This essay is about ice cream, beading, trust, friendship, and finding happiness in unexpected spaces while being an anthropologist. Collaboratively envisioned and written, we offer these reflections on praxis for a screen-bound contemporary moment, as well as an equitable and critical way to conceive of intellectual work in our future that feels like it engenders a space of happiness.

Setting the Stage
When the organizers (Uzma Z. Rizvi and Sarah Jackson) began planning an academic workshop, with funding from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, they envisioned a space of concentrated engagement for a group of anthropologists working on topics related to crafting and worldmaking in ancient contexts. They imagined intense, productive conversations, planned excursions that engaged with local experts and the landscape.

On the first Friday in October 2020, instead of meeting on Tohono O’odham land, the eleven of us found ourselves in a virtual space, located in Zoom boxes from our homes around the globe. The pandemic had changed our world. Instead of canceling, we had decided to imaginatively rethink the possibilities. We built in ways by which the engagement with the workshop was not bound by space or time, but rather through materiality and intentional gestures of community building that we borrowed from participatory and community-based archaeology, and from adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy (2017).

We met on the five Fridays in October, picking times that recognized our span of time zones. While we communicated a tentative plan for the meetings in advance, it evolved with group input over the month. The rhythm of the full-group meetings alternated between ones in which group members, their projects, and academic ideas took precedence, and two meetings in which we welcomed an honored guest, Krista Leddy, an expert Métis beader, who taught us beading techniques and told us stories to contextualize the significance of beading within Métis culture. This approach to crafting, learning, and being, fit beautifully within our concept of Crafting as Worldmaking. Between our weekly meetings, we hosted optional and agenda-less “coffee hours” — one per week — at various times. Alongside these synchronous, live contacts, we had a background infrastructure of multiple connections: group Dropbox folders to facilitate sharing of materials, and a Slack group with channels for both official and social exchanges.

At the end of October, we realized that none of us wanted to stop meeting, that we had made real, new friends, that our scholarly conversations had been some of the most productive and collaborative we had had. In the midst of unabashedly adverse circumstances, we had not only achieved success in carrying out our workshop, we had also found unexpected happiness. The larger context of the world was precarious, which made the connections we found particularly precious.

Our intention in writing this piece is not to share logistical best practices for successful or effective online meetings; rather, we wish to share what happened — how we found happiness and connection in an unlikely space of separate Zoom boxes, physical distance, and considerable disappointment — in order to think about how this experience can impact the ways we come together, to form and sustain communities, not only in pandemic contexts, but also in other moments of literal or metaphorical separation.

Building Trust
To gain trust you have to take a risk and open yourself up to others you do not know. This is not an easy thing to do even when you are meeting people in person. Being online takes it to another level as we cannot see or react to body language or cues of those with whom we are in conversation. It makes us think differently about how we engage and create trust with each other in this new reality. You are putting yourself out there, into a vulnerable place, trusting process. Without taking this risk we will not learn how to trust others in this new world of online convening.

We came together without most of us knowing each other beyond professional ties. We engaged in intentional, meaningful, and community building processes so that we could make our gatherings more than just a meeting. One of the significant ways we did this was through sharing parts of ourselves that we do not usually share in professional settings. A moment we all hold as significant is our first introduction with Krista Leddy; she asked us who we were, what kind of ice cream we liked, and how we came to like this type of ice cream. This simple yet important way to engage with each other created a place where we all have common ground, even sharing that some of us may not like ice cream. This exercise, facilitated by Krista, made her an important part of our group. She not only taught us how to bead together; through her teaching, we learned an archaeology of beads, histories, stories…ways of knowing about Métis life, and each other. Her framing allowed us to be heard as we started our conversations and not feel dismissed as we were talking.

In our meetings with Krista, we were taught a new skill — beading. Our vulnerability was inevitable as we all had the space to make mistakes. Interestingly, Krista made us feel like no mistake was ever irreversible nor was it something that could not be adjusted. That generosity of the craft and of her teaching created an energy of equitable exchange, a feeling that we were all in it together. It was also during this time we all became comfortable with silence on Zoom; when someone was ready, they shared.

Each part of this process allowed us to feel comfortable in taking a risk to engage with each other. As we shared and visited every Friday we started building trust in each other to follow through with what we were engaged with, and we learned how to think together.

Making Space
There is no one way that a virtual space has to be; because our meetings were mediated by Zoom did not mean that our interactions had to follow an established template. As the context for this workshop was during a period when we were all envisioning new ways of working, teaching, and collaborating, meant that we were all more open, willing and thus able to experiment. What we created together was a place for making mistakes; a space of vulnerability.

This space emerged from the framework and tone that the organizers established from the beginning, but it came alive through what we all brought to the space, and subsequently, what the space engendered. It began with the intentionality of the organizers to create a space that encouraged listening and engagement; one that eschewed hierarchy. For example, rather than facilitating discussion by calling on people, as a way to hear all voices and provide each voice with the vested position of directing our collective thoughts, whomever spoke would choose the next person to speak. This dismantled the hierarchy of conducting a conversation in a particular form and fashion.

As participants, we all found ourselves coming into a space that, therefore, was not strident or competitive; what we brought with us, and what was encouraged, was the ability and desire to be collaborative, open, and vulnerable. We found ourselves within our scholarship in new ways because we were in new spaces online, which in turn fostered a different engagement with texts, ideas, and our ways of sharing. We built together, adding bit by bit, and ensuring we did not tear things down. This became a clear ethos in the group – a generative, rather than destructive approach to knowledge sharing.

Moving beyond the visual-centered nature of Zoom created a different kind of space. Communal crafting engaged us tactilely while still allowing for conversation; our vision was engaged elsewhere, at a different focus; unexpectedly, we found that this more closely evoked in-person, comfortable encounters. This multi-sensory experience where the screen was de-privileged allowed for insights that would not have otherwise arisen.

Ultimately, the space was fluid in ways that mimicked in-person engagements but also took advantage of not being in one physical space for a continuous week. The virtual workshop was temporally spread out, allowing time to process ideas in ways that would not have been possible in the more intensive atmosphere of an in-person experience. A part of each participant’s physical space contributed to the collective virtual space of the workshop, and the interplay between the individual and collective spaces added to the productive and generative dynamic of the workshop.

Visiting, Not Meeting
Many of the virtual spaces we enter in our work are formal meetings or structured presentations, where our participation is determined by agendas or schedules. These spaces require us to interact in ways that conform to expectations of our workplaces and to come with our minds rather than our hearts. From the outset, however, it was clear in our crafting workshop that we were doing a lot more than meeting. Instead of the focus being on achieving some particular goal, our focus was on building connection. This shifted us from being in a meeting space to being in a visiting space. Indigenous scholar Cindy Gaudet writes about a visiting methodology as a means of building connection in her work with Métis women in Saskatchewan, where the emphasis is on spending time with one another.

Visiting centers reciprocity, respect, and relationality, rather than emphasizing the accomplishment of a specific outcome or producing a product. The outcome of the visiting space is actually the relationships built between the participants. In our context, we began each gathering in conversation with one another, inviting into the space something we were engaged within our lives. The prompt in our first meeting of what we have each been crafting or making, opened up the space where we entered into the fullness of each other’s lives. Krista’s ice cream inquiry created a visiting space as she led us through the process of learning to bead. Part of the beadwork teachings she shared with us emphasized the visiting nature of doing beadwork. She shared a story with us of when she first was learning to bead with her Métis relatives where they kept asking her to thread their needles as they beaded, drank tea, and visited. This story demonstrated for all of us the importance of visiting during the process of crafting or making.

We were not just visiting with each other, but we were also visiting with ideas. We would start with texts that we’d share with one another, readings that we found inspiring, or concepts that we wanted to discuss. In some of the small groups, we continued with our crafting work as we visited with ideas; in others, we shared our own writing as ‘crafted material.’ Out of these small groups came inspiration for work that we wanted to do, deep conversations about terms and concepts, and the forging of new relations between people as well as ideas.

Materializing Connections
In addition to the intentionality of building trust, creating space, and visiting, there were particular material connections we shared. This engagement came through boxes of materials that were mailed out by the organizers prior to the start of the workshop, which created and continue to create connections. Opening the box was like opening a delightful trove of presents on one’s birthday!

Archaeologically, it was an assembly of materials….but also a first step into the ethos of the meeting. The hosts had thought long and hard how to open the meeting and say, ‘trust us, these are places we are going to go’.

Some of the items were familiar residents of conferences: coffee, tea, a drip-coffee filter and mug, and to everyone’s glee, an assortment of gourmet, free-trade chocolate bars. Anthropologists have long recognized that commensality builds ties and makes communities. For us, the simple addition of a way to share in food and drink was one ingredient of intellectual sharing whereby taste and smell fed discussions, points of articulation between different research domains, and friendships between new colleagues.

The box included a suite of books on craft production, relationality, creativity and worldmaking from BIPOC, subaltern, queer, and feminist perspectives. The intent of the books was not to read each one cover to cover. Rather, participants dipped into different books before the meetings, read elements throughout at their leisure, and afterwards now have those books as points of reference – evoking other participants and recalling conversations.

Some of the other goodies in the box were meant to stimulate ideas through doing – a topic we as archaeologists are committed to in theory, but do not often engage with in practice. These included the bead-making kits, origami paper, watercolor markers and blank postcards. We might have been initially reticent, yet once everyone started, we realized that ‘doing’ opened up a creative outlet that had us ask new questions and allowed us to see craft production from new perspectives. The presence of these tools in our personal spaces throughout the month materialized the ongoing workshop. For some, the doing was therapeutic. For others, it was a way to share something with colleagues.  For all, it was good fun. We snail-mailed the watercolor postcards to each other with little hand-written notes at the end of the conference. These personalized notes and colored works are not just material mementos of the conference but are indeed gifts in the sense of the word by Marcel Mauss. They set up possibilities for reciprocity that so much of our participatory and community based archaeological work depends upon. They are points in a chain of reciprocal engagement that compel us to want to keep that conversation going.

Concluding thoughts

Now
make room in the mouth for
grassesgrassesgrasses

Layli Long Soldier begins Part 1 of her book of poetry, Whereas with these words. As one of the books in our box, we returned to her words in different ways during our sessions as we read her poems out loud to one another in our large group. These were emotional because we were reading out loud the violence of settler colonialism, not just citing it. These were not performative gestures or readings, rather, they became ways by which we were bringing each other closer; gentle and inclusive. We all shared the horror of the mass killing of the Dakota 38.  As we recognized parts of ourselves in each other through these feelings, there was an intimacy to scholarship and a focus on relationality among ourselves.

This relational aspect of togetherness as something we experienced, rather than just studied, shifts the ways by which we incorporate theory into our everyday research: we are not working on something but working with something. As we consider this experience, we feel it has pedagogical implications on how to teach and learn differently. Indeed, it has already shifted the ways by which we all engage in our academic spaces.

Finally, it is important to recognize the rigor and criticality that we imbued in our spaces — that criticality could be generative and not about tearing down arguments was a revelation for some of us, and became part of our ethos. We had come together not only to think about crafting as worldmaking, but in some part, we also redefined our own praxis as anthropologists. And it was there that we found our happiness – the ability to read, think, learn, make mistakes, bead, and visit theory in a just and equitable framework; where we were not asking the past in extractive ways to fuel our own professional goals, but where we brought respect and a different way of knowing to inform our workshop. In some manner of speaking, we enacted crafting as worldmaking as our experience beading made a new and different world for all of us, leading us to unexpected happiness in virtual spaces.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

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It’s dangerous to write and post when you have the flu. But I have been housebound since Friday and although my physical body is nowhere near ready to strike out into the world, my brain is ready to do more than just watch Parks and Recreation on repeat. So here we are.

In May 2018 I asked “should I stay or should I go?” with respect to the discipline of anthropology. By that point I had been working in the field for 8 years, including 3 years as a lecturer/prof. And those 8 years had nearly destroyed me. I was still puzzling through how to ethically occupy the space of being an Indigenous woman (I am a Métis woman with Métis, Cree, Scottish, Irish, British, and Norwegian ancestors, through my Métis dad and my white settler mom). I am trying to be in good relation with the territories I currently occupy, trying to honour my obligations to lands/waters/atmospheres back home, and trying to teach next generations of students to work reciprocally and thoughtfully through their positions in the world.

Back in 2018 I wrote:

“All jokes aside, though, the work of embodying the discipline, of disciplining myself into the structures of not only the academy, but the specificities of anthro itself, wear and tear at my Indigenous body. I paused the other day to ask myself if any of the last 8 years in anthro have brought me joy.

I cannot say that they have.”

Well, things did not exactly get better after I wrote that post. The experience of flying into San Jose to attend the American Anthropological Association annual meetings during the November 2018 forest fires was physically, spiritually jarring. The land was suffering and I could feel it with my whole being. The smoke was speaking to us. It literally infiltrated every corner of the convention centre, making itself known. After the #HauTalk panel on the final Saturday, I was so exhausted by the energy of the space and the discipline that I nearly collapsed in the hallway and my friend had to look after me until we could return to the hotel we were staying at. I spent the rest of the trip resting, recuperating, mourning. And when I flew back to New York the next day I vowed never to fly again unless it was absolutely necessary. I felt hot shame for thinking my work was important enough to necessitate flying into the scene of a crime to present a 12 minute paper (at that moment, we were descending upon the scenes of both the ongoing crime of genocide against Indigenous peoples in what is currently known as California and the explicit crimes of capitalist corporations violating life and meaning in those lands). Nothing I do as a scholar is important enough to ask me to violate my ongoing reciprocal obligations to lands, waters, atmospheres in order to perform my credentials or knowledge in american (or canadian or british or or or ) academic imperialist organizations. Or disciplines.

Put simply, doing (north atlantic) anthropology in still predominantly white, colonial institutions as an Indigenous person in Canada repeatedly makes me a bad relation to those I love. It asks me to forego the most foundational teachings of my Métis and Cree ancestors regarding how to be in the world. As I have learned from Indigenous scholars including Dr. Patti Laboucane-Benson, one of the first laws in Cree legal orders is love. I did not fly to San Jose out of love. I flew out of ego, the desire to prove my worth and my intelligence to a fellow group of scholars.

I suppose that was the true end. That conference. The fire and smoke. The realization that western academia currently takes itself far too seriously and is currently far too conservative in its configurations and imagination to really understand how it is imbricated in the disasters (Sharpe 2016). How can we think outside the systems when they demand so much of us, require fealty to such toxic and harmful structures and configurations?

For me, what I keep coming back to is a desire to honour my obligations to lands, waters, atmospheres and to work towards just living more reciprocally with my human and non-human relations. This is not easy work, and it is fraught and complicated when the spaces we are told we can occupy are so constricting and conservative and suspicious of real, deep, expansive change.

But I want to be a good relation.

During my PhD work in the early 2010s, I was struggling to frame the experiences my friends and interlocutors in the Northwest Territories in what is currently known as northern Canada were articulating within the constricting and often fetishizing frameworks anthropology had to offer to understandings of Indigenous environmental knowledges in Canada or the US. To be fair there was some great work — I drew heavily on people like Julie Cruikshank and Ann Fienup-Riordan, who have worked extensively and thoughtfully with Indigenous knowledge keepers in the Yukon and Alaska, respectively. I quickly started to get a feel for how thoughtfully an anthropologist considered their ongoing responsibilities to Indigenous knowledge keepers. I gravitated towards work that showed a scholar really understood the stakes of their position, that stepped aside to let people tell their own stories. And I was drawn to work that explicitly demonstrated the reciprocity and ethics of the work — it was clear from the work of both Dr. Cruikshank and Dr. Fienup-Riordan that the people they worked with had a say in how their knowledge was presented, and that in their work careful attention is paid to honouring Indigenous self-determination.

Other work sometimes struck me as extractive or even smug. I found it difficult to take seriously anything that gave a whiff of the anthropologist knowing better than the people they were speaking with. There’s more of this type of anthro than we probably realize. Supranthropology. (noun: the anthropology of superiority – carried out when folks lose sight of whose stories they are sharing, and results when a scholar forgets the consequences of speaking of/for/about people rather than focusing on our responsibilities, always and everywhere, to build relationships with time, place, stories, people. Every anthropologist is at risk of becoming a supranthropologist).

But even with some solid, ethical, accountable anthropological literature to draw on, things still were not clicking. People I was working with were articulating their self-determination, sovereignty, and knowledges in relation to their lands and waters and atmospheres, and in relation to nonhuman beings like fish, in ways that went beyond what most arctic or environmental anthropology could offer. These were more than stories, more than knowledge. There was a dimension I was missing.

It wasn’t until I was introduced to work on Indigenous legal orders in Canada that things really clicked for me.

As an Indigenous woman, it had never occurred to me that we have law. Colonizers work fastidiously and emphatically to deny Indigenous people have any kind of legal authority, sovereignty, or claims here in the lands that Canada occupies. I had never thought to consider the stories and teachings my dad and other Indigenous relatives shared with me as having any kind of legal dimension because colonial bodies in Canada work so hard to convince us law must look like western/imperial/colonial/white supremacist/capitalist forms of ‘law’. As legal scholar Val Napoleon demonstrates:

“As Indigenous peoples, we have gained much of our current understanding of law from our experiences with the western legal system in Canada. We know the western legal system through its courts, legislation, and enforcement, and by its treatment of our peoples, lands, and resources. Given this, many Indigenous peoples have come to associate “law” with power, punishment, hierarchy, and bureaucracy. In the case of my student, “real” law is clearly associated with formal, central, and deliberate processes of determining what law is and how to apply it.” (Napoleon 2007: 1)

But of course we have law. And always have had laws. It’s just that until I started learning from Indigenous legal scholars in Canada, including Val Napoleon, Tracey Lindberg, John Borrows, Joseph Paul Murdoch-Flowers and others, it had never occurred to me to consider the stories and knowledges my friends and interlocutors had shared with me were in fact law. In all the anthropology texts I’d read throughout my minor in anthropology in my undergrad, and throughout all the arctic and environmental anthropology texts I’d read in my doctoral work up until that point, western anthropologists were not discussing Indigenous people’s laws or legal orders. Ontologies? Yes (*contact me for access). Stories? Yes. Rules, even? Yes. But Laws? Not so much.

This is because anthropology has itself been one of the bodies that works very hard to convince us that, to riff off of Colin Scott’s important piece on James Bay Cree knowledge keepers — law is for the west, culture is for the rest. This is because, as Audra Simpson illustrates in her work, US/Canadian anthropology does not take Indigenous sovereignty seriously, even as it operates in lands stolen from Indigenous people through legal maneuvers that had to contend with, and vigorously erase, Indigenous sovereignty (Barker 2005, 1-31). As Simpson points out:

“in its theoretical and analytic guises “culture” is defined in anthropological terms most consistently by its proximity to difference, not its sovereignty, its right to govern, to own, or to labor. And that difference was to be defined against the sameness and omniscience of a stable ontological core, an unquestioned “self” that defined that difference (and thus “culture”) for a readership, one that corresponded to a metropole and to a colony, a self, and an other (Cooper and Stoler 1997, 1-56).” (location 2091 of 5974)

Simpson also points out that:

“To speak of Indigeneity is to speak of colonialism and anthropology, as these are the means through which Indigenous people have been known and sometimes are still known (Pagden 1982). In different moments, anthropology has imagined itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonized (Said 1989; Paine 1990).” (Simpson 2014, location 1963 of 5794).

In the decade that I’ve worked in anthropology as a doctoral student and later, professor, I have not seen convincing evidence that dominant assertions of anthropology in Canada or the US are actually ready to give up their role as ‘the voice of the colonized’ as Simpson references above. This is because, as Simpson demonstrates in her work, (dominant or north atlantic) anthropology does not take seriously the sovereignty and politics of Indigenous peoples in the US or Canada. And it does not honour Indigenous legal orders. Just imagine if an anthropology department in stolen Indigenous lands in Canada or the US had to operate according to the legal orders of the Indigenous nations it occupies. It is curious that a discipline that studies diverse and plural cultures is still governed so firmly in Canada, the US, the UK and elsewhere under white western euro-american universalist academic logics, structures, norms, and conventions.

Anishinaabe legal scholar John Borrows stated in 2013:

“Law is us. And it’s the animals, and it’s our dreams, and it’s our stories, and it’s our relationships. It’s the way we talk with one another and try to persuade one another, and that persuasion of course involves many different traditions now. But that persuasion is a part of our law, and it’s not just for the parliaments and it’s not just for the courts. We have a role in taking that kind of action.”

Anthropology gets in the way of this persuasion for me as an Indigenous person. It demands I backtrack through dead white men and women to make my arguments. It expects me to cite Hallowell on Anishinaabeg knowing, but rarely cites brilliant Anishinaabeg theorists alongside these old white men and their obsessions. It fails to understand who my nation, the Red River Métis, really are (a post for another day!). It still thinks it is a neutral voice in the relations between Indigenous people and the state here in Canada and the US. Anthropology, in its dominant configurations, is really really bad at reflecting upon itself and its actions. Even with the whole dang reflexive turn.

This year, after skyping into the joint CASCA/AAA conference in Vancouver, I had a migraine that pierced through my brain. Despite an invigorating experience interlocuting with three brilliant Indigenous scholars on a panel that was squished into a too small room late at night, I realized I was really truly done.

A family friend and a relative reached out to me this autumn with concerns with how the anthropology organizations (both Canadian and American) were treating local knowledge keepers in Vancouver in the lead up to the AAAs. In good faith, I reached out and tried to figure out what had gone wrong. But after weeks of runaround and sometimes pat responses from various organizers who kept assuring all of us that of course they honour Indigenous people, it finally occurred to me. Western disciplines will never honour Indigenous law here. They will never honour Indigenous sovereignty. They’re still too busy speaking for and about us. And, though they will not say it to our faces, they perpetually believe themselves to know us better than we know ourselves. Postmodernism did not break anthropology of its ardent belief in the ‘objectivity’ of the outside gaze. It just gave it more florid and obscure (and sometimes dishonest) ways to articulate its supranthropologisms.

In that final panel I skyped into, organized by CASTAC, Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte described anthropology with Indigenous nations in the US as ‘watered down Indigenous philosophy’. And that was really it. If I am to honour the laws and philosophies and cosmologies of the nations I owe my thinking and work to, I can more effectively and ethically do this through Indigenous approaches and beyond disciplinarity. As an Indigenous person working in Canada, the only real and true answer for me is to leave anthropology. Cut out the middle-person, as it were. Why would I practice Perrier Indigenous philosophy when I could work directly with Indigenous knowledge keepers and work to honour Indigenous legal orders using diverse epistemic tools that cut across western disciplinary divides and beyond.

So I did it. I formally notified my chair the following Monday that I could no longer work in the discipline. And I moved to a different program. 

For me, this was a relief. There are a great many people I adore in anthropology. And I do think that it has its uses, values, importance in certain contexts. Anthropology divorced from all the intrigue, ego, and extractivism of western academe could be a very interesting thing. I hope that folks working within it can keep striving to dismantle the structures of extraction, dishonesty, and other ills that all too often shape what knowledge production looks like in the euro-american-canadian academic context. (I of course cannot and do not speak beyond the contexts I live and work in, and hope that others can speak to their own experiences in the spaces they tend to). But as an Indigenous person working in spaces that are actively colonized by white settlers (or to cite Tiffany Lethabo King’s (2019) work: conquistadors) in Canada, it is ethically untenable for me to route my knowledge, labour, love, and care through a discipline that is still so intent on fashioning itself through paradigms of expertise, individualist academic achievement, and hierarchical knowledge transfers shaped by long and painful histories of white euro-american colonial capitalist extraction.

We have to be able to dream beyond the structures that are imposed by crumbling hierarchies. We have to be able to dream beyond tenure and peer review and the structures that have been imposed in these lands by white supremacist colonial capitalism. There’s a much bigger, more expansive set of possibilities out there. And for me, it means dreaming beyond the worlds anthropology imagines for Indigenous people in this place.

Works Cited: 

Barker, Joanne. 2005. Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Borrows, John. 2013. “The First Nations Quest for Justice in Canada.” Public talk April 26, 2013. Victoria, Canada. Retrieved January 27, 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PlAb2oOxzE)

Cruikshank, Julie. 2005. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters & Social Imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Fienup-Riordan. Ann. 2000. “An Anthropologist Reassess Her Methods.” Pp. 29-57 in Hunting Tradition in a Changing World: Yup’ik Lives in Alaska Today edited by Ann Fienup-Riordan, W. Tyson, W., P. John, M. Meade, and J. Active. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.

Napoleon, Val. 2007. “Thinking About Indigenous Legal Orders.” Research Paper for the National Centre for First Nations Governance. Retrieved January 27, 2020 (http://fngovernance.org/ncfng_research/val_napoleon.pdf).

Scott, Colin. 2011 [1989]. “Science for the West, Myth for the Rest? The Case of James Bay Cree Knowledge Construction.” Pp. 175-197 in The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader edited by Sandra Harding. Durham: Duke University Press.

Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press.

Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

zoetodd

Dr. Zoe Todd (Red River Métis) (she/they) is a practice-led artist-researcher who studies the relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish futures in Canada. As a Métis anthropologist and researcher-artist, Dr. Todd combines dynamic social science and humanities research and research-creation approaches—including ethnography, archival research, oral testimony, and experimental artistic research practices—within a framework of Indigenous philosophy to elucidate new ways to study and support the complex relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish well-being in Canada today. They are a co-founder of the Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures, which is a collaborative Indigenous-led initiative that is ‘restor(y)ing fish futures, together’ across three continents. They are also a co-founder of the Indigenous Environmental Knowledge Institute (IEKI) at Carleton University. In 2020 they were elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, and in 2018 were the Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University.

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