Priscilla Settee is a Cree activist for Native rights, women's rights and environmental rights living in Canada. She is the director of the Indigenous People's program at the University of Saskatchewan. [1]
Settee is from north Saskatchewan. [2] She attended Trent University and then became a teacher in Saskatchewan. [2] She works with Aboriginal gang members and she is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan. [3] Her specialty in Native studies is researching Aboriginal ways of understanding the world in the fields of sciences and engineering. [2] As a professor, she stresses real-world learning, assigning community service to her students. [4] Settee was on the board of the Oskayak High School, the only Aboriginal high school in Saskatoon. from 1996 to 2013. [5]
As an activist, she has worked to set up a shelter for women facing domestic violence in Prince Albert. [2] In 1996, she was the only Canadian woman on the board of the Indigenous Women's Network (IWN). [2] In 2013, she was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her work and contributions to Canada. [5]
In 2011, she published The Strength of Women: Âhkamêyimowak. The book's collection of stories were called by Windspeaker to be "both inspiring and thought-provoking" on the topic of women in Native communities. [6] The word Âhkamêyimowak, roughly means "persistence" and the "strength for women to carry on in the face of extreme adversity," writes Settee. [7] She has also published Pimatisiwin: Global Indigenous Knowledge Systems (2013). [5]
The Aboriginal Multi-Media Society (AMMSA) is an Aboriginal publisher in Canada. AMMSA was established in 1983 under the Alberta Societies Act and launched its first publication in March 1983 – simply titled AMMSA. The name of this publication was later changed to Windspeaker in March 1986.
Jeannette Christine Armstrong is a Canadian author, educator, artist, and activist. She was born and grew up on the Penticton Indian reserve in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, and fluently speaks both the Syilx and English languages. Armstrong has lived on the Penticton Native Reserve for most of her life and has raised her two children there. In 2013, she was appointed Canada Research Chair in Okanagan Indigenous Knowledge and Philosophy.
Janice Acoose (1954–2020) was a Canadian author, newspaper columnist, filmmaker, indigenous language advocate, and professor of indigenous and English literature at First Nations University of Canada in Saskatchewan.
Maria Campbell is a Métis author, playwright, broadcaster, filmmaker, and Elder. Campbell is a fluent speaker of four languages: Cree, Michif, Western Ojibwa, and English. Four of her published works have been published in eight countries and translated into four other languages. Campbell has had great influence in her community as she is very politically involved in activism and social movements. Campbell is well known for being the author of Halfbreed, a memoir describing her own experiences as a Métis woman in society and the difficulties she has faced, which are commonly faced by many other women both within and outside of her community.
Olive Patricia Dickason (1920–2011) was a Métis historian and journalist. She was the first scholar in Canada to receive a PHD in Indigenous history. She is known for writing one of the first textbooks about First Nations in Canada, Canada's First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from the Earliest Times.
Karla Jessen Williamson is an assistant professor of educational foundations at the University of Saskatchewan. Formerly, she was the executive director of the Arctic Institute of North America (AINA), the first woman and first Inuk to hold the position. Fluent in Danish, English, and Greenlandic, she is an educator and researcher on cross-culturalism, multiculturalism, antiracism, and Aboriginal epistemology.
Delia Opekokew is a Cree lawyer and writer from the Canoe Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada. She was the first First Nations woman lawyer to be admitted to the bar association in Ontario and in Saskatchewan, as well as the first woman to run for the leadership of the Assembly of First Nations. Opekokew attended Beauval Indian Residential School and Lebret Indian Residential School. She has received awards for her achievements, including the Aboriginal Achievement Award, Women's Law Association of Ontario Presidents Award, Law Society of Ontario Medal, and Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Saskatoon freezing deaths involved Indigenous Canadians in and immediately outside Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in the 1990s and early 2000s, and are suspected of being linked to actions by the members of the Saskatoon Police Service. The police officers would arrest Indigenous people, who were usually male, for alleged drunkenness and/or disorderly behaviour, sometimes without cause. The officers would then drive them to the outskirts of the city at night in the winter, and abandon them, leaving them stranded in sub-zero temperatures.
Eekwol is a Canadian rapper and singer from the Muskoday First Nation in Saskatchewan.
Lori Blondeau is a Cree/Saulteaux/Métis artist working primarily in performance art, but also in installation and photography. Blondeau is a member of the Gordon First Nation, and is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Ruth Cuthand is a Canadian artist of Plains Cree and Scots ancestry. She is considered an influential feminist artist of the Canadian prairies, and is lauded for her interpretation of racism and colonialism. Her work challenges mainstream perspectives on colonialism and the relationships between settlers and Indigenous people in a practice marked by political invective, humour, and a deliberate crudeness of style.
Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Institute (CILLDI) - an intensive annual "summer school for Indigenous language activists, speakers, linguists, and teachers" - hosted at the University of Alberta, Edmonton - is a "multicultural, cross-linguistic, interdisciplinary, inter-regional, inter-generational" initiative. CILLDI was established in 1999 with one Cree language course offered by Cree speaker Donna Paskemin. By 2016 over 600 CILLDI students representing nearly 30 Canadian Indigenous languages had participated in the program and it had become the "most national of similar language revitalization programs in Canada aimed at the promotion of First Peoples languages." CILLDI - a joint venture between the University of Alberta and the University of Saskatchewan - responds to "different sociolinguistic situations in language communities under threat" and includes three faculties at the University of Alberta in Edmonton - Arts, Education, and Native Studies. CILLDI provides practical training to students which is "directly implemented back in the community." Initiatives like CILLDI were formed against the backdrop of a projection of a catastrophic and rapid decline of languages in the twenty-first century.
Verna Jane Kirkness, is a Cree scholar, pioneer and lifelong proponent of indigenous language, culture and education who has been influential in Canadian indigenous education policy and practice. She is an associate professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia and resides in Winnipeg. Kirkness has received numerous awards for her outstanding contributions spanning five decades including the Order of Canada in 1998. Kirkness had an important impact on Canadian indigenous education policy and practice. She is the author of "numerous books and articles on the history of Indigenous education." The University of Manitoba's Verna J. Kirkness Science and Engineering Education Program was established in 2009 and in November 2013 a native studies colloquium honoured her as a national leader in education.
Marion Ironquill Meadmore is an Ojibwa-Cree Canadian activist and lawyer. Meadmore was the first woman of the First Nations to attain a law degree in Canada. She founded the first Indian and Métis Friendship Centre in Canada to assist Indigenous people who had relocated to urban areas with adjustments to their new communities. She edited the native newspaper The Prairie Call, bringing cultural events as well as socio-economic challenges into discussion for native communities. She was the only woman on the Temporary Committee of the National Indian Council, which would later become the Assembly of First Nations, and would become the secretary-treasurer of the organization when it was formalized. She was one of the women involved in the launch of the Kinew Housing project, to bring affordable, safe housing to indigenous urban dwellers and a founder of the Indigenous Bar Association of Canada. She has received the Order of Canada as well as many other honors for her activism on behalf of indigenous people. She was a founder and currently serves on the National Indigenous Council of Elders.
Kenneth T. Williams is a Cree playwright. He is from the Gordon First Nation, Saskatchewan in what is known as Treaty 4 territory. However, from the age of 12 through his early adulthood he lived off-reserve in Edmonton. Williams completed a B. A. and then became the first Indigenous person to earn an M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Alberta in 1992. Since 2017, Williams has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta.
The Wolf Award is an accolade conferred by a non-profit organization known as The Wolf Project to individuals, organizations, and communities in recognition of their efforts to reduce racial intolerance and to improve peace and understanding. The Wolf Award, which has also come to be known as the International Wolf Award, consists of a certificate of appreciation and a sculpture of a howling wolf, presented in ceremonial fashion to the recipient.
Tasha Hubbard is a Canadian First Nations/Cree filmmaker and educator based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Hubbard's credits include three National Film Board of Canada documentaries exploring Indigenous rights in Canada: Two Worlds Colliding, a 2004 Canada Award-winning short film about the Saskatoon freezing deaths, Birth of a Family, a 2017 feature-length documentary about four siblings separated during Canada's Sixties Scoop, and nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up, a 2019 Hot Docs and DOXA Documentary award-winning documentary which examines the death of Colten Boushie, a young Cree man, and the subsequent trial and acquittal of the man who shot him.
Emma LaRocque is a Canadian academic of Cree and Métis descent. She is currently a professor of Native American studies at the University of Manitoba.
Marie Smallface Marule was a Canadian academic administrator, activist, and educator. She served as executive director of the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB), chief administrator of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP), and secretary of the Indian Association of Alberta. Marule was president of Red Crow Community College for two decades, and led the creation of several indigenous studies programs. She was previously an assistant professor of Native American studies at the University of Lethbridge.
Police brutality is an instance or pattern of excessive and unwarranted force used against an individual or group of people. The Indigenous peoples of Canada include, as designated by the Canadian government, Inuit, Metis, and First Nations individuals and are officially considered Aboriginal peoples. Indigenous Canadians have experienced strenuous relationships with police as a result of colonization and lasting tensions. Since the early 2000s, several instances of police brutality against Indigenous Canadians have prompted media attention.