Burge Lecture 2025 | “A Crying Need for a Day Care Centre” with Dr. Sarah Nickel


DATE
Saturday February 1, 2025
TIME
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Burge Lecture with Dr. Sarah Nickel

The Burge Lecture is an annual endowed lecture organized by the History Graduate Students Association and made possible by a generous donation from UBC alumnus William Burge. The series provides students, faculty, alumni and community members the opportunity to connect with historians and scholars engaged in exciting research relevant to our times.

UBC Department of History is pleased to announce the 2025 Burge Lecture will be delivered by Dr. Sarah Nickel, Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta.

Light refreshments will be provided by Salishan Catering after the talk.

Location: AMS Nest, Room 2301.

“A Crying Need for a Day Care Centre”: Indigenous-Run Day Cares, 1967-1985.

“This talk examines the creation of Indigenous day care centres across the west to explain how Indigenous women shifted child care from a private issue within individual families to one grounded in their political rights as Indigenous women to have culturally suitable care for their children. I understand caregiving as an act of political resistance to preserve cultural integrity. I likewise explore child care in day care as an important intersection between labour and activism. Like other racialized women, Indigenous women often struggled to find permanent and well-paying employment, and their child care arrangements caught the attention of social workers who threatened to apprehend children while women worked for wages, looked for work, or did culture-based work. Indigenous women, in turn, used unpaid political activism in formal women’s organizations and ad hoc community groups to combat these dual inequities. Under the umbrella of child care activism, it is possible to articulate and understand the complexities of Indigenous women’s wage work, culture-based work, and voluntary political work and how these related to racialized and gendered understandings of labour, politics, and care for children.”

Speaker Bio

Sarah Ann Nickel is Tk’emlupsemc (Kamloops Secwepemc), French Canadian, and Ukrainian and grew up on the unceded lands of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest. Nickel is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on Indigenous political histories and activism in twentieth century western Canada, and the gendered nature of politics.

Nickel is the author of the award-winning book, Assembling Unity: Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (2019), which explores the relationship between pan-Indigenous politics in British Columbia and global political ideologies through the detailed history of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs. She also led the edited volume, In Good Relation: History, Gender, and Kinship in Indigenous Feminisms (2020), which facilitated a dialogue amongst leading scholarly feminist intellectuals. The book offers space for the questioning, revising and reinventing of Indigenous feminisms through the inclusion of pieces that question gender roles, identities, and tradition, explore kinship and sexuality, and centralize self-reflection.