Indigenous-Settler Relations

SARAH MACKENZIE is a Professor at Sheridan College, where she teaches Indigenous Studies. In 2016, she completed her Phd in Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her forthcoming manuscript (Fernwood Publishers), entitled Indigenous Women’s Drama: A Mechanism of Decolonization, examines the ways Indigenous women playwrights address the colonialist legacy of violence against women as it continues to play out in contemporary North American contexts. Broadly, her writing considers the way in which people come to define themselves in a “multicultural” space like Canada, focusing particularly upon redressing colonial violence by engaging with decolonial aesthetics. Sarah’s syncretic identity as the daughter of a Métis mother and a first-generation Scottish-immigrant father is integral to her role as a feminist, antiracist, academic researcher/critic. Her methods of interpretive analysis are thus founded upon a strong commitment to elucidating and subverting violent colonial transgressions. Both her academic work and social activism are fundamentally concerned with the outmoding and dismantling of colonial hierarchies, the rebalancing of unequal power relations between Indigenous peoples and White settlers, and the eventual forging of alternative modes of relation.