Please join us for an unveiling of the Shakespeare Reconciliation Garden on Friday, July 16, at 10 am at UFV’s Chilliwack campus.
The installation of this garden revives and reimagines UFV’s former Shakespeare garden from the previous Chilliwack North Campus. The garden aims to create a space of beauty, healing, and contemplation — a space for quiet enjoyment and a space to reflect on reconciliation, particularly between Settler Canada and Indigenous Peoples, but also more broadly, to include the everyday ways that we acknowledge past wrongs, stop, and make amends.
The garden is a symbolic act of reconciliation that “keeps living” the former Shakespeare garden in a new, evolving form that connects to and honours the past, and also aims to celebrate creativity and provide a healing and reflective space.
As a way to reflect an Indigenous perspective of the land on UFV campuses, Indigenous plants and names in Halq’eméylem (where possible) are featured. As a living space that focuses on healing, memory, and story, the garden will now feature orange flowers in recognition of the 215 bodies of children found in unmarked graves on the Kamloops residential school site. The orange flowers expand the original design to line the walkway/entrance into the Chilliwack campus. These are perennial flowers that will provide an annual opportunity to reflect and remember.
It is hoped that the garden will provide an outdoor educational space where students, faculty, and staff can learn about the plants and related stories, as appropriate, and that the garden will be a space of healing and beauty.
Please note that COVID-19 protocols will be in place.