Lecture: 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in MGH 251
Reception: 4:30 p.m. in MGH 206

Gathering at the Shoreline: Redefining Justice Through Coastal Praxis

This presentation will center on methodologies and theories for investigating the nature of justice for Indigenous people within conditions of settler colonialism. Through examples from Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-Chah-Nulth and Coast Salish territories, this talk reveals how collectively enacted cultural practices are being used to produce new knowledge about the nature of justice as expressed in relationships among the ocean, coastal lands, ancestors and kin. In particular, this research asks what we learn about coastal law when we think with the shoreline. Early findings from community-led research demonstrate how justice is being redefined via place-based philosophies of law which position the agency of gender diverse coastal relations at the centre, thereby delinking justice from colonial paternalism. Justice for coastal people is shown to be deeply intertwined with justice for the ocean and life within it, as enacted through coastal practices such as clam digging, fishing, canoeing, and working with cedar.

Bio
Sarah Hunt (Tłaliłila’ogwa) is an assistant professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Sarah’s research is concerned with questions of justice, violence, gender and self-determination, as well as Indigenous methodologies, land/water-based praxis and the spatial nature of Indigenous and decolonial knowledges. She is interested in geographies of resistance and resurgence in intimate, everyday relations. Having worked for over a decade as a community-based researcher prior to entering the academy, her scholarship emerges within the community and activist networks that have fostered her analysis, particularly her collaborations with Indigenous youth, women, Two-Spirit and queer people. In 2014, she was awarded a Governor General’s Gold Medal for her doctoral dissertation, which investigated the relationship between law and violence in ongoing settler colonial relations, asking how violence gains visibility through Indigenous and Canadian socio-legal discourse and action. Her current research seeks to generate knowledge about justice via the collectively enacted and embodied cultural practices of coastal nations, thinking with and across shorelines of the body, house and land. Sarah is Kwagu’ł - one of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations of the Pacific Northwest Coast.