C/O nichola feldman-kiss | Artist, Bob McNair | Photographer
Artist nichola feldman-kiss presents Scapegoat, a critique of the colonial paradigm
CW: Death, implied violence
The latest exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art, Scapegoat, critiques the colonial paradigm—the violent story of domination and submission—through displays of biological metaphors for the geopolitics and conflict. The exhibition will be available until Mar. 18 with advanced admission booking.
Artist nichola feldman-kiss began Scapegoat in 2015 following a series of works after the their deployment on a United Nations Mission to Sudan in 2011 as part of the Canadian Forces Artists Program.
The exhibition features hybrid-media installations, including photography, audio, video, digital and performative pieces. The aim is to bring to attention the injustices perpetuated by settler-colonialism structures. In the current era of heightened social awareness and responsibility, feldman-kiss’ work creates space for conversation around peace, reconciliation, recognition, decolonization and repatriation.
Since returning from Sudan in 2011, feldman-kiss has been attempting to make sense of what they saw and experienced through projects such as Between here and there.
Scapegoat attempts to uncover what is missing or left unspoken in the narrative about wars and world conflicts which are often told and fragmented by those who dominate the conversation, particularly those in power.
“I’m very suspicious about what is written down because when I approach what is written down, I know there is something missing. Sudan revealed to me a lot about what is missing, what is all contained in the narrative, what kinds of narratives are crafted for the Western press audience and how those of us who have not seen [the conflict first-hand] have very little capacity to imagine.
nichola feldman-kiss
Part of what is missing in these narratives are the identities and lives behind the death toll statistics. When human bodies are reduced to mere numbers, questions remain about their story, including who they were, where they lived, who is missing them, who is grieving them and why they went to war. An initial aversion to the plight of the sufferer (Pietà), was built upon these questions to reconnect the disembodied souls.
Between here and there / Human Toll is a sound piece in which a speech synthesizer reads the worldwide death statistic database from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program.
feldman-kiss’ worked with human skeletal sets to personify the death statistics further. . An initial aversion to the plight of the sufferer (Pietà is a series of photographic portraits of young men cradling the skeletal set by those who approximate the age of the specimen. It may be discomforting to see — but that is the point. The demographic in the pieces reflect the victims of state violence in the global statistical records.
The human skeletal sets used in the piece, originally intended for use in the medical field, were obtained from a Canadian osteological specimen supplier.
“I made that purchase [of human osteological specimens], that gesture, as another demonstration of the sort of between-here-and-there that I was experiencing from the original trip to Sudan. . .I, as a regular Canadian person, that world was so far away from my capacity to perceive it through this constant [thought] of, ‘Yes, this really happened,’” said feldman-kiss.
An important experience part of the previous project, Between here and there, and the current exhibition, Scapegoat, was feldman-kiss’ trip to India to learn about the human bone trade. A human bone specimen supplier gave feldman-kiss access to his full inventory for the video piece Scales of Justice and was a valuable resource for this project.
Caption: Still from The King’s two Bodies Scales of Justice 2016. Video projection (performance mediation).
“[Scales of Justice] came out of that experience. . .So that was an important experience for me to be able to bring empathy to the body of work which is in the exhibition Scapegoat,” explained feldman-kiss.
Altogether, Scapegoat allows its audience to reflect on the colonial paradigm by demanding confrontation with the reality of the current geopolitical landscape—a world in which marginalized folks, including people of low socioeconomic status and Black, Indigenous and People of Colour are disproportionately targeted and represented in armed casualties.
Through the culmination of works since 2015, Scapegoat facilitates grief, reflection and reimagination of a different, decolonized world.
*This article has been updated for clarity. We thank our friends at McMaster Museum of Art for clarifying key aspects of Scapegoat. For more information, visit museum.mcmaster.ca/exhibition/nichola-feldman-kiss-scapegoat/.
Halloween is a hard holiday for me. As the festivities come and go, I’m ultimately reminded of the death of my grandma, who passed away a few years ago following a series of health complications in the early morning of Halloween.
Along with my mom and my dad, she was a constant presence in my household and her passing not only spurned a blanket of grief, but marked a new batch of cultural anxieties.
My earliest memory is of my grandma teaching me how to pray. In the bedroom we shared, my grandmother would tell me to repeat after her as she taught me different Sikh hymns to recite every night. In broken Punjabi, I whispered them back to her, more scared of upsetting her than upsetting God. Despite her small stature, she was a commanding presence; even the simplest instruction sounds harsh in Punjabi.
She remained this looming figure, so much so that it never occurred to me that she was going to die one day. She would wait up for both me and my older brother everyday, asking us why we were so late and constantly driving to do better. So when she suddenly passed away when I was 17 years old, I had no clue how to handle it.
Losing her meant more than just losing my doting grandmother, it meant losing the person who most connected me to my ethnic and cultural identity, the one person I could rely on to teach me about the history that shaped my family.
There’s a certain isolation in growing up in a diaspora. The amount of cultural knowledge lost through the process of immigration seems to keep growing the older and older I get.
I don't have the same relationship with my cultural and ethnic identity as I did growing up. Paradoxically, I find myself more invested in it now that I'm the most isolated I've ever been from it.
Growing up, I always wanted to distance myself from my Punjabi identity and become what I deemed to be the right kind of Canadian, a desire that ultimately strained my relationship with my parents and grandma.
But as I grew up and unpacked why I felt that way, I started to realize what it is exactly that I gave up. So for me, belonging to the South Asian diaspora meant making peace with what I can feasibly take on and what I can’t from the culture that shaped my childhood home.
I don’t have the same relationship with my cultural and ethnic identity as I did growing up. Paradoxically, I find myself more invested in it now that I’m the most isolated I’ve ever been from it. At a university far from the Punjabi alcove I grew up in, I rarely speak my mother tongue, if at all.
My parents, who have both now spent 20 years in Canada, can’t ever imagine themselves going back to India for more than a few weeks at a time. My parents have adopted a new relationship with their identities, something I’ve been trying to do in the last few years.
I grew up under the assumption that there would always be time for me to learn more about my own identity and the history and traumas behind it. But now that I’m trying to build the identity, there’s always something I didn’t pick on, an insurmountable amount of knowledge that I could never absorb since I didn’t grow up in the region.
From the small traditions to the larger traumas, the knowledge exists at the fringes of my elders’ minds. Sometimes they will talk about it, but most of the time, they don’t.
My grandma lived in Punjab during the Partition of 1947, one of the most deeply affected areas during an extensively horrifying event. Despite this, I have no idea what happened to her during it. I have to wonder, did she carry that weight by herself all these years?
This kind of lapse in knowledge makes itself evident all the time, although they aren’t as dark. Once, while at a Ladies Sangeet — a traditional party for the bride’s family — I watched all of the older women sing songs for the bride. I turned to my cousin, who had only recently immigrated and asked her who would sing at my and my future children’s weddings. She said she would, but I realized that with my limited grasp of the language, I’d probably struggle to teach a child Punjabi in the first place. Would this ritual make sense to my future child? Would they want any of this? I’m not sure.
The difficult part of maintaining your cultural identity is that it’s not something you passively experience. I have to actively make sure I’m engaging with it all the time, but right now, that just means talking to my parents a lot and asking them lots of questions.
But my grandma’s death made me realize this technique is flawed. My parents aren’t going to always be there to explain the significance of every holiday, teach me how to make every dish and patiently help me practice my Punjabi. One day this is going to be up to me to maintain and pass on.
It’s undeniable that we carry the history of our family within us, whether we understand said history or not. More than anything I wish I had more time to make sense of all of the things that shaped my caretakers.
Existing within a diaspora means constantly creating and recreating yourself to mesh the multitude of cultures you’re exposed to growing up. I was almost done high school when my grandma died; I’m now three semesters away from being done my undergraduate. The more time passes, the more questions I have for her that I can never ask.
But that’s okay. The best thing I could do for her memory is to make sure that I practice the things she did pass on to me and try my best to learn more. She may have been my main link to my Punjabi identity, but she isn’t the only one.
Nowadays, I find myself wearing my grandma’s gold hoop earrings out and making all of my friends and coworkers try the Indian food I grew up eating. At night, I try to recall the exact syllables my grandma so painstakingly taught me all those years ago, and make sense of what they mean. My mom tells me stories from the years she spent living in a hostel when she was completing her master’s degree in Malipur and reminds me to read up on the significance of Sikh holidays.
These little things keep me grounded and in touch with the community that so lovingly raised me. At the end of the day, it’s only a snippet of what my cultural identity actually is, but I have to reckon with the fact that it will have to evolve into something unprecedented. It’s all I have for the time being, but it’s enough.
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If one more person tells me to posthumously respect Rob Ford I’m going to lose it. Even if we disregard him lying about smoking crack, he was objectively a bad mayor. He was accused of drinking in his city hall office, verbally and physically abusing his staffers, and frequently missing work. This is a man who said that he felt sympathy for cyclists, but stated that their deaths were “their own fault at the end of the day.” He claimed that he “didn’t understand a transgender … is it a guy dressed up like a girl or a girl dressed up like a guy?” and that Asian people “sleep beside their machines” and “work like dogs” (I believe this was an embarrassing attempt at a compliment). Here was a man who — as mayor of Toronto — skipped the pride parade almost every year of his term, despite the flag raising taking place directly outside his office. This list is by no means exhaustive.
Despite his controversial history, there have been calls to memorialize Ford. A poll demanded a statue of him in Toronto. His casket was displayed for visitation with an honour guard in city hall for the week before his full funeral procession. This is completely unprecedented for a mayor who did not die while in office.
This level of respect for the dead is selective. Media outlets had no problem portraying Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin — Black unarmed teenage boys — as suspect or criminal after they were killed. I’m willing to bet that Fidel Castro or Robert Mugabe will not be gifted with sympathetic eulogies. Who we choose to honour posthumously has nothing to do with reputation or controversy. If it did, Ford would not be viewed as a remotely sympathetic figure. It has little to do with lifetime achievement, as Ford’s state funeral is eclipses other former Torontonian mayors, including others who were significantly more effective at their jobs.
I can’t even begin to fathom how it feels to prematurely lose a parent. However, dying does not absolve you of your sins.
Posthumous respect is dependent on race and power. Would we have cared about Ford’s death if he had been a crack smoking racist office worker? How would we have treated Ford if he was a criminal Black mayor? We seem to only be comfortable respecting the dead when they are powerful White men, regardless of virtue. This begs the question, why do we feel the need to absolve him in the first place? Do we feel sympathy for his family? Do we feel guilt for the ways we treated Ford when we was alive? We have nothing to gain from rehabilitating Toronto’s most infamous mayor, yet we have everything to lose. What does it mean when a city that prides itself on diversity and acceptance gives a full funeral procession to a racist homophobe? Why are we more sympathetic towards him than we are towards the people whose lives he negatively affected?
No one should have to suffer the impact of cancer the way the Ford family has. I can’t even begin to fathom how it feels to prematurely lose a parent. However, dying does not absolve you of your sins. In the age of information it is often easier to cling to uncomplicated narratives: a man is dead and he has left behind a family and a legacy. We feel we ought to mourn. Forgotten are the consequences of his actions. Behind every one of Ford’s ignorant comments was very real prejudice that directly impacted his constituents. His death has not changed this. Even if we can reverse the damage he has done, I will continue to speak ill of the dead.
Photo Credit: Maclean's
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I found out over reading week that one of my distant cousins died. This, coupled with the death of two grandparents in the span of a year, has led to my first mortality crisis. “One day,” I said to myself, “you will die.”
Here’s the thing; I’ve been worried about growing old for a much longer time than I’ve been worried about what follows it. I wasn’t even particularly worried about a decline in quality of life with age (which has now arrived with Mortality Crisis 1.0). Instead, I’ve been worried — as long as I can remember — that one day I would no longer be a physically attractive woman. The scariest part? My fears are not unique.
Why are we so scared of growing old? Stylist speaks to 5 women over 60 to see how they feel https://t.co/CtaR85nMfr pic.twitter.com/AFCmKcQx9Z
— Stylist Magazine (@StylistMagazine) November 12, 2015
Every woman I’ve talked to about the topic has expressed worry about what will happen to her body. Whether it be stretch marks, or frown lines, or less-than-perky breasts, I have yet to find a woman who is entirely comfortable with the future of her physique. I wish that I could dismiss my own fears as irrational, or label them as an individual case of vanity and move on, but as this seems to be a pandemic, that is clearly not the case. Where do our fears come from?
The depressingly obvious answer is that we are told that our value is in our appearance. From a very young age, everything in my world said that I am most important when I am young and pretty. Even seemingly small things like compliments to my appearance before my intellect all contributed to one message in my young, impressionable mind: being beautiful is the key to success. Every warning of spinsterhood told me something else: never get old.
Notably, the television I watched growing up dictated where I was to fit in this world. Every fictional female character I admired was a young, white, love interest, and in need of male assistance. They were never anything less than flawless in appearance, and none of them were over the age of 25. Mothers were conveniently wrinkle free, and the only older women I saw in Disney movies were either helpless or villains. It is hard to picture yourself as living happily to a ripe old age when you cannot find an example in your pop culture repertoire of a woman doing so, and god forbid we think about having a happy sex life past the age of 30. The message was clear; you are valuable for your youth, and when you get old you disappear, you stop existing.
Every warning of spinsterhood told me something else: never get old.
Fear of old age is hardly an exclusively female phenomenon, yet while I listen to my male friends complain about pattern baldness or a loss of muscle tone, I can’t help but see their complaints as part of an entirely different class of anxiety. It is much easier to handle the impact of ageing when you haven’t been programmed to see your appearance as your entire worth. When ageing actors like Sylvester Stallone and George Clooney are not only still valued for their contributions on screen, but are paired with twenty-somethings as love interests.
So what can we do? Firstly, cut your body some slack. You are not going to have the same butt that you had when you were 17 for the rest of your life, and that is alright. It is natural for bodies to change with time. Your body will not be better or worse, just different. Appreciating yourself as you are currently is an excellent way to accept what may come. Solidarity is also important. We need to build communities and networks with which to support ourselves and others throughout different phases of our lives. Without the ones I love, Mortality Crisis 1.0 would have paralyzed me. Instead, despite struggling with my future, I feel as though one day I might be able to embrace it.
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By: Jennifer La Grassa
Last week, I locked myself in a bathroom stall on the second floor of the student center and cried. I had just gotten off the phone with my best friend who incoherently informed me through her uncontrollable sobbing that she had to put her dog, Daisy, down later that night. The combination of hearing her breaking down on the other end and the memories that flashed through my head of all that Daisy had been through with us turned me into a crying mess as well.
I was ashamed to be crying for a dog who wasn’t even my own and didn’t understand why, days later, I still felt a lingering sense of grief. When this same friend had broken up with her boyfriend she had been upset, but it wasn’t even comparable to the grief I heard her express over the loss of Daisy.
For those of you who have never been a pet owner, know that losing them is equivalent to the loss of a family member. It seems dramatic of me to be making that comparison, but until you care for and love an animal everyday for its entire life you won’t understand what it’s like. This is especially true for pets like an indoor dog or cat that are constantly involved in the life of their owner; no longer having them around can be emotionally devastating.
Pets provide companionship and love when no one else can or is around to do so. It is through watching television with them, petting them and burying your face in them for comfort that we create a psychological and social bond with them. They are there when everything is going right and are most reliably there when everything is going wrong. Just because we cannot speak dog (or cat or bird or lizard) and they cannot intellectually communicate with us should not be a reason to desensitize their death.
If you are dealing with the loss of a pet, don’t feel guilty or weird for grieving as it is natural and common to do so, especially when they have played such a large role in your life. Looking back on the tears I shed for Daisy, I realize that although she wasn’t mine I sympathize with the loss because I’ve been through it before. It was also difficult for me because I associate Daisy with my friend’s house and I strongly viewed her as being part of the family. I assume that going to my friend’s house and not having Daisy run up to me for the first time in eleven years will be tough to take in, but I know that like all other wounds created by loss, this too will soon heal.
Photo Credit: John Moore/ Getty Images
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Earlier this month I lost my grandpa to pneumonia. Gramps was 88 years old. He saved all his money for his children and spent most of his life living alone. He used to have Coffee, a Pomeranian who ran his apartment. I wish I could say he lived a good life, but the sad truth is I don’t know.
Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago, he was later moved to a retirement home. To see him deteriorate to the point of being unable to take care of himself, to the day he became wheelchair bound, and then to a point where he couldn’t recognize me or even speak is the most painful thing I’ve experienced. Reduced to a shell of who he used to be, it felt even worse to see family members struggle to come to terms with the fact that in a way, he had already died months ago.
It saddens me that he passed. It saddens me to see my dad in distress. But it saddens me the most that I didn’t really know my grandpa.
For my grandpa and I, it was the perfect storm of geographic, personality and cultural limitations. Since we lived in different continents until I was nine, I hardly ever saw my grandpa in my formative years. We were both quiet and reserved, and Chinese culture simply didn’t encourage an open relationship between more distant family members that exists in Western culture.
All I know about my grandpa is that he used to insist on giving me a Coke when I visited him, and would always comment on how I wasn’t eating enough as I was stuffing my face in front of him. In the fringes of my mind are hazy memories of my dad telling me that grandpa used to work six days a week and bought bruised bananas at the end of the day because they were cheaper. I never thought of asking grandpa about his experiences, nor did I ever thank him for his sacrifices. We exchanged few words with the unacknowledged understanding that we liked each other. So I spent little time with him. Instead I watched hours upon hours of SpongeBob and hung out with friends.
In my head, I can reason out why my grandpa and I aren’t close or why I didn’t visit him often when he was in the home. But that doesn’t excuse my inaction, and it certainly doesn’t make me feel any better. When I finally uttered the words, “My grandpa passed,” I cried in public. I thought it was going to be fine, but at that moment, all the guilt caught up with me, and no amount of reasoning could get me to stop sobbing.
I have friends who are very close to their grandparents. They hung out, watched TV together, and went to get dim sum every week. A self-centered version of myself used to think I was missing out on a great relationship. I saw grandparents as a source of embarrassing stories about my parents, or as figures that dispensed pearls of wisdom over tea. Pigeonholing grandparents to these stereotypical roles deprives them of the basic respect they deserve.
When friends tell me about their relationships with their grandparents, the onus is always on the elderly to initiate a connection with their grandchildren. They are the one who call and ask how school is going. While I can see why this is the case, it is also one of the greatest injustices in the world. Here is a person without whom I would literally not exist, without whom I would not be wearing Club Monaco and sitting at a café typing away on a MacBook. Yet the onus is on this person and not me. That’s messed up.
When I visited my grandpa in the hospital in his last days, with labored breathing he held my hand tightly and just looked at me. I don’t think he knew who I was, but I could tell he was comforted having someone by his bedside. I regret spending so little time with him; even more so when I realized that literally just sitting there without a word said was appreciated.
As cheesy and morbid as this sounds, you only have four grandparents and chances are they won’t be around for very long. These people have given up so much for you, and at the very least you should spend some time getting to know them. They will welcome it. It is your duty.
Photo Credit: St. Andrew's War Memorial Hospital
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A few weeks ago, I woke up to the deaths of two people who were dear to my heart. In the span of four days, actor Alan Rickman and rock icon David Bowie both passed away from their battles with cancer.
I was inexplicably upset. For several days, I found myself unable to shake off this feeling of unease. I watched any video that showed up on my newsfeed involving Professor Snape, the beloved and painfully misunderstood character played by Alan Rickman in the Harry Potter series. I put on all of the David Bowie records I had in my library on repeat, remembering the times my father and I would spend afternoons listening together on my bedroom floor. Grieving for these icons was a harrowing ordeal. At the same time, my distress was very confusing to me; why was I grieving for people I’d never even met?
In my father’s youth, his favourite artist was David Bowie. Considered one of the most influential musicians of our time, Bowie produced hits and entertained fans for over six decades. He transcended what it meant to be a star; not only did he influence music, but his gender-bending alter-egos also impacted art, fashion and the global LGBTQ+ community. When my father immigrated to Canada in his teens, he barely knew any English. Yet, it did not take him long to fall for Bowie’s infectious and innovative tunes. In fact, he told me he initially learned much of his English through singing along to many of Bowie’s songs. Through his years as a fan, he accumulated dozens of vinyl records that I now have the pleasure of inheriting. I remember few weekends in my childhood where we wouldn’t spend an hour or two listening to David Bowie, in silence and in each other’s company.
When I became a little older, some of the first novels I read were from the Harry Potter series. Like millions around the world, I became captivated. I was entranced by the complexity of the plot and the depth of all the characters. Although I dressed up as Hermoine for many Halloweens, my favourite character had always been Professor Snape. Unlike other “bad guys” I was accustomed to at the time, Snape taught me that things in life are never as black and white as they may seem. There is a vast grey area where tortured souls and tough decisions reside, a place where the line between villain and hero is hazy and unclear. Oftentimes, we fall so in love with characters in novels that the actor who portrays them in film inevitably falls short. Alan Rickman was an exception. He embodied everything that Snape was and, through his unassailable talent, made the character his own.
With the death of a popular public figure, such as the deaths of Alan Rickman and David Bowie, comes a strange and perplexing sense of grief. It’s an unusual feeling that accompanies the news that someone you sort of knew yet never really met is gone. It may seem petty to grieve the death of a celebrity. With everything else going on in your life and in the world around you, it seems unreasonable for such an inconsequential event to trigger even an ounce of feeling. But, whether it is a celebrity or the barista who served you at Starbucks every morning, there is no accurate way to react to death, especially the death of someone you never really knew. It will be confusing and elusive, but that does not make your sadness any less valid.
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McMaster researcher Hendrick Poinar and an international team of researchers have uncovered telling secrets from the grave. The research focuses on the recovery of DNA from fossil remains such as teeth from individuals who died from the bubonic plague in Marseille, France. DNA sequences can be used to trace the past and answer questions about the evolution of infectious disease.
“We are very interested in how diseases emerge and then continually re-emerge. We want to know if reservoirs are local or more distant. Are these epidemics repeatedly stemming from trade routes like the Silk Road from China and the Golden Horn from Kazakhstan or are they a localized epidemic?” Poinar explained.
This involves tracing back to Europe in 1346, during the time of the Black Death, when the bacteria Yersinia pestis wiped out a third of the European population.
“That was an epidemic like we have never seen before and hopefully will never see again,” said Poinar.
After an initial flare, the plague seemed to disappear in Europe. What followed its supposed demise is a series of little outbreaks that Poinar labeled as the “shouldering effect.”
“We are very interested in how diseases emerge and the continually re-emerge. We want to know if resevoirs are local or more distant.
“If you look over the course of decades, you see relatively nasty outbreaks. You have basically 400 years of repeated epidemics in Europe, until it disappears. The question has been if these are repeated epidemics that occur every 30 to 100 years, is the source of these epidemics a migration of pathogen from the East to the West.”
By analyzing the global phylogeny, a method of relating disease sequences and strains to each other, researchers observed that rodents are at the start of many diseases that reach human populations. The aforementioned rodents seem to have these basal strains or ancestral strains appear in the highlands of Mongolia and China and Kazakhstan. These sources are farther east from the European outbreaks, supporting research that the initial flare of Black Death was brought from the East along trade routes.
At least in the case of the plague that overtook Marseille, the pathogen was found to be a descendant of the Yersinia pestis strain. Contrary to the constant dribble of plague down trade routes, the pathogen must have remained in a reservoir closer to home. What these reservoirs are thought to be is the next big question. Rats could be to blame, or soil, however no answer is currently known.
“We have had major outbreaks in Eastern Europe up until the 1800s. In mainland Europe, it hasn’t [popped up] since 1720. We have about 400 years that were clear of outbreaks.” This could be as a result of attenuation in the variance of the bug, or a rise in resistance among humans. One of Poinar’s students is working on just that, looking for signs of selection within the human genome. This involves searching for resistance to the epidemic in the genes of those of European descent whose ancestors survived to pass on their protective genes.
Interestingly, having resistance to the Black Death can also give someone resistance to various other pathogens. A genomic mutation known to give people resistance to the HIV virus by blocking the virus from entering the cell has been found in higher frequency in Europe, despite the virus’ origin in Africa. You would expect the exact opposite, where populations exposed to the virus in greater amounts would undergo greater selection and therefore greater resistance.
“When you try to date the [onset of resistance], most of those dates show up around the time of the Black Death. So there is the issue that those that underwent a selection against plague and survived because of this genomic deletion, they were protected from the bacteria of the plague and now protected from the virus of HIV,” explained Poinar.
Rising concerns about antibiotic resistance has shifted a focus towards what causes the reappearance of bacterial infections. By attempting to dig up the roots of infectious diseases, researchers like Poinar are looking to uncover more about pathogens and their fluctuating attacks.
Photo Credit: Jason Lau
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Three weeks ago, one of my staff members came knocking on my office door.
“I recently found out about something, and I’m not sure what to do.”
The following 40 minutes were then spent discussing the difficult issue of covering the death of a student in the paper.
When someone the same age as you passes away due to sudden or violent reasons, it is never an easy discussion. It is something that needs to be done while still respecting the privacy of the deceased’s family, while still maintaining integrity and honesty in coverage. As a student news outlet that covers campus-related issues, the passing of a student can be a challenging but important story to cover.
As some of you may have heard, on the night of Saturday, Nov. 21, a fellow Marauder passed away from a tragic accident. Mariel Garcia, a first-year Humanities student, was struck and killed in a hit-and-run. The accused was recently released on bail, and the family is currently raising funds to pay for the funeral.
Garcia is not the first student to pass away during this school year. This is not meant to at all take away from her unfortunate and untimely death, but it is a reality that many students are sheltered from.
Our campus functions just as the rest of the world does — issues arise, conflicts are resolved, and sometimes, unfortunately, people will die.
There is a certain grief that comes across the student body that needs to be respected at a time when the loss of a life is affecting many. When you hear about the passing of a stranger in the paper, does it add or take away from your experience of grief? Is it our place to cover the death of a student?
As a newspaper governed by the ongoings of student-aged people, the notion of death can feel surreal in our community. We are taught that young people are not meant to die, and when it does happen, it is something to study and publicize. And while there can be merit in that, when you see someone’s face on a front page, it can be tough to associate them with a real person who once sat in the same lecture halls you may be in right now.
We have chosen not to write a piece specifically about the loss of one of our students as a way of allowing our campus community enough time to grieve together.
If someone close to you at McMaster has passed, and you would like to see a memorial, article or investigation related to their life or death, we ask that you contact us.
For 38 years, Art Yeas was the McMaster greenhouse manager. He could often be found diligently watering each plant, the top of his head peeking over a shrub. When he wasn’t nurturing his fauna, he was sharing his extensive knowledge and enthusiasm with students. Despite all the life around him, Yeas still stood out.
Unfortunately, Art Yeas passed away in early September, a loss that has been deeply felt in the McMaster community.
Robin Cameron is a professor in the Department of Biology at McMaster who worked closely with Yeas on developing the lab aspect of the second year “Biology 2D03: Plant Biology and Biotechnology” course. Cameron is aware of just how much thought Yeas put into mapping out the whole year ahead for students.
“We provide a lot of plant material during the course, and sometimes we need seedlings that are [various sizes] so that students can look at the development of the plant… He had this big board, cork board, with when to plant everything.”
Despite working a job whose description put him in the background, his dedication and effort did not go unnoticed by the students and community at large. He worked as a supervisor for students working on biology practicums, aided graduate students with research and was an integral component to undergraduate plant labs.
Yeas managed over 217 plants at a time, many of which he brought in of his own accord. The more outrageous, the more likely it was that Yeas had ordered them. Susan Dudley, also a professor in the Biology department, attributes the diversity of plant life in the greenhouse to Yeas’ quirky tastes.
“He loved weird and interesting and outrageous plants, so we have a lot of those. We have a great collection of carnivorous plants for example… and we have plants that move, and just kind of amazing, or pretty, or bizarre dyed orchids for example… He was working on maintaining the collection; he was looking at propagating our chocolate tree… He had just gotten in a shipment of seeds, including seeds of indigenous varieties… and some strange seeds that we aren’t even sure what they are.”
His acquisition of the Titan Arum corms brought crowds of visitors through the greenhouse this past year. The six-foot tall flowers are infamous for their odour which resembles that of rotting flesh, but bloom beautifully for no more than a few days. Dudley remembers how the plants brought out Yeas’ giddy side.
“When the Titan Arum was blooming, he decided he was going to keep the greenhouse open to 11 o’clock at night. He was not sleeping very much at night. He was surviving on Red Bull and telling people stories. When I had gone away he set up a fog machine, because he liked the atmosphere.”
For the last few years of his life, Yeas could not sit still. He acquired the Titan Arums; he grew bamboo shoots to feed the Giant Pandas at the Toronto Zoo. Cameron believes that Yeas put the greenhouse on the map.
This past July, Yeas was awarded the 2014 President’s Award for Outstanding Service. The award is for any McMaster employee that is nominated for their meaningful contribution to university life. Other members of the community write letters in support of each nominee, justifying why they deserve the title. Art Yeas won—not because of anything a paper said, but because he had won over the community.
Art Yeas had big plans ahead for the greenhouse. Cameron knows that he was hoping to replace the old greenhouse, which is costly and inefficient, with a newer model.
“The long-term goal was to have a new greenhouse…That was the last thing I did with Art… in August. [We] visited Vineland, which is an agricultural research station run by Ontario… They have a new greenhouse that’s just being completed, so we toured this new greenhouse to see what new innovations they have today. And Art was so excited, and just so thrilled that we would have, maybe, a new greenhouse.”
Whether the plan for a new greenhouse is realized or not, it is because of Yeas that the option is even on the horizon. No one is going to forget about Yeas any time soon. He embodied the greenhouse and it now embodies him—a physical reminder of a member of the McMaster community who will be dearly missed by many.
Photo Credit: Jon White/Photo Editor
