Mr. Teri Westerby

09/26/2025

🧡✨ Chilliwack Secondary School is hosting an Orange Shirt Day Pow Wow on Friday, September 26 & Saturday, September 27, 2025.

🪶 This free, public gathering is a time for community to come together in the spirit of truth, reconciliation, and remembrance to honor Survivors of residential schools and remember the children who never made it home.

🧡 Orange Shirt Day, inspired by Phyllis Webstad, reminds us that “Every Child Matters.” This Pow Wow is an opportunity to learn, to connect, and to walk together on the path of reconciliation.

✨ Everyone is welcome. Bring your family, your friends, and your orange shirts.

📍Where: Chilliwack Secondary School, 46363 Yale Rd

🎶Host Drum: Red Hawk Express
🎤 MC: Chris Wells
🎟️ Arena Director: Gary Abbot

✨ Grand Entries: Friday at 7 p.m. / Saturday at 1 p.m. + 7 p.m.

🍲 Community Feast: Saturday at 5 p.m.: first come, first served, all welcome

🛍️ Vendors: Browse Indigenous art, jewelry, moccasins, clothing, and more.

🧡 Orange Regalia Special: Honouring Survivors and children lost to residential schools, with prizes awarded.

✨ Cost: Free & open to everyone

From 1876 to 1951, the Indian Act tried to silence powwows and other cultural traditions, but communities held onto them, protecting their songs, dances, and teachings. That resilience, paired with the rise of the Indigenous rights movement and the strength of interconnection across Nations, has brought powwows back into the open as powerful celebrations of culture and community.

Powwow is drumming and dancing. It's a circle of sharing. It is a place where people from different Nations, territories, and traditions come together to learn from one another, to honour each other, and to celebrate life.

For non-Indigenous Canadians, accepting the invitation to attend is not only about watching, it’s about showing respect, bearing witness, and choosing to stand alongside Indigenous Peoples.

After generations of attempted erasure, gathering together in the powwow circle is an act of joy, of survival, and of reconciliation in motion. 🧡

Photo from Indigenous Tourism BC

09/18/2025

Congratulations to Steven Point for the highest honour this nation can give, celebrating his dedication and achievements.

09/13/2025

For too long, public schools in BC weren’t built for everyone.

Students and educators with disabilities were excluded, segregated, or told to “make do” with systems that weren’t designed with them in mind. That began to change because people spoke up.

Because communities demanded better.

Now, that's changing thanks to decades of struggle, advocacy, and courage from disabled people and their families.

The Accessible BC Act is part of that history.

Two years ago, it made it a requirement that every school district create an accessibility committee, draft a plan, and set up a way for people to share feedback. The purpose? To identify, remove, and prevent barriers so that schools are places where everyone belongs.

But accessibility isn’t just about ramps, elevators, or door buttons. It’s also about words. If policies are written in government jargon or legalese, then the very people they’re supposed to support can’t use them.

That’s where plain language comes in.

Plain language means writing policies, guides, and information in ways that are clear, direct, and usable for everyone. It’s not “dumbing down” - it’s opening up. It’s accessibility in action.

That’s why the Surrey Schools Accessibility Working Group created a four-part animated video series that explains four key terms: disability, barriers, accessibility, and inclusion.

These videos make big ideas simple, without losing their depth. They remind us that accessibility is about the kind of community we want to live in where no one is left out.

👉 Watch the videos here: https://vimeo.com/1067776709?fl=pl&fe=sh

👉 Learn more about School District No. 33 - Chilliwack's accessibility plan: https://www.sd33.bc.ca/sd33-accessibility-plan

Thanks to the work of Inclusion BC, more people can have a deeper understanding of disability, barriers, accessibility, and inclusion with the hope that it will transform into more actions to ensure that all students feel they belong in their schools

See all four animated videos in the Surrey Schools Accessibility Series! Part 1: Disability Part 2: Barriers Part 3: Accessibility Part 4: Inclusion

09/12/2025

The Myth of One Right Way to Be

Pathologizing difference always starts with the same dangerous idea: that there is only one right way to be. One normal. One standard against which every human life must be measured. And if you don’t fit that narrow mold? You must be broken, sick, in need of fixing.

Once someone is pathologized, they’re no longer just a person—they become a specimen. We study them. We catalogue their habits. We write reports as if we’ve discovered some strange new species in the wild. Their life gets framed not as a way of being, but as a problem to solve. Like zoo animals, they’re observed through glass, documented in detail, and always compared to the “right” kind of human on the outside.

Take Eamonn. Eamonn cycles for hours every weekend. He talks about gears and routes with a passion that can leave little room for other tasks. In the pathological frame, we could call this “restricted interests,” “repetitive movements,” “difficulties engaging.” In other words: symptoms. But strip away the clinical lens, and what do you actually see? A cyclist who really loves his thing. That’s it.

This is how pathologization works: ordinary passions, traits, and identities become “abnormal” when they’re filtered through the assumption that deviation from the majority must mean disorder.

And history is littered with examples. Q***r people once carried the medical label of “sexual deviance.” Trans people were slotted into “gender identity disorder.” Neurodivergent people were (and still are) pathologized for the very traits that shape their brilliance. Women who resisted men were “hysterical.” Left-handed children had their hands tied to force conformity. Indigenous people were “studied,” stripped of culture, and forced into schools under the banner of “civilizing.”

All of this was—and is—about control. If difference is disease, then intervention becomes justified. If nonconformity is a symptom, then the system gets to claim authority as the cure.

But the truth has always been simpler: difference is not a diagnosis. It’s humanity. Nobody is normal. Some people are only “normal” by accident.

So the real challenge isn’t to find the cure for difference. It’s to unlearn the lie that there was ever one right way to be in the first place.

We can pathologise anyone’s behaviour- especially if we don’t understand what they’re doing- or you know- ask them!

The third in this series is Eamonn

This is Eamonn. Eamonn moves his legs repetitively for hours on end. He also has restricted interests and can spend up to 5 hours at a time cycling, especially at the weekends. While doing so Eamonn has difficulties engaging in other tasks. Eamonn’s behaviour demonstrates symptoms of unusual hyperfixation not seen in his non-cycling peers.

09/11/2025

09/11/2025

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09/08/2025

When I first started noticing the ways people engaged with me as an Indigenous woman, I saw how often “curiosity” was framed as innocent:

“Where are you really from?”
“Can you teach me about your culture?”
“What does this ceremony mean?”

At first, I thought answering these questions was part of solidarity. But over time, I realized something deeper: curiosity can be extractive. It can turn Indigenous Peoples into objects of learning rather than relatives to be in relationship with.

That’s when it clicked—solidarity isn't necessarily based on obtaining more knowledge. It is rather an opportunity for unlearning colonial conditioning, surfacing the hidden assumptions we carry, and practicing curiosity that is relational, reciprocal, and accountable.

That’s exactly why Part 1 of the Relentless Indigenous Solidarity Webinar Series begins with Curiosity.

📅 September 24 at 6PM MST / 8PM EST
⏰ 90 minutes

We’ll get into:

- Unlearning colonial conditioning
- Surfacing hidden assumptions
- Practicing land-based somatic work to notice where colonial narratives live in our bodies
- Building a toolkit for solidarity that is relational, not performative

*Limited capacity*
💻 Register via the RIW Patreon (Tier 3 – $40/month)

Sign up now here: www.patreon.com/u71040194

09/06/2025

Good school budgets are the backbone of public education.

When schools are properly funded, they can provide much needed upgrades to buildings, keep up to the economy with teacher salaries, continue to update learning resources as education research progresses, and continue to increase the critical support services that all students rely on.

A strong budget means smaller class sizes, more individualized attention, and programs that meet the diverse needs of students, like arts, sports, special education, and inclusive learning initiatives.

Without adequate budgets, school districts are forced to cut corners, leaving students with fewer opportunities and staff stretched too thin.

Every educator I know can "get creative" on a shoe strong budget, but creativity and tenacity can only go so far.

Investing in education is about so much more than today’s classrooms. It's about investing in our own future as a nation.

By giving every child the tools they need to learn and thrive, they grow into active, capable leaders, ready to inherit Canada (and the world) and make it their own.

As children across B.C. head back to class, many schools are facing the reality of doing more with less after spring budget cuts in school districts province-wide.

BCSTA president Tracy Loffler recently spoke with CBC to highlight the challenges districts are facing and the need for long-term investment in our schools.

While it’s a challenging time, boards of education across the province are doing their best to support students and staff under these constraints. That’s why BCSTA continues to advocate for greater, sustained funding — because when there is greater funding for public education, students and communities can thrive with better results.

Learn more here: https://bit.ly/45QGwWL

09/06/2025

Do you know a parent with school-aged children or youth with disabilities?

💠A teacher, school administrator, or educational assistant?

💠A PAC or DPAC member?

💠A community organization that supports families?

💠Or even doctors and health practitioners in your community?

👉 They could all benefit from our Parents’ Handbook on Inclusive Education: a practical resource to help make sure every student belongs in BC schools.

Help spread the word! Share this resource and start the 2025–26 school year with inclusion at the centre.

✨ Back-to-School Sharing Challenge! ✨
Do you know a parent with school-aged children or youth with disabilities?
💠A teacher, school administrator, or educational assistant?
💠A PAC or DPAC member?
💠A community organization that supports families?
💠Or even doctors and health practitioners in your community?

👉 They could all benefit from our Parents’ Handbook on Inclusive Education: a practical resource to help make sure every student belongs in BC schools.

Help us spread the word! Share this resource and let’s start the 2025–26 school year with inclusion at the centre.

💬 Drop a comment to let us know how many times you shared and let’s see our collective impact grow!

🔗 https://ow.ly/IOJB50WPy5M