2012 Conference

Aroha Te Pareake Mead is from the Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou tribes (Māori) of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Aroha is the global Chair of the IUCN Commission on Environment, Economic and Social Policy and a Senior Lecturer in Māori Business, Victoria Management School, Victoria University of Wellington. She has been involved in indigenous cultural and intellectual property and environmental issues for over 30 years at tribal, national, Pacific regional and international levels.

Aroha previously worked as the National Policy Director for Te Tau Ihu o Ngā Wānanga – the National Secretariat for the three Māori/tribal universities: Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, Te Wānanga o Aotearoa and Te Wānanga o Raukawa, and before that she held managerial positions in Te Puni Kōkiri, the Ministry of Māori Development. She led the organisation of the conference that developed the 1993 Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples; the 1994 Roundtable of Indigenous Peoples and Self-Determination; and the 6th International Conference of Ethnobiologists as well as numerous, national, regional and international conferences on traditional knowledge, cultural and intellectual property rights, biodiversity and genetic resources. The most recent conference she led was Sharing Power: A New Vision for Development held in Whakatane, New Zealand, January 2011. A multi-disciplinary conference that explored de-centralisation in the governance and management of bio-cultural resources; enabling indigenous peoples and local communities to have greater rights and responsibilities in governance and management of the landscapes and ecosystems they live in and near; and looked at alternatives to the current capital based economic model that has created social and economic inequities and large scale environmental damage.
Her current interests are in providing insights into new models of conservation and development.

Indigenous Affiliation: Tuscarora/Saponi

Troy A. Richardson (Tuscarora/Saponi) is Associate Professor of Education and American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Cornell University. As both a philosopher of education and scholar in American Indian studies, Troy’s research, scholarship and pedagogical efforts centre on expanding the philosophical and conceptual foundations of education to include the intellectual traditions of indigenous and other minoritised communities. He draws particular attention to the epistemological and ontological dimensions of indigeneity as it is revealed in literature, visual culture and non-fiction works by indigenous peoples. More specifically, he theorises the nature of selfhood, ethics, gender, ecology and power from these indigenous intellectual traditions to chart the alternative social and philosophical imaginaries of indigenous peoples. His work helps to reveal the precise operations of a still operative colonialism in Euro-centric intellectualism and knowledge production in research and academic settings.

Indigenous Affiliation: Skolt Sámi
Rector, Sámi allaskuvla / Sámi University College, Guovdageaidnu (Kautokeino), Samiland/Norway

Jelena Porsanger is head of the Sámi University College. She is a Skolt Sámi, one of the Eastern Sámi groups in the borderland between Finland, North-West Russia and Norway.
She received her doctoral degree in the history of religion and Sámi research from the University of Tromsø, Norway in 2006. Her doctoral thesis, originally written in Sámi, deals with evaluation of source material for the study of indigenous religion of the Eastern Sámi, within the framework of indigenous methodologies.

Before becoming Rector, Dr. Porsanger was Associate Professor at the Sámi University College leading a pilot project on documentation and protection of Sámi traditional knowledge. From 2005 to 2009 she worked at the Nordic Sámi Institute (NSI), first as a senior researcher and later as the head of the NSI. She was a Director of Research for the Sámi University College, which the NSI joined in 2005. She was a research scholar and lecturer at the Department of Sámi at the University of Tromsø 1998−2005 and a lecturer at the University of Helsinki, Finland prior to 1998.
She has published many papers about Eastern Sámi traditions, religion and history, indigenous methodologies, traditional knowledge and indigenous epistemologies. She has presented at international conferences and has been an expert in knowledge and capacity building for the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. For many years she has been the chief editor of the Sámi dieđalaš áigečála, a peer-reviewed research periodical in the Sámi language.

Indigenous Affiliation: Kānaka ‘Ōiwi o Hawai’i

Chair and Associate Professor of Native Hawaiian Health and Deputy Director for the Center of Native and Pacific Health Disparities Research in the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
Keawe’aimoku Kaholokula has a PhD in clinical psychology and is the Chair and Associate Professor of Native Hawaiian Health and Deputy Director for the Center of Native and Pacific Health Disparities Research in the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. His current research is funded by the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. to examine biological, psychological, and socio-cultural factors (and their interplay) affecting Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander health and to develop community-based and culturally-relevant interventions. He is also a member of a Native Hawaiian cultural group, called the Halemua o Kūali’i, dedicated to the perpetuation of Hawaiian cultural practices and values and building strong leaders for our Hawaiian communities.

Indigenous Affiliation: Ngāti Raukawa, Marutūahu, Ngā Puhi
Director of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga and Professor of Indigenous Development in the Faculty of Arts, University of Auckland.

Professor Royal is a musician and researcher with interests in the creative potential of mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), particularly as this relates to the whare tapere (traditional houses of performing arts), the whare wānanga (traditional institutions of higher learning) and indigeneity. Charles has been Director of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga since late 2009. He is also Professor of Indigenous Development in the Faculty of Arts, University of Auckland.
Charles is a former Director of Graduate Studies and Research at Te Wānanga o-Raukawa, Ōtaki, where he was also Kaihautū (convenor) of a graduate programme in mātauranga Māori and conducted research into theories of knowledge and worldview. As a New Zealand Senior Fulbright Scholar and a Winston Churchill Fellow in 2001, Charles conducted research into indigenous worldviews in the United States and Canada. In 2004 he took up a research residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Centre in Bellagio in Italy. In 2011 Charles was a visiting scholar at the University of London. Charles has written or edited six books on aspects of mātauranga Māori and iwi history, the most recent being Te Ngākau: He Wānanga i te Mātauranga (MKTA 2009), a text in Māori about knowledge.