Harvey A Feit
Professor Emeritus, Anthropology

My scholarly commitments and writing turn around understanding, and appreciation for, how Eeyou People (James Bay Cree) attend to encompassing human-animal-weather relations, and how these relationships and knowledge sustain their lives and their ways of life, and shape their responses to colonialism. Eeyou land stewards’ responses to colonialism are part of actively stewarding lands and animals and securing the conditions necessary for the future of their way of life.

My scholarship indicates how attending to these relational ontologies can inform distinctive responses to colonialism. My scholarly analyses and practices have been shaped by Indigenous Studies, feminism, and radical environmentalism. At different times I have worked as a researcher, scholar, advisor, expert witness, political analyst, and program developer. And I write about anthropological engagement and its history.

Joint research with Eeyou land stewards, community members, and leaders contributes to scholarly debates and practical knowledge about:
• conservation systems outside Western science, and their histories;
• resilience of sharing economies with relations to market capitalism;
• means of supporting land-based ways of living at risk from market encroachment and instabilities;
• inherent forms of self-governance outside nation-state tenures and dominion; and,
• Indigenous knowledge and practices of respect for a world encompassing other-than-human beings, without polarizing nature-culture distinctions.

This includes writings about Eeyou counter-colonial practices, and the possibilities and limits encountered when Eeyou and Indigenous Peoples mobilize non-Eeyou legal systems to recognize inherent rights, negotiate and implement modern treaties, challenge resource developers by creating risks in financial and resource markets and political centers, build alliances with public media and environmental movements, choose to share the land with newcomers, and renew their practices of governance. Eeyou draw on long histories of engagements with diverse colonial intrusions. Half a century after renewing and expanding Eeyou self-governing institutions to better control the opening of their lands for hydro-electric and other development, Eeyou are now better able to challenge, stop, or change colonial intrusions.

These studies contribute to wide-ranging public as well as expert discussions and debates about:
• renewing Indigenous law and governance, and the impacts of modern treaties and of nation-state and international recognitions of Indigenous rights;
• histories and theories of colonial effects on Indigenous societies, and of Indigenous counter-colonial practices;
• stories and metaphors that are practices and invitations to cross-colonial dialogues and relationships;
• risks and possibilities for Indigenous Nations in neoliberal decentering of nation states and expanding corporate autonomies;
• co-governance as co-optation and as complement to inherent self-government.

I am Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at McMaster University, co-founder of Indigenous Studies programming at McMaster, former Adjunct Graduate Faculty for the Indigenous Studies PhD at Trent University, social science researcher and adviser with several Indigenous Nations, governments, and media, recipient of the Canadian Anthropology Society’s Weaver-Tremblay and Founding Fellows awards, and I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.