Asian Indigenous Relations

Marc (he/him) is a fourth-year undergraduate at Simon Fraser University, majoring in Marketing at the Beedie School of Business and minoring in Interactive Arts & Technology (SIAT) for design. Marc’s studies and work center on leveraging creative and digital marketing strategies to convey positive messaging and build community through social media, design and branding. His designs aim to make information accessible, drive community and create meaningful connections. Marc is passionate about crafting design solutions that resonate with audiences and foster meaningful engagement.

Cynthia (崔心桐, she/her) is a Chinese-Canadian curator and designer working to reflect the intricacies of marginalized physical experiences in our digital world. Her thesis work focuses on the exploration of Chinese Indigenous relationalities within the history of Vancouver’s fishing industry through a critical reframing of the Iron Chink and The Water We Call Home, an exhibition currently on display at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site. As a product designer, Cynthia aims to refine, polish, engineer, and successfully launch great products that make people’s lives easier. As a curator, Cynthia aims to create spaces where marginalized communities can tell their own stories and truths.

Geri (she/her) is a master’s student in sociology at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests surround the survivance of Indigenous women in Canada, street-based/survival sex work in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and British-Indigenous historical relations in British Columbia. Her forthcoming thesis explores the short- and long-term socioeconomic impacts of Not Safe For Work content creation on OnlyFans during COVID-19, between 2020 and 2021. This project seeks to understand how whore stigma and misogyny unevenly operate along gendered, classed, abled, and raced lines to produce lasting impacts on individuals on- and offline.

Ryan Buyco is a travel writer and an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California. He holds graduate degrees from Cornell University (PhD in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture) and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (MA in Asian Studies). Ryan’s work focuses on travel writing as a decolonial practice, especially as it is informed by Filipinx engagements with settler colonialism and Indigeneity in the Pacific. His current project, Island Under the Sun: Filipino American Detours in Okinawa, blends modern travelogue with a reflection of Asian settler colonial critique in what is often referred to as “Japan’s Hawai‘i.” In this book, Ryan guides readers through his own detours across the militarized and touristic space of Okinawa to consider how legacies of US empire and Japanese imperialism shapes the relationship that Filipinos have to this place.

Dr. Ashley Caranto Morford (she/her) is a diasporic Filipina-British settler scholar and educator whose interdisciplinary work is accountable to and in relationship with Filipinx/a/o studies, Indigenous studies, critical race studies, anti-colonial methods and praxis, literary studies, digital media and communication studies, and digital humanities. She is an Assistant Professor of Multiethnic American Literatures in the Department of English Language and Literature at Weber State University. Caranto Morford’s current research asks how literature by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) writers can help settler Filipinx/a/os understand how to be better and more accountable kin and relations to Black and Indigenous communities in colonially called North America. Her forthcoming book project, Settler Filipino Kinship Care: Confronting Colonial Canada and Honoring Indigenous Life, takes up and addresses the question: How can Filipinx/a/os in Canada be better kin and better relations to Indigenous lands and life?

Cheyanne Brown Armstrong (née Connell) (she/xe/they) is a Queer Indigenous scholar and member of West Moberly First Nations (Dunne-Za Cree). They are a Doctoral Student in Socio-Cultural and Indigenous Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC), UBC Public Scholar, and Canada Graduate Scholarship recipient. Currently, their research focuses on their own communities’ processes of Dunne-Za language reclamation and how Indigenous feminism intersects with these processors and history of Dunne-Za language culture and use. Their PhD project is inspired by their MA project, which focused on urban and diasporic Indigenous Ainu identity-making in transnational digital spaces, like Instagram and TikTok. They are a frequent collaborator on and advocate for Indigenous-Asian relations related projects and initiatives.

Gage Karahkwí:io Diabo (they/them) is a Mohawk scholar from Kahnawake, recently hired at Concordia as an Assistant Professor with a cross-appointment in English and First Peoples Studies. Their research concerns the entanglement of land, oral tradition, and political philosophy in Indigenous literature, especially that of the Mohawk nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Their essays on Beth Brant, Waubgeshig Rice, Tom Porter, Lee Maracle, and Robert Alexie have been published in Canadian Literature, Studies in American Indian Literature, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and The Capilano Review. They graduated with a PhD in English Literature from the University of British Columbia in 2023 and recently held the Horizon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Concordia.

Candace Fujikane is a Japanese settler on Kanaka Maoli lands. She is an English professor at the University of Hawaiʻi. In 2000, she co-edited with Jonathan Okamura a special issue of Amerasia Journal on Asian settler colonialism. That issue was expanded into Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008). Her book, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi (Duke UP, 2021) argues that if capitalist economies of scarcity fear abundance, then settlers can help to make Indigenous economies of abundance the foundation for living a future beyond settler capitalism. She is currently working on her new book, Elemental Cartographies for a Changing Earth. She has given her breath in testimony, labor, and chant to protect and restore the lands and waters of Hawaiʻi.

Michael Hathaway is a professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University  in Vancouver, Canada. His work has primarily focused on the Pacific Rim, from earlier studies on how global environmentalism works out in Southwest China (Environmental Winds) to more recent work on how one of the world’s most valuable mushrooms not only shapes regional economies but carries out their own world making activities (What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds they Make). A long-term collaborative team player, Michael works to challenge forms of Eurocentrism and explore the diversity of Indigenous life projects across the Pacific Ocean.

Em He (they/he) is a community organizer and activist based in unceded Coast Salish lands. They began their organizing journey building intergenerational community and fighting for social housing in Vancouver’s Chinatown. They spent the last 7 years organizing with New York Chinatown’s working-class immigrant community to fight against real estate and for dignified housing for all. They believe in a world where racial capitalism and imperialism falls and where land is treated as the sacred life-giving home we create together.

Jade Ho

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Yi Chien Jade Ho 何宜謙 (she/they) is an immigrant settler on the Unceded Territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) peoples. They are currently a Post-doctoral Fellow at the School of Public Health and Social Policy at University of Victoria, BC, working with Dr. Jeff Masuda, Dr. Daniela Aiello, and Nisga’a Elder Rhonda Stephens and her team to build a community-centered Indigenous public health response and help advance tenant organizing. This includes supporting cross-racial tenant organizing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Chinatown in combatting housing exploitation, racism, and colonial policing and neglect. Jade has also been a labour and housing organizer for the past decade. Her experinece as an organizer highly informs her scholarly work. Jade’s doctoral work, entitled Radical Pedagogy of Place: A Decolonial Feminist Narrative Exploration of Returning, Organizing and Resisting centers on developing a radical pedagogy of place through the lens of decolonization in cross-cultural contexts and the connection between place, land and identity in marginalized communities in Taiwan and in Vancouver.

Rishma Johal (she/her) is a PhD Candidate at McGill University. Her research examines intersections as well as dissension among early South Asian Migrants and Indigenous communities of the Pacific Northwest between 1857 and 1947. Last year, she conducted her research work across Washington, Oregon, and California as a Fulbright Visiting Researcher. Rishma also completed her Masters in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Before returning to academia, she worked as a reporter for a major South Asian network covering a variety of social, cultural, and political events daily. Additionally, Rishma completed a Visual Arts Certificate and conducted a photo and video project aimed at shedding light on the plight of temporary foreign workers in the Okanagan Valley. She has published several articles and worked as a freelance writer for a few popular publications as well. Furthermore, Rishma has been actively involved within the McGill community serving in distinct leadership positions and continues to contribute to the diverse communities she has become a part of over the past few years.

Guntas Kaur is a Punjabi-Sikh community-based researcher and PhD student in Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her academic research broadly explores the possibilities of Indigenous-Sikh solidarities through historical anti-colonial linkages and contemporary intercultural connections. Her doctoral work, in particular, is centered in exploring the future of the Punjabi language in the Canadian diaspora and the interconnectedness between the preservation of the Punjabi language outside of Punjab and the revitalization and reclamation of Indigenous languages in settler Canada. Guntas also currently works as a Policy Analyst at Indigenous Services Canada.

Jane Komori is a Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Labor, Migration, and Racial Capitalism in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on race, labor, and ecology. Jane’s current book project investigates the labor history and self-organization of Asian immigrant and Indigenous workers in Western Canada’s primary resource industries from the 1850s to the mid-twentieth century. The book theorizes the way that racial forms, specifically the racialization of labor, are produced at the intersection of settler colonialism, resource extraction, and resultant environmental change.

Félix Landry Yuan is an artist and scholar whose work straddles the interface of culture and nature, and their fluid interdependence across space and time. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at UBC and as part of the CHANS Lab. His current research explores how elders navigate their relationships with nature and connections with ancestors in their preferred deathcare/burial practices. This work focuses on Vancouver’s historically impactful, multigenerational Asian settler communities (Punjabi, Chinese, and Japanese), and how these views on death, nature and ancestry change with migration, and throughout the following generations. 

Sarah Law 婉雯 (she/her) is a sociology master’s student at Simon Fraser University, the director of community engagement at Doing STS, and a climate justice organizer. She studies how we make sense of living with crisis, subjects of uncertain futures, feelings of world ending, and climate grief.

Steff Huì Cí Ling 林惠慈 (b. 1991) is a cultural worker, labour researcher, and occasional critic and film programmer living as a guest on unceded territories. She is a PhD student at Simon Fraser University where she studies in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and works as a teaching and research assistant in Labour Studies and the School for Communications. Her research is concerned with worker subjectivities, working class knowledge systems, the political tradition of workers’ inquiries and its application in the cultural sector to unsettle labour’s role in the reproduction of private property. She is a member of the Teaching Support Staff Union and Asian Canadian Labour Alliance. You can read more about her and her activities here.

Sharon Luk was born and raised in the San Francisco bay area. Before pursuing an academic career, she worked mainly in fields of independent media and youth and community development, with training in domestic violence counseling and non-discursive techniques in abuse recovery. Prof. Luk is currently an associate professor and Tier II Canada Research Chair in Geographies of Racialization at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC. She is author of The Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity (University of California Press, 2018) and numerous articles. She is currently working on two book manuscripts: “The Other Ones: Syllabi to Nourish Radical Thinking” socializes some of the curriculum and discussions that have happened in her classrooms, and “Sea of Fire: An Abolitionist Inquiry into the Making of Nonviolence” recontextualizes dominant notions of nonviolence in relation to evolving meanings and movements of the global South.

As a 3rd generation Chinese Canadian, artist and community organizer, I love to explore, play and collaborate. I have organized & co-written over 50 music scores for documentaries. As co-founder/ Artistic Director of Festival Accès Asie. & co-founder of Green Chinatown Montreal, I am a cultural activist in heart, mind and spirit. I was born in Toronto, lived in Vancouver for 10 years, and have been living in Montreal for over 40 years. Inspired by the natural order & people, I believe there is order in chaos. I take chances in the magic of the moment.

My name is Kabir (he/him), and I am an international graduate student at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. I am an Indian citizen, and I have lived across various parts of India over the past 25 years, from North to South. Thanks to my mixed heritage, I am fluent in Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi and English. At the moment, my research primarily focuses on urban commons and the making of spaces for sports in Indian cities, with a particular focus on soccer. In so-called ‘Vancouver’, I have been active as an organizer with the Teaching Support Staff Union at SFU, as well as the Cleaning Worker Justice Coalition at SFU.

Vanessa Vigneswaramoorthy (she/her/ள்) is a second-generation Illankai Tamil settler writer, artist, and researcher living and working from Treaty 13 and 14 territories. She holds a BA in English with a minor in Creative Writing and an MA in Adult Education and Community Development, both from the University of Toronto. She is currently working on academic and creative projects exploring Tamil diasporic experience, (South) Asian-Indigenous relations, diasporic land-based practices, environmental justice, war-affected communities, and racialized queer safety. 

Rebecca is currently a candidate in the joint JD (Canadian Common Law) & JID (Indigenous Legal Orders) program at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria. In her Major Research Paper, she plans to focus on what Bidayuh adat (customary law) says about property and land, and specifically at how fruit trees act as a source of sovereignty for the Bidayuh. While at uVic, she works as a Research Assistant with Dr. Pooja Parmar, who is the Chair of Indigeneity in a Global Context. For the past 5 years or so, Rebecca has worked for the federal government in the departments of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Indigenous Services Canada. She has held multiple positions as a Parliamentary Affairs Officer, Policy Analyst and Assistant Negotiator.

Ayaka Yoshimizu 美水彩加 is a Japanese settler on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh, and Skwxwú7mesh peoples and an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. She teaches transpacific histories and cultures, Indigeneities in Asia and Asian diaspora, and embodied and decolonial methodologies. Her current research looks at various sites, objects, and practices that commemorate the deaths of Japanese sex workers involved in transnational and interracial sex trade in the late 19th century through early 20th century in the transpacific world. Through this research she also explores how to grieve the deaths of Japanese migrants/settlers that took place on stolen Indigenous Lands, and how to cultivate a translocal space to acknowledge other neglected losses in the past and present.

Dr Daozhi Xu is currently an ARC DECRA fellow in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature at Macquarie University. She completed her PhD at the University of Hong Kong where she is an adjunct Assistant Professor. Her current research explores the historical and ongoing relationships between Indigenous Australians and Chinese immigrants, particularly focusing on Chinese writings about Indigenous people and Country. She is the author of Indigenous Cultural Capital: Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature (2018). She has published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Australian Historical Studies, Journal of Australian Studies, Australian Aboriginal Studies, JASAL, Antipodes, etc. She is a member of the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures at Macquarie University, and a member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.