Working to End Racial Oppression Conference 2025

Linda (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou) is Distinguished Professor at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi. She is a leading scholar and researcher in indigenous studies, indigenous education and kaupapa Māori research and has written many publications in this area. She was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2013 for her services to Māori and education. Professor Smith a recipient of the Apaarangi Rutherford Award, 2023 amongst her many achievements. 

Michelle Johnson-Jennings, a Choctaw Nation-enrolled tribal member, is a professor and the director of the division of environmentally based health and land-based healing at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute. She holds a joint appointment at the University of Colorado School of Public Health. She is a license eligible clinical health psychologist and serves as the Canadian Research Chair (CRC) Nominee in Indigenous Community Engaged Research.

Jeffrey Ansloos (Cree and English) is an Associate Professor of Indigenous Health and Social Policy and the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Studies in Health, Suicide Studies, and Environmental Justice at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. His areas of research and teaching focus on affective, socioecological and political dimensions of health; suicide studies; youth and community mental health; feminist, queer, anticolonial and abolitionist methodologies; and land and community education. He is a registered psychologist and supervises graduate students in Applied Psychology and Human Development. He is the founding director of the Critical Health and Social Action Lab, a CFI-funded innovation and research centre working with students and communities to advance health justice with Indigenous communities. He is cross appointed in Psychiatry at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, and is an affiliate faculty member of the School of Cities and the Waakebiness Institute for Indigenous Health at Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He is a member of the board of directors for the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. Ansloos is Cree and English, and a a citizen of Fisher River Cree Nation (Ochekwi-Sipi; Treaty 5). He was born and raised in the heart of Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba and currently lives in Toronto.

Donna Cormack (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe) is an Associate Professor, with joint positions at Te Kupenga Hauora Māori (University of Auckland) and Te Rōpū Rangahau Hauora a Eru Pōmare (University of Otago, Wellington). She has been involved in both qualitative and quantitative Kaupapa Māori studies on racism and its health impacts for a number of years, such as the Whakatika Survey of Māori experiences of racism. She is the Principal Investigator of Te Whakahaumaru Taiao - a project that examines experiences of discrimination, harassment and bullying amongst Māori medical students and doctors.

Read a sample of Dr Cormack's work: Dear Epidemiology

Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, and she recently released her fourth book, Imagination: A Manifesto. Ruha is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and in 2024 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship. 

Nathan Rew is a lecturer of Indigenous Studies in Te Pua Wānanga ki te Ao – the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Waikato. Of Papua New Guinean and Pākehā whakapapa, Nathan’s research is primarily concerned with the prospect of a new Oceania and the necessity of overcoming modernity to move towards a truly collective regional Indigenous Oceania. Nathan’s doctoral thesis examined how white supremacy and aqua nullius structure our colonial-capitalist world and function today as twin logics of violence ordering Pacific relationalities. Against these logics, he engages with Indigenous Oceanian theory to challenge and unravel modernity’s onto-epistemic order. Through his work he hopes to reinvigorate Indigenous Oceanian relationships to water and Black Oceania and stresses the importance of these relationships in overcoming the consequences of colonisation, capitalism, and climate change.

Veronica Tawhai, from Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Uepohatu, works as Pūkenga Tiriti for the Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor Māori at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa / Massey University and as a Tiriti o Waitangi educator nationally for Te Atakura Educators. Previous to her Pūkenga Tiriti role she lectured for 14 years for Te Pūtahi a Toi / School of Māori Studies in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, contemporary Māori politics and policy, and Indigenous critical theories. Between 2012 – 2017 Veronica coordinated the national Matike Mai Aotearoa Rangatahi  / Youth for Constitutional Transformation project, led by Moana Jackson and Professor Margaret Mutu. Her PhD research, supported by a Fulbright - Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga scholar award, studied the conscientisation work of senior Indigenous political educators in Aotearoa, Turtle Island (USA and Canada), Hawai’i and Australia for their strategies towards societal transformation in settler colonial contexts. She is currently working on building the critical mass of decolonial educators in Aotearoa through the newly established Te Atakura Institute for Educators Aotearoa (TAIEA). 

Mohan J Dutta is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication, and Director, Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research & Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University. Mohan Dutta’s research examines marginalisation in contemporary healthcare, health care inequalities, the intersections of poverty and health, political economy of global health policies, and the meanings of health in the realms of marginalised experiences in underserved communities in the global South. Based on his work on healthcare among indigenous communities, sex workers, migrant workers and rural communities, he has developed an approach called the culture-centered approach that outlines culturally-based participatory strategies for addressing unequal healthcare policies and global disparities.