Come attend an Indigenous Speaker Event at Hart House over dinners!
Join Us
Hosted by the Hart House Student Social Justice Committee, this unique experience will feature food by Dashmaawaan Bemaadzinjin (They Feed the People), a local Indigenous catering business. Student will learn from three guest speakers about their journey and activist work in Indigenous Social Justice Issues concerning health equities, food insecurity, poverty and more. This is a great opportunity to get to know the core aspects of Canadian Indigenous Culture and Politics. After a panel discussion, students can chat and network with speakers while enjoying delicious Indigenous inspired food.
Speakers
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Kevin J White
Assistant Professor
Kevin is an Assistant Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion and Centre for Indigenous Studies at UofT with a Mohawk background (from Akwesasne, with family from Tonawanda Band of Seneca). His work focuses primarily on Haudenosaunee Creation and culture. The process and act of storytelling rouses his curiosity in not only decolonizing stories collected and archived but understanding the inherent generational knowledge and wisdom in those collections of stories. As a Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) scholar, his work, research, and curiosity are guided by community, cultural values, and a Haudenosaunee lens of analysis.
Kevin is currently working on his first book, Revisiting Hewitt’s Iroquois Cosmology Part I, in which he is working to adjust and lightly edit the original texts published in 1903.
Additionally, Kevin is working with the Six Nations Grand River community in the Deskaheh Project and Waugh Story Collection—two community-based projects. For his work with the Six Nations Grand River community, Kevin, and Dr. Susan Hill, were awarded a Jackman Humanities Institute Scholars-in-Residence award to transcribe letters involving Deskaheh’s attempts to address and seek membership for the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee in the League of Nations.
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Wendy Markoons Geniusz
Professor
Wendy is a professor at York University and an Indigenous woman of Cree and Métis decent. She was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but her Cree family comes from the Pas, a Reserve in Manitoba. To honour her Ojibwe namesake, Keewaydinoquay, Wendy was raised with Ojibwe language and culture. Before coming to York, she was Professor of Ojibwe Language at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where she taught for 14 years.
Since childhood, Wendy has worked on Ojibwe language and culture revitalization projects in Indigenous communities throughout the Great Lakes Region. All her publications and research focus on creating decolonisation tools for Indigenous language and culture revitalization. Wendy is the authoress of: Our Knowledge is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings, the editor of: Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do is Ask (by Mary Siisip Geniusz), and the authoress of the Ojibwe plant name glossary found in that text. She is the co-editor (with Brendan Fairbanks) of Chi-mewinzha: Ojibwe Stories from Leech Lake(by Dorothy Dora Whipple).
