Core Team

Dr. Lisa Bourque Bearskin, a Cree Métis Registered Nurse leader from Beaver Lake Cree Nation, is a tenured Associate Professor and CIHR Chair holder at University of Victoria with 30 years of experience in nursing.  She is known for her expertise in Indigenous nursing leadership, equity, and Indigenous knowledge in nursing. She now devotes her research career to community knowledge as a generative process to advancing Indigenous health nursing. She is recognized for her work on relational, rights/strength-based research approach to advancing Indigenous health rights. She is a former president of the Canadian Indigenous Nursing Association (CINA) and has led organizational changes that focused on reconciling parallel pathways of traditional Indigenous health care in the context of community wellness. She is a proud sur-thriver of the residential school and sixties scoop era, who rebuilt and maintained a solid connection to her community and culture and became a Licensed Practical Nursing. She went on to receive her Baccalaureate, Master of Science, and Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing from the University of Alberta.

I am a PhD-prepared registered nurse who graduated from the University of Ottawa, located in Ottawa, on the unceded, unsurrendered Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. My doctoral research focused on exploring the use of digital storytelling as a methodology to promote epistemic justice for people with psychotic disorders and establish a line of communication with healthcare leaders. I have been involved in multiple diverse national and international research projects and publications, including designing and facilitating a Community of Practice (CoP) at the University of Ottawa to provide graduate students with a form of social learning that supports group engagement, dialogue, debate, and networking. My goal as a researcher/educator is to address the professional mandate of social justice to help bring the voices of marginalized people forward into programs, practices, and services to improve healthcare delivery and patient outcomes. I am also interested in addressing nurses’ ambivalence with political agency to promote the social mission of fostering justice, uncovering inequities, and promoting patient-centred care by challenging systems and structures that exert discriminatory and oppressive power. Prior to academia, I worked as a medical/surgical, community and mental health nurse in Ontario.

Blythe is a Phd prepared nurse, educator, and researcher. She is anglo-European and Greek white settler born and raised on the lands of the Niitsitapi. Her doctoral research asked Canadian nurse educators to examine structural, pedagogical, and discursive barriers to robust and effective implementation of anti-racist education in baccalaureate nursing programs.  Her role in the chair work is to coordinate and support the research arm of the I-GEN project.