“It’s a small labour of love,” says Hanss Lujan Torres, describing the Indigenous Futures Research Centre (IFRC) Symposium. Lujan Torres is the Research Coordinator for the IFRC, speaking with me following the Centre’s third annual Symposium.
With Programming Coordinator Joëlle Dubé and Communications Coordinator Milo Puge, Lujan Torres organized the 2025 Symposium, bringing together Indigenous scholars for two days of panels at Concordia’s 4TH SPACE.
That small labour of love is steadily getting bigger, year by year. This year marked the largest undertaking yet, with eight panels in total and new contributions from the Office of Community Engagement and the First Peoples Studies program.
Researchers, artists and community members presented work on topics like re-conceptualizing design through Indigenous knowledge systems; cultural practices including hide tanning, skin marking, and making wampum belts; and Indigenous cyberspace as subverting colonial futures.
With an engaged audience in-person and online throughout both days, the Symposium served as a crucial intellectual and social gathering for Indigenous scholars.
“The Symposium is really the first place where a lot of students and faculty can work together or meet one another,” Lujan Torres explains.
Undergraduate Work Shines Through
As a space for meeting peers and collaborators, the IFRC Symposium puts special emphasis on inter-generational conversations. The Centre programs undergraduates in dialogue with professors and affiliate members, fostering a setting where new researchers or those who might have less formal academic experience are encouraged to speak up and try things out.
“It’s really beautiful to see that – different perspectives addressing really interesting and urgent topics and research,” Lujan Torres says.
The Indigenous Cyberspace and Rez Futures panel, for example, put multimedia artist and AbTeC (Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace) founder Skawennati in conversation with Naskapi artist Destiny Brennan-Chescappio, as well as Indigenous Futurist and Tłı̨chǫ artist Morgan Zoe.
Brennan-Chescappio, an incoming 2024-25 Milieux Undergraduate Fellow, presented her RezBorgs and RezPunk projects. The playful RezBorg portraits depict half-human, half-robot characters, while RezPunk is a cyberspace environment demonstrating reservation life.
The projects emerged out of a desire to communicate the values and significance of reservation cultures, she explained, as well as undermining settler visions of a future without Indigenous peoples. “I can romanticize my own future,” Brennan-Chescappio said.
“I wanted to create a statement, with the rez’s themes of survival and resilience, with how we look today,” Brennan-Chescappio added, sharing her portraits. “That’s how I perceive us, who we are today, the present Indigenous person – we’re just as valuable as we were before.”
For Lujan Torres, it’s a treat to see undergraduates like Brennan-Chescappio shine at an early stage in their careers. “[It’s] such a lovely thing,” he says, “to catch her at that moment, presenting something so smart and meaningful and new.”
Inviting New Collaborators Into the Space
The 2025 Symposium marked the first time that the IFRC has invited other Indigenous organizations at Concordia to participate.
The Office of Community Engagement presented the Symposium’s closing panel, ‘Community in the Centre: Indigenous Ways of Doing Research.’
Moderated by the OCE’s Geneviève Sioui, the panel featured recipients of the OCE’s CELFIS grants, awarded to students conducting research using Indigenous methodologies. The six panelists, instead of presenting their work in-depth, participated in a macro-level conversation about what it means to do community-based research.
Sioui conceptualized the panel as a way for the grant recipients to start building knowledge of best practices. “From an Indigenous researcher’s perspective, how do you want research to be conducted in your community?” she tells me.
But she was surprised that the conversation took a turn towards highlighting the importance of the CELFIS grant itself. Panelists like Véronique Picard and Iako’tsi:rareh Amanda Lickers spoke about how the restrictive, merit-based approaches of many research grants can be limiting when it comes to working with communities.
“This is not just my work alone, this is the work of my collaborators and my peers, as well as our elders and our knowledge keepers, and also participants and learners,” Lickers said. “We have to honour where these knowledge systems have come from.”
The CELFIS grants, designed specifically for Indigenous researchers, make that more feasible, with a flexible structure that can help bridge gaps around building equity with participants.
Questions about how to do research ran implicitly through the whole Symposium: Victoria May had earlier presented her dance-ifesto, which re-imagines dance practices through Métis values; Nicolas Renaud’s ‘Wampum as Pedagogy’ presentation considered the complexity of teaching a course on sacred materials. The Symposium is an opportunity for Indigenous scholars to consider what research practices can and should be, with the OCE panel bringing that to the fore.
The other new participant group, the First Peoples Studies program, deepened the Symposium’s engagement with undergraduate work. Four BA students in the program – Dalia Beaudry, Lena Palacios, Bailey Parkinson, and Zephyriah Roberts – presented on topics like decolonial filmmaking and Indigenous counter-archives; Haitian history and Creole language as refusal; and making wampum as an organic, living process.
Parkinson’s presentation struck a particular chord with the audience. She told the story of three Métis languages, tracing their emergence through contact with French Canadian missionaries and voyageurs, their restriction and repression under colonial policies, and the contemporary endangerment of those languages.
“The last census showed only 1845 people speak Michif in Canada, and only a fraction of that number are actual native speakers,” Parkinson said. One of those native speakers is Parkinson’s grandmother. Parkinson shared memories of hearing her grandmother speak Michif as a kid and her own journey towards learning Michif now as an adult. “Knowing their stories of struggle and resilience, I want to do everything I can to maintain that identity,” Parkinson added.
“We could see Métis professors and folks with PhDs in tears because that was reverberating with them,” Lujan Torres recalls. “Again, these are moments where you can build that camaraderie and relation.”
Both panels emphasized the contributions of students who are in the process of developing a practice or a research approach.
“For me it’s important to value what these young – in the sense that they haven’t graduated yet – young researchers are doing and giving them a voice,” Sioui explains. “That’s also my way of being like, ‘I believe in you, I’m supporting you, keep going – what you’re doing is great.’”
“The Symposium has always been a moment of gathering for Indigenous scholars at Concordia across disciplines to hear what people are working on,” Sioui continues. Now, the OCE and FPS programs are part of that process.
Showcasing Indigenous Design Practices
The 2025 Symposium featured a complex exploration of Indigenous design – a field that, Lujan Torres notes, is not commonly showcased with such depth. “To see all that’s possible within this field, that’s so rich,” he says.
‘Indigenous Knowledges in Interdisciplinary Design,’ moderated by IFRC Co-Director Jason Edward Lewis, highlighted three scholars and designers. Dr. Mel Lefebvre shared work on skin marking, highlighting the ancestral practice as a means of finding acceptance within one’s own skin as well as recognizing others. Dr. Miranda Smitheram – Co-Director of Milieux’s Textiles and Materiality cluster – shared a project that explores liminal spaces, as she works with invasive species on Île Sainte-Hélène and remediates them into dyes. Iako’tsi:rareh Amanda Lickers presented work on Indigenous hide tanning and the collective Buckskin Babes, which leads hide tanning training at local community site Bâtiment 7.
With vastly different technical specialties, each panelist emphasized design as a collaborative, relational practice – not one-person’s top-down vision.
That approach reverberated through ‘Weaving Culturally-Grounded Visual Identities,’ a roundtable by research program Abundant Intelligences that detailed the process of developing the program’s logos. The program’s global logo bucks Western design trends of minimalism to embrace abundance, with 21 tiles making up the letters ‘AI.’ The tiles represent flora, fauna, land, and technology, each one a piece of the Abundant Intelligences story.
Nicolas Renaud’s ‘Wampum as Pedagogy’ explored design through the lens of an advanced topics course he taught on wampum belts, though as he put it, “I didn’t teach anything about wampum… Wampum taught us.” Like the tiles in the AI logo, each wampum made by students told a particular and intricate tale, ranging from narratives of romantic partnership to visualizations of salmon and maps of territory.
Lewis had earlier noted that Indigenous design might not receive as much discussion as Indigenous art, but the line between the two is porous. “There’s a constant movement back and forth between design and art,” he said.
That came through clearly in art and art history panels ‘More Than Fluff and Feathers’ and ‘Where the Waters Flow.’ Like the design panels, they featured artists and scholars who were conceptualizing art as a communal undertaking and considering their own positionality, whether as inheritors of a tradition or uninvited guest. Across mediums and disciplines, the presentations emphasized diaspora and dislocation; connection to the land; and paying homage to ancestors, Lujan Torres notes.
Throughout the Symposium’s two days, scholars and community members could dip in and out of the panels, picking up the thread wherever they left off. After the OCE panel, participants mingled at Shift, eating snacks and debriefing and sharing laughs, making new connections or igniting familiar ones.
Each panel at the IFRC Symposium featured stimulating research and creative practices, adding up to an intricate whole – like tiles in a logo or beads in a belt, all part of a futuristic tapestry that the IFRC continues to weave.
Looking Ahead
After a successful Symposium, the IFRC is getting ready to move back into a new and improved permanent space in Concordia’s EV building. Following renovations at Milieux, the cluster will have additional space on the building’s 10th floor. Lujan Torres is excited for what that might bring.
“For the longest time the Symposium was really our only opportunity to bring in folks into a space together,” he says. The Symposium is a crucial gathering opportunity, but that kind of coming-together shouldn’t be once a year.
“We’ll have more opportunities to do more programming and more casual encounters,” Lujan Torres suggests. He’s excited to open up the space beyond IFRC members to other Milieux scholars as well, building cross-cluster encounters and initiatives.
“Just making an inviting space for exchange and dialogue – that’s what the Symposium has been for us, but now we get to do it in a more consistent and open and homey space,” he adds.
As for the Symposium itself, the goal is to continue building and expanding the relationships that turn a small labour of love into a community touchstone.
“It took a lot to get to a place where we could really have a Symposium like this,” he says.
“We’re really excited about what we can do going forward – and how we can continue to make it better and better.”
– Rosie Long Decter, Milieux Storyteller
