Image of Dr. Marie Battiste, Professor, College of Education; taken outdoors.

Bio/Historical Note: Dr. Marie Battiste is a retired Mi'kmaw educator from the Potlotek First Nation, Nova Scotia and full professor at the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the founding academic director of the Aboriginal Education Research Centre (AERC) at the U of S, a founding board member of the Canadian Council on Learning, and a former co-director of the Aboriginal Learning Knowledge Centre. Dr. Battiste headed a SSHRC-funded research hub called the Canadian Prevention Science Cluster, which aimed to identify evidence-based research for violence prevention programs in schools. With degrees from Harvard and Stanford, she is widely acknowledged as a senior Indigenous scholar in Canada whose work in Aboriginal knowledge and teaching has opened up new areas of research. In 2008 Dr. Battiste was awarded the National Aboriginal Achievement Award in Education for helping to spur institutional change in order to decolonize education, activate social justice and promote postcolonial approaches to education that recognize and affirm the political and cultural diversity of Canada. Dr. Battiste’s book Decolonizing Education Nourishing the Learning Spirit, 2013, follows her Sask Book Award for Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge, co-authored with J. Youngblood Henderson. She was editor of Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision and senior editor of First Nations Education in Canada: The Circle Unfolds. Dr. Battiste received the Distinguished Academic Award from the Canadian Association of University Teachers in 2013 and was the first woman to receive the Distinguished Researcher Award from the U of S. She has three honourary degrees to her credit (St. Mary’s, University of Maine at Farmington, and Thompson Rivers University), and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2014. Dr. Battiste was appointed an Honourary Officer of the Order of Canada in 2019.