Cathleen Clark
Cathleen is a settler scholar whose work contributes to national and transnational histories of Indigenous rights movements, postwar Canada, and the global Sixties. Her current book project examines the multifaceted trajectories of intertribal Indigenous political resistance within and outside Canada from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Through careful investigation of the relationships between Red Power activists, regional and national Indigenous advocacy groups, and international organizations like the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and the International Indian Treaty Council, Cathleen’s work offers an innovative retelling of this critical era of mobilization.
In addition to her research interests, Cathleen holds a BEd from Queen’s University and engages critically with approaches to history education and pedagogy in her professional practice. At the University of Toronto, she teaches JIC366H1: Indigenous Histories of the Great Lakes, 1815 to the Present and HIS496H1: Race in Canada & the United States.
People Type:
Research Area:
Indigenous histories; 20th century Canada; cross-border Canada-U.S. activist movements; transnationalism; history of education
Program:
Cathleen’s dissertation examines the evolving nature and (re)emerging intertribal and transnational consciousness of Indigenous rights activism in Canada during the late 1960s to early 1980s.
Indigenous rights and sovereignty were hotly contested and negotiated by Indigenous and state actors in this period, as were ideas about how to best advocate for them. Attentive to both earlier histories of Indigenous resistance and to Indigenous peoples’ broader engagement with global discourses on human rights, decolonization, and protest, her work traces the multifaceted and experimental trajectories of Indigenous political mobilization and visions for Indigenous rights both in and beyond the Canadian context. By bringing together the work of Red Power activists, regional and national advocacy groups, and internationally-oriented organizations like the World Council of Indigenous Peoples she challenges popular portrayals of this era which separate these approaches by focusing on their ideological and strategic differences. Instead, she argues that there were important continuities and intersections between these pathways of resistance and between the people that identified through them. Considered together, such connections reveal a sustained and dynamic dialogue that transformed articulations of Indigenous rights and provided a foundation for future courses of political action.