Co-Investigators

Dẕenēs̱ hoti’e! Edōsdi ushyē. Tałsetān didene hots’ih.Tsesk’iye esdā tsehi. Tlabānotine hots’ih ja’ sini. My name is Edōsdi (Judy Thompson) and I am a member of the Tahltan Nation. I was the Language Reclamation Director for my Nation from 2012-2019 and I am a learner of my Tāłtān language. I have been teaching at the post-secondary level for over 25 years and am an associate professor in the Department of Indigenous Education at the University of Victoria. I am excited to continue my learning, teaching, and research journey out of Victoria, and to continue to build relationships with the Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples.

My research interests include Indigenous language revitalization; Indigenous language and health and wellbeing; Indigenous research methodologies; Indigenous based curriculum and pedagogy; and Indigenous knowledge systems.

Charlotte Loppie is a Professor with the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria. Her research interests are sexual and reproductive health across the lifespan; sexual diversity; sex trade work; HIV/AIDS; the construction of female sexuality and the cultural determinants of health.

In the following video, Charlotte discusses one of her main foci of research, HIV/AIDS in Indigenous communities. She explains how by talking to and building relationships with Indigenous communities we can better understand and address their health concerns: https://youtu.be/KGATBevw9GQ

Jessica Ball is a professor in the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria, Canada.   Jessica has written and taught countless courses on child and youth health and development, including teaching in universities in Canada, the United States, Malaysia, Singapore and Bangladesh.  At UVic, she was a founding faculty member in UVic’s Early Childhood Development Virtual University, teaching initial cohorts of leaders in Africa and the Middle East. She teaches upper level undergraduate courses on mental health and addictive behaviours and graduate courses on social determinants of child development.

Her program of research includes a range of projects centering on cultural and policy contexts of child wellness, early learning, and development. Her achievements have been recognized by awards for teaching, knowledge mobilization, contributions to Indigenous children’s well-being, and research in service of communities.

Ewa Czaykowska is a Professor and linguist at the University of Victoria, Canada. She has had the honour of working for many years with the W̱SÁNEĆ community and with the Nxaʔamxčín Language Program of Colville Tribes. Her work has included supporting and contributing to community language reclamation projects, digital dictionary construction, and expanding community-based research methodology in language documentation. Ewa has taught in the Linguistics department and in Indigenous Education, and has been a founding participant in the development and delivery of all the undergraduate and graduate programs in Indigenous Language Revitalization at UVic.   

T’łat’laḵuł Trish Rosborough focused her scholarship on Indigenous language revitalization. An adult learner of her late mother’s first language, Kwak’wala, Trish often used a narrative approach to her research, sharing stories of her personal journey as a language learner, teacher and researcher.

Her SSHRC Insight grant research project, Beautiful Words: Enriching and Indigenizing Language Revitalization through Understandings of Linguistic Structure, stemmed from her view that it is important to consider both how to retain Indigenous languages and how to retain the worldview understandings within the languages.

Trish was a co-Principal Investigator with the NEȾOLṈEW̱ Partnership, where she supported community Partner research and helped to guide the overall Partnership. She will be missed greatly by all members of the NEȾOLṈEW̱ Partnership. Her intelligence, compassion, and fierce determination will continue to guide us as we carry on with the work Trish was so deeply committed to.