My scholarly commitments and writing turn around understanding and exploring how Eeyou People
(James Bay Cree) attend to encompassing human-animal-land relations, and how these relations
sustain the lives of each, as well as Eeyou ways of life. These relationships also inform Eeyou land
stewards’ responses to colonialism which seek to secure the future of Eeyouch and of all others
who share the land and make a living from its resources, while also confronting corporations and
governments incessant and destructive exploitation.
My analyses and practices have been shaped by ethnography, critical and feminist theories, peace
studies, Indigenous studies, and diverse ecological analyses. I have worked as a teacher,
researcher, advisor, expert witness, political analyst, and editor. Through this work I have also
explored how anthropologists’ ethnographic relationships shape their engagements in social and
political arenas.
My research contributes to scholarly and public policy discussions on:
• Conservation systems outside Western science, and their histories;
• Knowledge and ways of living in a world that encompasses other-than-human beings, with
ontologies that do not polarize humans from nature or from each other;
• Challenges to and ways of enhancing modern sharing economies, and land-based ways of living,
amidst their entanglements with market capitalism;
• Forms of self-governance that are outside nation-state tenures and sovereignty, and therefore
involve co-existing jurisdictions;
• How modern Indigenous treaties differ from government and public understandings of those
treaties, where integral to the terms of the treaty is a recognition of shared dominions, involving a
plurality of self-governing and co-governing arenas of jurisdiction;
• Theories and histories of the effects of colonial practices on Indigenous societies, and theories of
the effects on colonial practices of Indigenous relational ways of encountering persistent others;
• Stories and metaphors as invitations and approaches to non-colonial dialogues and relations.
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, former Visiting/Associate scholar at the London School of Economics, at the Laboratoire
d'anthropologie sociale (Paris), and at McGill University. I am a social science researcher and
adviser with various Indigenous Nations, governments, and media, recipient of the Canadian
Anthropology Society’s Weaver-Tremblay and Founding Fellows awards, and a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Canada.-
