Historian.
She is an Associate Professor with the School of Native Studies at the University of Alberta and has been part of the faculty since 1994. Previously, she was the Curator of Ethnology at the Provincial Museum of Alberta (now the Royal Museum of Alberta). She has conducted ethnohistorical and material culture research in northern Canada, southern Alberta, and Scotland. Her areas of interest include North American Aboriginal peoples and Scottish peoples, early Norse expansion, cultural transformation and renewal, oral traditions and indigenous knowledge, material culture, the fur trade, missionaries and Native Christianity, the expansion of the state, and patterns of colonialism. Currently, she is completing a book about Fort Chipewyan, a northern Canadian plural society, and working on a second book about Thanadelthur, an historic Dene woman. She has assisted and advised lawyers in numerous cases and served frequently as an expert witness, most recently in the Benoit Treaty No. 8 taxation case.
Her articles for the Manitoba Historical Society:
Visioning Thanadelthur: Shaping a Canadian Icon
Manitoba History, Number 55, June 2007Review: Flora Beardy and Robert Coutts, Voices from Hudson Bay: Cree Stories from York Factory
Manitoba History, Number 35, Spring/Summer 1998Review: Kerry Abel and Jean Friesen (editors), Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects
Manitoba History, Number 24, Autumn 1992
Page revised: 22 November 2012
