Joy brings history into the future

How do we apply the lessons of the past to change the future? You inspire lasting change as Professor Joy Porter has. As a Professor of Environmental and Indigenous History her work has informed laws, changed exam syllabuses, and reimagined museums. She is a world-renowned and award-winning researcher and writer and delivers keynotes and invited lectures at universities across Europe and North America.

Joy has policy expertise in the field of historical indigenous treaties and has contributed to changes within Canadian law. She is the co-founder and co-principal investigator of the Treatied Spaces Research Group, which brings together educators, Indigenous groups, museums, creative artists, NGOs and policymakers to make treaties and environmental concerns central to education, policy and public understanding.

What challenges are you addressing through the Treatied Spaces Research Group?

Our group’s research has had a positive impact on contemporary legal cases in Canada through providing historical testimony that has helped courts formulate new decisions. Our excavation of evidence of Indigenous collective sovereign abilities to articulate legal doctrine, wage war, and negotiate peace via treaties in the past is being used to affect contemporary struggles to assert Indigenous sovereignty within North American state and constitutional law. These struggles are dynamic, hotly contested, and are at the intersection of legal, historical, and political analysis.

What new knowledge will this research bring?

This is likely to have profound implications for how the relationship between Canada’s First Nations peoples and the Crown is understood. Crucially, the Court acknowledged that the Treaty relationship invoked was largely unwritten. It also accepted oral history, as well as associated written records, in making its determination. Since oral culture is central to Indigenous practices, this is vitally important, as it develops awareness and expands understanding of Indigenous jurispractice and legal norms.

Joy Porter

Professor Joy Porter

Professor of Indigenous and Environmental History

Joy supports museums and heritage spaces internationally to decolonise their collections and include indigenous voices. She recently co-produced two major exhibitions, including Dress to Redress: Exploring Native American Material Culture, which featured work from Material Kwe by Anishinabekwe artist Dr Celeste Pedri-Spade. Dress to Redress (American Museum & Gardens 19 March - 3 July 2022) celebrated the inspirational women in Dr. Pedri-Spade’s community while examining oil pipeline politics, Indigenous diplomacy, and the wider cultural significance of the British Crown’s relationships with Indigenous populations in the Northeastern United States.

Joy also led the research project ‘Clan Mothers of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’. The Clan Mothers within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy of Northeastern North America have always occupied a powerful and vital role within their communities. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Six Nations or the Iroquois, is a matrilineal society; each Clan is linked by a common female ancestor, with women undertaking leadership roles within the Clan. Everything in the Clans’ worldview is vested in the life-giving force of women, who have both a political and spiritual voice. Joy and the team are researching their absence in the written archive.

This video features an interview with Dr Celeste Pedri-Spade on her artistic process, working with textiles, and celebrating the inspirational women in her community.

Joy helps examination boards in the UK include Indigenous perspectives in the school curriculum. She has worked with the British Library on a project about Indigenous languages and with English Heritage and Historic England to explore Indigenous presence in Historic Houses. She is committed to supporting the needs of students from diverse educational backgrounds and was recognised in 2018 by the award of a National Teaching Fellowship and in 2014 by the Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. In 2023, she was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of her service to historical study.

She is also the co-lead of the Leverhulme Doctoral Centre for Water Cultures, which explores our relationship with water and is the Primary Investigator (PI) for the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded “Brightening the Covenant Chain: Revealing Cultures of Diplomacy Between the Iroquois and the British Crown”. 

Canadian Environment
2024 marks the 260th anniversary of a pivotal juncture in the first ‘special relationship’ between America and Britain, a massive and expensive diplomatic pageant known as the Treaty of Niagara when the Indian ‘Magna Carta’ confirmed Native rights and sovereignty over vast lands and resources. This historic perspective is essential to understanding contemporary issues related to political and environmental rights, and forms part of the Indigenous history of the British Commonwealth.
Professor Joy Porter

Professor Joy Porter

Professor of Indigenous and Environmental History

What are your ambitions for your research in the coming years?

One globally significant area where Treatied Spaces is working to help advance positive change is in relation to the challenge of protecting the sovereignty of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property within international law. This is under threat as the Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds and AI, along with other technologies, makes the reproduction, intellectual theft, and monetisation of unique Indigenous knowledge easier to achieve. A further concern is ‘biopiracy’ – the misappropriation of genetic resources and their associated traditional knowledge.

Why are you interested in using digital platforms to present the findings of your research?

Treatied Spaces' dynamic and interactive Movement and Common Worlds Kinetic Map and the Voices from the Edge of the Woods Soundscape are meeting cross-sectoral demand for innovative digital representation of Indigenous cultural agency and resilience.

Header image: 'Water Warrior (detail) by Dr Celeste Pedri- Spade'. 

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