Ci aaniko wiitamaakeyak kaa kiitaawew kaye kihkentamaawin awenenowiyak
Sharing with others, wisdom and knowledge, about who we are
The JHI is excited to announce our 2025-26 Distinguished Visiting Indigenous Faculty Fellow—Gina Starblanket. Gina will be a member of the Circle of Fellows during our Dystopia and Trust theme year.
Gina Starblanket is associate professor in the School of Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria and is co-editor of the journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAIS). She is Cree/Saulteaux and a member of the Star Blanket Cree Nation in Treaty 4. Dr. Starblanket studies Indigenous–settler political relations with a specific focus on Indigenous politics in the prairies, the politics of treaty implementation and the politics of gender and feminism. Professor Starblanket is the author of important sole and co-authored interventions theorizing relational responsibilities to one another and to the land, including the 3rd edition of Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (Fernwood Press, 2024), Storying Violence: Unravelling Colonial Narratives in the Stanley Trial (ARP, 2020) and the fifth and sixth edition of Visions of the Heart: Issues Involving Indigenous Peoples in Canada (OUP, 2019 and 2025).
Fellowship Project
Treaty: Utopic Rhetoric, Dystopic Practice
Indigenous traditions of relationality such as treaty-making can represent significant and inspiring models of non-domination and mutuality, often engaged as ideals for relationship in contexts of settler colonialism. Yet the substance of contemporary engagements varies widely, as some risk betrayal of the spirit and intent of treaty through the reproduction of colonial, capitalist, racialized, and/or heteronormative logics and structures. My work offers a critical, intersectional engagement into the violence occasioned by hollow articulations of treaty, demonstrating how they can function to reproduce, conceal, or justify violent, hierarchical, and extractive forms of relation both within and outside of Indigenous contexts. Further, it is concerned with the possibilities for relationship that present orientations to treaty either foreclose or enable for future generations.
About this Fellowship
The Distinguished Visiting Indigenous Faculty Fellowship was inaugurated in 2016-2017, with the intention to bring a senior Indigenous scholar into the Circle of Fellows to do research relevant to the year’s theme. The name of this fellowship is transliterated above in Cree syllabics. Professor Harris' predecessors include Sherry Farrell Racette, Tracey Lindberg, Alex Wilson, Heidi Stark, Max Liboiron, Dale Turner, Glen Coulthard and Aroha Harris.