Decolonizing & Indigenizing
Standing Committee
Adele ᒪᐢᑿᓱᐤᐃᐢᑵᐤ Arseneau
Knowledge Keeper
Adele ᒪᐢᑿᓱᐤᐏᐢᑵᐤ Arseneau is a disabled multidisciplinary artist whose practice honors her Nehiyaw (Cree) and Michif (Métis) heritage through a powerful blend of storytelling, traditional craftsmanship, and contemporary innovation. A disabled artist with over 40 years of lived cultural experience, she is a recognized knowledge keeper and Elder in Training, committed to cultural preservation and ethical reconnection.[...]
Her work has been exhibited in galleries from North Vancouver to Toronto, with notable public art commissions for the City of Vancouver. Each piece she creates embodies her commitment to weaving connections between cultural heritage, environmental consciousness, and social issues.
Celeste Smith
Knowledge Keeper
Indigenous Traditional Knowledge Holder, Seed Keeper, Founder/Director, and Teacher/Advocate
Celeste Smith is Oneida from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. Celeste is a seed steward, traditional agriculturalist and former instructor of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) at Niagara College. She is the Founder/Director of Cultural Seeds, an Indigenous seed store/rematriation project and Ga Gitigemi Gamik an agroecological center on a permanent Indigenous stewarded site, where women and 2SLGBTTQQIA+ persons can (RE)learn ancestral agricultural methods lost to colonization.
.jpg)
Jaimy Fischer
Co-Chair
Jaimy Fischer (Ph.D.) has training in GIScience, healthy cities, urban transportation and mobility, and community-engaged research. Within all these areas, she works to centre principles of equity and inclusion. As a Michif (Red River Métis) person and researcher, Jaimy has a strong passion for social justice and equitable mobility, and for decolonizing and Indigenizing practices within institutions and disciplines such as planning, education, and GIScience. Jaimy has extensive experience conducting and teaching GIS & sociospatial equity analyses, particularly in the context of urban planning and intervention research. Their PhD research investigated equity in spatial data and interventions aimed at supporting bicycling for transport, and current research focuses on transport reconciliation, equity in spatial accessibility to daily needs, and urban trails as pathways for Indigenous health and inclusion.
Dr. Sarah Rotz
Co-Chair
Dr. Sarah Rotz is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. She is a white settler scholar learning how to live and work in right relations with others and the land. Her research focuses on land and food systems and situates political economic processes, such as agri-food industrialization and financialization, within a lens of settler colonial patriarchy and racial capitalism. Through her scholarship and community organizing, she also examines the consequences of land and capital accumulation for sovereignty, justice and resistance movements. She is a community engaged scholar whose interdisciplinary and collaborative work is seeking to build care and justice-oriented research methodologies, processes, and pedagogies.
Susan Elliott
Ex-Officio Member
Susan Elliott is a health geographer and University Research Chair in Health Geography at the University of Waterloo, Department of Geography and Environmental Management. She has an active research career, with 250+ publications related to global environment and (public) health. She has also supervised 50+ graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to completion. Elliott has undertaken a range of leadership roles including Director of the Institute of Environment and Health (McMaster), Senior Research Fellow in the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, Dean of Social Sciences (McMaster University) and Dean of Health Sciences (University of Waterloo). She sits on several boards including the Canadian Association for Global Health as well as CARTS (the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa). She is the founder and Co-editor in Chief of Wellbeing, Space & Society, as well as the Editor in Chief and medical geography editor for Social Science and Medicine. She has a commitment to impactful research in the area of global public health, and her research is characterized by strong science-policy bridging. See her lab website for more information.
Aishah Cader
Aishah Cader is a public policy professional with experience in urban planning and health policy. She works at the City of Toronto, most recently on regulating ride hailing services and short-term rental activity. She holds a Master of Public Health from Queen's University and is passionate about making cities successful and livable. In her spare time, she enjoys exploring urban parks, kayaking and birdwatching.
Heather Castleden
Dr Heather Castleden (she/her) is a Professor and the President’s Impact Chair in Transformative Governance for Planetary Health at the University of Victoria. She is a white settler scholar, trained as a human geographer, and has been doing community-based participatory research in solidarity with Indigenous Peoples for over two decades. She is a former Canada Research Chair, Fulbright Scholar, and is now an elected member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. Heather is the co-director of the Archipelagos of Indigenous-led Resurgence for Planetary Health research program, scientific director of the HEC Lab, and co-host of the Indigenous Planetary Health podcast.
Lea Denieul Pinsky
Lea Denieul Pinsky works with Kanien'kehá:ka Land Defenders to make maps for various projects including but not limited to land dispossession, illegal waste dumping and locating unmarked graves of children having attended religious institutions in Quebec. She is particularly interested in repatriating state-sanctioned colonial materials and repurposing them as “counter-archives” to support Indigenous led investigations into State crimes. After having completed her Ph.D at Concordia University in the Geography Department, she now works at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientique (INRS) as a postdoc.
Jenna Dixon
Bio coming soon...
Dr. Emmanuel Kofi Ackom
Dr. Emmanuel Ackom’s work intersects energy transitions, bioenergy, climate action and urbanism with a special interest in marginalized societies. He integrates academic scholarship with 11 years of international practitioner experience from the United Nations (UN) - where he was a Senior Scientist - to promote sustainable communities. He critically examines sustainability challenges and develops solutions that are distributive and fair. He believes in a concerted decolonization and indigenization effort that listens to and is guided by our Indigenous relatives. The CAG D&I Committee seems to hold great promise in this direction. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Hosea Patrick
Dr. Hosea Patrick is a transdisciplinary researcher and postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Geography, Geomatics, and Environment, University of Toronto, Mississauga. Hosea has a Ph.D. in Political Science with a specialization in environmental politics from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. His research focuses centrally on the United Nations' sustainable development goals application and implications in the areas of climate change (SDG 13), human security-water and food (SDG 2 and 6), as well as social and environmental justice (SDG 16). He also works on public policy, decolonization, and academic exclusion research areas.
Dr. Deondre Smiles
Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) is an adjunct professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Society (IRES) at the University of British Columbia. Their research centres on Indigenous cultural and political responses to anthropogenic climate & environmental change, with a particular focus on 'everyday' forms of resistance and resurgence. Dr. Smiles is the co-chair of the CAG's Indigenous Peoples' Working Group and the Indigenous Peoples' Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). They live in Songhees and Esquimalt territories, now known as Victoria, BC.
Contact Us
Canadian Association of Geographers
Email
info@cag-acg.ca
Address
PO Box 25039
Welland RPO Rose City, ON L3B 6G9