Indigenous Academic Delegate
Angele Alook
Dr. Angele Alook is a Nehiyaw Iskwew and mother from Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory.
She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. She currently teaches the first year Introductory to Gender and Women’s Studies course, and she teaches the second-year course on Race, Gender, and Sexuality where she focuses on a critical interdisciplinary approach to power and difference, examining settler colonialism, anti-racist feminism, queer studies, sexuality studies, and intersectional approaches to feminism. She identifies as an anti-racist Indigenous feminist, who specialized in Canadian race relations in her PhD studies. Prior to returning to York University, she worked in the labour movement as a researcher where she focused on gender and the workplace, harassment and discrimination, conflict management, and where she acted as an advisor on environmental and human rights issues. As a member of Bigstone Cree Nation, her research has mainly focused on the political economy of oil and gas in Alberta. She specializes in Indigenous feminisms, life course approaches, Indigenous research methodologies, cultural identity, and the sociology of family and work. In 2019, she attended COP25 with observer status as part of the York University Delegation at the UNFCCC. She recently joined the editorial board of the Studies in Political Economy journal, which she is very excited about. As a proud union member, this year she has taken on the role of Indigenous Caucus Union Representative with YUFA.
She is a co-investigator on the SSHRC-funded (Partnership Grant) Corporate Mapping Project, where she is completed research with the Parkland Institute on Indigenous experiences in Alberta’s oil industry and its gendered impact on working families.
Angele is a member of the Just Powers research team, which is a SSHRC-funded Insight Grant. In this project she is researching traditional subsistence practices in her Indigenous community; simultaneously, she is investigating the practices of settler allies who are also stewards of the land in her traditional territory, all while exploring peoples’ relationships to industry in the area. Through the Just Powers project Angele has been able to produce a documentary called "Pîkopayin: It is broken" which features stories on the land with Indigenous traditional land users, environmental officers, and elders. She is interested in synergies and disjunctures between ways of being, knowing and doing on Bigstone lands. She is directing her research toward a just transition of Alberta’s economy and labour force and the impact climate change has on traditional Treaty 8 territory.
For more information on her research projects, please go to: