Firstly we would like to acknowledge that on January 25th, 2019, the culture sharing session of the event, due to our lack of rigor in the preparation, has caused some cultural misunderstandings. We are deeply sorry for the influence and discomfort caused by our culture sharing session. IUB Chinese Calligraphy Club respects people of all ethnicities and different kinds of culture, and we would not wish to intentionally offend any groups.
Regarding the problems that occurred in this culture sharing event, Uyghur Nationality(ethnic group), IUB Chinese Calligraphy Club have realized our mistakes and done the following review:
Problems with ethnic picture on the poster: Due to our negligence and the inaccurate source of the picture, the first version of the poster for the workshop used an inappropriate picture and caused a misunderstanding of the Uygur costumes and culture. After we were informed, we made instantaneous revisions and corrections. We have deleted the first version of the poster to our greatest extent. On January 24th, 2019, we revised our poster and posted correction statements as follows.
Problems with translation of festivals: During our culture sharing section of the event, we mentioned two Uyghurs’ festivals. We did not correctly translate the name of 肉孜节 and 宰牲节 and did not consider the profound meaning of these festivals. Regarding this, the Chinese Calligraphy Club apologize to groups with those beliefs and cultural practices.
Problems with pictures used: During the culture sharing section of the event, we were trying to show the costumes of Uyghur men. However, we are negligent in choosing the accurate pictures of the costume of Uyghur men, using inaccurate images from another nationality. We are sorry for using the wrong picture that misguided or offended any groups during our workshop.
Actress‘ ethnic problem: During our event, one of our members said that Uyghurs are mainly spread in Xinjiang autonomous region in China, so she posted pictures of two actors who come from Xinjiang in the PowerPoint slide. We were told that the actress is not Uyghur and her costume is not the traditional costume of Uyghur, our intention was to show people from Xinjiang rather than the Uyghurs themselves. After deep consideration and self-reflection, we will be more careful in the production of PowerPoint, and we will post annotation in our PowerPoints so that a situation like this can be avoided in the future. We are grateful to the person for questioning our presentation.
Regarding those severe mistakes in the workshop, the Chinese Calligraphy Club decided to make corrections starting from the next workshop. Details as following:
We will post the official apology statement on our official website. We welcome and are grateful for having supervisions and corrections.
IUB Chinese Calligraphy Club will establish a more thorough and comprehensive supervision system for our culture sharing events. Before the activities of culture sharing, we will seriously and strictly supervise the sharer to let him/her get the accurate information from highly credible sources in the future. We will try our best to ensure our information is correct and precise, reducing the possibility of causing false demonstration and misapprehension. We are welcome for supervisions and corrections.
Regarding academic attitude, IUB Chinese Calligraphy Club will include all references to our information shared in the future workshops and events.
We sincerely apologize for our mistakes in the misrepresentation of Uyghur Nationality and the discomfort caused by that. Again, for those erroneous remarks, we did not intend to offend any traditional culture.
IUB Chinese Calligraphy Club will continue our tradition of sharing different topics in Chinese culture. If there is any problems or differences of perception in the future culture sharing event, We welcome everyone to correct us and have a pleasant conversation with us.
Thanks for everyone’s continued interest in IUB Chinese Calligraphy Club. The Chinese Calligraphy Club consists of student members from different disciplines and members who are interested in Chinese culture. From the establishment of the club in 2011, our objective is to share different topics in Chinese culture in Bloomington, IN, USA. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their love and support to our club in these years. We always welcome everyone’s supervision and hope that the future of IUB Chinese Calligraphy Club will be better.