CANOE Approach Workshop for Community-Engaged Research with Indigenous Communities

Kimberly R. Huyser is an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. She is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and grew up on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, USA. The central intellectual motivation driving her research agenda is to gain a deeper understanding of the social conditions that undermine health, as well as to identify the cultural and social resources leveraged by racial and ethnic groups in order to further their individual and collective health and well-being.

Derek K Thompson – Čaabať Bookwilla | Suhiltun is from the diitiidʔaaʔtx̣ – Ditidaht First Nation, one of fourteen Nuuchahnulth communities along the west coast of Vancouver Island. 

Derek is the Director, Indigenous Engagement for the UBC Faculty of Medicine, and he brings over 30 years of experience working with First Nations organizations and communities across the province and country to achieve wellness through health and related services. 

His mission is to foster trust and mutual respect amongst students, staff and faculty in an effort to create an understanding of the commitments made by the Faculty of Medicine to strengthen the relationship with Indigenous peoples and communities. 

Daniel Gallardo is a nonbinary Mestizx from Mexico and a UBC Public Scholar. They are Nahua and P’urhépecha on their father’s side of the family, and on their mother’s, they are of settler ancestry, Andalusian-Berber and French. Daniel is a doctoral student with the Department of Educational Studies whose research involves the ideological leverage of settler-colonialism and its impacts on sexuality and gender in education. For the past fifteen years, Daniel has worked in educational leadership and curriculum with a passion and commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion. Their research focus contributes to the emerging field of Indigenous informed sexual orientation and gender identity scholarship as it proposes to interrogate and dismantle patriarchal and colonial assumptions of heterosexism and gender binaries performed within the normative culture and context of North America. Daniel collaborates with community organizations to develop, test and inform curricular practices that positively affect the well-being of those who regularly experience gender-based violence.