Rosemary 昕禾 Xinhe Hu (she/her) is a Chinese immigrant settler from the northeastern coastal city of Dalian. She lives on the territories of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples.
Rosemary holds a Speech Sciences degree from UBC, where she was a linguist who supported the Gitksan Nation in building an open-access Gitksan dictionary. Her work experiences include supporting Indigenous youth seeking employment as bike mechanics and low-income Chinese seniors fighting for social housing in Vancouver’s Chinatown.
Rosemary is in her third year of the JD/JID degree in common law and Indigenous legal orders at UVic and is grateful to equip her toolbox with ways to support Indigenous communities revitalizing their legal orders into full brilliance. The intersections of her identity also include being a poet who lives with bipolar disorder. Her poetry zine: freshwater | salt was published by Moniker Press in 2021, and is a meditative exploration of water and its relation to Rosemary’s mental health recovery after psychiatric hospitalization.
Rosemary feels most joyful and hopeful when mountain biking - zipping down the mountain, feeling the dirt beneath her, seeing sunlight glitter through the trees. She is grateful to be supporting the WCEL team as a summer student, and believes intersectional environmentalism is critical in addressing and changing how marginalized communities bear the disproportionate burden of climate change.