Greater Sudbury Northern Life Reporter Mandi Hargrave
It's been four years since professors at Laurentian
University started celebrating Margaret Atwood's birthday.
And this year was the first year the iconic Canadian author was
able to come and be a part of the event.
After enjoying a birthday feast, guests heard Pandora Topp
perform Tomson Highway's The Stove and Atwood read from her
latest novel, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.
The novel is about debt in its broadest sense, but is
anything but a how-to on regaining control of your finances.
"It's about human interaction. Trading positive and
negative things. The positive part is called reciprocal
altruism, one good turn deserves another. And the negative kind
is called payback or one bad turn deserves another," said
Atwood.
"So it's that kind of interaction that the stuff we do with money is only apart. One of the things that went wrong with our recent financial global meltdown was that things got beyond people. The sums were so big the transactions were being done by computers. It wasn't people interacting with other people."
She continued, "It takes the subject in its broadest form including revenge, and including our relationships with nature. We've been drawing from the nature bank much more than we've been paying back."
But guests weren't there to simply sing Happy Birthday to Atwood. The event also raised funds for Laurentian's Indigenous Sharing and Learning Centre. It's a part of the university's new 50 Year Campaign.
"Laurentian will turn 50 in 2010. And the idea is that we're tri-cultural - English, French and First Nations - so we would like a place on campus where the First Nations people can gather and feel at home," said Shannon Hengen, an English professor at Laurentian.
Laurentian's director of Native Academic Affairs, Sheila Cote-Meek, agrees.
"The whole concept is built around this notion of creating a home away from home for aboriginal students," she said.
"It's especially important for aboriginal students that might be coming from some of the northern and rural types of communities. Sometimes when you come into a city there's a lot of adjustments that have to be made. But also the centre is going to be important in terms of creating academic spaces and research spaces so that we can start doing research that's relevant to our communities and meets our community needs."
Hengen estimates about $6,000 was raised from Thursday night's event. There is still a lot of work to be done, as the centre is likely to cost between three and five million dollars.
"The centre will house a number of things. One will be that it will house the School of Native Human Services, which is actually an academic program," said Cote-Meek.
"So students that are enrolled in that program will be able to access their classrooms in that building because there will be classroom space. There will also be classroom spaces that are technology enabled so we're hoping that will create access for students that are outside of the area of Sudbury, through e-learning platforms."
