In 2017, Dr. Matthew Wildcat and Dr. Daniel Voth received an inter-institutional (KIAS-CIH) grant to run an Indigenous Relationality Workshop that would bring together predominantly junior Indigenous academics and graduate students whose work is connected to the concept of Indigenous relationality. In 2018, they secured an SSHRC Connection Grant and worked with Dr. Jobin to plan and run a Prairie Indigenous Philosophy Project (PIPP) symposium to explore the idea of a project aimed at making accessible and facilitating sustained engagement with the works of prairie Indigenous philosophers. This was an opportunity to have preliminary discussions about the potential of PIPP with Maria Campbell and Leroy Little Bear, our two initial partner philosophers. A subsequent two-day symposium in September 2019 assessed the viability of a relationship-driven form of inquiry with Campbell and Little Bear.

The enthusiasm for the project among partner philosophers and assembled academics built momentum and resulted in the creation of a Visiting Declaration, which outlined the key tenets of visiting as a prairie Indigenous form of knowledge transfer. In 2020, Dr. Gina Starblanket received a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, which took the key foundations, and enthusiasm developed at the PIPP Symposium, and expanded it to a wider, more expansive partnership in which we formalized our research network, established a physical and digital presence, implemented the visiting method with our partner philosophers and undertook a range of research activities resourced by the partnership under a single umbrella, thereby providing a unified focus—prairie relationality—to that work.