Dr. Catherine Kineweskwêw Richardson Métis Nation. Full Professor, School of Community and Public Affairs, Concordia University. Concordia University Research Chair in Indigenous Healing Knowledges, Teaches in First Peoples Studies and Creative Arts Therapies.  

Catherine works at the junction of community practice, public affairs, and communication: the public naming of violence, the restoration of dignity in services and institutions, and the terms on which Indigenous and minority knowledge enters the record. She is Co-Founder of the Centre for Response-Based Practice, an international approach to violence that treats the act, not the person, as the problem.  She is a former Co-Director of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. She was Visiting Professor at Curtin University, Australia, 2022–2023, and former Director of First Peoples Studies.

The second practice is studio and Indigenous creation.  Her creative practice is centered around beading, working with wool, community facilitation/performance and creative writing.  She works with arts-based methods, participatory action research and research creation as a means of interacting with community and co-creating knowledge.  Here, resistance, relationality, and ceremony come together. 

She is a member of AuralinAI, a Montreal-based AI and emerging-technology research organization with partnerships in South America and Scandinavia. Her brief there is women’s leadership and the ethics of AI: who designs the system, whose knowledge it protects, and whether it expands a life or diminishes one. Her interest is applying Indigenous knowledges into Earth-Care and community thrivance.

Current projects include Reassembling the Human and Weaving Meaning. She is convening the 2027 symposium North to South in Public: The Lives This Age Expands and the Lives It Diminishes. The chair, Indigenous Healing Knowledges, is built from interviews and shared making in Greenland, Aotearoa, Venezuela, and Turtle Island. On Catherine’s Writings she publishes on response-based practice, dignity in higher education, and women’s resistance misread as syndrome, including a reframing of the Norrmalmstorg case as well as contesting victim-blaming in general. A podcast is in development.

Books include Life Course, Missive and Methodology (2025, with Erin Gurr), Facing the Mountain: Indigenous Healing in the Shadow of Colonialism (2021) and Stitching Our Findings Together: Indigenous Graduate Student Research, with Jeannine Carrière (University of Regina Press, 2025).

Courses: FPST 301 The Indian Act (and resistance to it!); FPST 398 Indigenous Approaches to Helping and Healing; FPST 298 Métis People and Culture; FPST 303 First Peoples and Health.

catherine.richardson@concordia.ca. ORCID 0000-0001-7846-0558.

Her writings can be seen on substack https://catherinerichardson.substack.com

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