Are We All Treaty People? Building Research with Students

The 2025 Keynote Lecture for the Inquiry@Queen's Undergraduate Research Conference. 

"In this talk I will discuss my experience integrating teaching with research. Often professors find teaching and research compete for our time because our courses are not at all on the same topics as our research. In 2012, I found myself puzzling over the slogan “We are all Treaty People” coming out of the Indigenous rights movement Idle No More. I asked myself what I thought would be a simple question: “Am I? is there a treaty for Kingston?” But this question wasn’t in fact easy to answer, and thus began a ten year research project. I was lucky to have funding from the Principal and support from my Department Head to begin to work through these questions via the course Unsettling Kingston/Katarokwi, which was a very satisfying process, and the reverse of the usual expectation that the professor figures everything out and THEN teaches it."

Laura J. Murray is a Professor in the Department of English and recently completed a 4-year term as Co-Director of the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies.