The 2026 Indigenous Futures Research Centre (IFRC) Annual Research Symposium features panels, workshops, performances, and artist talks from faculty, students, and alumni of the IFRC.
Guided by the theme, “Practicing the Future”, this year’s symposium considers how Indigenous research and research-creation can actively shape the futures we envision. It offers a moment to exchange ideas, imagine new avenues, and cultivate intergenerational and relational forms of knowledge-sharing. The symposium fosters community-building across disciplines, creating a space where we not only imagine the future but intentionally practice it.
Designed to spark interdisciplinary exchanges and highlight current research, this gathering reflects on the continued emergence and growth of Indigenous scholarship. It celebrates trailblazing accomplishments while foregrounding new and evolving perspectives on Indigenous methodologies. Now in its fourth iteration, this symposium has become an essential event where IFRC faculty and student members alike share their work with one another and with the greater Concordia community.
This project is generously supported by the SSHRC Connection Grant.
LOCATIONS:
4TH SPACE (1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W., Concordia University);
Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W., Concordia University);
The Centre for Canadian Architecture (1920 Rue Baile);
daphne (5425 Casgrain Ave, Unit #103).
DAY 1
Thursday, January 29
9:30 AM
Leonard and Bina Ellen
Art Gallery
Ohèn:ton Karihwatékwen (Words before all else)
Led by Prof. Hannah Claus
The Ohèn:ton Karihwatékwen often referred to as the Words before All Else is a thanksgiving address that recognizes the interconnectedness and significance of all life forces. Spoken to open a gathering, it invites those present to bring their minds of everyone at the gathering together as one, grounding the moment in gratitude and relationality.
We will gather at Hannah Claus’ exhibition tsi iotnekahtentiónhatie (Tiohtià:ke) to collectively offer thanks and begin together.
10:00 AM
4TH SPACE
Collective Meaning-Making in Research
Presented by the Office of Community Engagement
Brooke Wahsontiiostha Deer, Christine Qillasiq Lussier, Harriet (Akat) Tsiawenion Ransom, Melissa Joy Granovsky, Savannah Wilde, Wade Paul
Moderated by Geneviève Sioui
The Community-engaged learning fund for Indigenous students (CELFIS) supports Indigenous students in anchoring their work in Indigenous communities. This panel brings together this year’s recipients to discuss how researchers can build a shared vision and understanding of complex issues through community engagement. This presentation will bring examples of community engagement in various disciplines.
11:00 AM
4TH SPACE
Cross-disciplinary Research Within the
First Peoples Studies Program
Dr. Gage Karahkwi:io Diabo, Dr. Sigwan Thivierge
Moderated by Liz Howard
This panel highlights how the First Peoples Studies Program (FPST) brings together a wide range of disciplinary perspectives while centering Indigenous knowledges and community relationships. Faculty members will discuss how their distinct research practices inform the innovative Indigenous-based courses they have developed for the program, and how these methods shape their pedagogical approaches.
Together, the panelists will reflect on how cross-disciplinary teaching can bridge the distance between academic training and Indigenous ways of knowing, while creating a program where research, practice, and community-informed learning converge.
12:00 PM
4TH SPACE
LUNCH BREAK
Pizza will be provided!
1:00 PM
4TH SPACE
Indigenous Video Games as Research Creation
Van Racine, Morning Star Fayard
Moderated by Hanss Lujan Torres
This panel explores Indigenous video games as sites of research and knowledge transmission. Bringing together two emerging Indigenous video game researchers and designers, this conversation examines how game-making functions not only as a creative practice but also as a methodological approach to Indigenous research. Through storytelling, world-building and player interaction, Indigenous video games enact relationships to land, language, kinship and futurity that challenge colonial narratives and extractive models.
By centering Indigenous perspectives on design, research, and play, this panel highlights video games as platforms for intergenerational learning and evolving forms of cultural expression.
2:00 PM
4TH SPACE
2Spirit & Indigiqueer Systems of Care
Moe Clark, Maddison Schmitt
Moderated by Dr. Michelle McGeough
This panel reflects how 2Spirit and Indigiqueer modes of coming together generate systems of care rooted in relation, continuity, and collective imagination. Centering gathering, storytelling, and shared creative practices, the discussion approaches these acts as relational methodologies that hold complexity, grief, joy, and contradiction, while nurturing kinship, and imagining vibrant Indigiqueer futures.
This panel also considers how relation itself becomes a form of resistance, how choosing to gather, witness one another, and share disrupts isolating and extractive structures, and how such practices affirm continuities across timelines and dimensions.
3:30 PM
4TH SPACE
KEYNOTE: Dr. Suzanne Kite
Dr. Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta visual artist, composer, and scholar whose interdisciplinary practice spans sound, video, performance, and computational media to imagine Indigenous futurisms grounded in Lakota ontologies. She critically engages artificial intelligence as Indigenous knowledge-making, kinship, and sovereignty, and co-directs Abundant Intelligences while leading the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI.
5:45 PM
Leonard and Bina Ellen
Art Gallery
kâh-wâhkôtama misihsih sîpîy
(great river relations)
A Performance by Moe Clark
Join 2Spirit Michif multidisciplinary artist and scholar Moe Clark for kâh-wâhkôtama misihsih sîpîy (great river relations), an intimate evening of song and performance featuring compositions responding to themes of place, river ways, life ways, and the emergent practices and relations that tether us to them. kâh-wâhkôtama misihsih sîpîy draws inspiration from the exhibition tsi iotnekahtentiónhatie (Tiohtià:ke) by artist Hannah Claus. The event concludes the first day of the symposium.
DAY 2
Friday, January 30
11:00 AM
CCA
Curatorial Tour: Everlasting
Led by Iako’tsi:rareh Amanda Lickers
Everlasting is a film from the CCA’s 2023-2024 Indigenous Land Restitution Research Creation Fellow, multidisciplinary Haudenosaunee artist Iako’tsi:rareh Amanda Lickers.
This experimental short film—a research-creation blending documentary and archival research in the cinema verité format—follows the place-keeping power of unbroken ties to territory through local seed saving and hide tanning initiatives. These ways of being and doing refuse settler partitions of land and city and challenge settler geographies of terra nullius. Interlacing past-present-future across the backdrop of a shape-shifting metropolis, the short film affirms Indigenous peoples’ connection to the land beyond the past—as everlasting.
Everlasting is presented at the CCA accompanied by an installation in the Sottsass salon in the Shaughnessy House.
Lickers was commissioned by the CCA to create this work as the 2023-2024 Indigenous Land Restitution Research Creation Fellow linked to the institution’s Living Lands project.
Seats limited. Registration required.
1:00 PM
4TH SPACE
Deconstructing Pedagogy within
the Institution: Indigenous Ways
of Knowing and Doing
Prof. Dayna Danger, Prof. Kristy Snell, Dr. Louellyn White
Moderated by Prof. Hannah Claus
This panel brings together Indigenous faculty members from across disciplines to discuss approaches to challenging and reimagining dominant pedagogical methodologies within the university.
Looking beyond Western curricula and institutional frameworks, each panelist will bring forward their practices, theories, and community-rooted knowledges that shape their teaching. Together, they will contemplate ways to insert and sustain Indigeneity within academic spaces, unsettling colonial structures, and cultivating learning environments grounded in relationality.
How can teaching become a site for decolonial transformation, where Indigenous ways of knowing and doing not only inform course content but reshape the conditions of learning itself?
2:30 PM
4TH SPACE
Workshop: Indigenous Youth Leadership
in Research and in Practice
Presented by the Quebec Youth Research Network Chair: Indigenous Stream
This panel and workshop will highlight the leadership, creativity, and vision of Indigenous youth in research and community action. Members of the Quebec Youth Research Network Chair: the Indigenous Stream, will share tools, reflections, and lived experiences that place Indigenous youth voices at the centre of knowledge creation and wellness. From the interactive resource bundle developed, to a youth-led journey of decolonizing research into action, participants will discover how Indigenous youth are shaping research practices, building connections, and leading initiatives that strengthen identity, language, culture, and collective well-being.
4:00 PM
4TH SPACE
Indigenous Curatorial Practice in a few acts
Keynote by Dr. Léuli Eshraghi
Inaugural Curator of Indigenous Practices at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi (Ph.D., Monash University 2018), member of Sāmoan clans Seumanutafa and Tautua, will discuss their research-creation journey from Montreal in 2019 to Montreal in 2026, touching on the challenges and opportunities in curation as service to local and international Indigenous communities.
6:00 PM
daphne
Ohèn:ton Karihwatékwen (Words before all else)
Led by Prof. Hannah Claus
The Words before All Else is a thanksgiving address that acknowledges and recognizes the importance and relationship of all life forces. The purpose is to bring the minds of everyone at the gathering together as one.
6:30 PM
daphne
Artist Talk: everywhere and completely
By Emma Hassencahl-Perley
Join artist Emma-Hassencahl-Perley for a walk-through of her exhibition, everywhere and completely. She will reflect on her multidisciplinary visual art practice shaped by language, cultural knowledge, and relational ways of working. Drawing from painting, muralism, beadwork, and digital illustration, she reflects on how motifs of water, the cosmos, and Wolastoqey visual traditions inform her approach to memory, kinship, and contemporary Indigenous futures.
7:15 PM
daphne
Performance: My Souvenir Ceremony
By Jobena Petonoquot
Join artist Jobena Petonoquot for a performance confronting the legacy of Indigenous souvenir dolls and their harmful claims to authenticity. Drawing from personal memory, ceremonial gesture, and hand-crafted regalia, the performance, in relation to her exhibition, My Souvenir Ceremony, transforms objects of misrepresentation through burial and release.
7:45 PM
daphne
Closing Reception
Catered by Messy Kitchen
Stick around for a reception marking the conclusion of the symposium! This gathering offers a moment to celebrate the artists, speakers, and share exchanges that shaped the event.