Step into the third floor of University Canada West’s West Pender Campus and an ordinary page no longer stays still. Words disappear beneath dark marks, a few phrases remain, and light, movement and recorded voices carry them across the room. The installation, On Land, In Absence, turns a familiar classroom exercise into a walk-through experience about arrival, distance, memory and belonging in Canada.
The project began with workshops led by Dr. Kathleen Hare and Dr. Gitanjaly Chhabra, in consultation with UCW’s Indigenous Action Committee. Thirty-seven students from the Associate of Arts and Bachelor of Arts in Business Communication programs—representing eight countries—created more than 50 erasure poems from texts by Indigenous authors Cody Caetano, Alicia Elliott, Jessica Johns and Joshua Whitehead. Instead of adding more words, students selected what would remain visible, discovering how silence and space can carry meaning too.
That creative process took learning far beyond an essay submitted for a grade. The finished installation presents 53 poems across three rooms, combining projection, sound and movement with recordings of students reading their work. Visitors hear markers crossing paper and pages rustling while the poems explore migration, colonial histories, hope, pain and healing. A third room invites visitors to try the method themselves, turning the exhibition into an open conversation rather than a one-way presentation.
For international students, the most striking part may be the way personal history becomes part of academic learning. Experiences of moving between countries, languages and identities are not treated as background details; they become a lens for thinking carefully about Indigenous lands, reconciliation and responsibility in Canada. The result is a vivid example of campus life at its best: students learning with care, sharing perspectives across cultures and finding that their own voices can change the atmosphere of a room.
