What is
Ziibiing Lab?

Known today as Taddle Creek, Ziibiing is the name of a hidden waterway. Ziibiing Lab operates nearby and seeks to remember, relate to, reproduce, and revitalize the waterway. A specific reference to that sacred river in Tkaronto, flowing from north to south into Lake Ontario, ziibiing is also a general reference in Anishinaabemowin for being at or near a creek, river, and waterway. It has been revered, especially by Anishinaabeg, for its roaring waters, fish and plant life, and spirit. Yet today, it is largely considered lost and disappeared. With increasing Euro-American settlement and urbanization in the 19th century, Ziibiing became submerged. It was dammed to create McCaul’s Pond for recreational purposes, encased underground to develop the city’s sanitation system, and then built upon by the University of Toronto to construct Hart House. But, the creek did not vanish. Ziibiing continues to flow and be heard. The river resurfaces as a wet reminder—or muddy nuisance—and audible disruption that it, like Indigenous peoples who revere it as a sacred source of life, endures.

A collaboratory is a research laboratory integrating collaboration into governance, operations, research, programs, and ethics, to name just a few areas. Ziibiing Lab is collaborative in a number of meaningful ways. First, a Governing Council of Indigenous professors, stationed across the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto’s St. George campus, lead strategic planning, development, and advancement. Although Dr. Uahikea Maile is the founding Director, Professor Maile is one of nine members of the Governing Council. Read more about our people. Second, a Research Council being constituted with faculty across the University of Toronto’s three campuses—St. George, Mississauga, and Scarborough—will collaborate together on research projects concerning Indigenous politics. Stay updated on our research. Third, faculty collaborate together with graduate and undergraduate students and community members to design, conduct, disseminate, implement, and archive Indigenous politics research. For instance, check out our podcasts. Collaboration in Ziibiing Lab is not incorporated simply into a single project or program, it is structured into the very fabric of the research collaboratory. Inspired by colleagues in the Tkaronto Circle Lab and Technoscience Research Unit, the collaboratory is unsettling the dominant research lab model in social sciences.

Indigenous politics does not begin or end in any one country. Ziibiing Lab views it is an accumulation of nation-specific struggles and community-based movements across territories and oceans. Indigenous politics has always been global. Organizing and solidarity within and beyond nation-states, Indigenous internationalism shaped the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and initial UN adoption in 2007 and subsequent domestic ratifications, such as Bolivia in 2009 and just recently Canada in 2021. Early contributors included delegates from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and Nishnawbe Aski Nation. Yet, Indigenous politics can get caught in the trap of state recognition through national law and policy. This effectively obscures how the categories of Indigenous and Indigenous Peoples, as well as the legal regimes of Indigenous rights, are international and transnational by nature. Ziibiing Lab focuses on Indigenous politics in global perspectives in the spirit of Indigenous internationalism to interrupt the homogenization of Indigenous politics, nations, communities, peoples, thought, and movements. Our work inhabits the echo between local and global. Between Tkaronto in the Dish With One Spoon and the Arctic, Andes, Oceania, to name a few. We value the heterogeneity and relationality implicit in Indigeneity in our governance, research, and programs. In other words, we value the interconnected diversity of Indigenous peoples, thought, and movements around the world.

If you are interested in getting involved at Ziibiing Lab, send us a message. You can also email us. Or, visit the collaboratory in Sidney Smith Hall Room 3067 on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday from 10am–5pm (Spring 2024).