2007 winners of the Distinguished Academics Awards

Born on a Manitoba sugar-beet farm that served as an internment camp for Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, Miki’s early experiences with racial discrimination fuelled his desire to express his ideas and emotions, and to create opportunities for others to do so.

Miki is credited with almost single-handedly creating the field of Asian Canadian literary studies. His 1998 book, Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity and Writing, built upon his earlier academic work and the public impact of Joy Kogawa’s 1980 novel Obasan to establish Asian Canadian literature as a legitimate, and important, field of study. Moreover, it was Miki’s 1985 edited collection of the essays and letters of Muriel Kitagawa that Kogawa credited as a source for her novel.

These achievements alone may have earned Miki the CUFA/BC Career Achievement Award, but using his scholarship and creative writing in service of the Japanese Canadian redress movement clinched the award. Working alongside his brother and movement leader, Art Miki, Roy took part in the complex and conflictive proceedings leading to the 1988 financial settlement from the federal government for internees and their families.

Miki also acted as chronicler of the movement, culminating in his 2004 book Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice. More than a history of the struggle for redress for the 23,000 Canadians of Japanese descent who were uprooted from the West Coast and dispersed across the country, Miki’s book is also a personal memoir and meditation on what it means to be a Canadian of Japanese descent today.

Weaver is not content with studying climate, though-he is also trying to change it. Or rather, he is trying to change public attitudes towards the climate. He has delivered hundreds of keynote addresses, lectures and presentations to technical and non-technical audiences around the world. He is a frequent media commentator and editorialist, and he has advised government officials on climate science.

If this weren’t enough, Weaver has given hundreds of hours of his time to the Victoria Weather Network; the project for which he is being recognized with the 2007 CUFA/BC Academic of the Year Award.

Since 2005, he and his research team have installed solar-powered weather monitoring stations on more than 70 school rooftops across Southern Vancouver Island. Computers in Weaver’s lab collect data from these stations in real time and make that information available to students and the public through the School-Based Weather Station Network website.

Not only does this make weather science more concrete for the students who see their schools listed on TV as the source for current weather conditions, but it also generates those sometimes elusive “teachable moments” that provide educators with the opportunity to touch the minds of their students in profound ways.

Weaver has supplemented this work through a cooperative project with Victoria teacher Steven Toleikis to prepare extensive curriculum materials to be used by schools in the monitoring network. In doing so, physics, chemistry and mathematics are given a life outside of the textbooks.

Weaver also gives life to these subjects directly through on-going visits to school classrooms and by bringing students and teachers to his lab to learn first hand about the cutting edge of weather and climate science.