Blue Sky Research Lab at CSA 2026

From June 10 to 13, 2026, Blue Sky Research Lab members joined the 59th Canadian Sociological Association annual conference at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Under the conference theme Harbours of Hope: Sociology in a Divided World, the team contributed two panels that placed Treaty, Indigenous leadership, climate, and relational accountability at the centre.

(IND7) Utilizing Treaty Philosophies to Support Indigenous Research in Academia

This panel approached Treaty not only as a historical document, but as a living relationship and an ethical framework for coexistence, accountability, and care. Grounded in Treaty Six and Nêhiyawak worldviews, the discussion considered reconciliation, decolonization, and how settlers can enter difficult conversations without defensiveness or white saviourism.

Panelists examined what it means to move from allyship toward accompliceship. This requires listening, sitting with discomfort, centring Indigenous voices and leadership, and learning to act with Indigenous communities rather than for them. It also asks non-Indigenous people to understand when their responsibility is to stand beside or behind Indigenous Peoples instead of taking centre stage.

(IND8) “As We Have Always Done”: Indigenous Responses to Climate Change

Grounded in the teaching that the land speaks when we “listen, hear, and feel,” shared by Elder Gudia Mary Jane Johnson in July 2025, this panel centred Indigenous voices within climate-change research. The discussion focused on water quality and the lived realities of floods, droughts, wildfires, and other changes experienced by Indigenous communities in Alberta and the Yukon Territory.

Drawing on oral narratives, traditional stories, and photovoice interviews from the 2025 field season, the all-Indigenous panel shared practices for braiding Nêhiyawak and Southern Tutchone Knowledges with Western Sciences. The panel also confronted the roles of whiteness, colonization, and dispossession in the divisions that shape climate research and public conversations.

Together, the two panels asked what it means to listen, learn, and work alongside Indigenous Peoples with humility, accountability, and responsibility.