Contributors

Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez is Zapotec from Oaxaca, Mexico and an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, where she teaches on topics such as Indigenous peoples and globalization and Indigenous women and politics, among other topics. She is the author of Indigenous Encounters with Neo-liberalism: Place, Women, and the Environment in Canada and Mexico. She recently completed a three-year research project that examined the role of Indigenous women’s knowledge in the stewardship of water for which she was awarded a Cluster Grant from the University of Alberta’s Kule Institute for Advanced Studies.

After studying at the University of Sherbrooke and the University of California (Berkeley), Denise Geoffroy held various positions, including at the Canadian Parliament. She then was involved with the Naskapi Band of Schefferville, the Naskapi Construction Company, and finally was the executive director of the Naskapi Development Corporation. Since 1998, she has worked from her home office in Northern Québec.

Shalene Jobin is Cree (from her mother) and Métis (from her father) and is a member of the Red Pheasant Cree First Nation, a signatory to Treaty 6. She is an associate professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, where she also serves as the director of the Aboriginal governance programs. Her research interests lie with Indigenous perspectives on self-determination, Indigenous economies, and Indigenous ways of knowing and on the interaction of Indigenous peoples with the institutions of the state. She holds an MA in Indigenous governance from the University of Victoria and an interdisciplinary PhD in political science and Native studies from the University of Alberta.

Kahente iontats. Akskeré:wake ní:i Kanienkeháka niowehtsioton. (I am introducing myself in a traditional manner. My name is Kahente, I am bear clan, and that the earth that I come from is the place of the Mohawk) Watkanonwerahton tanon sewakwékon. (Greetings of Peace from the Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) people). I am from Kahnawà:ke, in Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) territory, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River near Montreal. My name means “she walks ahead.” My work is rooted in my identity and community. I am a mother to four daughters who ground me in a rich communal family life with my mother and all of my sisters and their families. I hold a PhD from Concordia University and currently I am an assistant professor at Carleton University in the School of Canadian Studies. I teach, research and write in the areas of consensus-based decision making, Indigenous identity and belonging, and Indigenous women’s issues. I work at bringing to life old traditions in the modern setting. More recently, I have begun work performing the Sky Woman narrative “We Are in Her and She Is in Us” as an act of decolonizing her story and rematriating its female elements. I work at balancing my academic activities with my creative work in beading, moccasin making, sewing, photography, and creative writing.

Nathalie Kermoal is a Breton. She is a professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. In 2011–2012, she served as Interim Dean of the Faculty of Native Studies and recently served a two-year term as special advisor to the provost on Aboriginal academic programs. From 2009 to 2015, Professor Kermoal was the Associate-Dean Academic of the Faculty of Native Studies. Her areas of interest include Métis history, Aboriginal constitutional issues, urban Aboriginal history, contemporary Aboriginal art, and Aboriginal women’s issues. The author of Les francophones de l’Alberta (translated into English as Alberta’s Francophones) and Un passé métis au féminin, in addition to numerous articles, she is currently involved in several research projects pertaining to the Métis and to urban Aboriginal issues. She holds an MA in contemporary history from Université de Nantes (France) and a PhD in Canadian history from the University of Ottawa.

Carole Lévesque is a professor at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique. She holds a PhD in social and cultural anthropology from the Sorbonne and has devoted her entire career to Aboriginal issues. She has worked closely with Québec’s First Nations communities, organizations, and institutions for more than four decades and, over the years, has developed a number of applied research approaches in which Aboriginal peoples play an active role either as individuals or at a community level. She is the founder and director of DIALOG: Aboriginal Peoples Research and Knowledge Network, an interuniversity, interinstitutional, interdisciplinary, and international cluster that brings together researchers, students, and collaborators from the academic milieu and from Aboriginal organizations and communities. These diverse participants share the objectives of promoting, disseminating, and renewing research relating to Aboriginal peoples. Lévesque is also co-director, with Edith Cloutier, of the ODENA Research Alliance, dedicated to the study of Aboriginal peoples in Québec’s cities. In 2015, she was awarded the Université du Québec’s Prix d’excellence en recherche et création.

Leanna Parker holds a PhD in Native studies and environmental sociology from the University of Alberta. Her research interests include Indigenous resource use and management, Indigenous economies, and Indigenous economic history. Her dissertation examined the resiliency and adaptability of nineteenth-century Indigenous economies, with a focus on the participation of Indigenous peoples in the fur trade in Canada and in the whaling industry in New Zealand.

Brenda Parlee is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in the Faculty of Native Studies and the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology at the University of Alberta. Her research into traditional ecological knowledge began in the Northwest Territories in 1995, and since that time she has carried out numerous collaborative research projects with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities in many parts of the North, including a four-year study of the social dimensions of changing caribou populations. Her research interests include social responses to ecological variability and change, local and traditional systems of knowledge, the health and well-being of Aboriginal communities, and the impact of resource development, including the assessment and monitoring of its cultural and socioeconomic effects. She holds a PhD in natural resources and environmental management from the University of Manitoba.

Geneviève Polèse is a trilingual (French, English, and Spanish) researcher at Institut national de la recherche scientifique at the Centre urbanisation culture société in Montréal, Canada. Her research focuses on economic development within culturally diverse societies and traditional knowledge of Indigenous populations in Québec, Canada, and abroad.

Zoe Todd is Métis and a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. She completed a BSc in biology and an MSc in rural sociology, both at the University of Alberta. She is currently conducting research into the discourse and practice of fishing in Paulatuuq, Northwest Territories. In addition to her academic work in the North, she also writes about the issues facing the urban Aboriginal populations in Canadian Prairie cities. She is a 2011 Trudeau Scholar.

Kristine Wray holds an MSc in rural sociology from the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology at the University of Alberta and was the first graduate of the university’s combined BSc/BA program in environmental and conservation sciences and Native studies. In addition to her academic interests, which include the role of Aboriginal traditional knowledge in natural resource management and institutional ethnography, she is a painter and photographer and is currently focusing her energies on developing her artistic work.