This issue presents students' presentation abstracts from the 18th Annual Indigenous Graduate Student Symposium which was held virtually on March 6th and 13th, 2021.

Given the impacts of current global events, the need to reflect on our collective and individual actions and the role we play has become increasingly important. The 2021 IGSS theme, Collective Response-Abilities: Intervention for Indigenous Wellbeing, explores our individual and collective responsibilities for the restoration and maintenance of our communal and personal wellbeing.

With this in mind, the conference welcomed all students from across faculties, institutions, and campuses to reflect on what intervention for wellbeing means, with respect to their work in the many spaces and intersections of being we occupy. Individually, we are given a diversity of gifts and abilities to respond to our collective needs, this conference explores and celebrates these gifts.

The abstracts reflect the following themes:

• Our Responsibility to the wellbeing of ourselves, our community, and our people. This stream asks, “What should we be doing?”


• Our Ability to support the wellbeing of ourselves, our community, and our people. This stream asks, “What are we able to offer?”


• Our Response for the wellbeing of ourselves, our community, and our people. This stream asks, “What are/will we be doing?”

The Indigenous Graduate Student Symposium Journal is a student-led volunteer initiative founded in 2021 by Supporting Aboriginal Graduate Enhancement (SAGE) at The University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. This volume features twenty-nine abstracts of students who presented virtually and in-person during the 20th Annual Indigenous Graduate Student Symposium (IGSS) hosted at UBC’s Vancouver campus on March 17-18, 2023.

Students represented in this volume are affiliated with Indigenous nations and academic institutions largely in western Canada and spanning across Turtle Island (Indigenous North America) with representation also from Latin America. They include students pursuing masters and doctoral degrees in a diversity of disciplines and fields including Architecture, Biology, Counselling, Dental Hygiene, Educational Studies, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geography, Health Sciences, Indigenous Museology, Interdisciplinary Studies, Kinesiology, Law, Library & Information Studies, Medicine, Nursing, Psychology, Public Health, and Rehabilitation Sciences. All with an interwoven commitment to employing research and Indigenous methodologies in ways that honour community.

The 20th Annual IGSS theme was Honouring Research, Honouring Community. 

Student abstracts in this volume exemplify four interrelated sub-themes:

1. Centering Indigenous Paradigms, Knowledges & Research Practices


2. Renewing & Reimagining Knowledge Transmission: Past, Present, Future


3. Nurturing the Relationship between Community & Research


4. Embodying & Actioning Interventions through Indigenous Research

Student-led and co-sponsored by UBC and SFU, the annual IGSS seeks to provide Indigenous graduate students a supportive and empowering environment grounded in Indigenous cultural values in which to share multidisciplinary research. It fosters peer-to-peer mentoring and supportive connections with emerging and established Indigenous scholars in the SAGE network. Students are invited to present finished and in-progress work connecting to annual symposium themes and sub-themes.

The Indigenous Graduate Student Symposium Journal was founded in 2021 by Supporting Aboriginal Graduate Enhancement (SAGE) at The University of British Columbia (UBC) and Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia. This volume features a portion of permissioned abstracts from student presentations shared during the 19th Annual Indigenous Graduate Student Symposium (IGSS) which was hosted virtually on March 19, 2022. 

The 19th Annual IGSS theme was Indigenous Empowerment and Resurgence. Students presented on the following sub-themes:

1. Indigenous Languages, Ceremonies, Pedagogical Practice, and Knowledge Systems for Healing Colonial Trauma


2. Indigenizing the Academy (e.g., Pedagogies, Research, Policies) 


3. Indigenous Resurgence (e.g., Health, Science, Mathematics Employment) 


4. Indigenous Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Student-led and co-sponsored by UBC and SFU, the annual IGSS seeks to provide Indigenous graduate students a supportive and empowering environment grounded in Indigenous cultural values in which to share multidisciplinary research. It fosters peer-to-peer mentoring and supportive connections with emerging and established Indigenous scholars in the SAGE network. Students are invited to present finished and in-progress work connecting to annual symposium themes and sub-themes.