The Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies is welcoming Dr. Abra Wenzel as the 2024 Roberta Bondar Postdoctoral Fellow in Northern and Polar Studies.

Dr. Wenzel completed her PhD in anthropology at Carleton University in 2023 where her research took an economic anthropological approach to Indigenous women’s textiles and art in the sub-Arctic region, specifically in the Mackenzie Valley in the Northwest Territories, and their relationship to the Canadian tourism industry.

“I always liked art, but I never knew that I would be conducting research with artists about their artwork,” Dr. Wenzel told Arthur. 

Her interest in studying Arctic communities and arts came as a result of a chance to travel to the Yellowknife, Northwest Territories in 2016 as a Masters student at the University of Victoria to study a large collection of Indigenous artwork and textiles for her then supervisor’s research project on art produced within Residential Schools. 

It was during this trip that Dr. Wenzel became interested in the art form of caribou hair tufting in particular, which remains a major interest for her. Tufting involves the bundling of the hair against a backing, usually leather or bark, which is then secured and trimmed down to create a dense three dimensional “tuft”.

During her first trip, Dr. Wenzel made connections with museum curators and members of the community who have continued to be central to her research. 

“That [experience] really blossomed into this larger research project of uncovering women's narratives of how their grandmothers, their aunties, their mothers, and now them continue to support their communities and their families through their artwork, specifically in the tourism trade,” she said. 

In the course of her doctoral research, Dr. Wenzel worked to uncover narratives of women who worked to support their families and communities through their work as artists and how this knowledge was shared within communities.  

“Women have always navigated those realms, but their artwork has been so important, decade after decade, for not only economically supporting their families and communities, but also continuously representing Indigenous sovereignty and culture,” Dr. Wenzel explained, noting how her research also illuminated the ways in which art specifically made for tourism trade purposes has historically been looked down on as a “lesser realm” of art.

During her tenure as a Bondar Fellow, Dr. Wenzel’s research will shift slightly towards generating a more culturally nuanced understanding of the impact of forest fires in the Northwest Territories. 

She explained that this really is “an expansion” of her previous research on art and tourism as many of the communities she works with had to be evacuated during last year’s wildfires. In Yellowknife alone 20,000 people — the entire population of the city — were evacuated in August as a precaution during the worst of the wildfires.

There is of course an important connection to be studied between the land, art, and communities in the north of Canada, and Dr. Wenzel’s research dwells on questions of making those connections clear while also filling a gap in the academic literature on climate change and wildfires in particular in the Northwest Territories.

“Art is also so embedded within the boreal forest — it's such an important environment, not only to the north, but to the peoples who live there, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous,” Dr. Wenzel said. “So our work is still going to be embedded within that research, but it's also an expansion into the growing emergence of wildfires and the threat that they're posing to the northern climate.”

In addition to the cultural and human impact of fires and displacement, Dr. Wenzel also foresees her project deepening our current understanding of the economic impacts of climate change and wildfires in particular in the region.

“A very important aspect is continuing my conversations with the Indigenous communities there, so the Dene communities around their knowledge of the wildfires,” Dr. Wenzel said, adding that she hopes by continuing with her existing collaborations with community members and government agencies forward looking and culturally informed solutions to preventing further catastrophes can be found through co-management of the forests.

In the meantime, being able to understand what that looks like will mean drawing on archival sources which document cultural burns and also how the Canadian government’s outlawing of many cultural practices has interrupted the transmission of traditional land-based knowledge in northern Indigenous communities. 

As part of the fellowship, Dr. Wenzel will also be teaching a course on issues related to the Arctic which will be offered as a seminar-based course both to upper-year undergraduate students and graduate students at Trent under the course codes CSID 5902H and CAST 4953H Special Topic: The Changing Arctic in the Winter 2025 term. 

The opportunity this course offers is exciting, Dr. Wenzel says, as “it gives a lot of room in the classroom for discussion.”

“I always tell my students ‘I could talk at you all day long but one of the best ways to learn is through each other and through conversation’,” she said. “It's really important to have the multiplicity of a thought.”

Ideally, Dr. Wenzel hopes that the course offers a unique opportunity for undergraduate students to get a better sense of what graduate school may be like and to prepare them for further studies. 

“It is a really great experience for the sharing of ideas. It allows upper-year undergraduate students, if they're interested in graduate school, and often many of them are, if they're taking that style of course, to kind of get a feel of what it's like to be in a graduate seminar.” 

The opportunity for students from different disciplines and academic backgrounds is also important as questions surrounding the north in Canada are so expansive and multi-faceted and include “discussions of north as identity, as embedded within language, and environment” and of course studying art as an essential component of one’s understanding of the north. 

“The north is this massive part of the Canadian identity, but so few people actually know about the north, nor do they ever really get a chance to experience it,” Dr. Wenzel explained.

Director of the Frost Centre, Professor Heather Nicol, also expressed her excitement at Dr. Wenzel will be joining the department as a Bondar Fellow noting how timely her research on climate change, wildfires and Indigenous cultural memory is and how it speaks to the goals of the Frost Centre. 

“The threat of current and previous wildfire seasons in the Canadian North speaks to the importance of Wenzel’s research, and the continuing impact of colonial legacies,” Dr. Nicol wrote in a statement to Arthur. “I am delighted Dr. Wenzel's research will be shared with students and faculty at Trent, through public lectures such as North at Trent, as well as within the classroom.”