Dan Levy made good use of the extra time he got during the COVID-19 lockdown — but he’s not done yet.
In August, the “Schitt’s Creek” star signed up for a free 13-week online course on Indigenous history and issues at the University of Alberta, and encouraged fans to join him.
“If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we actively need to re-learn history,” he said at the time.
On Sunday, Levy posted another video to Twitter, this one praising the course and encouraging donations to the university’s Native Studies faculty.
“The faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta is the only faculty of native studies in North America,” he said in the video, decked out in a U of A Native Studies sweatshirt. For that reason, he’s encouraging fans to donate to the faculty, and he says he will match donations up for $25,000, he said.
The University of Alberta’s faculty of Native Studies started in 1972, and offers courses in Indigenous law, land claims, health, art, language, and other disciplines.
Other schools offer programs that focus on Indigenous issues, like the Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont. And several universities, like the University of Manitoba, McMaster, and Wilfred Laurier, offer degrees in Indigenous studies, which is an option either in the Faculty of Arts or the Faculty of Social Studies. But by being a faculty, rather than a school, U of A’s program has more autonomy.
If you missed the Indigenous Canada course Levy took, it’s being offered again, still free and online, with a new session starting on Sunday, Nov. 15. Levy wrote on Twitter that it was “nothing short of transformational.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story stated incorrectly that the University of Alberta’s faculty of Native Studies is not the only one of its kind in North America. There are other departments that offer Indigenous studies at other schools, but University of Alberta’s faculty is unique.