About

Shalene Wuttunee Jobin is a Cree and Métis scholar and a citizen of Red Pheasant Cree First Nation, Treaty 6. She is an associate professor of Indigenous studies and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Governance at the University of Alberta, the founder of the Indigenous Governance and Partnership program, and a co-founder of the Wahkohtowin Law and Governance Lodge

In February 2023, Shalene finished writing Upholding Indigenous Economic Relationships: nehiyawak narratives (UBC Press). In this book, she utilizes a narrative analysis research method to pull out key concepts related to economic relationships from core-concepts found in the Cree language, first through Cree stories, and then through interviews with Cree knowledge holders.

Jobin has published in the edited collections Creating Indigenous Property: Power, Rights, and Relationships (2020), Living on the Land: Indigenous Women’s Understanding of Place (2016), Indigenous Identity and Resistance (2010), and in the journals American Indian Quarterly (2011), Revue Générale de Droit (2013), and Native Studies Review (2016). She has also co-authored in Canadian Legal Education Annual Review (2021), Aboriginal Policy Studies (2012, 2022) and Surviving Canada (2017). The Wahkohtowin Law and Governance Lodge, a partnership between the Faculty of Native Studies and the Faculty of Law, was created to support Indigenous communities’ goals to identify, articulate, and implement their own laws and governance.

Shalene is involved in numerous community-centred research initiatives, including Indigenous Approaches to Governance in the 21st Century, co-founding the Wahkohtowin Law & Governance Lodge, and the Prairie Indigenous Relationality Network (PRN). She currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Bent Arrow Healing Society and was the recipient of the 2023 University of Victoria Distinguished Women Scholars Award, the 2022 Indigenous Community Alumni Award and the 2020 University of Alberta’s Community Scholar Award winner.