Learning Outcomes

Matt Murphy, a Professor of sustainability and strategy at the Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria, teaches and carries out research in the areas of sustainability and social entrepreneurship. Matt is a settler of Irish, English and Scottish decent, and a 7^th generation Texan raised on traditional territory of the Comanche and Kiowa Peoples. He currently resides on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples. Through collaboration and community-based action research, Matt works with Indigenous partners to co-develop decision support and (cumulative) impact assessment systems to further self-determination, stewardship, and economic development efforts.

Tricia is an award-winning Indigenous entrepreneur, facilitator, speaker, consultant, and proud member of the Halalt (Xeláltxw) Nation on Vancouver Island where she lives and raises her two children. She is dedicated to advancing Indigenous self-determination through community engagement, strategy, facilitation, and implementation. 
With an MBA in Sustainable Innovation from the University of Victoria, Tricia has contributed to significant projects, including Indigenous Early Learning in Child Care in BC, Regional Energy Resource Tables, and the BC Climate Aligned Energy Framework. She is the Founder and Principal of Tumuxw Communications, offering consultation on First Nation Rights and Title issues, and the Creative Director of Salish Eye Productions, producing award-winning Indigenous media. 
As an Assistant Teaching Professor at UVic’s Gustavson School of Business, Tricia shares her knowledge on Indigenous entrepreneurship and collaboration with First Nations. She has been honoured with several awards, including the MBA Leadership/Citizenship Award.

Kēpa’s current research focuses on ecosystem impact assessment and empowering Iwi in relationships with regional and local government. 
 
Kēpa developed the Mauri Model, a decision-making framework that combines a stakeholder assessment of worldviews, with an impact assessment of indicators to determine sustainability and trends over time. This framework uses the concept of mauri as the measure of sustainability, rather than the conventional monetary based assessment.
 
The Mauri Model measures mauri in four dimensions – environmental wellbeing (Taiao), cultural wellbeing (Hapū), social wellbeing (Hapori) and economic wellbeing (Whānau). Indicators are then chosen that represent the impacts upon mauri for each dimension.

Dr. Gerald Singh is an Associate Professor and Ocean Nexus Chair in Global Change and Sustainable Development with the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. He has a PhD in Resource Management and Environmental Sciences from the University of British Columbia. Singh is also the Deputy Research Director with the Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center.  His research is primarily situated in the science-policy interface, and focused on understanding the dynamics between social, economic, and environmental dimensions in sustainable development.

Justine Keefer is a Dutch settler and a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria in the School of Environmental Studies Political Ecology lab. She was born in Treaty 2 territory and has spent the majority of her life living on Treaty 6 and 7 lands. She now resides on the unceded lands of the WSÁNEĆ peoples. Justine has experience working and engaging with provincial, federal and Indigenous governments from her time as a consultant with Calliou Group and as a policy analyst at the Metis Nation of Alberta. Her interests lie in understanding how cumulative effects assessment can be used as a tool to protect Nations rights.

Dr. Astrid V. Pérez Piñán was born and raised in Puerto Rico. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Administration, where she integrates interdisciplinary research with feminist scholarship to critically examine tensions between global development agendas and local realities, alongside shifts in the global development cooperation landscape, including the emergence of feminist policy frameworks. Her work engages the “measurement turn,” with a focus on the use of indicators in global and local development. Astrid is experienced in the use of community-engaged research. She analyzes the processes through which diverse, emerging economies take shape at the community level—challenging neoliberal economic (dis)orders—particularly within Indigenous and Afro-descendant contexts. Her most recent research explores themes of food sovereignty and reproductive justice.

Professor Dayna Nadine Scott served as York Research Chair in Environmental Law & Justice in the Green Economy from 2018-2023. She is cross-appointed with York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies & Urban Change. Professor Scott is the Director of Osgoode’s Environmental Justice and Sustainability Clinic and a Co-Coordinator of the joint MES/JD program.
Professor Scott joined Osgoode’s faculty in 2006 after completing a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship at McGill’s Faculty of Law and a Hauser Global Research Fellowship at NYU. Professor Scott’s research interests focus on contestation over extraction; exercises of Indigenous jurisdiction in relation to lands and resources; the distribution of pollution burdens affecting marginalized communities and vulnerable populations; gender and environmental health; and the justice dimensions of the energy transition or “green extractivism”.
Professor Scott is currently the co-Principal Investigator, with Professor Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark of the University of Victoria, of a SSHRC Partnership Grant called “Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism: Material Approaches to Restoring Indigenous Jurisdiction”. The project includes more than 20 critical Indigenous and anti-colonial scholars and land defenders from across Turtle Island pursuing research oriented towards how the “just transition” to sustainable economies can be imagined and infrastructured to restore Indigenous jurisdiction, laws and governance systems.
In 2026, Professor Scott directed, with Professor Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark and Professor Susan Hill, the International Political Economy & Ecology Summer School on the theme of ‘Jurisdiction Back: Restoring Indigenous Governance in the Wake of Extraction’.
Professor Scott has been the Primary Investigator on several SSHRC-funded projects, including “Consent & Contract: Authorizing Extraction in Ontario’s Ring of Fire” (2015-2018), “Reconciling Sovereignties: New Techniques for ‘Authorizing’ Extraction on Indigenous Territories” led by Professor Shiri Pasternak, in partnership with the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade (INET) and MiningWatch Canada.  She also completed research in partnership with environmental justice activists from the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, near Sarnia`s Chemical Valley, that applied a critical, feminist perspective to the examination of law’s treatment of the risks of long-term, low-dose exposures to pollutants, and another SSHRC-funded project (“Investigating Regulatory Chill”) that examined constraints on regulation to protect the environment, with a focus on investor rights in the resource extraction context.
Professor Scott has worked on collaborative policy reports for the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, including “Implementing a Regional, Indigenous-Led, and Sustainability-Informed Impact Assessment in Ontario’s Ring of Fire” in partnership with Chief and Council of Neskantaga First Nation, a remote Anishinaabe community in Ontario’s far north (2020) and “Operationalizing Indigenous Impact Assessment” in 2023.
Some of her recent publications include: “The Power of ‘Net Zero’: Seductive Dispossession on the Critical Minerals Frontier” in Law, Text Culture (2025);  “Infrastructural (Dis)Entitlement: Tactics of Dispossession on the Critical Minerals Frontier” in the Journal of Law & Political Economy in 2025; “Extraction Contracting: The Struggle for Control of Indigenous Lands” (2020) in a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, co-edited with Shiri Pasternak; “Extractivism” in Mariana Valverde, Kamari Clarke, Eve Darian-Smith and Prabha Kotiswaran, eds, The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021); the resurgence of Indigenous law in Treaty 9, with Andrée Boisselle (2019 UNB Law Review); the dynamics of “sacrifice zones” in the context of the emerging green energy economy (McGill Law Journal 2017, with Adrian A. Smith); anti-toxics politics (“Wanna-be Toxic Free? From Precautionary Consumption to Corporeal Citizenship” in Environmental Politics 2016); and the tactics of activists resisting tar sands extraction in Peace River Alberta (“‘We are the Monitors Now’: Experiential Knowledge, Transcorporeality and Environmental Justice” (2015) in Social & Legal Studies). 

For more than two decades, Tara has been dedicated to advancing sustainable development and operationalizing free, prior and informed consent for Indigenous peoples. 
Drawing on her Master’s degree in Political Science and her upbringing in Gitksan Ayookxw (laws), Tara has worked for a number of First Nations governments, academia, the provincial government, philanthropic organizations, and most recently for the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs as Wilp Sustainability Director where she led the development and implementation of the Wilp Sustainability Assessment Process. 
Tara is the founder of Hlimoo Sustainable Solutions (2021), an independent consulting business which she operates in her Gitksan homeland in New Hazelton, BC.

Robyn (Te Rarawa, Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Kurī) is a Chemist, Environmental Scientist and Public Health Professional by training.  She has had a varied career mainly spent using her science training to support Māori and Pacific students to succeed in STEM tertiary education. This began in 1991 when she established Tuakana Tutorials in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Auckland. Beyond Chemistry, her passion is improving the health and wellbeing of all, especially vulnerable communities. Those communities are predominantly Māori and Pacific whose health and wellbeing is directly impacted by our taiao. 
Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au. 
Robyn utilises her knowledge of health and Aotearoa NZ’s health system as the Chair of Pharmac’s Consumer Advisory Committee.  

Medoly Lepine was with the Mikisew Cree First Nation Government and Industry Relations (GIR) Department since 2003 until 2024. The GIR is mandated to manage all consultation matters pertaining to natural resource development within the Mikisew Cree’s traditional territory and Athabasca Oil Sands region. She is also a member of the Mikisew Cree a First Nation and was raised in Fort Chipewyan, the oldest settlement in Alberta. Melody studied environmental conservation sciences at the University of Alberta and the masters in environmental management program at Royal Roads University. Her balance in teachings of both traditional knowledge and western science has become Ms. Lepine’s key strength in her professional career. During her time with the GIR, Ms. Lepine has been managing numerous files for the Mikisew Cree some of which include oil sands regulatory interventions, developing and implementing the Mikisew Cree consultation protocol, negotiations of Impact Benefit Agreements, Indigenous Knowledge studies, land use planning, government policy reviews, community based research and creating a community based environmental monitoring program. Melody served as co-chair of the Alberta Oil Sands Advisory Group, member on the Alberta Indigenous Wisdom Advisory Panel, board member at the Pembina Institute, advisor on the Indigenous Advisory Committee for the federal government’s Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, council member on the

Stark’s innovative approaches to Indigenous law and governance have advanced the restoration of Indigenous political authority and jurisdiction. Centering Anishinaabe political thought, her work transforms our understandings of treaty and promotes a radical ethic of relationality for how we live together as treaty partners, as communities within which conflict and harms arise, and as humans in relation with the environment. “Indigenous law and governance are uniquely suited to take up the most vexing issues facing our world. They guide us away from rights-based models that are too often individualist, extractive and capitalist driven and toward deeply relational modes that center our responsibilities to one another and the lands and waters.”

Harlan Inkster is from the Tahltan Nation and was raised by extended family with matriarchal grandmothers taking the lead in his development and teaching him the respect and responsibility to the land that sustains his people and Tahltan way of being. He is actively involved in supporting his family board representative for the Tahltan Central Government. Harlan’s spouse and their adult children are Kaska Dena and much of the family focus is on Kaska lands and its governance. His two daughters and spouse are employed in mining reclamation on Kaska lands.    
  
Harlan worked ten years in frontline policing and another year as a conservation officer mainly based in the north. He also an airline rated pilot and flown throughout North America for an airline, medivac, charter and for the national police force.

I have dedicated the past 15 years working with a variety of community members, including children and youth, seniors, marginalized, and, most recently, First Nations in grass roots discussions regarding energy, community design, environment, and sustainability.  
I have incorporated best practice methods of facilitation, including open space technology, world cafe, conversation cafe, appreciative inquiry, sharing circles, and more, on the topics of sustainable development, energy development and policy, rights, ethics, and much more.  
I have worked with a variety of educators, planners, designers, and other stakeholders to holistic design policies, planning policies that are inclusive of all community groups.  
I continually participate in sustainability projects, programs, and education to learn new studies and research about sustainable development, water protection, conservation, alternative energy, and a variety of issues that we are challenged with today, such as poverty, economic diversity, sustainability, water availability and pollution, air pollution, global climate change, and social sustainability issues (drug addiction, homelessness, affordable housing etc).