July 2024

To the People’s University for Palestine at UW:

We, the undersigned faculty and community members, wish to express our heartfelt thanks for your courageous witness during the seven-week encampment at the University of Winnipeg.

We recognize and honour all of your hard work on behalf of those who have been silenced—both in Palestine and in our community. We would like to say to you: we saw you and we know that you made a lasting difference—to our campus community and beyond.

We saw you as you cared for community members; providing them with food, water, and other forms of support. You practised strategies of de-escalation and harm reduction for all community members in need. You offered friendship and support to community members of all ages—making crafts, sharing meals, playing basketball.

We learned from you as you held teach-ins and workshops to educate the community about Palestine, settler colonialism, and many other issues of justice. You created music and art and taught one another new skills, including shared governance, carpentry, harm reduction, and safety. We note that during the encampment there was not one incident of harm or violence that occurred under your watch. You kept encampment and community members safe through your thoughtful preparation and skill.

We were inspired by you as you held a moving graduation vigil to honour the students, staff, and faculty who were killed in Gaza, whose names you commemorated through voice and chalk. We lament and protest that these efforts were washed away or went unnoticed by the University.

We stood in solidarity with you as you spoke out against antisemitism, Islamophobia, and every other form of racism. You endured homophobic harassment and racist hate speech directed against you and supporters of the struggle—all the while you kept our campus’ attention attuned to the genocide and to the Palestinian cause. In a world that consistently censors speech about Palestine, you spoke out boldly. You endured surveillance from campus security, the WPS, and critics of the encampment movement. You were subjected to the trivialization and misrepresentation of your cause and yet you did not retaliate or do anything that would harm your steadfast aim of standing with Palestine.

Despite the pushback, harassment, and disinformation, you changed our campus. You made it more engaged than it has been in years with members of the downtown community. You enacted ideas we have long taught in the classroom and written about in books and articles, but that many of us had not enacted ourselves. The encampment was the living embodiment and a beautiful example of solidarity.

We as educators have been moved by your powerful commitment to transformative education, education that moved beyond the classroom, and education that challenged the received knowledge of the Western neoliberal university. We are awed and humbled by your commitment to listening to the voices of Palestinians, to the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, and to all the dispossessed people across the globe who are refusing the annihilation of the world’s most precarious citizens and ecosystems. 

We are proud to have supported you. Your protest work roused many of us from our offices and onto the ground, and we are committed to continuing the ongoing work of divestment from colonialism at home and abroad. We recognize that the encampment tactic had a time and a place and we respect its retreat and regrouping into different tactics. We continue to learn from you and are proud to be in a community of struggle alongside you. Thank you for teaching us the meaning of solidarity and resistance. We recommit ourselves to our joint cause until all Palestine is free. This is only the beginning. The struggle continues.

Signed,

Jane Barter
Jason Hannan
Noah Schulz
Roewan Crowe
Kerry Sinanan
Alyson Brickey
Heather Milne 
Chigbo Anyaduba 
Michelle Owen
Marcella Siqueira Cassiano
Jenny Heijun Wills
Sharanpal Ruprai
Janis Thiessen 
Heather Snell
Kathryn Ready
Bruno Cornellier
Peter Ives
Curtis Pankratz
Sandy Pool
Celiese Lypka
Bill Kirkpatrick
Kathleen Venema
Melissa Funke
Laura Forsythe 
Leah Kuragano
Flavia Vasconcellos Amaral
Angela Failler
Ian Fraser
Jordyn Sheldon
Yannick Molgat-Seon
Erin Weinberg
Ashley Huot
Michael Minor
Mark Libin
Ruby Warren
Aarzoo Singh
Christine M'Lot
Leslie Tucker
Mike Link
Jan DeFehr
Sharon Wall