The Editorial Team
Jérôme Melançon (left) and Emily Grafton (right)
Emily Grafton (Métis Nation) is an Associate Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan. She has a PhD in Native Studies and Master of Public Administration from the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg), and a Bachelor of Arts (Advanced) in Political Science and Women’s Studies from the University of Winnipeg. Emily has worked in provincial, municipal, and Indigenous politics. Also, she held a research fellowship at the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies (Chicago, IL), was the research-curator of Indigenous Content at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (Winnipeg, MB), and held the roles of Indigenous Research Lead and Executive Lead, Indigenization at the University of Regina. She teaches courses on settler colonialism, reconciliation, the Canadian government, international relations, and feminist theories.
Emily is connected to the prairies through lived experience and ancestral connections. She was raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba in Treaty 1 territory, and later moved to Regina, Saskatchewan in Treaty 4, where she married into the McKenzie/Brabant families. Emily’s ancestors, the Lafrenières, were fur traders with the Northwest Company and Hudson’s Bay Company, working the waterways from the Great Lakes to Cumberland House in the Northwest (now Saskatchewan). They settled in the historic Métis Red River Settlement in Selkirk, St. Francois Xavier, and St. Boniface, and also the Pembina Mountains. As a community researcher, Emily affirms her continuing, expanding, and deepening kinship ties with many Indigenous communities.
Jérôme Melançon is a settler of French Canadian origin, with some other mixed European ancestry, originally from Québec. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Regina. At the time of filming, he taught in the French and Francophone Intercultural Studies program at La Cité universitaire francophone (U Regina). Part of his current research focuses on the structures of Indian Residential School system as part of the wider settler colonial system in Canada and on the ideas and ideologies developed to make it possible and justify it, as well as on supporting the Indigenous research teams who are working to identify children who died or went missing while at a IRS. He has recently completed a book manuscript on what reconciliation could still be in Canada.
In addition to this work, he has recently published a cycle of academic journal articles dealing with the place of French speakers within Canadian settler colonialism, and is completing a book on Francophone communities in minority settings in Canada. His work on phenomenology has led to the publication of one book, the editing of two books and two journal issues, and numerous other articles on the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), and to the preparation of a book on the French-speaking Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao.
