The Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies and the Centre for Feminist Research present a free public lecture by the renowned poet, author and scholar Emma LaRocque, titled From Resistance to “Reconciliation”: Ruminations on Decolonization from a Feminist Métis Academic.
LaRocque will deliver her remarks as part of the Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies Annual Lecture. The talk will take place on Oct. 5, from 2:30 to 4:30pm in 519 Kaneff Tower, Keele campus.
Welcoming and opening remarks by Professor Ruth Koleszar-Green, the chair of the Indigenous Council at York University.
The current trend to conflate “reconciliation” as decolonization threatens to obscure and obstruct Indigenous decolonization efforts. In particular, race and gender power imbalances continue to figure large in our society. In her lecture, LaRocque questions how can we resist colonizing forces under the pressure of reconciliation? And can feminist analysis (and allies) assist in shattering colonial lenses and in the rebuilding of Indigenous cultures and presence?
LaRocque is a scholar, author, poet and professor in the Department of Native Studies, University of Manitoba, and one of the most recognized and respected Native Studies scholars today. LaRocque is originally from a Cree-speaking and land-based Métis family and community from northeastern Alberta.
She has been a significant figure in the growth and development of Native Studies as a teaching discipline and an intellectual field of study. She has developed most of the core undergraduate courses and contributed to the development of graduate studies in the Native Studies Department at the University of Manitoba, where she has been teaching since 1977.
LaRocque’s work has focused on the deconstruction of colonial misrepresentation and on the advancement of an Indigenous-based critical resistance theory in scholarship. Her prolific career includes numerous publications in areas of colonization/decolonization, racism, violence against women, and First Nation and Métis literatures and identities. Her poems are widely anthologized in prestigious collections and journals. She is frequently cited in a wide variety of venues and has lectured locally, nationally and internationally on Indigenous/Re-settler, or colonizer/colonized relations.
In 2005, LaRocque received the National Aboriginal Achievement Award. She is author of Defeathering The Indian (1975) and of When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse 1850 – 1990 (2010), which won the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction.
This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for Aboriginal Student Services, tje Faculty of Education, Department of Equity Studies, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode, Department of Politics, Social and Political Thought, Department of Social Science, Department of Social Justice Education at OISE, Chair for Indigenous Governance, Ryerson University.
Organizers request that if you interested in attending this free public lecture that you submit an RSVP via email to juliapyr@yorku.ca.