Why Skookum?
A Skookum name for a new magazine
Editor's intro by Anne Russell
At UFV we’re all about doing our best. Our new strategic plan sets a goal of providing the best undergraduate education in Canada. We encourage and enable our students to achieve their best: both while studying with us, and after they graduate and become alumni.
We strive to provide the best learning environment and best faculty and staff. And our standings in the last Globe and Mail University Report, in which UFV earned the most A’s and A+’s of any public university in the province, prove that we’re already one of the best universities around.
So when we decided to reposition our award-winning magazine Aluminations to reflect the best of the whole university, instead of focusing solely on our outstanding alumni, we looked for a name that reflected that dedication to being the best.
Skookum means good, best, ultimate, first-rate, mighty, excellent, and strong. It’s a true west coast word with its roots in Chinook, a trade dialect that allowed different aboriginal groups to communicate with each other and with multi-ethnic newcomers in what is now British Columbia.
We hope you’ll agree that we’re featuring some truly skookum people in this issue. Click through the links of our magazine so you can read on to find out more about UFV berry expert
Tom Baumann, Trudeau Scholar and Harvard doctoral student
Lisa Kelly, ‘school of hard knocks’ veteran turned enthusiastic student and alumnus
Dennis Clark, nurse-educator and Distinguished Alumni winner
Tracey Vanderaegen-Jones, Teaching Excellence winner
Glen Baier, the generous
Seikhon family, and pop culture sociologist
Darren Blakeborough, among others.
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Skookum: good, best, ultimate, first rate. That's what UFV aims to be: the best undergraduate university in Canada, which is why we’ve named our university magazine with this strong superlative word from the Chinook jargon, a trade dialect that was used as a cultural bridge between multi-ethnic newcomers to British Columbia and the aboriginal peoples.
