Ci aaniko wiitamaakeyak kaa kiitaawew kaye kihkentamaawin awenenowiyak
Sharing with others, wisdom and knowledge, about who we are
The JHI is excited to announce our 2026-27 Distinguished Visiting Indigenous Faculty Fellow—Eva Jewell. Eva will be a member of the Circle of Fellows during our Doubles, Doppelgangers theme year.
Eva Jewell’s award-winning research supports Anishinaabe community reclamation movements of culture, language, and governance. Her multi-year co-authored Calls to Action monitoring advocated for higher standards of accountability in Canada’s reconciliation practices. Her current work blends critical Anishinaabe perspectives on concepts of care with anti-colonial practices and reclamation of original Indigenous worlds. Eva Jewell is Anishinaabekwe from Deshkan Ziibiing (Chippewas of the Thames First Nation) in southwestern Ontario, with paternal ties to Oneida Nation of the Thames. She is an Associate Professor in the sociology department at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Fellowship Project
Dualities of Care in Indigenous Cultural and Social Reproduction
Care is a site of doubles, where both Indigenous liberation and oppression reside. In one iteration where it is embodied in original law, care is a medium for illuminating the responsibilities we bear to our entwined existence with our world and non-human being/beings. It is the matter that substantiates land-based and relationship-based principles that are common in Indigenous ontologies, and the recursive means by which our worlds are produced and reproduced.
In its doppelganger, where it is a facade for colonial logics, care is the rationale for constraint and control of Indigenous peoples, the means by which Indigenous worlds are denigrated. Care becomes the medium of producing and reproducing colonized livelihoods. Settler claims to care undergird the Indigenous-Crown relationship, where historical and ongoing concepts of Great white mother/father, fiduciary duty and honour of the crown tout trust in, and submission to, Canada's settler colonial project. In this context, care is gendered, racialized, denigrated, and obscured.
Indigenous political conversations too often omit the role of care in original legal orders and its importance in resurgence movements. Through interdisciplinary and cross-cultural conversations, my work explores the double dimensions of care as destructive and generative practice. By exploring unique ethics of care within Indigenous worldviews as well as the role of care in settler colonial genocidal logics, my work interacts with and supports Indigenous social and cultural reclamation movements.
About this Fellowship
The Distinguished Visiting Indigenous Faculty Fellowship was inaugurated in 2016-2017, with the intention to bring a senior Indigenous scholar into the Circle of Fellows to do research relevant to the year’s theme. The name of this fellowship is transliterated above in Cree syllabics. Previous fellows include Sherry Farrell Racette, Tracey Lindberg, Alex Wilson, Heidi Stark, Max Liboiron, Dale Turner, Glen Coulthard, Aroha Harris and Gina Starblanket.