During the 1960s and 1970s an influx of immigrants from the United States seeking asylum from the war in Vietnam and people from other parts of Canada stirred the cultural pot of the West Kootenay, adding a unique countercultural element to the area.
Selkirk College graduate and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Ottawa. Kathleen Rodgers has conducted extensive research into contributions of American immigrants to the West Kootenay, with a focus on issues of peace. Rodgers sharing what she has learned in a lecture entitled Idealism in Exile: The Making of the West Kootenay Counterculture at Selkirk College’s Mir Centre for Peace on Thursday, April 12.
Rodgers, a native of the Kootenays, conducts research and writes about social activism in her role at the University of Ottawa. Her current research on the West Kootenay focuses on the cultural influx to the region in the 1960s and 70s and relies on interviews conducted with the generation of Americans and others that arrived in the area between 1965 and 1975. Her research, which will be published in a forthcoming but as-of-yet untitled book, focuses on documenting their life histories, their ideas and contributions to local life.
Rodgers will speak at the Mir House on Selkirk College’s Castlegar Campus at 7p.m. Tickets cost $12 for adults and $10 for students or seniors and are available at the door.
For more information, phone 250-365-1234 or visit selkirk.ca/mir.