Twenty-five years of the conditional tense. Contract. Sessional. Limited term. Contingent. Words that never quite fit what it actually was, which was showing up every September, as I belonged there. Because I did.
The neoliberal academy has a way of making you feel like a guest in your own house. No nameplate. No permanence. Just the work, and the work, and the work. Metrics where meaning used to be. Outcomes where wonder was.
And yet the students came. And yet the ideas grew. And yet something held.
She asked if I wanted to make a speech.
I smiled, looked down, and shyly said no.
Because what would I have said that the twenty-five years had not already said for me.
President Arini stood beside me, beautiful and kind, the way some people just are, like they were made to make others feel that what they did mattered.
And standing there in that hall at Thompson Rivers, in my red dress, holding something small and teal, I felt it.
That it mattered. That I mattered. Not as a line in a budget. Not as a temporary measure. As a person. As a teacher. As someone who stayed.
The gift came on a black cord. Copper, round and warm, figures etched into it the way the Secwépemc etched truth into stone long before any institution decided what counted as knowledge.
A tall figure, arms open. A small one beside. Together on the land.
I will wear it against my chest where all of it lives, the hard years and the good ones, the classrooms, the students, the quiet stubbornness of continuing.
They did not make it easy. They did not make it secure. They did not always make it fair.
But here is what I know, standing in that light, beside that woman who looked at me like I was worth celebrating:
I am still here.
Not in spite of it. Through it.
Still here. Still teaching. Still myself.
Amy Tucker. Still here.
