Reparations for the Caribbean: progress and promise
Feb 16, 2023 — All day
For Black History Month, graduate students and Teacher Candidates of Colour collective joined professor Lerona Dana Lewis to organize a series of events to discuss anti-Black racism in education and legacies of colonization.
Description
Under the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Canada along with some Caribbean islands were ceded to the British and France was allowed to keep its more profitable sugar plantations where people stolen from Africa were enslaved. Historians note that giving up Canada, “made sense from a mercantile perspective.” To say that the institution of Slavery generated wealth for the Colonizers would be an understatement. Yet, as we all know when Slavery ended colonizers were compensated but the formerly Enslaved people were given nothing. The Institution of Slavery led to the underdevelopment of Africa and the creation of small island developing states with fragile open economies. In his address Arley Gill will describe the work of the CARICOM Reparations Committee from its Inception in 2011 to the present time. Mr. Gill will detail the legal and moral rationale for Reparations for the people of the Caribbean. He will detail the achievement of the Commission to date, along with its challenges. In the wake of recent apologies, by former colonizers he will ask who gets to decide the form that Reparations should take after an apology.
Speakers:
Arley N Salimbi Gill
Lawyer and Chairman of the Grenada National Reparations Committee
Arley N. Salimbi Gillis an Attorney-at-Law, cultural critic, social and political commentator. He was a former Chairman of UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention, Chairman of Spicemass Cooperation responsible for Grenada's Carnival.
He is a former Minister of Culture in Grenada and is currently the chair of the Grenada National Reparations Commission and Member of the CARICOM Reparations Commission.
Attorney Gill is a graduate of the University of the West Indies (UWI) and The Hugh Wooding Law School. He holds a Master of Law degree in International Maritime Law from the Institute of International Maritime Law in Malta.
Lerona Dana Lewis
Assistant Professor
Professor Lerona Dana Lewis completed her doctoral studies in the Faculty of Education and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University, exploring the culture of faculty development in medical education. Her primary areas of expertise are school, family, and community relations, and the social practices that shape Black children's schooling experiences in K -12 contexts.
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