Intergenerational Indigenous Resilience and Navigating Academic Administration

The author has been asked a number of times about how she arrived at the role of an academic administrative leader in postsecondary education. Queries and interviews on questions such as these have provided her with an opportunity to reflect on her path into academic administration and to think more deeply about her own values and understandings about academic leadership. This chapter provides critical reflections of her experiences, understandings, and knowings from an Indigenous women's leadership lens and provides a perspective on navigating academic administration in the postsecondary environment. She intentionally weaves personal narratives as well as relevant literature to discuss the challenges and successes of navigating academic administration as an Indigenous woman. She does this because of the nature of this book and also because women in academia continue to be oppressed. Importantly, she situates the importance of staying true to core values and her own Indigeneity drawing on her own intergenerational resilience.

Law, Equality, and Entrepreneurship Through a Gendered Lens

An insurmountable amount of great research being done in academia rarely gets transformed into laws and policies. This can be attributed to the disconnect between academia, law/policy makers, and decision-making tables. A three-pronged approach to bridge the gap between academic scholarship, grassroots advocacy, and political activism could be instrumental in impacting socio-legal and policy reforms. Gender, as a social construct, has intersected since time immemorial with the way law and society have been organized. Law, as a hegemonic collection of practices and processes, has actively perpetuated a particular social order that did not go far enough in matching lived realities. This chapter begins with the author's efforts to examine family law and social inequality through a gendered lens by exploring marriage, divorce, and family entrepreneurship. It further outlines the ongoing debates about gender vs. diversity mainstreaming in policy realms. Lastly, it concludes with how these experiences drove the author's passion for grassroots advocacy, which finally led the author to political activism.

“I Didn't Come to Play”

Pasifika women in the academy face many of the same challenges as other racialised women working in universities. At the intersection of race and gender, we experience the white and masculine imprints of higher education. These imprints lead to Pasifika women experiencing excess labour, infantilization, hyper-surveillance, stranger making, expectations of intelligibility, and desirable diversity. In spite of this daily onslaught Pasifika, women continue to work and engage in higher education and the question needs to be asked: Why? This chapter explores these experiences and more importantly the motivations of Pasifika women to continue to engage with higher education in spite of the systemic exclusion they face.

Breaking the Ice

The “leaky pipeline” has become a popular analogy to explain the gender disparity in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine (STEMM). The reasons for the “leaky pipeline” are varied and continue to be addressed in the literature, and entire sections of the pipeline are missing for Indigenous women, LGBTQ2S+, persons with disabilities, racialized minorities, and women who experience other forms of marginalization. In 2019, the authors were selected for Homeward Bound, a 12-month international leadership program that culminated in the largest ever all-women expedition to Antarctica. They joined 97 women from 34 different countries around the world where they explored and reflected on their leadership in the context of personal values, strategic planning, visibility, and team building. In this chapter, they explore current statistics that paint a clear picture that the “pipe” is still leaking. They also share reflections from their journey to Antarctica and offer strategies to “break the ice” and create a system that will enable all women to thrive in academia.

“I Didn't Expect YOU to Be the University President!”

After decades of being male dominated in nearly every respect, Canadian universities made significant progress toward gender equity in 1980s and ‘90s. That momentum stalled for the most part for almost two decades, and only in the past few years has an awareness of the lack of progress—as well as the importance of overtly promoting gender equity and women's leadership—re-emerged as an urgent priority both for faculty members and for the institutions where they work. In this chapter, the past three decades of women's advancement and leadership in Canadian academia are described and analyzed through the reflections and experiences of one woman.

The Emergence, Experiences, and Empowerment of Women Administrators, Coaches, and Athletes

The objective of this chapter is to provide a more thorough understanding of the current United States intercollegiate athletics model that includes competitive sport opportunities within its system of higher education, the history and emergence of women in sport within higher education, the experiences of women leaders within intercollegiate sport, and future women sport participant and leader empowerment initiatives within higher education. While women were provided opportunities to compete in sport competitively within higher education at a much later date than their men counterparts, the significant impact of athletic participation for women and girls at this level has been established within the previous research. Most notably, women and girls with past sport participation experience at the college level have been found to represent a high proportion of women in leadership roles across a variety of industry segments. These insights provide significant evidence of the importance of equitable access to sport participation within the higher education model.

An Intersectional Love Story

As a lesbian couple working in academia, you might imagine that the authors have similar experiences. However, once you add race and ethnicity to the mix, the equation changes beyond measure. This chapter will focus on the different paths that two lesbians take to leadership positions in academia. Often referring to ourselves as “professionally gay,” the authors tell their stories from “slightly” different lenses: the White woman with a PhD who moved to a rural town for a tenure-track position and the Black woman with a Master's degree who took positions such as “assistant to the administrative assistant.”

A Pathway to “Becoming”

In Canada, an exciting transformation has taken place within the context of Indigenous health research and scholarship. As Canadian universities strive to embrace processes of indigenization, the author takes the position that much can be learned from the Indigenous health experience. Drawing in large part from her own journey into Indigenous health scholarship, first as a student and now as an academic leader, the goal of this chapter is to describe the author's pathway “to becoming” an independent Indigenous health scholar. Herein she shares stories that describe how her pathway—and her continued learning as a researcher, teacher, and mentor—has been shaped by the powerful experience of being engaged in these Indigenous health training environments. She describes the important sense of belonging and success she achieved from learning in such indigenized environments, but also of the internal struggles she has experienced when attempting to bridge these powerful practices within the wider university context, where the same openness to indigenized ways of learning and doing has not been similarly embraced.

Resisting Exotic Puppetry

Indigenous women have increasingly taken up leadership roles in the academy, particularly in the time of truth and reconciliation within the Canadian context. While the institutions are keen to promote Indigenous leadership, spaces are carved out, yet there is a surge of resignations, firing, and toxic work environments. This chapter will delve into the colonial patriarchy and misogyny that intersects with Indigeneity within academic institutions. The notion of these carved out spacing being stages of performance and the exotic puppetry that often plays out particularly for Indigenous women will be underscored.

Indigenous Killjoys Negotiating the Labyrinth of Dis/Mistrust

Indigenous scholars often feel like they have to do better and be better to fit in the academy. The sense of being an imposer is an emotion that is familiar to many. Indigenous women particularly become very accustomed to the gendered and racialized codes of academia. Raising the issue positions Indigenous women as killjoys – always demanding more than they are entitled. Indigenous scholars bring a lot to the academy and can draw on millennia of Indigenous knowledge as they negotiate a labyrinth of dis/mistrust in the system. Despite this, they will prevail as scholars of substance and worth.