Treatied Spaces Awarded Leverhulme Visiting Professorship for Canada Research Chair Damien Lee
Feb 29, 2024
Summary The Treatied Spaces Research Group welcomes Canada Research Chair Damien Lee as a Leverhulme Visiting Research Professor for 10 months from June 2024. A member of the Fort William First Nation and citizen of the Anishinaabe nation, Professor Lee is a global expert on Indigenous political and legal orders. Whilst with TSRG, he will be completing his next book "Wiitkamaganak: Adoption and the Resurgence of Anishinaable Citizenship Law" (UoT Press) and developing joint plans for a yet larger project, "A First Indigenous History of North American Adoption" that reconceptualises North American history using the lens of Indigenous and settler-Indigenous adoption. Linked Funders The Leverhulme Trust People Joy Porter Org Units History Projects Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship - Damien Lee Research Centres/Groups Treatied Spaces
News (5)
Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War UK Nomination for Canada's Pierre Savard Award
Dec 12, 2023
Summary Pierre Savard Awards
Pierre Savard (1936-1998), well-known historian, Professor and Canadianist, contributed greatly to the development of Canadian Studies. He was President of the ICCS from 1983 to 1985.
1) Book written in French or English
Application Rules
Eligibility Requirements
2) Book written in a language other than French or English
Application Rules
Eligibility Requirements
Deadline and Contact Person
The Pierre Savard Awards are designed to recognize and promote outstanding scholarly monographs on a Canadian topic. The awards form part of a strategy that is aimed at promoting, especially throughout the Canadian academic community, works that have been written by members of the Canadian Studies international network. The awards are intended to designate exceptional books that contribute to excellent scholarship in Canadian Studies and may be given only once to the same person. There are two categories:
1) Book written in French or English;
2) Book written in a language other than French or English.Linked Funders 00 University of Hull People Joy Porter Outputs Post-Traumatic Futures: Ecology and Technological Change Org Units History Projects What Would Nixon Do?:The Forgotten Republican Roots of American Environmentalism’ Research Centres/Groups Treatied Spaces URL https://iccs-ciec.ca/pierre-savard-awards/
Fulbright Feature
Feb 12, 2021
Summary Fulbright US/UK Commission Author Interview
"Prewett somehow captures something very now- he survives being buried alive, lives through a global pandemic, experiences a homosexual demi-world few of us are familiar with and cons the Bloomsbury set, a literary elite who deserved it on so many levels!"
Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War (Bloomsbury, 2021) examines the extraordinary life of Frank “Toronto” Prewett and the history of trauma, literary expression, and the power of self-representation after WWI. Joy Porter sheds new light on how the First World War affected the Canadian poet, and how war-induced trauma or “shell-shock” caused him to pretend to be an indigenous North American. We caught up with the author in this Snapshot to discuss the book and her broader scholarship.Linked Funders AHRC Arts & Humanities Research Council People Joy Porter Org Units Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education Projects Brightening the Covenant Chain: Revealing Cultures of Diplomacy Between the Crown and the Iroquois Research Centres/Groups Treatied Spaces URL https://fulbrighternetwork.com/news/393117
British Acdemy Global Professor to Work With Treatied Spaces Over 4 Years
Oct 1, 2019
Summary 9
Gregory Smithers, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of History in the College of Humanities and Sciences, is one of 10 scholars from around the world selected for a prestigious four-year professorship in England.
As part of his professorship, Smithers will undertake a research project exploring how threats to our well-being posed by climate change can be addressed by drawing on Indigenous knowledge rooted in the deep past.
The British Academy awarded Smithers one of its 2019 Global Professorships, a program that aims to demonstrate and enhance the U.K.’s commitment to international research partnerships and collaboration, as well as strengthen its research capacity and capability in the humanities and the social sciences.
Gregory Smithers, Ph.D.
Gregory Smithers, Ph.D. (Contributed photo).
“I was shocked! This was only the second year of the British Academy’s Global Professorship program,” Smithers said. “When I was preparing my application, I looked over the winners in 2018 and was in awe of the breadth of accomplishments of the first cohort of scholars to win one of these four-year awards. To now be in that company still feels surreal.”
Beginning in 2020, Smithers will be hosted at the University of Hull, a public research university in Kingston upon Hull, a city in East Yorkshire, England. Smithers also will work closely with colleagues from around the world who are associated with the Treatied Spaces research cluster at Hull.
Smithers’ research and writing focus on the histories of Indigenous people and African Americans from the 18th century to the present. He is the author of a number of books, including most recently “Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).
During the professorship, Smithers is planning to spend time in archives and speaking with Indigenous people in the United States and Australia for his research project on climate change and Indigenous knowledge.
“Indigenous people throughout North America and the southwest Pacific have a long history of observing climate change and renewing their social and cultural structures to successfully respond to changes in climate,” Smithers said. “This reality runs through the archival sources I’ve consulted throughout my career.”
The topic of climate change has continued to be present in conversations Smithers has had with Indigenous people in recent years, he said. He felt drawn to the project given the current climate crisis, and because scientists, until very recently, have ignored Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) as irrelevant to 21st-century concerns, he said.
“That struck me as intellectually arrogant and just plain foolish. The 21st-century climate crisis is multidimensional and it’s going to involve diverse and innovative responses,” he said. “Given [that] Indigenous people in North America and Australia have been paying very close attention to climate and local ecosystems — and, I should add, doing science — for many thousands of years, it seemed to me the time had come for us to listen to tribal elders and draw the threads of Indigenous ecological knowledge systems into the global discussions about climate change. I’m hoping that my research will make a small contribution to these larger conversations.”
The cover of Gregory Smithers' 2019 book, "Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal.”
Smithers' 2019 book, "Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal.” (University of Oklahoma Press).
Smithers’ research for the project focuses on mountain ecosystems and the rivers in those critically important, but fragile, locations. He is developing cases studies on the Cherokee in the U.S. Appalachians, and the Ngarigo and Walgal people of the Great Dividing Range in Australia.
“The goal in focusing on these particular case studies is to draw our attention to the ways in which broader fluctuations in long-term climate patterns impacted — and continue to impact — these critically important local ecologies and the people who’ve managed them for over a millennia,” he said. “By presenting deep histories of these regions, my goal is to produce research that is of value to the tribal people I’m collaborating with and contributes original solutions to the larger climate crisis we now confront.”
Using settler and indigenous sources, Smithers plans to map a “genealogy” of indigenous ecologies in order to construct the first deep history of a set of Indigenous responses to fluctuations in climate.
“By ‘genealogy’ I mean the store of knowledge that Cherokee, Ngarigo and Walgal people have nurtured over extended periods of time that both pre- and post-dates European colonial invasions after the 16th century,” he said. “Some of this knowledge is protected, and we have to respect that. The history of, for example, pharmaceutical corporations stealing and profiting from TEK is well known. So, in doing research that involves both archival and oral histories, in mapping long-range ecological knowledge that’s responsive to different types of environmental changes and challenges, you have to be willing to engage in genuine partnership with Indigenous communities.”
Smithers’ interest in studying climate change and Indigenous knowledge goes back to previous research for his book “The Cherokee Diaspora,” in which he noticed the importance of rivers, watershed and mountain ecosystems in Cherokee culture.
“The historical, cultural and spiritual importance of mountains and rivers in Cherokee culture became so obvious that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen just how integral these facets of regional history were (and are),” he said. “I then went back to my research from much earlier work in Australia and noticed the same thing. I remember thinking, ‘Why haven’t I seen this before?’”
It reminded him, he said, that historians have too often focused on questions about settler colonialism and land, too often missing what is important to Indigenous communities.
“Land matters, of course, but the land Indigenous people nurture is part of a much more holistic worldview,” he said. “In other words, historians had been only telling small pieces of the historical story, something that made our work of marginal value to Indigenous communities. That felt wrong to me. It’s an object lesson in the importance of being led by, and listening to, tribal communities.”Linked Funders British Academy People Joy Porter Projects BA Global Professorship - Professor Gregory Smithers (Virginia Commonwealth University ) Research Centres/Groups Treatied Spaces URL https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/british-academy-appoints-ten-new-global-professors-universities-across-uk