Mount Royal University Knowledge Gifting Ceremony - Frances Widdowson

Aug 11, 2025

In September 2022, for "Truth and Reconciliation Day", Mount Royal University held a "Knowledge Gifting Ceremony", where the president, Tim Rahilly, was told that he now had a "new role" and "responsibility". What was the "knowledge" that was "gifted" to Mount Royal University? Was this a forced gift to create a poisonous environment for those who might consider challenging the incorporation of unscientific beliefs into an academic institution?

0:00 Linda ManyGuns introduction 1:00 Paulette Fox and acknowledgements 3:11 Linda ManyGuns on the "transfer of knowledge" 7:35 Helper Roy Bear Chief and the Spider Web and Kindness and Compassion 12:40 Healing or Hurtful Words 13:32 The 10 Tipis (Seven Teachings and the 3 Ls - Look, Listen, Learn) 16:59 Clarence Wolfleg and Buffalo Robe Ceremonies 23:01 Grandmother Doreen Spence and the the Seven Sacred Laws/Teachings 32:33 Dean Stephen Price and Professor Andrea Kennedy's Showing Gratitude 37:47 Medicine Trail Coordinator, Dion Simon, and the Painted Buffalo Robes 45:15 President Tim Rahilly Accepting the "Transfer of Knowledge" 51:18 Rahilly states that MRU "is a caring and compassionate community"

Regina Public Library Batshit Crazy Raw Footage - Frances Widdowson, formerly with Mount Royal University

Oct 5, 2024 #FrancesWiddowsonCase

This is unedited footage of the "Indigenization and Academic Freedom: Lessons from the #FrancesWiddowsonCase" presentation at the Regina Public Library on October 3, 2024. At 34:40 a thug tells an 86 year old man to "shut the fuck up" and then proceeds to threaten him physically. The event eventually was shut down. "Note [from Daniel Page]: In this raw footage the audio is recorded using a wireless microphone system that allows channel splitting, so each speaker's audio has its own channel (Frances (left), Lloyd (right)). The videographer will use this along with the other video/audio sources for a final version that will be produced eventually."

The Political Economy of "Truth and Reconciliation": Neotribal Rentierism and the Creation of the Victim/Perpetrator Dichotomy - Frances Widdowson

The Political Economy of “Truth and Reconciliation”:

Neotribal Rentierism and the Creation of the

Victim/Perpetrator Dichotomy 

Frances Widdowson 

Mount Royal University

fwiddowson@mtroyal.ca 

Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Ryerson University, May 30-June 1, 2017

In his 2013 book Truth and Indignation, Ronald Niezen shows how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has transformed the assessment of the residential schools. While historically the schools were seen as a paternalistic and misguided effort to “protect, civilize and assimilate” the aboriginal population,1 they now are described as instruments of “cultural genocide”. This assessment, according to Niezen, is due to the increasing tendency to conceptualize aboriginalnon-aboriginal relations in terms of a “victim/perpetrator dichotomy”.2 In such a dichotomy, all aboriginal people are seen as victims and all non-aboriginal people perpetrators, obscuring the complex historical interaction within and between these two, very diverse, categories of people. Although Niezen’s book is an important addition to the literature, in that it shows how historical viewpoints on aboriginal-non-aboriginal relations are being transformed by entities like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, his work is limited by the fact that he does not explain why this has occurred. More specifically, Niezen does not recognize how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the product of particular historical and material circumstances connected to the processes of neotribal rentierism. As will be explained below, neotribal rentierist processes are oriented towards extracting “rent” so as to incorporate aboriginal groups into late capitalism. The “rent” being sought3 in this instance is the dispersal of compensation payments – a form of circulation that is becoming increasingly common in addressing the conflicts between aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state. The creation of a victim/perpetrator dichotomy justifies these payments, but it also acts to disguise the connection between the development of capitalism and the residential schools. The uncritical reliance on unsubstantiated aboriginal memories by “truth and reconciliation” processes, as well as postmodern relativism’s opposition to developing a universal conception of history, also has impeded understanding...

continued reading here .. https://cpsa-acsp.ca/documents/conference/2017/Widdowson.pdf