Profile of Carrie Sacha DeWolfe

Award Received: SSHRC Doctoral Award

Awarded for the project: LIVING THROUGH DESIRABILITY: EXPANDING IDENTITY AND DISRUPTING COLONIAL IDEOLOGIES

Faculty: Education

Project supervised by: Amanda Benjamin, PhD

Are cultural practices intrinsic to ethnicity?  How do people understand who you are if you do not fit into their frame of reference?  My research will juxtapose the social, political and historical factors that influence Indigenous identity formation to how these forces inform[ed] it. 

As an Indigenous scholar, I examine the problematizing, pathologizing and culturizing of my identity as a Mi’kmaq person. I will apply multitextual communication to explore my lived experiences, utilizing an autoethnographic approach alongside visual research methods, producing a documentary film informed by lived experience, artefacts, proverbs, archival footage, and mentors encountered throughout my life.  My stories shared in the film will form an antithesis to damage-based narratives, discourses perpetuated by statistics gathering and reporting and Indigenous scholarship.  My autoethnographic documentary film will take audiences on a journey from damage to desire by presenting a different narrative. As a result, my research is a cultural negotiation, investigating how an expanded dialogue of my Mi’kmaq identity might present opportunities for First Nation students in this territory.