Tag Archives: Mina Kerr-Lazenby

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Newcomer to Vancouver: Navigating new accent boundaries

By Mina Kerr-Lazenby, North Shore News, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Sometimes, when I’m feeling especially wicked, I like to play a little game called “Confuse the Canadian.”

Played during conversation, it involves me responding to a statement or question with deadpan sarcasm or a nonsensical English phrase. Almost every time someone gets a little head-scratchy, and more often than not — something which continues to surprise me — my hogwash is taken as gospel.

The Canadian way of hearing British linguistic acrobatics and taking it in a literal sense was one of the first things I noticed when I arrived in the country in August last year.

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Education, Indigenous Nations

Land-based learning: These schools spotlight culturally immersive education

By Mina Kerr-Lazenby, North Shore News, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Pen? Check. Paper? Check. Fishing rod, canoe paddle, and weaving wool? Check, check, check. For the students of land-based learning schools, education facilities that bring culture to the classroom, school supplies extend beyond the classic pencil case, binders and backpack.

Run by educators who believe schools should nurture the innate needs and wants of young people, rather than put them into a cookie cutter student mould, you would be hard pressed to find a youth hunched over their desk, scribbling notes monotonously from a whiteboard.

“Kids need to move. If they move, they are learning,” says Tanya O’Neill, principal of siʔáḿθɘt, a K-12 Tsleil-Waututh Nation school in North Vancouver.

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Transportation

Newcomer to Vancouver: Transit like waiting for a flaky date

By Mina Kerr-Lazenby, North Shore News, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Like all great love affairs, the one that occurred between myself and Vancouver’s public transit system was brief and tumultuous. It was a summer fling that began at the tail-end of August, when I, like a gazillion British people before me, moved to the city in search of great landscapes, good people, and endless poutine.  

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Indigenous Nations

North Vancouver school given traditional, Tsleil-Waututh name

By Mina Kerr-Lazenby, North Shore News, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Seycove Secondary, a high school in North Vancouver’s Deep Cove neighbourhood, has been gifted a new name of Seycove at sə́yəmətən by the Tsleil-Waututh Nation. 

Pronounced say-əm-me-ton, the name translates to ‘a good place of water’ in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language, and is the name of the original Indigenous village at Strathcona.

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