23rd Annual Indigenous Graduate Student Symposium
The Indigenous Graduate Student Symposium (IGSS) brings together Indigenous graduate students from across disciplines to share research, stories, and emerging scholarship in a supportive, community-centered environment. It is a space engage in meaningful dialogue and strengthening relationships among Indigenous scholars. The IGSS conference welcomes all Indigenous graduate students from across all faculties and institutions (regional, national, global), to present their work as they see it connecting to the theme, “Carrying our Ancestors with Us:
Knowledge, Responsibility, and Collective Learning,” and/or any of the sub themes:
Carrying Knowledge: How Indigenous knowledges are held and mobilized across disciplines and contexts.
Responsibility to Community, Land, and Relations: Accountability to community, land, ancestors, and future generations.
Resurgent Methods: Indigenous methodologies that disrupt or work beyond dominant academic norms.
Building Futures: Exploring how disciplines are growing, shifting, or being re-imagined in response to contemporary challenges.
Digital Basket: Exploring emerging technologies, application, ethics, and impact.
Abstract
Nicole Halbauer, X’staam Hana’ax (UNBC): Braided Voices of Ts’msyen Women : A Poetic and Scholarly Presentation about Matriarchs in Healthcare
Tsimshian
With an overview of unfolding PhD research and some spoken word poetry, this presentation addresses the theme of resurgent methods. For over fifty years, Ts’msyen women have shaped health, education, and. Community wellness across British Columbia. Our leadership, however, remains largely undocumented within academic and healthcare institutions. This presentation offers and overview of a PhD project that will braid together the stories of Ts’msyen Matriarchs whose lived experiences span from 19705 to 2025. The PhD research is grounded in Indigenous Research Methods, Narrative Inquiry, and Ts’msyen relational ethics. The research is responding to ongoing forms of disappearance-Epistemicide, institutional silencing, and the extraction of Indigenous identity for colonial systems. As a Ts’msyen researcher of the Ganhada clan, my positionality and matrilineal teachings will shape the projects accountability and methodology, something I discuss in the presentation. The presentation of my PhD research is amplified by spoken word poetry, a narrative that creatively explores shifts in White colonial society-from refusal of Indigenous identity, to conditional acceptance rooted in exploitation, to contemporary dependence on Indigenous cultural expertise during reconciliation initiatives. I am interested in revealing both resilience an harm: emotional labour, cultural burden, and the undervaluing of Indigenous knowledge systems within healthcare. By giving Ts’msyen stories a home in academia, the aim of my research is to challenge Western hegemony, revitalize Indigenous epistemology, and assert that Ts’msyen women have never been invisible-we have always been leaders, knowledge keepers, and essential architects of community wellness.
