One can surely envisage few ideals yet dearer to the heart of the Canadian than this grand nation’s consummate manner of societal inclusion for all amongst its population in each and every forum of economic and social opportunity, and in every facet of public life. With like admiration, we may gaze back in pride on those previously ostracized sects who have now so heartedly been welcomed back to the forefront of our culture, and whose traditions and ways of life have been embraced and celebrated by the passing tolerance of the vaguely curious public.
It is then of little wonder that I hasten to proffer a warning to the discerning and ever-ready reader that in our own Camosun College there exists a group who have yet to benefit from the above-described Canadian deference to the love of diverse celebration, a people whose practices remain largely unappreciated and whose ancient and intricate traditional way of life defined the local lands long before the better number of my readers walked their formerly hallowed territory. Self-evidently, I write of the First Students.
In the timeless yesteryear of 1971, the First Students roamed these very halls where we today most thoughtlessly tread, practicing a way of life which brought them great spiritual fulfilment, the better part of the intricacies of which threaten to disappear unrecorded. The First Students were a proud people, and my heart is cloven in twain to conceive that their territories now see use by us, the modern student, an immigrant people to be sure, with scarce acknowledgement of the traditional territory on which we walk. We who hope to see the legacy of the First Students’ culture remain proud and rich, as it has since the class of 1971, can only begin—and, if similar projects are to be taken as indication, perhaps only end—with a consummate acknowledgement of that which we owe to those peoples who sat dreary-eyed in morning lectures before the idea had even occurred to the modern millennial.
Solace may be taken, at least, in the remembrance that many practices of the First Students remain alive, albeit in their modern context. Whenever we down one too many mugs of beer on Thursday pub nights, or wander their traditional hunting grounds of Hillside Centre, let us think of them.