Dr. Verna St Denis (Chair ARAO) is Professor in Educational Foundations. She graduated with her teaching certificate from the Indian Teacher Education Program in 1980, earned her Ph.D. from Stanford in 2002 and on faculty since 1992. A member of Beardy’s and Okemasis First Nation and grew up as a non-status Indian and Metis in parkland Saskatchewan. Her scholarship has advanced anti-racist education. In addition to teaching anti-oppressive education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, she supervises graduate students research in anti-racist education, and provides professional in-service for schools and other educational organizations. (Read more here)

Robert (Bob) Badger is the Cultural Coordinator in the Office of the Vice-Provost Indigenous Engagement

Sarah Buhler (Sabbatical) joined the College of Law's faculty of 2010. Prior to that, she practiced law in a Saskatoon firm, taught as a sessional lecturer at the College of Law, and served as the Executive Director and Supervising Lawyer at CommunityLegal Assistance Services for Saskatoon Inner City (CLASSIC). (Read more here)

Dr. Lalita Bharadwaj (Sabbatical) Research areas include: Barriers and key issues to the access of safe and sustainable drinking water sources in First Nations communities; Community-based participatory research with Indigenous communities; Human and environmental health risk assessment; Community-based education.

Dr. Geraldine Balzer (Sabbatical) Dr. Geraldine Balzer is an Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan. Her experiences teaching Inuit students led to her interest in decolonizing pedagogies and transformative education. Her teaching focuses on ways of disrupting the hegemony of standard English and embracing the diversity of Englishes within our world, incorporating Aboriginal and postcolonial literature into secondary classrooms, and preparing teachers to be advocates of social justice.  Her research focuses on decolonization and social justice. She works with teachers to explore the use of diverse literary texts and literary theory in order to engage students in critical thinking about societal issues.  (Read more here)

Colleen Bell, PhD, Associate Professor, Faculty Member in Political Studies (Sabbatical) Dr. Colleen Bell is an international relations scholar who specializes in theories of security and war, the contested boundary between military and civilian modes of intervention, and the politics of Western counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. Her work is embedded in critical theoretical approaches, including post-structuralism, de-colonialism and feminism. Currently, she is examining the role of public relations management in Western ways of war. She is also working on an adjacent project which critically examines the role of police power in stabilization and counterinsurgency campaigns. She is editor of the journal Critical Studies on Security. (Read more here)

Carolyn Brooks, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Associate Professor, Tenured, Department Head of Sociology, Faculty Member in Sociology.

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Lynn Caldwell is a Professor of Church and Society, St. Andrew's College; Adjunct Faculty, Department of Religion and Culture, St. Thomas More College; Adjunct Faculty, Department of Educational Foundations, College of Education. Her research and teaching interests include:  Anti-oppressive education; critical race theories; feminism and gender studies; social ethics; adult education and lifelong learning; qualitative research; cultural studies; interlocking equity issues (race, gender identity, sexual diversity, disability, class); critiques of settler colonialism; national and regional mythologies; nostalgia, public memory and commemoration; community-engaged learning; academic skills support and development. 

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Carmen Gillies  Research areas include: Critical race theory; anti-racism education; Indigenous education; critical mixed-race studies.

Monica Hwang, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Associate Professor, Faculty Member in Sociology. Her research interests include: Racial and Ethnic Stratification; Immigration and Diversity; Political Sociology; Social Inequality; Social Capital; Education.

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Jaime Lavallee is an Assistant Professor in the College of Law. Her research areas include: Nation Building, Governance- Indigenous and Corporate; Indigenous entrepreneurship and economic development; Repatriation of ancestors and cultural items.  (Read more here)

Marcia McKenzie, Professor, Educational Foundations (Sabbatical)

Marcia McKenzie is a Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and Director of the Sustainability and Education Policy Network (www.sepn.ca). She has recently authored a number of reports for UNESCO, and leads the SSHRC-funded Monitoring and Evaluation of Climate Change Education (MECCE) project, a six-year global partnership project to advance the quality and quantity of climate change education, training, and public awareness. Encompassed within Dr. McKenzie’s empirical projects are theoretical and applied contributions at the intersections of comparative and international education, global education policy research, and climate and sustainability education, including in relation to policy mobility, scale, affect, intersectionality, and other areas of social and geographic concern. (Read more here)

Dr. Melanie Morrison, B.A., M.Sc, Ph.D., Faculty member in Psychology Investigates forms of bias (the attitudes, behaviours, and psychophysiological reactions) that negatively affect the wellness of marginalized persons and the social groups to which they belong. Much of my research has documented the various forms of prejudice and discrimination harboured by primarily white, heterosexual, cisgender persons. Placing onus on dominant majority group members to effectively confront and reduce the biases that they may witness or enact is a key feature of the research that I, along with my students, conduct in the Saskatchewan Equity, Equality, and Diversity (SEED) Lab. (Read more here)

Emily Snyder is a faculty member in the Department of Indigenous Studies and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at USask. Her research interests are in the areas of Indigenous legal issues, Indigenous feminisms (including Indigenous feminist legal theory), Indigenous-settler relations, and decolonial feminist approaches to legal education. Before joining USask, she worked as a Lecturer in Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. Prior to that appointment, she was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Indigenous Law Research Unit (ILRU) in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria. Emily completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Alberta. She is a white settler originally from Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories/the Waterloo region in southern Ontario. She recently published a book titled, Gender, Power, and Representations of Cree Law (UBC Press).  (Read more here)

Debbie Venne

Venne is a citizen of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and grew up in Saskatoon.  An Alumni of the Edwards School of Business, she joined the University in 2018 as the Coordinator, Community and Government Relations in University Relations.  Moving to the Office of the Vice Provost Indigenous Engagement in 2019, Debbie comes with vast and varied experience working with a number of Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations in Saskatoon. 

As the Executive Assistant to the Vice-Provost, Debbie provides high-level executive support to ensure the smooth functioning of the office and implementation of strategies, initiatives and projects. She is responsible for the day-to-day management of the office and is the primary contact for those seeking the Vice-Provost’s time or attention. She also assists USask’s Speakers Bureau, provides support for the Anti-Racism/Anti-Oppression Committee and is a committee member for the māmowi āsohtētān (Let’s Cross This Together) Building Truth and Reconciliation Internal Forum.

Karla Williamson is an Assistant Professor in Educational Foundations. Areas of specialization include: Discourses on epistemologies; Cross-culturality; Multi-culturalism; World views - especially Inuit; Gender relations; Resilience and Aboriginal peoples; Aboriginal higher learning; Artic peoples and governance.  (Read more here)