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Questions of Indigenous and Human Rights are central questions of the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, or modern-day Winnipeg, as are questions of Indigenous people, places and communities, and their relationships to settler society and government, are central for the Prairie provinces. In the past years, historians, political scientists, geographers, sociologists and literary scholars have directly and critically addressed the prairies’ particular histories of settler colonialism and the ways it has produced lived realties of violence, marginalization, poverty, and too often death for Indigenous people. At the same time, scholars have shown how Indigenous people have both formally and informally resisted settler colonialism and built and nurtured communities and resistance and dispossession
At the Forks: Where Indigenous and Human Rights Intersect is:
A virtual meeting place for conversation and information about the intersection between Indigenous rights and human rights, with a focus on the prairies and its neighbours.
An open-access platform to highlight scholarship that engages in critical conversation around the connections, tensions, limits, and possibilities of Indigenous and human rights.
A collaboration between the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Human Rights’ Research (CHRR) and Mamawipawin – the Indigenous Governance and Community Based Research Space.
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At The Forks
Special Issue: Unmasking Transphobia, Building Transpositive Solidarities
Vol. 3 (2024)
The historical catalyst for this collection of essays is a tragic and disturbing one, consisting both of a particular event and a general global pattern. In March of 2023, Joanne Boucher, a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of Winnipeg, delivered a public talk with the dodgy title, “The Commodification of the Human Body: The Case of Transgender Identities.” According to the event description, Boucher’s talk was to explore the “economic interests involved in transgenderism” and to investigate the intersection of “government, corporate-funded lobby groups, the medical industry and the biotechnology sector.” Although framed in neutral-sounding academic jargon, both the event title and the event description contained blaring red flags, readily identifiable even to casual readers. Far from being a unique and isolated event, Boucher’s talk was part of a much larger and more general global explosion of transphobic discourse, which has been expressed in recent years in the form of utterly cruel and inhuman legislation. In response to this frightening national and global drift, the University of Winnipeg’s Centre for Research in Cultural Studies (CRiCS) organized a public event aimed at understanding our current political moment and offering guidance for solidarity and praxis. This collection features essay versions of the informal talks delivered at the March 2023 event.
Funding
At the Forks would like to acknowledge the financial contributions of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and our contributing partners around the University of Manitoba including the Margaret Lawrence Endowment Fund, Women’s and Gender Studies, Department of History, and the Faculty of Arts.
