Rising Up: Graduate Students’ Conference on Indigenous Knowledges and Research in Indigenous Studies.

Dr. Marie A. Battiste is a Mi’kmaw educator from the Potlotek First Nation of Unama’ki (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia) and a full professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Saskatchewan. Internationally renowned for her seminal research, writing, and communications on the history, protection, recovery and renewal of Indigenous  knowledge and language, she continues to advocate for decolonizing education and support reconciliation strategies and Indigenizing at postsecondary institutions.

She is an honorary Officer of the Order of Canada and elected Fellow to the Royal Society of Canada. Holding graduate degrees from Harvard and a Stanford Universities, she has been honoured with four additional honorary doctorate degrees (St. Mary’s University, University of Maine at Farmington, Thomson Rivers University and University of Ottawa), is the recipient of the Distinguished Academic Award (2013) from the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), an Aboriginal Achievement Foundation Award now INDSPIRE (2008), and first woman to receive the distinguished researcher award at the University of Saskatchewan.  

Battiste’s publications include Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit (Purich Press, 2013) and, Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge (Purich Press/UBC Press, 2000), which won a Saskatchewan Book Award.  She has several edited collections, Visioning Mi’kmaw Humanities: Indigenizing the Academy (2016), Living Treaties: Narrating Mi’kmaw Treaty Relations (2016), Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision (2000), and First Nations Education in Canada: The Circle Unfolds (1995).

Dr. Christopher Trott has worked with Inuit on Baffin Island since 1979 and achieved a reasonable competency in Inuktitut.  His interests have focused on social organization, gender, and symbolic systems (most especially to do with bears). For ten years he co-directed the Pangnirtung school with Prof. Kulchyski and worked with Zack Kunuk and Ian Mauro on the film Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change. He has been the head of St John’s College for the past nine years.