CIS Associates

Kim Lawson

Research and Community Liaison Librarian with the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre
Kim is a member of the Heiltsuk Nation and worked at UBC’s Xwi7xwa Library for more than ten years prior to joining the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre (IRSHDC).
Kim came to the Centre in a secondment role in November 2019 and has now joined the IRSHDC in a permanent capacity. In this role, Kim is leading the development of educational and engagement initiatives, providing reference and instruction services, and collaborating on digital collections development at the Centre. Kim is also working on grant writing, strategic planning, as well as outreach and engagement initiatives with the broader community of Indigenous libraries and information services. She is also an integral member of the curatorial team developing a virtual exhibition and year of engagement for the 40th anniversary of the Indian Child Caravan.

Margot Leigh Butler

Academic Director, Hum Program
Margot Leigh Butler has been the Academic Director of Hum (Humanities 101 Community Programme at UBC and in the Downtown Eastside/Downtown South (DTES/S) since 2006. Now in its 20th year and with almost a thousand alumni, the Programme runs four free, university-level, Cultural Studies-style courses on campus — and free public programmes at local community centres — with low income residents of the DTES/S and nearby areas. Dr. Butler has long worked closely with CIS staff and faculty, many of whom are guest teachers on Hum’s Indigenous-strong courses. Her work as a teacher, theorist, activist and installation artist focuses on practices and figurations of implicatedness.

Sheryl Lightfoot

Senior Advisor to the President on Indigenous Affairs
Canada Research Chair in Global Indigenous Rights and Politics
Associate Professor, First Nations and Indigenous Studies and Political Science
Sheryl Lightfoot (Anishinaabe, Lake Superior Band) is Canada Research Chair of Global Indigenous Rights and Politics at the University of British Columbia, where she holds faculty appointments in Political Science and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs as well as an association with the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. She serves as the Vice Chair and North American Member on the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP) as well as Senior Advisor to the UBC President on Indigenous Affairs, where she is the lead on UBC’s Indigenous Strategic Plan and directs the Office of Indigenous Strategic Initiatives. She is currently President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). Her research focuses on Indigenous global politics, especially Indigenous rights and their implementation in global, national and regional contexts.

Maggie Moore

Academic Advisor
Maggie is an Academic Advisor with Arts Indigenous Student Advising in the Faculty of Arts. She holds an MA in History from UBC, and previously attended Simon Fraser, Concordia and Capilano Universities. Her first co-op job was conducting research for In-SHUCK-ch/N’quatqua Treaty Group and she has worked with Indigenous artists and communities on exhibits at the UBC Museum of Anthropology and other Lower Mainland museums. She joined Arts Advising in 2016 and is available to help with questions about academic planning and graduation.

Amy Perreault

Senior Strategist, Indigenous Initiatives (CTLT)
Amy is the Senior Strategist, Indigenous Initiatives at the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT) at the University of British Columbia on the traditional and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. Amy is proudly Red River Métis, with mixed European ancestry. She was born in Thompson Manitoba but spent most of her childhood fishing, picking huckleberries, hiking and being on the land and water ways in the East and West Kootenay’s on the traditional territories and homelands of the Ktunaxa Nation. She holds an MLIS from the UBC School of Information, where she currently serves as adjunct faculty and oversees the First Nations Curriculum Concentration. Amy works with staff, faculty groups, training programs for teaching assistants, new faculty, and administrators, to support the development of a higher standard of professionalism in conducting discussions of Indigenous and other contentious social issues in curricular settings. Amy is a co-developer and researcher for the educational resource What I Learned in Class Today: Aboriginal Issues in the Classroom and manages the development of Indigenous Foundations. Work on these projects, as well as her own experience as an Indigenous student, staff and faculty member at UBC, clearly identify the complexities and challenges of classroom conversations involving contentious cross-cultural discussions, and in specific discourse around Indigenous curriculum.

Coll Thrush

Professor, History
FNIS Faculty Associate in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies
Coll Thrush (PhD, Washington, 2002) is a historian of place, looking at the intersections between Indigenous histories and the histories of settler colonialism. His first book, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (2007, second edition released in 2017), examined the links between urban and Indigenous histories in the Northwest’s largest city, while his most recent book, Indigenous London: Native Travellers at the Heart of Empire (2016), reframes the history of the British Empire’s capital through the experiences of Indigenous children, women, and men who journeyed there, willingly or otherwise. He has also written about ghosts, earthquakes and tsunamis, and food. His current projects are an archivally-grounded fictional work set during the Green River Killer case in the 1980s, entitled SlaughterTown, and a critical cultural and environmental history of shipwrecks and settler colonialism on the Northwest Coast, entitled Wrecked: Ecologies of Failure in the Graveyard of the Pacific. Most of his courses are FNIS-approved, and he also offers a field course in London through FNIS every third year. For more information about Coll, please visit the UBC History website.