This two-year project will apply an Indigenous feminist theory/methodology to the Boas-Hunt archival collections, seeking to reconnect Kwakwaka’wakw women, girls and gender diverse people with the knowledge and material culture of their ancestors. Led by a great-great-granddaughter of Tlingit anthropologist George Hunt and Kwakwaka’wakw matriarch Lucy Homiskanis, this project seeks to: 1) create new theories and methods for engaging gender diverse knowledge and cultural materials within the Boas-Hunt collections; 2) reconnect Kwakwaka’wakw women, girls and gender diverse people with their ancestral wealth, including socio-legal, cultural and land-based knowledges which form the basis of Indigenous governance, and; 3) open up new areas of inquiry in the study of cultural and historical heritage through centering the perspectives of Indigenous women, girls and gender diverse people. The aim is not to limit inquiry within the archive, but rather to find new ways of bringing gender diverse knowledge back into relation with the people, lands, ancestors and cosmologies where it originates. In this way, the project is concerned with recuperating the fractured material and ideological basis of Indigenous self-determination.

This project synthesizes research which advances a gendered analysis of Canadian archives, highlighting the important role these institutions play in shaping dominant narratives about Canadian history, society, culture and futurity. Utilizing Indigenous research, this project will also synthesize the ways that Indigenous communities are creating space in which to center and celebrate underrepresented voices of women, Two-Spirit, Trans and gender-diverse people in community archives which recuperate hidden or lost histories and allow their traditions and cultures to resurge into the future. Our research team brings together a broad base of scholarship on the gendered dimensions of Canadian, provincial and other colonial archives, alongside community knowledge gleaned from Indigenous and Queer, Two-Spirit, and Trans archives, highlighting a) the practices through which colonial narratives have omitted women, Trans, Two-Spirit and gender diverse histories and b) how Indigenous archives are applying culturally appropriate gendered lenses within institutions being built to house repatriated and restored cultural materials and histories. 

This community-based and community-led partnership with Nak'azdli Whut'en in Northeastern B.C. seeks to understand the complex interrelationships between land, water, and health critical to the future well-being of Indigenous women, gender diverse people and communities. This project aims to revitalize relationships with culturally important places via a series of workshops in which land- and water-based practices are used to share knowledge intergenerationally, with a focus on women, girls and gender diverse people. Through the creation of a community toolkit, this initiative will advance the state of knowledge about the relationship between healing bodies and healing lands, and the role of land-based cultural practices in preventing gender-based violence.