At The Edge Of Canada: Indigenous Research
October 30, 2017
Today our guest is Anishinaabe PhD Candidate in Education at the Univeristy of British Columbia, Amber Shilling. In addition to her doctoral research, Amber has recently been appointed the Coordinator of Supporting Aboriginal Graduate Enhancement — British Columbia (SAGE-BC). SAGE, an international network of peer-mentoship between Indigenous graduate students, was started by the Maori in New Zealand to improve graduate school completion rates for Maori researchers. In Canada, SAGE operates on the West Coast as “pods” and in Southern Ontario and Quebec as “nests” between major research institutions and Indigenous intellectual communities. Amber coordinates all BC “pods” in her role as provincial coordinator. In my work as Indigenous Graduate Student Success Coordinator, I have been working to grow a SAGE “garden” on the prairies with the Hub being at UManitoba and connecting outwards to other “gardens” at UWinnipeg, BrandonU, UCN, URegina, and UMinnesota. As support workers in higher education, Amber and I dish about our philosophies of student support, programming models, the challenges of building a diverse and spread-out community of researchers, and how essential ethically collaborative networks are for surviving the harsh eco-system of graduate school as an Indigenous graduate student.