Event Date: December 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 2:30pm
Location: FSS4006, 120 Université private
Presented by CIPS and the International Theory Network
Professor Lightfoot’s talk will focus on how Indigenous peoples’ rights and Indigenous rights movements represent an important and often overlooked shift in international politics – a shift that powerful states are actively resisting in a multitude of ways. While Indigenous peoples are often dismissed as marginal non-state actors, this book argues that far from insignificant, global Indigenous politics is potentially forging major changes in the international system, as the implementation of Indigenous peoples’ rights requires a complete re-thinking and re-ordering of sovereignty, territoriality, liberalism, and human rights. After thirty years of intense effort, the transnational Indigenous rights movement achieved passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in September 2007.
Sheryl Lightfoot (PhD – University of Minnesota, Political Science) is Anishinaabe, a citizen of the Lake Superior Band of Ojibwe, enrolled at the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in Baraga, Michigan. She is an associate professor in First Nations and Indigenous Studies and the Department of Political Science.
Prof. Lightfoot is Canada Research Chair in Global Indigenous Rights and Politics. She holds a Master’s Degree from the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, with specialties in Foreign Policy and International Affairs as well as Economic and Community Development. She also has fifteen years’ volunteer and contract experience with a number of American Indian tribes and community-based organizations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, including nine years as Chair of the Board of the American Indian Policy Center, a research and advocacy group.
Her book, Global Indigenous Politics: A Subtle Revolution, was published in May 2016 by Routledge Press in their “Worlding Beyond the West” critical international relations book series.
Prof. Lightfoot is currently engaged in a SSHRC-funded project, “The Politics of State Apologies to Indigenous Peoples,” a major multi-national comparative study of state apologies to Indigenous peoples.