The Prairie Indigenous Relationality Network (PIRN) is built out of organizing since 2017 between predominantly Indigenous, early and mid-career scholars who are from or have a connection to the prairies.
The work of PIRN has involved regional events, workshops, research publications and partnerships with approximately 50 scholars from over a dozen institutions from 2017 - 2023.
This work has been funded by internal institutional funds, external funders, the Canada Research Chairs Program, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
We recognize Indigenous knowledges as relational. Visiting creates and transfers Indigenous knowledges to future generations. Together, we will create space and take action to center visiting in our work, and invite those who want to join in our commitment to visiting with the following in mind:
● We commit to investing the time, space and resources to create relationships.
● We have a shared commitment to better our communities and Nations.
● We embrace the range of teachings, ideas, stories, insights and experiences of Indigenous peoples.
● We believe the best motivation for the work will be building the relationships we have with each other because they are individually and collectively beneficial.
● We care for each other and respect our different capacities.
● We commit to the importance of reflecting on how we place different traditions in conversation with each other, where no one loses their distinctiveness but can also create new understandings.
● We are committed to accessible practices and outcomes.
● We recognize that disagreement is an important part of passing on knowledge and is crucial to making decisions together.
● We are attentive to the importance of following protocols, and to the diversity of protocols that have an impacton the work we are doing.
● We acknowledge that the opportunity to do this work requires us to assume responsibility both for what we do and how we do it.
● We affirm and support partners to build custom agreements for their specific research projects reflecting localIndigenous knowledges.
● We affirm and uphold a commitment to consent. Consent is understood to be revisable, and can be withdrawn.
● As participants in this grant we commit to being truthful and transparent about who we are and where we come from.
We understand visiting to be extending ourselves to enter into a relationship with others. Visiting involves offering and receiving hospitality, sharing tea and food, being both a good host and a good guest. Visiting happens in short and long term relationships, it creates relations and communities of many different forms, and allows us to theorize and reflect. We believe in creating space for gentle and critical conversations. The work and spirit of visiting also creates something larger than the relationships of people coming together at that moment. When we think about visiting this way, we see it as an enduring method of learning, teaching, connecting, correcting, and deciding.
Visiting changes us, individually and collectively, in the moment, and over time.
The origins of PIRN can be traced back to an Indigenous Relationality Workshop organized by Matthew Wildcat and Daniel Voth in 2017 through institutional funding from the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) and the Calgary Institute for the Humanities (CIH). In 2018, Dr. Daniel Voth and Matthew Wildcat secured a SSHRC Connection Grant to plan and run the first Prairie Indigenous Philosophy Project (PIPP) Symposium. Dr. Jobin was also a key leader in planning and contributing to the symposium. In 2020, Gina Starblanket received a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (PDG) with Dr. Jobin, Dr. Voth, Dr. Wildcat, Dr. Robert Henry, and Jessie Loyer. This PDG grant took the key foundations, and enthusiasm developed at the SSHRC-supported PIPP Symposium, and expanded it to a wider, formal partnership in which we implemented the visiting method with our partner philosophers, while also bringing a number of other individual research activities under a single umbrella and providing a unified focus to that work.