At The Forks Contributors

Honoure Black is settler woman living in Winnipeg, Treaty One Territory. She is a PhD Candidate in Design and Planning at the University of Manitoba, Faculty of Architecture and a 2021-2024 SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship recipient for her research. Her dissertation is currently titled: Insurgent Public Art, Decolonizing Settler Colonial Urban Space in Winnipeg, Treaty One. Honoure is also a sessional instructor for both the School of Art and the Faculty of Architecture, often teaching courses in art history, landscape theory, and interdisciplinary research methods. She is a mother to two young daughters and a loving partner. In her spare time, Honoure loves to garden, camp, and hike with her family.

Sarah Carter FRSC is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History, Classics and Religious Studies, and Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. From Saskatoon, she received her B.A. Hon. and M.A. from the University of Saskatchewan and Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba. She taught at the University of Calgary from 1992 to 2006. Her research focuses on the history of settler colonialism in Canada and in comparative colonial and borderlands perspectives. Her 2016 book Imperial Plots won several awards including the Governor General’s History Award for Scholarly Research. Her most recent book is Ours By Every Law of Right and Justice: Women and the Vote in the Prairie Provinces (2020). In 2020 she was awarded the Killam Prize in the Humanities.

Dr. Karlee Sapoznik Evans is a longstanding social justice and human rights advocate and researcher. She was named one of CBC Manitoba’s Future 40 under 40 and has served as part of reconciliation, anti-slavery, genocide prevention, social justice, and human rights projects across Canada, in Sierra Leone, Mali, Peru, Italy, England, Spain, Ukraine, Israel, and the United States. From 2014-2015, she led a team of researchers for Library and Archives Canada’s Document Disclosure Project for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Her research on historical and contemporary slavery, including human trafficking, helped inform Canada’s Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act. From 2012-2016, she was a professor at l’Université de Saint-Boniface. Since 2016, she has worked as a civil servant, overseeing mixed-methods research and strategic policy in the best interests of children, youth, young adults, and families in Manitoba.

Leah Gazan was first elected as the Member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre in October 2019. She is currently the NDP Critic for Children, Families, and Social Development, as well as the Critic for Women and Gender Equality, and the Deputy Critic for Housing. Gazan is a member of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, and the Standing Joint Committee on the Library of Parliament. In 2019, she introduced a private member’s bill, Bill C-232, The Climate Emergency Action Act, which recognizes the right to a healthy environment as a human right. In August 2020, she submitted M-46, which calls on the federal government to convert the Canada Emergency Response Benefit into a permanent Guaranteed Livable Basic Income. In December 2021, she built on this motion by introducing Bill C-223, The National Framework for a Guaranteed Livable Basic Income Act. She was recently named in Maclean’s 2021 Power List.

As an educator, advisor, and media contributor, Leah Gazan has been deeply engaged with issues and organizing in Winnipeg’s core for nearly three decades. Gazan has spent her life working for human rights on the local, national, and international stage. Her recent success includes organizing and traveling across the country to push Bill C-262, the Indigenous Human Rights Act.

Her contributions in Winnipeg have both shaped our understanding of our collective struggles and strengths and helped move us towards justice. As president of the Social Planning Council between 2011- 2015, Gazan organized and pushed policy in support of an end to poverty, addressing violence against women and girls, finding solutions for housing insecurity and homelessness, ensuring fair wages, community-based actions addressing addictions and proper supports for mental health.

Gazan was a prominent Winnipeg lead during Idle No More, articulating the movement to the Winnipeg public. Gazan also co-founded the #WeCare campaign aimed at building public will to end violence against Indigenous women and girls. Gazan is a member of Wood Mountain Lakota Nation, located in Saskatchewan, Treaty 4 territory.

Photo credit: https://www.leahgazan.ca/about

Anne Lindsay’s career has focused on archival primary source research, particularly in areas relating to settler interactions with Indigenous peoples, as well as fur trade-era history. She has worked and continues to work as a researcher for a number of Indigenous communities, including work focusing on the present implications for educational planning that stem from the colonial history of education in specific communities. In addition to this work, she has held positions in archives and research with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba and before that, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. She continues to work both formally and informally with individuals trying to locate information about their own or their family’s connections to Residential and Indian Hospital Schools. Prior to working with Residential Schools histories, her work with the Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies at the University of Winnipeg engaged with a wide range of fur trade-era histories. In addition to her studies, she is also currently involved in local dialogues around honouring the children buried in Residential School cemeteries.

William Osborne has a pre-Masters degree in education and counselling. He is a spiritual leader and the former leader for Pimicikamak Cree Nation. He has lived all his life in one of the 4 Pimicikamak communities known as Cross Lake. He is a spiritually-gifted Elder in the Circle of Life teachings, having attained and earned the right of the Elder status through ceremonies.

Dr. Adele Perry is director of the Centre for Human Rights Research and distinguished professor of history and women’s and gender studies. She is a historian of colonialism, gender, race and western Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries. From 2003 to 2014, Perry held a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair and she is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and past president of the Canadian Historical Association.