museum, which was completed in 2007. The iconic teepee-like structure was designed by architect Ron Goodfellow. The Buffalo Nations group, headed by Leo, took over the old Luxton Museum in Banff and I was delighted to attend planning meetings to assist them to obtain grants to develop new exhibits, care for collections and undertake necessary restoration work to the building. The Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum became a popular attraction in Banff.

The vista from the rear windows of the Blackfoot Crossing Interpretive Centre, which is a National Historic Site of Canada located near Cluny, Alberta. The area in southern Alberta is significant as both a geographic and cultural centre of Blackfoot territory and includes the grassy flood plain of the Bow River Valley. It was the location where Treaty No. 7 was signed in 1877 by representatives of the the Siksika (Blackfoot), Pekuni (Peigan), Kainai (Blood), Nakoda (Stoney) and Tsuu T'ina (Sarcee) First Nations. They surrendered their rights to 50,000 square miles of territory. Numerous archaeological resources and historical features are located there including the grave of Chief Isapo-Muxika (Crowfoot). Photographer: Adriana A. Davies.

Another of my Indigenous mentors was Reg Crowshoe, a former chief of the Piikani Blackfoot First Nation, who had worked as an RCMP officer. He assisted the Historic Sites Service on various projects and generously shared his traditional knowledge with students at the universities of Lethbridge and Calgary. He founded the Old Man River Cultural Society and followed in the footsteps of his father, Joe Crow Shoe Senior. Joe was an Elder and Bundle Keeper and ran Sun Dances; he renewed the Brave Dog and Chickadee Societies. Father and son collaborated with Historic Sites Service, Government of Alberta, and were instrumental in the building of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre near Fort Macleod, which showcases and interprets Blackfoot culture. It opened in 1987 and is run by Alberta Culture. It is a Canadian national historic site and UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Gerald Conaty, Julia Harrison’s successor at Glenbow as Curator of Ethnology, was an invaluable resource and took me on a number of field trips to Treaty Seven areas to meet with Elders and ceremonialists. Beginning in 1990, he helped the Glenbow to develop and implement repatriation policies with respect to sacred objects. The initial work was done by Hugh Dempsey, long-time Glenbow curator and sometime Acting Director, who had extensive relationships in the Indigenous community going back to his involvement with the Indian Association of Alberta. He married Pauline Gladstone, the daughter of James Gladstone, the first status Indian appointed to the Canadian Senate. In mid-1990, Dempsey with Board approval loaned a medicine bundle to Dan Weasel Moccasin for a ceremony thereby setting a precedent. The bundle was returned.

Towards the end of my tenure as Executive Director of the Alberta Museums Association around 1998-1999, I was involved in an interesting project titled “Lost Identities” put together by Historic Sites Service Museums Advisor Eric Waterton; Provincial Archives of Alberta Archivist, Marlena Wyman; Pat Myers, historian with the Provincial Museum of Alberta; and Shirley Bruised Head, the Education Officer at the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre. We wanted to develop a photographic exhibit for the Centre and Marlena scanned their collection for a cross-section of photos representing Treaty 7 people. When the committee reviewed them, we noticed that archival photographs frequently had the label “unknown Indian.” We decided to focus on those photographs for the exhibit and selected about 30 photographs that were enlarged and framed. They were hung in an exhibit room at the Interpretive Centre and next to each was a copy of the photograph with blank outlines of the people. Visitors to the exhibit were encouraged to identify anyone they knew.

I remember well the exhibit launch organized by Shirley. There was a feast for the Elders and after the blessings were finished, the exhibit was introduced and the participants began to walk around looking at each photograph carefully. For some time, there was absolute silence in the room followed by a kind of buzzing noise as they began to talk to each other and point at people they knew.

Shirley was an extraordinary woman (Sacred Hill Woman "Naatoyiitomakii"), who died too soon in 2012. She was a member of the Piikani Nation and she and her twin sister Barbara were born on the reserve on February 19, 1951 to Irene and Joe Scott. Her parents ranched. After their early death, the children were separated and she grew up in her Uncle’s home in Siksika and then moved to Edmonton to attend St. Joseph’s High School. She married Norbert Bruised Head and supported his rodeo career and worked for Native Counseling Services in Lethbridge. She obtained a BA degree from the University of Lethbridge and, later, a Master’s in Education. She was a ceremonialist and was a pipe owner; she assisted in the beaver bundle ceremony.

A committee of former presidents of the Alberta Museums Association met for several years to discuss how to make the Association more financially independent and how to promote museums more effectively. The result of this was the creation of the Heritage Community Foundation in summer 1999 with the mandate “to link people with heritage through discovery and learning.” At that time, I was a member of the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) advisory committee and involved in a “Museums and the Web” study. I quickly became convinced that the World Wide Web offered enormous opportunities for promoting heritage. The Foundation obtained funding to create our first website – a kind of overview of Alberta’s heritage and museums – and this gave us our direction.

I pitched to the Board that the primary focus of the Foundation should become the development of web content drawing on museum and archival collections and, furthermore, that we should create the “Alberta Online Encyclopedia.” They wholeheartedly endorsed this and www.albertasource.ca was born. Luck and, I guess, timing was on our side. In March 2001, CHIN launched the Virtual Museum of Canada, which had a grants program, and I knew which project to bring forward. The Spirit of the Peace Museum Network had developed a travelling exhibit titled “The Making of Treaty 8 in Canada’s Northwest.” It was rich in artifacts, documents and records. I approached Fran Moore, the Chair of the network, and asked whether they would partner with us and the answer back was an unequivocal, “Yes!” It was all systems go. I developed the grant application, which was jointly submitted, and we obtained funding to hire some project staff and a firm of web developers. In the end, content and images for the bilingual website were contributed by not only the Museums of the Peace but also, the Glenbow, Provincial Museum of Alberta, Treaty 8 First Nations and the Lobstick Journal. I remember going up North to test the site with Elders and seeing the excitement on their faces when they began to identify relatives in the archival photos. The website was launched in 2002 and CHIN was thrilled with it.

In 2004, we designed a project to celebrate Alberta’s centenary: expansion of the websites in order to cover Alberta’s social, natural, cultural, scientific and technological heritage. Albertasource.ca, the Alberta Online Encyclopedia, received a $1 million Centennial Legacy grant. On September 29, 2005, the Foundation launched the Encyclopedia – the Province’s intellectual legacy project – at the Edmonton Space and Science Centre to a supportive crowd including children from neighbourhood schools.

After development of the Treaty 8 website, we moved all technical development in-house because we found that we could better control quality as well as guaranteeing that websites were completed on time. This was crucial because in some instances the majority of funding was received on project completion. Of our first four interns, two stayed on with us for a number of years and became permanent staff. Dulcie Meatheringham, a young Métis woman from Northern Alberta, became our first webmaster. Over the 10-year life of the Foundation, we had over 450 interns, most for three-month internships.

There are certain groupings of websites that the Trustees and I take particular pride in; among them are the over 30 websites that are either wholly or partly devoted to Indigenous content. All involved partnerships with Treaty organizations and the Métis Nation of Alberta. These include sites on individual treaties as well as Alberta’s Metis Heritage, People of the Boreal Forest and Elders’ Voices. The last included content from the “Ten Grandmothers Project” undertaken by Linda Many Guns of the Nii Touii Knowledge and Learning Centre; the Centenarians, a nine-minute video production celebrating Indigenous women resulting from a partnership between Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, the Institute for the Advancement of Aboriginal Women and EnCana Energy. We also undertook some oral histories of Métis veterans. Thirteen Edukits draw on the content of the various websites and provide teacher and student resources directly related to the K-12 curriculum. They are: Alex Decoteau; Origin and Settlement; First Nations Contributions; Culture and Meaning; Language and Culture; Spirituality and Creation; Health and Wellness; Leadership; Physical Education, Sports and Recreation; Math: Elementary; Science; and Carving Faces: People of the Boreal Forest.

I am proud of the fact that we created three Indigenous internship programs in partnership with the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology that trained young people in web design. We obtained some funding from Western Economic Diversification in support of the project. We had not only interns who specialized in web design but also graduates in history who wrote site content. They worked on both Indigenous and non-Indigenous websites. Some have made careers in this area. On June 30, 2009, the Heritage Community Foundation gifted the Alberta Online Encyclopedia to the University of Alberta so that it could make available the websites in perpetuity.

What people in the museum and heritage field accomplished in partnership with Indigenous Peoples and institutions from 1987 to the present is only a beginning. As we move into the era of the “decolonizing of museums,” a whole new generation of Shirley Bruised Heads, Linda Many Guns and others are needed. It’s good to see these new voices, talents and abilities emerging and tackling recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I was privileged to be able to attend the last day of the Commission hearings held in Edmonton from March 27-30, 2014 at the Shaw Conference Centre. I eagerly awaited the release of the report in June 2015 and have tracked how heritage and arts organizations have begun to implement its recommendations.

The last physical event that I attended before Covid was the Edmonton Heritage Council’s Symposium titled “Reconciliation and Resurgence: Heritage Practice in Post-TRC Edmonton.” Their website notes:

On March 3 and 4, 2020, 150 people came together at La Cité Francophone to discuss Reconciliation and Resurgence in post Truth and Reconciliation Commission Edmonton. Members of the Indigenous community, Edmonton’s heritage sector, academics, not-for-profit workers, students, public sector workers, and members of the public, came together to learn how each of us can contribute to reconciliation work in the heritage community. Those in attendance were encouraged to consider and examine the ways in which Indigenous peoples and heritage have been and continue to be excluded or marginalized within heritage institutions and narratives. We asked attendees to think critically about their own roles in this pattern of erasure, and to consider a way forward where Indigenous voices are lifted up, where Indigenous heritage is told by Indigenous people, and how historical erasure and marginalization has contributed to the current realities of systemic racism.

The Edmonton Heritage Council was advised by Elders and community members from First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities throughout the planning process. Each day of the symposium began in ceremony with smudging and a prayer.4

From the 15 - 18 of March, 2021, I attended a virtual symposium organized by the International Committee for Museology of the International Council of Museums, which is part of UNESCO. I have been a member for over 30 years and served on the ICOM Canada Board. The conference was to take place in Montreal but Covid turned it to an online encounter. The topic was “Decolonizing Museology: Museums, Mixing and Myths of Origin.” The focus was as follows:

The purpose of the ICOFOM Annual Meeting is to create an international forum for a high level discussion on a museological topic. Usually, the topic is different each year, but sometimes it is analyzed over a three year period.

Approaches to museology vary widely around the world, for example, using museums to make statements about nationalism is given priority in some countries. In others, conservation and the exhibition of highly aestheticized, non-controversial artefacts, are regarded as the primary roles for museums. By contrast, in other nations, the development of “histories from below” or the salvaging of the histories of the lives of people who were regarded as having no value, is now a primary museological focus. The wide international variety of museologies means that the annual meeting has fundamental importance for the expression and recording of these differences.

I am looking forward to seeing the next era of history writing and interpretation.

The Dome

Standing on the Dome, Dawson City, You can see the fingers of river stretching towards the Bering Strait. Rotating through 360 degrees, The various landscapes open up to you.

The place is magical – Both in its natural and human elements. The light, in this Land of the Midnight Sun, Is like no other.

It brings out the artist in me. I want to paint word pictures— Of rocks, trees, sky and water, A haze smudging the distant mountains into the cloud cover.

Time present and time past merge. Geological time has shaped rock formations; Glaciation normally softens these, but not in this valley; And vegetation adds the finishing touches.

Up here, the town site is miniscule— The works of man diminished by the works of nature. The reverse of what is seen at the valley floor, Where churned-up gravels dominate.

There, the striations of gold-dredging, Form giant worm leavings— The only industrial operation that almost looks natural— The regularity and symmetry of gravel ridges resembling a moraine.

Dredge no. 4 now sits tethered. Its work of creating new landforms ended. Its appetite for muskeg stilled by economic forces, The devaluing of the sovereign metal.

And what of those changed lives? The preserved buildings are a memorial to them. Window displays tell of events, And objects are tangible evidence.

You can identify buildings and streets, Forming the background of archival photos. But, what you don’t get are the raw emotions— The greed, flimflam, pain and loss.

When it all went bust, Those gold gypsies walked away, Leaving their possessions behind, like empty cocoons— The residue of a transitory, disposable society.

We now want to put those lives on show, In restored and recreated buildings, For the entertainment of bus-tour travellers. How can we do it and pay homage to their humanity?

In the window in the madam’s house, I see photos—a woman in a fashionable, fifties swing coat with a dog, Also a family portrait with an Oriental man and little boy. Was it greed that brought this genteel Parisienne to the Yukon?

The priests and religious are also there. Ministering to their flocks brought hardship and even death. Did they feel it was worth it, in the end, When facing their Maker?

The substantial buildings survive, Set down for a future territorial capital, Their neoclassical tin facades, Bravely face river and forest.

Those gold hustlers must have had other qualities to counter the greed. Some must have come to stay— To put down roots, And leave a legacy for their children.

What about the Native People— Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie? Cast as bit players in this colonial saga, Their impassive countenances don’t say much.

We need the Han Centre to place the Gold Follies in a larger context. Indigenous time and values— Centuries in the making— Providing a silent commentary on white mayfly lives.

Did they know that it would be heritage tourism — The “gold rush” of the early 20th century— That would provide the window on their lives, The measure of their success whether they struck it rich or not.

The aged prospector in the CBC documentary, Repeats the eternal round of digging into the earth, Like an Ancient Mariner marooned in mid-century, A generation away from when the action left Dawson.

Museums have serious powers. Unearthing the past has its responsibilities. Each day, we make and break reputations— Validate one person’s struggle, while ignoring another’s.

We have become dream merchants. A rootless civilization finally coming to its senses, Needing the bone, twigs, cloth and feathers Of heritage “shamans” to reconstruct the world.

Is a code of professional ethics enough? Or do we acknowledge our powers— To create the symbols and icons for the next generation, And turn job into vocation?

Whitehorse, June 3, 1998, Canadian Museums Association conference

________________________________________________

1 Michelle Filice, “Treaty 6,” The Canadian Encyclopedia Online, URL: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/treaty-6, retrieved January 15, 2022. See also Harold Cardinal and Walter Hildebrand, Treaty Elders of Saskatchewan: Our Dream is that Our Peoples Will One Day Be Clearly Recognized As Nations (2000).

2 Robert Henry Houle, “Richard Secord and Métis Scrip Speculation,” June 28, 2016, Edmonton Heritage Council, Edmonton City as Museum Project, URL: https://citymuseumedmonton.ca/2016/06/28/richard-henry-secord-and-metis-scrip-speculation/

3 See Connor Thompson, “Edmonton’s River Lots: A Layer in Our History,” September 9, 2020, URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=Edmonton%27s+River+Lots&ei=QBraYfTfC5mU0PEPuq-0oAk&ved=0ahUKEwj0_7fYo6P1AhUZCjQIHboXDZQQ4dUDCA4&oq=Edmonton%27s+River+Lots&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAxKBAhBGABKBAhGGABQAFgAYABoAHAAeACAAQCIAQCSAQCYAQA&sclient=gws-wiz

4 See “Reconciliation and Resurgence: A Year Later,” Edmonton Heritage Council, URL: https://edmontonheritage.ca/blog/2021/03/04/reconciliation-and-resurgence-one-year-later/, retrieved January 18, 2022.

#yegarts #yeg #edmonton #edmontonarts #yegheritage #yorathhouse

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southeastasianists · 5 years ago

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Findings from a nationwide survey commissioned by Yangon-based NGOs Colors Rainbow and &PROUD indicate that Myanmar’s general public are in favour of greater equality for the country’s LGBT* population, and that a strong majority of people do not support the current criminalization of LGBT people.

With an election around the corner (featuring the country’s first openly gay candidate), activists in Myanmar will soon be presented with a renewed set of policymakers with whom reform can be pursued. The strategic use of this new public opinion data can play a critical role in convincing the Myanmar government to dismantle laws that justify discrimination and marginalization of the country’s rainbow folk – but there are hurdles ahead.

The push for LGBT equality in Myanmar takes place within a broader context of increased attention on sexual and gender minorities across the Asia Pacific region. Positive examples include India’s dismantling of anti-sodomy laws in 2018 and Taiwan’s recognition of same-sex marriage in 2019. Elsewhere, however, there are some more worrying cases, such as Brunei’s near-instalment of the death penalty for homosexuality, public officials spouting anti-LGBT vitriol in Indonesia and Singapore’s high court quashing an attempt to decriminalise male same-sex relations.

In all cases, strategically aligning political maneuvers with broader public sentiment has been the goal of actors on both sides of the battle. In the post-election environment, the same will be true in Myanmar. As such, it is critical to understand the general population’s perspectives on sexual and gender minorities, in order to inform campaign strategies and messaging.

In Myanmar, ‘LGBT’ is the term used to describe sexual and gender minorities, rather than the longer and more inclusive form of the acronym – LGBTIQ – that is more common in Western rhetoric and advocacy. Accordingly, to align with the Myanmar context, this study and subsequent analysis uses the term ‘LGBT’. In any case, both acronyms are rooted in Western conceptualisations of sex, sexuality and gender that do not always perfectly translate into Myanmar’s cultural or linguistic realities.

In Myanmar, people of diverse sexualities and gender identities face human rights abuses and violence on multiple fronts for not conforming to culturally-entrenched understandings of gender norms and behaviours. LGBT individuals frequently suffer physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of family and household members, and others in their communities such as law enforcement officers, neighbours, teachers and classmates.

Such cases are rarely taken seriously by Myanmar’s authorities. This reality was made clear following the highly publicised suicide of 26-year-old gay librarian, Kyaw Zin Win, who took his life in June 2019 after being forcibly outed and bullied by his colleagues. The Myanmar National Human Rights Council dismissed any wrongdoing and instead attributed the youth’s death to his own ‘mental weakness’. Inevitably, such views are bolstered by the ongoing existence of the colonially-introduced Section 377 and associated police acts which serve to criminalise same-sex relations and enshrine binary, heteronormative gender ideals into Myanmar’s legal system.

The objectives of Colors Rainbow and &PROUD’s research were two-fold: i.) to produce Myanmar’s most comprehensive stand-alone study on public attitudes towards LGBT people; and ii.) to inform community-led campaign strategies to promote greater acceptance and support of the LGBT community. The study was conducted by mobile phone using the proprietary research panel of a locally contracted research agency, and respondents were representative of the population across demographics such as gender, age, location and education.

By far the most salient findings for LGBT activists will be the fact that 74% of respondents did not agree with the criminalization of LGBT identities—indicating that if handled sensitively, dismantling Section 377 and the relevant Police Acts will not be a publicly unpopular action for the government. Even more reassuring is the finding that 81% of people agree with the statement: “I believe LGBT people deserve equality and equal treatment just like anyone else in Myanmar”. This finding is particularly interesting to note alongside the fact that 31% of people did not agree with the more personal statement “I accept and support LGBT people”. We can conclude that despite personal prejudices, a belief in equality and equal treatment for all people seems to take precedence.

Indeed, it must be noted that people were more willing to accept LGBT people in an abstract sense, but less so when the person in question was closer to home. One in two respondents expressed it would be completely unacceptable if their own child was LGBT, while a similarly high number indicated an unwillingness to accept an LGBT sibling.

While the results are reassuring for LGBT activists insofar as that they demonstrate solid public support for legal reform, they also unearth some unignorable tensions. Most glaringly, the lack of support and acceptance for LGBT children or family members reveals that for many, LGBT people are only acceptable at arm’s length. This demonstrates a need for advocacy and campaign strategies that can emotionally compel people to unconditionally support and welcome LGBT people in both their public and private lives.

Furthermore, while it’s a powerful tool, demonstrable public support alone will not be sufficient to achieve legal reform. Separate lobbying will need to take place behind the scenes with Bill Committees and parliamentarians before substantive actions can be taken. Led by Colors Rainbow and the LGBT Rights Network, this work is indeed already underway, but the process is not as easy as convincing lawmakers to strike a line in the rule books. For example, a major issue in the Myanmar Penal Code is that the current definition for rape (Section 375) only holds in heterosexual circumstances, with same-sex intercourse being illegal whether consensual or not. Thus, if consensual same-sex relations are decriminalized, lawmakers will need to redefine rape to include non-consensual intercourse between people of the same sex, which means that three intertwined sections in the Penal Code will require examination and amendment.

What is clear in the road ahead is that securing human rights for Myanmar’s queer folk will require attention being paid to both social and legal realms. In battlefronts for queer equality across the globe, negative voices and violence can and do drown out quiet support and acceptance. Nevertheless, this data indicates that there is in fact widespread belief in the inherent right for LGBT people to be treated with dignity and respect. Myanmar’s LGBT community needs to find ways to activate positive voices within the general public and amplify human faces and stories within the debate.

A full analytical report detailing all the findings of the survey will be released later this year in both Burmese and English language.

* In Burmese, the word for intersex is not widely understood by the general public, and intersex issues have not been mainstreamed into the existing LGBT movement. As such, this study was regrettably not able to cover intersex experiences and realities in a cohesive or comprehensive manner. Nevertheless, both Colors Rainbow and &PROUD are working towards awareness-raising, advocacy and programming that addresses the needs of intersex people and encourages their participation in the movement.

#Southeast Asia #Burma #Myanmar #LGBTQIA+ Rights #LGBTQIA+ Issues

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decolonisemenstruation · 5 years ago

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Code of Conduct

Decolonise Menstruation - Safer Spaces Policy Decolonise Menstruation was founded by Decolonising Contraception & Bloody Good Period, our Code of Conduct that reflects the principles of both groups. Decolonising Contraception is based on the principles outlined in their sexfesto and has a safer spaces policy. More information on Bloody Good Period can be found on their website.

We are at our best when we are inter-sectional; inclusive and diverse. As part of our working we aim to create environments where our collective and others feel secure and respected. We strive to ensure that everyone is treated with dignity and respect regardless of gender, sexual orientation, transgender status, marital or family status, colour, race, nationality, ethnic or national origins, creed, culture, religion or belief, age, immigration status, body size, mental health, neuro (a) typicality, differently abled, skill level, occupation, or background. To ensure that our events meet our standards we like all our members and event attendees to abide by the following principles and use this to guide their behaviour.

We will not tolerate bullying or harassment, whether the conduct is a one-off act or repeated course of conduct, and whether done purposefully or not. It is important to recognise that conduct which one person may find acceptable, another may find totally unacceptable. [dm1] Behaviour that falls short of these principles will be challenged and may lead to you being ejected from the event on the day or asked to commit to an accountability process before returning to future workshops.

Our events at times involve discussing topics that may be difficult for some participants and you should be mindful that they may have experiences that cause or have the potential to cause emotional distress (triggering) e.g sexual assault. It is vital that nobody feels pressured to share a particular experience.

To set the foundations for a safe learning and organising environment please abide by the following, Code of Conduct

In solidarity, Decolonising Contraception Collective, Bloody Good Period and Decolonise Menstruation

Code of Conduct

Respect Confidentiality: don’t repeat anything you hear in Period Club, outside this space without getting informed consent first, this applies to breakout groups, comments and screenshares

Come and go as you need to: but you can type BRB (Be Right Back) or Bye so we know you are or aren’t coming back

Self Care: you know yourself best, so we ask you to participate at the level that feels comfortable and take a break whenever you need Caveat If you can, we ask you to sit with discomfort: Because the most learning comes from gently pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. But you know for yourself, when something is a discomfort versus a trigger and take care of yourself as you see fit.

ONLY Share what feels comfortable & appropriate (for yourself and others): It is vital that nobody feels pressured to share a particular experience. Also discussions may arise that may be difficult for some participants so you should be mindful that they may have experiences that cause or have the potential to cause emotional distress (triggering) e.g sexual assault, FGM please be mindful

Practice Personal Responsibility: DM has a duty of care towards our team members and participants. However, it is necessary that, as with any successful community, each individual takes a share of responsibility towards the group as a whole.

Only speak from your lived-experience: Don’t try to speak on behalf of other people, cultures, communities. You can share anecdotes but don’t speak on behalf of others, be wary of explaining a person’s experiences to them

One person speaks at a time

Step Up / Step Back: if you are shy we will all try to make this a safer space for you to speak so please try to speak up, if you have a dominant personality, try giving softer voices space, try prioritising marginalised voices

Respect difference lived experiences / backgrounds: don’t make assumptions

Challenge discriminatory behaviour It is unlawful to discriminate directly or indirectly against a ‘protected characteristic’. The Equality Act defines the protected characteristics as being age, disability, sex, gender reassignment, pregnancy, maternity, race (which includes colour, nationality, caste and ethnic or national origins), sexual orientation, religion or belief, or because someone is married or in a civil partnership. In addition to the UK law we also don’t accept micro-aggressions or discrimination because of immigration status, employment status,(unemployed or type of employment) or body type.

Challenge the statement not the person: Instead of saying “you are wrong”, say you may not have realised that your comment has this meaning to me

Clarification, there’s no such thing as a silly question: Please feel free to ask anything, there really is no such thing as a silly question, if you are confused that usually means others are as well. You can send a private message to a volunteer who will repeat it to the group anonymously

Conflict resolution: You don’t have to continue in a conversation, but if you choose to continue you have to be willing to answer clarifying questions. This can feel exhausting and unfair but it also can sometimes end an argument which was a misunderstanding rather than a disagreement. Oftentimes, if given the chance, people will understand how they misspoke when they are asked to clarify so it saves everyone emotional energy.

Note: We have a duty to listen to those informing us that they feel harmed by a particular action and to undergo a process of self-reflection to address any harm caused. We all acknowledge that we must continue to educate and learn from our actions.

#code of conduct #safe space #safer space #safer spaces

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blackfreethinkers · 5 years ago

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A racial realist IS a white supremacist!!!

By Greg Miller

In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.

After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.

Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”

When challenged on these views by subordinates, Trump has invariably responded with indignation. “He would say, ‘No one loves Black people more than me,’ ” a former senior White House official said. The protests rang hollow because if the president were truly guided by such sentiments he “wouldn’t need to say it,” the official said. “You let your actions speak.”

In Trump’s case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.

Over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.

His immigration policies hark back to quota systems of the 1920s that were influenced by the junk science of eugenics, and have involved enforcement practices — including the separation of small children from their families — that seemed designed to maximize trauma on Hispanic migrants.

With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.

After rolling back regulations designed to encourage affordable housing for minorities, Trump declared himself the champion of the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He ordered aides to revamp racial sensitivity training at federal agencies so that it no longer refers to “White privilege.” In a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, Trump vowed to overhaul what children are taught in the nation’s schools — something only states have the power to do — while falsely claiming that students are being “fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism.”

The America envisioned by these policies and pronouncements is one dedicated to preserving a racial hierarchy that can be seen in Trump’s own Cabinet and White House, both overwhelmingly white and among the least diverse in recent U.S. history.

Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him

Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.

“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”

A second White House official who worked closely with Trump quibbled with the comparison, but only because later Oval Office occupants also had intolerant views.

“Woodrow Wilson was outwardly a white supremacist,” the former official said. “I don’t think Trump is as bad as Wilson. But he might be.”

White House officials vigorously dispute such characterizations.

“Donald Trump’s record as a private citizen and as president has been one of fighting for inclusion and advocating for the equal treatment of all,” said Sarah Matthews, a White House spokeswoman. “Anyone who suggests otherwise is only seeking to sow division.”

No senior U.S. official interviewed could recall Trump uttering a racial or ethnic slur while in office. Nor did any consider him an adherent of white supremacy or white nationalism, extreme ideologies that generally sanction violence to protect White interests or establish a racially pure ethno-state.

White House officials also pointed to achievements that have benefited minorities, including job growth and prison-sentence reform.

But even those points fade under scrutiny. Black unemployment has surged disproportionately during the coronavirus pandemic, and officials said Trump regretted reducing prison sentences when it didn’t produce a spike in Black voter support.

And there are indications that even Trump’s allies are worried about his record on race. The Republican Party devoted much of its convention in August to persuading voters that Trump is not a racist, with far more Black speakers at the four-day event than have held top White House positions over the past four years.

This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials, including some who have had daily interactions with the president, as well as experts on race and members of white supremacist groups. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a desire to provide candid accounts of events and conversations they witnessed without fear of retribution.

Coded racial terms

Most attributed Trump’s views on race and conduct to a combination of the prevailing attitudes of his privileged upbringing in the 1950s in what was then a predominantly White borough of New York, as well as a cynical awareness that coded racial terms and gestures can animate substantial portions of his political base.

The perspectives of those closest to the president are shaped by their own biases and self-interests. They have reason to resist the idea that they served a racist president. And they are, with few exceptions, themselves White males.

Others have offered less charitable assessments.

Omarosa Manigault Newman, one of the few Black women to have worked at the White House, said in her 2018 memoir that she was enlisted by White House aides to track down a rumored recording from “The Apprentice” — the reality show on which she was a contestant — in which Trump allegedly used the n-word. A former official said that others involved in the effort included Trump adviser Hope Hicks and former White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

The tape, if it exists, was never recovered. But Manigault Newman, who was forced out after clashing with other White House staff, portrayed the effort to secure the tape as evidence that aides saw Trump capable of such conduct. In the book, she described Trump as “a racist, misogynist and bigot.”

Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece, has said that casual racism was prevalent in the Trump family. In interviews to promote her recently published book, she has said that she witnessed her uncle using both anti-Semitic slurs as well as the n-word, though she offered few details and no evidence.

Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, has made similar allegations and calls Trump “a racist, a predator, a con man” in a newly published book. Cohen accuses Trump of routinely disparaging people of color, including former president Barack Obama. “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a s---hole,” Trump said, according to Cohen.

These authors did not provide direct evidence of Trump’s racist outbursts, but the animus they describe aligns with the prejudice Trump so frequently displays in public.

In recent months, Trump has condemned Black Lives Matter as a “symbol of hate” while defending armed White militants who entered the Michigan Capitol, right-wing activists who waved weapons from pickup trucks in Portland and a White teen who shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin.

Trump has vowed to safeguard the legacies of Confederate generals while skipping the funeral of the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, and retweeted — then deleted — video of a supporter shouting “White power” while questioning the electoral eligibility of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the nation’s first Black and Asian American candidate for vice president from a major party. In so doing, Trump reanimated a version of the false “birther” claim he had used to suggest that Obama may not have been born in the United States.

These add to an already voluminous record of incendiary statements, including his tweet that minority congresswomen should “go back” to their “crime infested” countries despite being U.S.-born or U.S. citizens, and his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after torch-carrying white nationalists staged a violent protest in Charlottesville.

In a measure of Trump’s standing with such organizations, the Stormfront website — the oldest and largest neo-Nazi platform on the Internet — recently issued a call to its followers to mobilize.

“If Trump doesn’t win this election, the police will be abolished and Blacks will come to your house and kill you and your family,” the site warned. “This isn’t about politics anymore, it is about basic survival.”

As the election approaches, Trump has also employed apocalyptic language. He recently claimed that if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected, police departments will be dismantled, the American way of life will be “abolished” and “no one will be SAFE.”

Given the country’s anguished history, it is hard to isolate Trump’s impact on the racial climate in the United States. But his first term has coincided with the most intense period of racial upheaval in a generation. And the country is now in the final stretch of a presidential campaign that is more explicitly focused on race — including whether the sitting president is a racist — than any election in modern American history.

Biden has seized on the issue from the outset. In a video declaring his candidacy, he used images from the clashes in Charlottesville, and said he felt compelled to run because of Trump’s response. He has called Trump the nation’s first racist president and pledged to use his presidency to heal divisions that are a legacy of the country’s “original sin” of slavery.

Exploiting societal divisions

Trump has confronted allegations of racism in nearly every decade of his adult life. In the 1970s, the Trump family real estate empire was forced to settle a Justice Department lawsuit alleging systemic discrimination against Black apartment applicants. In the 1980s, he took out full-page ads calling for the death penalty against Black teens wrongly accused of a rape in Central Park. In the 2000s, Trump parlayed his baseless “birther” claim about Obama into a fervent far-right following.

As president, he has cast his record on race in grandiose terms. “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said July 22, a refrain he has repeated at least five times in recent months.

None of the administration officials interviewed for this story agreed with Trump’s self-appraisals. But several sought to rationalize his behavior.

Some argued that Trump only exploits societal divisions when he believes it is to his political advantage. They pointed to his denunciations of kneeling NFL players and paeans to the Confederate flag, claiming these symbols matter little to him beyond their ability to rouse supporters.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is in any way a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi or anything of the sort,” a third former senior administration official said. “But I think he has a general awareness that one component of his base includes factions that trend in that direction.”

Studies of the 2016 election have shown that racial resentment was a far bigger factor in propelling Trump to victory than economic grievance. Political scientists at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts, for example, examined the election results and found that voters who scored highly on indexes of racism voted overwhelmingly for Trump, a dynamic particularly strong among non-college-educated Whites.

Several current and former administration officials, somewhat paradoxically, cited Trump’s nonracial biases and perceived limitations as exculpatory.

Several officials said that Trump is not a disciplined enough thinker to grasp the full dimensions of the white nationalist agenda, let alone embrace it. Others pointed out that they have observed him making far more offensive comments about women, insisting that his scorn is all-encompassing and therefore shouldn’t be construed as racist.

“This is a guy who abuses people in his cabinet, abuses four-star generals, abuses people who gave their life for this country, abuses civil servants,” the first former senior White House official said. “It’s not like he doesn’t abuse people that are White as well.”

Nearly all said that Trump places far greater value on others’ wealth, fame or loyalty to him than he does on race or ethnicity. In so doing, many raised a version of the “some of my best friends are Black” defense on behalf of the president.

When faced with allegations of racism in the 2016 campaign, Trump touted his friendship with boxing promoter Don King to argue otherwise. Administration officials similarly pointed to the president’s connection to Black people who have praised him, worked for him or benefited from his help.

They cited Trump’s admiration for Tiger Woods and other Black athletes, the political support he has received from Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and other Black lawmakers, the president’s fondness for Ja’Ron Smith, who as assistant to the president for domestic policy is the highest-ranking Black staffer at the White House, and his pardon of Black criminal-justice-reform advocate Alice Marie Johnson, expunging her 1996 conviction for cocaine trafficking.

In his speech at the Republican National Convention, Scott used his personal story of bootstrap success to emphasize the ways that Republican policies on taxes, school choice and other issues create opportunities for minorities.

Trump “has fought alongside me” on such issues, Scott said, urging voters “not to look simply at what the candidates say, but to look back at what they’ve done.”

For all the prominence that Scott and other Black Trump supporters were given at the convention, there has been no corresponding representation within the Trump administration.

The official photo stream of Trump’s presidency is a slide show of a commander in chief surrounded by White faces, whether meeting with Cabinet members or posing with the latest intern crop.

From the outset, his leadership team has been overwhelmingly White. A Washington Post tally identified 59 people who have held Cabinet positions or served in top White House jobs including chief of staff, press secretary and national security adviser since Trump took office.

Only seven have been people of color, including Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who are of Lebanese heritage. Only one — Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development — is Black.

Under Trump, the nation’s federal courts have also become increasingly White. Of the 248 judges confirmed or nominated since Trump took office, only eight were Black and eight were Hispanic, according to records compiled by NPR News.

Retreating from civil rights

Trump can point to policy initiatives that have benefited Black or other minority groups, including criminal justice reforms that reduced prison sentences for thousands of Black men convicted of nonviolent, drug-related crimes.

About 4,700 inmates have been released or had their sentences reduced under the First Step Act, an attempt to reverse the lopsided legacy of the drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which disproportionately targeted African Americans. But this policy was championed primarily by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and former officials said that Trump only agreed to support the measure when told it might boost his low poll numbers with Black voters.

Months later, when that failed to materialize, Trump “went s---house crazy,” one former official said, yelling at aides, “Why the hell did I do that?”

Manigault Newman was similarly excoriated when her efforts to boost funding for historically Black colleges failed to deliver better polling numbers for the president, officials said. “You’ve been at this for four months, Omarosa,” Trump said, according to one adviser, “but the numbers haven’t budged.” Manigault Newman did not respond to a request for comment.

White House officials cited other initiatives aimed at helping people of color, including loan programs targeting minority businesses and the creation of “opportunity zones” in economically distressed communities.

Trump has pointed most emphatically to historically low Black unemployment rates during his first term, arguing that data show they have fared better under his administration than under Obama or any other president.

But unemployment statistics are largely driven by broader economic trends, and the early gains of Black workers have been wiped out by the pandemic. Blacks have lost jobs at higher rates than other groups since the economy began to shut down. The jobless rate for Blacks in August was 13 percent, compared with 7.3 percent for Whites — the highest racial disparity in nearly six years.

Neither prison reform nor minority jobs programs were priorities of Trump’s first term. His administration has devoted far more energy and political capital to erecting barriers to non-White immigrants, dismantling the health-care policies of Obama and pulling federal agencies back from civil rights battlegrounds.

Under Trump, the Justice Department has cut funding in its Civil Rights Division, scaled back prosecutions of hate crimes, all but abandoned efforts to combat systemic discrimination by police departments and backed state measures that deprived minorities of the right to vote.

Weeks after Trump took office, the department announced it was abandoning its six-year involvement in a legal battle with Texas over a 2011 voter ID law that a federal court had ruled unfairly targeted minorities.

Later, the department went from opposing, under Obama, an Ohio law that allowed the state to purge tens of thousands of voters from its rolls to defending the measure before the Supreme Court.

The law was upheld by the court’s conservative majority. In a dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that voter rolls in African American neighborhoods shrank by 10 percent, compared with 4 percent in majority-White suburbs.

The Justice Department’s shift when faced with allegations of systemic racism by police departments has been even more stark.

After the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991, Congress gave the department new power to investigate law enforcement agencies suspected of engaging in a “pattern or practice” of systemic — including racist — misconduct. The probes frequently led to settlements that required sweeping reforms.

The authority was put to repeated use by three consecutive presidents: 25 times under Bill Clinton, 21 under George W. Bush and 25 under Obama. Under Trump, there has been only one.

The collapse has coincided with a surge in police killings captured on video, the largest civil rights protests in decades and polling data that suggests a profound turn in public opinion in support of the Black Lives Matter cause — though that support has waned in recent weeks as protests became violent in some cities.

A Justice Department spokesman pointed to nearly a dozen cases over the past three years in which the department has prosecuted hate crimes or launched racial discrimination lawsuits. In perhaps the most notable case, James Fields Jr., who was convicted of murder for driving his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, also pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.

“The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice is vigorously fighting race discrimination throughout the United States. Any assertion to the contrary is completely false,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband. “Since 2017, we have prosecuted criminal and civil race discrimination cases in all parts of the United States, and we will continue to do so.”

But the department has not launched a pattern or practice probe into any of the police departments involved in the killings that ignited this summer’s protests, including the May 25 death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, who asphyxiated after a White policeman kept him pinned to the ground for nearly eight minutes with a knee to his neck.

The department has opened a more narrow investigation of the officers directly involved in Floyd’s death. Attorney General William P. Barr called Floyd’s killing “shocking,” but in congressional testimony argued there was no reason to commit to a broader probe of Minneapolis or any other police force.

“I don’t believe there is systemic racism in police departments,” Barr said.

Deport, deny and discourage

Days after the 2016 election, David Duke, a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted that Trump’s win was “great for our people.” Richard Spencer, another prominent white nationalist figure, was captured on video leading a “Hail Trump” salute at an alt-right conference in Washington.

People with far-right views or white nationalist sympathies gravitated to the administration.

Michael Anton, who published a 2016 essay comparing the country’s course under Obama to that of an aircraft controlled by Islamist terrorists and called for an end to “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” became deputy national security adviser for strategic communication.

Ian Smith served as an immigration policy analyst at the Department of Homeland Security until email records showed connections with Spencer and other white supremacists. Darren Beattie worked as a White House speechwriter before leaving abruptly when CNN reported his involvement in a conference frequented by white nationalists.

Stephen K. Bannon, who for years used Breitbart News to advance an alt-right, anti-immigrant agenda, was named White House chief strategist, only to be banished eight months later after clashing with other administration officials.

Stephen Miller, by contrast, has survived a series of White House purges and used his position as senior adviser to the president to push hard-line policies that aim to deport, deny and discourage non-European immigrants.

While working for the Trump campaign in 2016, Miller sent a steady stream of story ideas to Breitbart drawn from white nationalist websites, according to email records obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one exchange, Miller urged a Breitbart reporter to read “Camp of the Saints,” a French novel that depicts the destruction of Western civilization by rampant immigration. The book has become a touchpoint for white supremacist groups.

Miller was the principal architect of, and driving force behind, the so-called Muslim Ban issued in the early days of Trump’s presidency and the separation of migrant children from their parents along the border with Mexico. He has also worked behind the scenes to turn public opinion against immigrants and outmaneuver bureaucratic adversaries, officials said.

To blunt allegations of racism and xenophobia in the administration’s policies, Miller has sought to portray them as advantageous to people of color. In several instances, Miller directed subordinates to “look for Latinos or Blacks who have been victims of a crime by an immigrant,” then pressured officials at the Department of Homeland Security to tout these cases to the press, one official said. Families of some victims appeared as prominent guests of the president at the State of the Union address.

In 2018, as Miller sought to slash the number of refugees admitted to the United States, Pentagon officials argued that the existing policy was crucial to their ability to relocate interpreters and other foreign nationals who risked their lives to work with U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“What do you want? Iraqi communities across the United States?” Miller erupted during one meeting of National Security Council deputies, according to witnesses. The refugee limit has plunged since Trump took office, from 85,000 in 2016 to 18,000 this year.

In response to a request for comment from Miller, Matthews, the White House spokeswoman, said that “this attempt to vilify Stephen Miller with egregious and unfounded allegations from anonymous sources is shameful and completely unethical.”

As a descendant of Jewish immigrants, Miller is regarded warily by white supremacist organizations even as they applaud some of his actions.

“Our side doesn’t consider him one of us — for obvious reasons,” said Don Black, the founder of the Stormfront website, in an interview. “He’s kind of an odd choice to be the white nationalist in the White House.”

Trump’s presidency has corresponded with a surge in activity by white nationalist groups, as well as concern about the growing danger they pose.

Recent assessments by the Department of Homeland Security describe white supremacists as the country’s gravest domestic threat, exceeding that of the Islamic State and other terror groups, according to documents obtained by the Lawfare national security website and reported by Politico.

The FBI has expanded resources to tracking hate groups and crimes. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified Thursday that “racially motivated violent extremism” accounts for the bulk of the bureau’s domestic terrorism cases, and that most of those are driven by white supremacist ideology.

Major rallies staged by white nationalist organizations, which were already on the upswing just before the 2016 election, increased in size and frequency after Trump took office, according to Brian Levin, an expert on hate groups at California State University at San Bernardino.

The largest, and most ominous, was the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

On Aug. 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-fascists and Confederate sympathizers descended on the city. Purportedly there to protest the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, they carried torches and chanted slogans including “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us” laden with Klan and Nazi symbolism.

The event erupted in violence the next day, Saturday, when Fields, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, tossing bodies into the air. Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old Virginia native and peace activist, was killed.

Trump’s vacillating response in the ensuing days came to mark one of the defining sequences of his presidency.

Speaking from his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., Trump at first stuck to a calibrated script: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” Then, improvising, he added: “on many sides, on many sides.”

In six words, Trump had drawn a moral equivalency between the racist ideology of those responsible for the Klan-like spectacle and the competing beliefs that compelled Heyer and others to confront hate.

Trump’s comments set off what some in the White House came to regard as a behind-the-scenes struggle for the moral character of his presidency.

John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was just weeks into his job as White House chief of staff, confronted Trump in the corridors of the Bedminster club. “You have to fix this,” Kelly said, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “You were supporting white supremacists. You have to go back out and correct this.”

Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser at the time, threatened to resign and argued that there were no “good people” among the ranks of those wearing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In a heated exchange, Cohn criticized Trump for his “many sides” comment, and was flummoxed when Trump denied that was what he had said.

“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn shot back, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”

Trump relented that Monday and delivered the ringing condemnation of racism that Kelly, Cohn and others had urged. “Racism is evil,” he said, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups”

Aides were briefly elated. But Trump grew agitated by news coverage depicting his speech as an attempt to correct his initial blunder.

The next day, during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to highlight infrastructure initiatives, Trump launched into a fiery monologue.

“You had a group on one side that was bad,” he said. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” By the end, the president appeared to be sanctioning racial divisions far beyond Charlottesville, saying “there are two sides to the country.”

For all their consternation, none of Trump’s top aides resigned over Charlottesville. Kelly remained in his job through 2018. Cohn stayed until March 2018 after being asked to lead the administration’s tax-reform initiative and reassured that he could share his own views about Charlottesville in public without retaliation from the president.

Kelly and Cohn declined to comment.

The most senior former administration official to comment publicly on Trump’s conduct on issues of race is former defense secretary Jim Mattis. After Trump responded to Black Lives Matter protests in Washington this summer with paramilitary force, Mattis responded with a blistering statement.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis said. “Instead, he tries to divide us.”

In some ways, Charlottesville represented a high-water mark for white nationalism in Trump’s presidency. Civil rights groups were able to use footage of the mayhem in Virginia to identify members of hate groups and expose them to their employers, universities and families.

“Charlottesville backfired,” Levin said. Many of those who took part, especially the alt-right leadership, “were doxed, sued and beaten back,” he said, using a term for using documents available from public records to expose individuals.

“When the door to the big political tent closed on these overtly white nationalist groups, many collapsed, leaving a decentralized constituency of loose radicals now reorganizing under new banners,” Levin said.

Some white nationalist leaders have begun to express disenchantment with Trump because he has failed to deliver on campaign promises they hoped would bring immigration to a standstill or perhaps even ignite a race war.

“A lot of our people were expecting him to actually secure the borders, build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” Black said.

“Some in my circles want to see him defeated,” Black said, because they believe a Biden presidency would call less attention to the white nationalist movement than Trump has, while fostering discontent among White people.

But Black sees those views as dangerously shortsighted, failing to appreciate the extraordinary advantages of having a president who so regularly aligns himself with aspects of the movement’s agenda.

“Symbolically, he’s still very important,” Black said of Trump. “I don’t think he considers himself a white supremacist or a white nationalist. But I think he may be a racial realist. He knows there are racial differences.”

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