Scharf taught a class at the University of Ottawa with the support of the schools Centre for Students with Disabilities, but got an email recently telling her the class couldn’t continue for this school year.
Advertisement
Reported by the Ottawa Sun, Jennifer Scharf, who has been giving instruction at the university since 2008, was told in September her popular classes were being discontinued after staff from the Centre for Students with Disabilities highlighted “cultural issues of implication involved in the practice”.
They said the cultures yoga stems from “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy”, according to the Sunday. “We need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga”.
Scharf looked to find a compromise by renaming the course from “yoga” to “mindful stretching” but issues regarding how the phrase would translate to French ultimately led to the program being suspended.
“I guess it was this cultural appropriation issue because yoga originally comes from India”, she told CBC NEws.
“There’s a real divide between reasonable people and those people just looking to jump on a bandwagon”.
Scharf does not believe this to be true, and blames a “social justice warrior” with “fainting heart ideologies” for the complaint that led to her class being suspended. “I would never want anyone to think I was making a few sort of spiritual claim other than the pure joy of being human that belongs to everyone free of religion”, she told the Washington Post.
The concept of cultural appropriation is normally applied when a dominant culture borrows symbols of a marginalized culture for dubious reasons without any regard to cultural significance. “But in the future (after we have reflected on which kinds of exercise are more inclusive for our centre)”.
‘And unfortunately, it ends up with good people getting punished for doing good things’. She goes on to explain that the yoga classes she taught didn’t educate students about “the finer points of ancient yogi scripture”, but they instead helped students become more aware of their physical bodies, fostering a sense of better health for anyone who practiced the postures.
Advertisement
One student federation official, Julie Seguin, said labeling the center’s yoga program as cultural appropriation is “questionable” and “debatable”.
