Faculty and Staff

• faculty
  • Daniel Heath Justice
  • Glen Coulthard
  • Sheryl Lightfoot
  • Dory Nason
  • Linc Kesler
  • Sarah Henzi
• staff

Room: BUCH E-255, 1866 Main Mall
linc.kesler(at)ubc.ca

I grew up in Chicago. My mother was Oglala-Lakota from the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, my father a German American from segregationist rural North Carolina. There wasn’t much in our family uninflected by race, and our yearly trips to Pine Ridge and North Carolina covered quite a lot of territory, both geographic and otherwise.

I went to Yale University during the tumultuous Vietnam and civil rights era and later to grad school at the University of Toronto, where I specialized in semiotics and early modern English literature. Following a year working in the People’s Republic of China, my wife and I moved to Oregon where I taught at Oregon State University for nineteen years. While at OSU, while teaching early modern literatures and linguistics, I worked with American Indian student groups and a state-wide Indian education coalition, coordinated the establishment of an Indian Education Office (later replicated in three other minority offices) and the state's only Ethnic Studies department, and served as a co-chair of a new minority faculty association. I also developed curriculum in the English department on American Indian and other Minority literatures and established an oral history project in collaboration with some elders of the Klamath tribes in southern Oregon.

I came to UBC in January 2003 to be the first director of FNSP — a truly exciting opportunity. My research work focuses on the relationship between technological change and the representation of knowledge, a topic as vital to strategizing the survival of Indigenous communities as it is to understanding the development of industrialism in the west, and I’m interested in developing uses of emerging and interactive technologies that truly serve the needs and interests of Indigenous communities.

Currently I am also working in another capacity at UBC: starting in January 2009 I am also Director of the First Nations House of Learning and Senior Advisor to the President on Aboriginal Affairs. In these roles I will be continuing work on the development of UBC's Aboriginal Strategic Plan. That plan is designed to allow for more integration of Aboriginal programs and initiatives at UBC and to provide a better environment for programs such as FNSP to develop and grow.

Below is a video of Linc discussing his experience becoming a faculty member at UBC.

This video was originally developed for the Aboriginal Transitions: Undergraduate to Graduate (AT:U2G) Project through the Indigenous Education Institute of Canada in the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia.