University of Toronto Black Indigenous Waterways Postdoctoral Fellowship

The land where the University of Toronto stands has been the site of cosmopolitan activity for more than 15,000 years. This is the case for most locations of thriving metropolitan sites across the Americas. The Black Indigenous Waterways major research project will foster a collective mission to explore the relationships forged between Black and Indigenous peoples through historical encounters across the Americas, under the pressures of racial oppression, colonial domination and resource extraction.

According to scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, "settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave". However, historical narratives about Indigenous and Black peoples have typically centred on their relations with European settlers. This two-dimensional picture distorts our past and obscures the rich histories, cultures and politics that emerged from the relations between Indigenous and Black peoples of the Americas. We explore these historical encounters across the Americas and trace - globally - Black Atlantic byways of relations as mapped by waterways. In doing so, our project looks at the places, poetics, and politics of key sites of engagement between Indigenous and Black peoples across time and place.

This is a $70K, one-year political fellow position, with the possibility of a year renewal, that will commence no later than September 2023.