Original Article
Epistemic Injustice and
Indigenous Women: Toward
Centering Indigeneity in
Social Work
Marjorie Johnstone1
Affilia: Journal of Women and Social
Work
1-15
ª The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0886109920985265
journals.sagepub.com/home/aff
and Eunjung Lee2
Abstract
Using the theoretical framework of epistemic injustice articulated by philosopher Miranda Fricker as
an analytic tool, we analyze recent victories of Indigenous feminist activism in gathering the stories of
Indigenous women, challenging dominant meta-narratives and rewriting the herstory of Canada. We
use the epistemic concept of the hermeneutic gap to consider the implications of this resistance in
conjunction with the increased visibility of the intersectional positionality of Indigenous women. To
illustrate our analysis, we focus on two case studies. Firstly, an individual perspective through the life
journey of a feminist Anishinaabe Activist, Bridgett Perrier. Secondly, we conduct a systemic analysis
of the recent Report on the National Inquiry into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and
Girls (MMIWG). We close with a discussion on how critical it is for social workers—especially nonIndigenous social workers—to relearn and document the meaning of the MMIWG issues. This
includes recognizing Indigenous resistance, activism, and the newly formulated hermeneutic
understandings that are emerging. Then, the final task is to apply these concepts to their practice and
heed the calls to action which the report calls for.
Keywords
epistemic justice, epistemic resistance, Indigenizing social work, Indigenous feminist activism,
Indigenous women and girls, intersectionality
The rate of violent victimization among Indigenous people in Canada is over double that of nonIndigenous people. Moreover, the rate of violent victimization of Indigenous women is double that
of Indigenous men and triple that of non-Indigenous women (Wilson-Raybould, 2019). Despite this
pervasive violence against Indigenous people, especially Indigenous women, there has been limited
attention from feminist social work perspectives to theorize the workings of this historically and
systemically sustained violence, whether in Turtle Island (i.e., Canada and the United States) or
1
2
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Corresponding Author:
Marjorie Johnstone, University of Toronto, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 3J5.
Email: marjorie.johnstone@dal.ca
2
Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work XX(X)
globally (Hart, 2010; Kuokkanen, 2015). In this research, we align with non-Indigenous feminist
social work scholars globally who have joined with the resistance initiated by Indigenous feminist
activists and scholars (Valkonen & Wallenius-Korkalo, 2016). In so doing, we echo the assertion
that we need to relearn and rewrite the Indigenous people’s history from an Indigenous perspective.
In this process, we honor St’olo feminist activist and author, Lee Maracle’s (1996) standpoint that
“to plan we must learn to sum up our history—not the history of betrayal but the history of our
resistance. We must learn from our mistakes and chart the course for our eventual victory” (p. 95).
Therefore, in this article for social work readers, we document Indigenous feminist resistance and
victories and highlight how this resistance and the victories achieved have been rewriting the history
of Turtle Island.
As settlers who align with feminist social work scholarship, we are mindful that Indigenous
methodologies call for respecting Indigenous knowledges and worldviews. In her overview of
Indigenous methodologies, for example, Kovach (2015) notes that using Indigenous methodologies
requires “knowledge of the politicality surrounding Indigenous knowledge systems, given the history of assimilation” (p. 57). Furthermore, she points out that there is an expectation that we should
all engage in anticolonial work and have a respect for Indigenous knowledge systems and Indigenous experience. She notes the importance of documenting contemporary conditions of Indigenous
people but also notes that it is crucial that research be based on actual need in order to be respectful.
Central to Indigenous methodologies is relationality and relational accountability. An Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson (2008) notes that relationality is an expression of Indigenous
worldviews and emerges through the process of building relationships. He explains research as a
ceremony that is a process whereby the relational gap between our world/cosmos and ourselves is
bridged and a raised consciousness of our world is produced. This process then leads to relational
accountability. Shawn Wilson encourages us to acknowledge our presence in the “relationship” with
our ideas and the processes by which they are formed. Within Indigenous approaches, the researchers’ own relationship with their ideas should be accounted for. He states that “the shared aspect of
relationality and relational accountability can be put into practice through choice of research topic,
methods of data collection, the forms of analysis and the presentation of information” (p. 137).
Before moving ahead, we position ourselves in relationship with the stories we present in this
article. We question our roles and responsibilities as two non-Indigenous cisgender female academics who have the privilege of choosing to be a witness of the past and an ally for the future. We
are settlers and recognize that the nation we call Canada was built on the destruction of other
nations which have been here for thousands of years. As non-Indigenous social workers and social
work scholars, we have worked with Indigenous elders, scholars, service providers, service users,
and social work students. Our scholarship has been rooted in an anticolonial standpoint and has
critiqued Canadian social work complicity and neglect in responding to Indigenous people, community, and land (Authors 1 & 2, 2019; Author 1, 2015, 2018). While we wish to stand alongside
Indigenous women as allies and to contribute to Indigenous resistance, we are also mindful of ourbeing very much limited by our internalized colonialism and whiteness. Rather than hiding behind
our non-Indigenous status or remaining deep-seated colonial subjects, we follow what Indigenous
scholars guide for non-Indigenous people toward centering indigeneity, that is, relational
accountability.
We thus chose to explore the continuing epidemic of violence against Indigenous women and
girls by honoring the successes of Indigenous women whose tireless resistance in the face of
egregious testimonial injustice has resulted in the recent publication of Reclaiming Power and
Place: The Final Report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous women and Girls (MMIWG)
published in November 2019. The nationwide 2019 MMIWG report declares this epidemic as a
Canadian genocide. This report was the result of joint pressure from multiple sources, including
long-standing intense activism and research by the Native Women’s Association of Canada
Johnstone and Lee
3
(NWAC), pressure from grassroots family members and survivors, advocacy by international human
rights organizations, and the impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada
(2016). The report documents the statement testimonies of 750 participants and 819 testimonials
using artistic expressions as well as 84 expert witnesses, elders and knowledge keepers, frontline
workers, and officials (Reclaiming Power and Place, 2019). We were spurred to action by this report
where Indigenous women and girls have been speaking out about this epidemic of violence for
decades but have not been listened to by police, social workers, or the general public. This injustice
should not be repeated, and this article is a part of listening to and forming the relationship with the
action put forward by Indigenous people.
Among long-standing resistance by Indigenous people, we select two levels of illustrative case
studies that shed light on the implications for social work practice: one on an individual level, where
we draw from the publicly available life journey of Bridgett Perrier, a feminist Anishinaabe activist,
and the other on the systemic structural level, where we analyze the Canadian process of the 2019
Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report on MMIWG. In what follows, we introduce our
theoretical frameworks of epistemic justice and Indigenous feminist perspectives, which we illustrate with two case studies. We close with a discussion on how critical it is for social workers to
understand how social work has participated in the MMIWG epidemic. We document Indigenous
resistance and activism and newly formulated hermeneutic understandings of the life experience of
MMIWG that are now emerging.
Theoretical Frameworks
In what follows, we draw from several theoretical frameworks to guide our analysis: Indigenous
feminist perspectives (Anderson et al., 2018; Arvin et al., 2013; Baikie, 2009; Green, 2007; Lawrence & Dua, 2005; Levell-Harvard & Brandt, 2016; Maracle, 1996; Nickel, 2020; Silman, 1987),
white settler colonial critiques (Good, 2018; Lawrence, 2002; Razack, 2002; Wolfe, 2016), and
epistemic injustice and resistance scholarship (Fricker, 2010; Medina, 2013; Tsosie, 2019). We
chose these frameworks for several reasons. First, we need to consider the intersectional omissions
of second wave feminist resistance to violence against women, which failed to examine the compounded lethality of sexism and racism enacted in tandem against Indigenous women. Moreover,
such an approach considers the limitations of antiracist activism, which likewise fails to recognize
the harms of Indigenous dispossession from their lands and culture. In addition, to understand the
continuing social phenomenon of violence against Indigenous women requires an understanding of
gendered settler colonial history with a particular focus on the heteropatriarchal oppression
entrenched in the Indian Act and the dehumanization of Indigenous women, which continues
unabated into the present. Furthermore, to increase our understanding of how this wrongdoing has
systemically and relationally continued from the past to present, we use theories of the epistemic
construction of truth. In sum, we document Indigenous feminist resistance to epistemic injustice in
the face of the agenda of “elimination” perpetrated by the white settler colonial state in Canada.
Intersectionality and Indigenous and Feminist Perspectives
Indigenous or aboriginal feminisms bring together multiple critiques: including feminism, anticolonialism, antiracism, and challenges to heteropatriarchy. Indigenous scholar Bonita Lawrence
(2005) observes that antiracism and postcolonialism discussions, while relevant to her life, nevertheless fall short of fully capturing her experience. She notes that “antiracism does not begin with
and reflect the totality of Native peoples’ lived experience—that is, with the genocide that established and maintains all the settler states within the Americas” (p. 121). For example, liberal multiculturalism discourses assume that all minority groups are devoted to a form of social justice which
4
Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work XX(X)
is founded on equity and inclusion but “the issues facing Indigenous women [are] as inseparable
from the issues facing Indigenous peoples as a whole, and are resolved via decolonization and
sovereignty, not (just) parity” (Arvin et al., 2013, p. 10). The feminist issues confronting white
women, women of color, and Indigenous women are in part shared and in part very different, even
potentially in conflict. For Indigenous feminisms, colonial dispossession is central to an analysis of
systems of oppression. Indigenous scholar Audra Simpson described Indigenous feminism as
“acting in good relation” and being responsible to her Mohawk community (cited in Green, 2007,
p. 2).
Indigenous women who politicized women’s issues have a long, yet not well-documented,
history: They have been criticized from within their own communities and have usually remained
outside mainstream feminist organizations. Indigenous women continue to be subject to multiple
colonizations and persisting external systemic oppression as well as internalized and systemic
colonial heteropatriarchy. For example, Mohawk activist Mary Two-Axe Early lost her status under
the Indian Act and began to lobby for change in the 1950s. She eventually appealed to the Royal
Commission on the Status of Women in 1968 and created the “Equal Rights for Native Women”
association. Her work was then continued by the Tobique women’s group in New Brunswick who
after 10 long years of lobbying and activism succeeded in having the Indian Act amended in 1985,
with the passing of Bill C-31 which reversed the ruling that Indigenous women lost their status if
they married a non-Indigenous person and furthermore reinstated those who had lost their status
(Green, 2007; Silman, 1987).
Indigenous feminisms are multiple and may not always adopt the language of Western feminisms, but they consistently “take account of how racism and sexism fuse when brought to bear on
Aboriginal women” (Green, 2007, p. 23). Gender-based analysis against heteronormativity and
heteropatriarchy is located contextually within Indigenous communities. While current tribal governments and national chiefs do recognize that one of the results of violent colonial dispossession is
the presence of lateral violence (Bailey, 2020; Wingard, 2010) in Indigenous communities, they
view it as an internal matter which can be addressed once Indigenous autonomy has been achieved.
This seeming conflict between Indigenous women’s rights and Indigenous self-determination has
long been a source of dissension within the Indigenous community. Indigenous feminists are
accused of being corrupted by “Western feminists” and male Indigenous leadership assumes that
self-government will address women’s concerns (Kuokkanen, 2012; Maracle, 2015). The Assembly
of First Nations which was formerly the National Indian Brotherhood opposed Indigenous feminist
activism as selfish individual interests which they believed should be subsumed into the collective
agenda of sovereignty (Barker, 2006).
Feminist Indigenous scholar Lee Maracle (2015) identifies Indigenous women as not only targets
of stranger violence within Canada but also targets of lateral violence within their own communities.
She observes that “the issues facing women are ignored at both tribal and government levels” (p.
129). Maracle challenges the shortcomings of Western human rights legislation to end violence
against Indigenous women. At the same time, she differentiates herself from the many Indigenous
men who see human rights legislation as a political invasion from outside and makes the point that
her objection is that these measures mask the subnormative conditions that entrench the lives of most
Indigenous people and which are themselves potent grounds for the violence that plagues Indigenous
communities. Maracle asserts that poverty subsumes the problem of violence within Indigenous
communities, which is furthered through the masculine internalization of stereotypical colonial
myths about Indigenous women so that both non-Indigenous and Indigenous men do not respect
Indigenous women and both stranger and lateral violence are committed against Indigenous women.
From her position of intersectional feminism, Maracle poses a poignant question: “why have Indigenous women become the most violated, the least educated, and the most overworked and
Johnstone and Lee
5
unprotected human beings in the history of Turtle Island?” (pp. 130, 131). We suggest that this
question demands answers from all of the residents of Turtle Island, especially from social workers.
Critiques of White Settler Colonialism
White settler society scholarship studies the commonalities between the settler societies established
by the British Empire, particularly Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. The
existence of Indigenous people challenges the claimed legitimacy of the settler state. An agenda of
elimination of Indigenous people was strategically set in the white settler governance structures.
Enforced removal and confinement on reservations preserved Indigenous sovereignty but banished
it to a separate realm. Indigenous people were conceptually erased by being positioned “in the past”
and by being represented as wandering people who did not “use” the land. Assimilation or absorption (disappearance) was enacted with the residential school program and administrative tactics such
as the legislation of Indian status and citizenship which was entrenched in the Indian Act (Lawrence,
2002; Razack, 2002; Wolfe, 2016).
Cree scholar Michelle Good (2018) ponders the dissonance surrounding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was declared in 1949 against the backdrop of World War II and the
liberation of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. The declaration of “Never Again” was seen as a
promise of a better, more tolerant world that would stand against dehumanization. Good speculates
that for settlers to continue on their path of destroying Indigenous peoples, they needed to dehumanize the targets in order to rationalize their brutality. She draws from the recent archival work of
historian James Daschuk. In his book, Clearing of the Plains, Daschuk (2019) documents “how
Indigenous women were reduced to items of ransom and barter as their families struggled with the
horrors of famine conditions created intentionally to establish economic supremacy for the newcomers and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples” (p. 92). Daschuk describes how British traders of
the Hudson Bay Company routinely took women as collateral for debts and sold them to company
employees. If any attempt was made to stop this by fathers, husbands, or family members, violence
was used to ensure submission. Not only that, but slave trafficking (and often sex trafficking) of
Indigenous women was perpetuated by the Department of Indian Affairs employees. It was known to
the superiors and supervisors of these agents that half of their men were engaged in predatory
relationships with young Indigenous girls. Rations were withheld unless Indigenous women provided sexual favors to the Indian Agents (Daschuk, 2013).
Good (2018) comments that “the legacy of this dark chapter of colonialism is that Indigenous
women are still seen as disposable and even as commodities to be used as members of the nonIndigenous society see fit” (p. 95). Good further argues that generations of non-Indigenous Canadians have been weaned on these pervasive dehumanizing discourses, which embrace intersecting
misogyny and racism and position Indigenous women as objects to be used and discarded: “50 years
after Confederation, these images are still superimposed on our women, and it is killing them. These
images are like a permission slip for rape and murder” (p. 98). Thus, she theorizes MMIWG as an
intersecting oppression that is rooted in white settler colonialism.
Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson (2016) pinpoints the slow, corrosive violence
of cultural genocide and links this toxic colonial legacy with the widespread violence and despair in
Indigenous communities:
White supremacy, rape culture, and the real and symbolic attack on gender, sexual identity and agency
are very powerful tools of colonialism, settler colonialism, and capitalism, primarily because they work
very efficiently to remove Indigenous people from our territories and to prevent reclamation of those
territories through mobilization. These forces have the intergenerational staying power to destroy generations of families, as they work to prevent us from intimately connecting to each other. They work to
6
Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work XX(X)
prevent mobilization because communities coping with epidemics of gender violence don’t have the
physical or emotional capital to organise. They destroy the base of our nations and our political systems
because they destroy our relationships to the land and to each other by fostering epidemic levels of
anxiety, hopelessness, apathy, distrust, and suicide. They work to destroy our relationality by making it
difficult to form sustainable, strong relationships with each other. (pp. 218, 219)
What is so powerful in this analysis is the clear articulation of the historical violence of dispossession juxtaposed with the persistent contemporary colonial violence. Simpson describes the continuing effects of settler colonial discourses of erasure in the epidemic of unhealed wounds that
permeate the present. As part of a commitment to relational accountability, it is imperative that nonIndigenous social workers are cognizant of the deep reach of this historical violence and honor the
principles of epistemic justice in addressing the unhealed wounds in Indigenous communities.
Epistemic Injustice and Indigenous Feminist Resistance
Fricker (2010) suggests that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice which is a wrong done
to someone in their capacity as a knower. She states that “to be wronged in one’s capacity as a
knower is to be wronged in a capacity essential to human value” (p. 44). Fricker identifies the
capacity to reason as fundamental to the distinctive value of humankind and thus to be wronged in
this capacity is dehumanizing. She identifies a social aspect to this form of injustice as the person is
not only degraded as a knower of one’s own experiences but is represented as being less than fully
human. And if this denial of credibility is public, then they are also a victim of social humiliation.
Fricker further elaborates this idea by describing two types of epistemic injustice, that of testimonial injustice and that of hermeneutic injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when a hearer gives
reduced credibility to a speaker due to a hearer’s prejudice and dismisses the speaker’s capacity as a
giver of knowledge. In the case of an incident of testimonial injustice where there is a prejudicial
stereotype that the social group is humanly lesser (as in the case of Indigenous racism), then the
injury is not only symbolic but also literal. Fricker observes “no wonder, too that in contexts of
oppression the powerful will be sure to undermine the powerless in just that capacity, for it provides
a direct route to undermining them in their very humanity” (p. 44).
Hermeneutic injustice refers to an even more fundamental injustice when a social phenomenon
has not yet been identified, named, and conceptualized. This hermeneutic gap in understanding
creates socially what Fricker calls a gap in the “collective interpretive resources” (p. 155). This gap
puts someone at a disadvantage when it comes to making their own sense of their social experience
but also makes it very difficult to communicate to others and thus creates hermeneutic isolation. The
example Fricker gives to illustrate this concept of the hermeneutic gap is the phenomenon of sexual
harassment. She explains that it was during the 1970s that second wave feminists gathered in
consciousness raising groups and identified sexual harassment in the workplace and collectively
named it such. Subsequently, they moved the concept into the public domain and regulations
followed. Until this time, women had been experiencing sexual harassment but had difficulty
naming what was happening, and even when they tried, the receptivity was limited as there was
no public understanding of the phenomenon (i.e., a gap in the collective interpretive resource).
In the case of a structural prejudice (i.e., the presence of a hegemonic discriminatory discourse
such as racism), hermeneutic injustice is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s
social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in
the collective hermeneutic resource” (p. 155). When this is present, the speaker is further silenced,
and his or her own identity becomes objectified. As illustrated later, in the countless reports of
MMIWG, demands for investigation were dismissed as “not credible” such as individual faults,
mishaps, and nonrelated crimes, and the cries from Indigenous women to address the pervasive
Johnstone and Lee
7
violence against them were not heard (i.e., testimonial injustice). Furthermore, there was a significant gap in the collective hermeneutic resource as there was no public recognition that Indigenous
women had become targets of violence and there were few opportunities for Indigenous women to
collectivize their stories. Thus, as we go on to argue, the testimonial injustice was ongoing and there
was also a significant hermeneutic gap in the collective resource.
A critical feminist philosopher Medina (2013, p. 2019) attests that epistemic injustice calls for
epistemic resistance. Epistemic resistance means going beyond simply designating “something of
instrumental value or a transitional stage” (p. 4). It refers to “a mode of relationality” in the world we
live in and “the central epistemic and political mechanisms and activities of contestation” that act to
create friction and unsettle the status quo and thus contribute to a democratic approach to social
transformation. The concepts of epistemic injustice and epistemic resistance have been taken up by
Indigenous scholars, notably Rebecca Tsosie (2012, 2019) who applies the concepts to legal and
policy structures. She describes the hegemony of discourses of science and technology as epistemic
imperialism and argues that “forms of epistemic injustice permeate the legal system and reflect the
longstanding cultural construction of Indigenous peoples as “others” (Tsosie, 2019, p. 360).
Therefore, in this research, we document Indigenous resistance to different forms of epistemic
injustice and colonial and systemic violence. We illustrate how Indigenous women construct counterstories and close hermeneutic gaps to claim their epistemic knowledge/power while actively
constructing Indigenous communities for healing and growth.
Rewriting the Herstory of Indigenous Women
The Life Journey of Bridgett Perrier in Thunder Bay
Thunder Bay is a Northern Ontario city on the shores of Lake Superior in Canada. Hundreds of rivers
converge on the lake, and these rivers were once the meeting place of the thriving Indigenous
societies of the Cree and the Ojibwe. It became a hub where the fur traders and Indigenous trappers
and traders met, and it was at this time that the French adopted the Ojibwe name of Thunder Bay.
The Ojibwe of Fort William First Nation still live at the foot of Mt. McKay. Settlers arrived in the
20th century with the development of railway connections and shipping on Lake Superior. A
residential school was created out of the Catholic orphanage which was established in 1870, and
hundreds of Indigenous children were forcefully abducted and transferred to the city. It wasn’t until
1966 that St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School was demolished (Talaga, 2017).
Within this historical backdrop, Bridgett Perrier was born in 1976 in Thunder Bay to an Anishinaabe woman and was adopted out when she was 5 weeks old. She was adopted by a non-Indigenous
white family, which was very common at the time, and there was no regard to the implications of
uprooting a child from family, community, and cultural ties. Perrier reports that her adoptive parents
were good to her and she was settled in their care. However, when she was 8 years old, she was
molested by a family friend and her subsequent acting out behavior resulted in her being placed with
the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) when she was 11 years old (Johnson, 2019).
Later, this practice of transracial Indigenous adoption was dubbed “the Sixties Scoop” by Patrick
Johnston (1983) who conducted a survey of Indigenous children and the child welfare system in the
early 1980s. He noted that large numbers of children had been removed from their families and
placed in foster homes and adopted out to white families, which was the path Perrier’s own life
followed. In his study of the separation of Indigenous children from their families and placement in
residential institutions, Indigenous social work scholar Ernie Crey (1997) characterized this splitting
of Indigenous families through the child welfare system as “wolves in sheep’s clothing” meaning
that the language of rescue and child well-being masked the harsh reality of the continued cultural
and familial dispossession of Indigenous children (p. 81). He asserted that the effects of child
8
Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work XX(X)
welfare apprehensions were even more virulent in its impact on Indigenous families than the
preceding era of residential schools. By no means was Crey supporting the practice of residential
schools, but rather he was making the point that in the residential school system the students returned
back to home and community for 2 months each summer, and in addition, they were living with other
Indigenous children. However
in the foster and adoptive care system, Indigenous children typically vanished with scarcely a trace, the
vast majority of them placed until they were adults in non-Aboriginal homes where their cultural identity,
their legal Indian status, their knowledge of their own First Nation and even their birth names were
erased, often forever. (Fournier & Crey, 1997, p. 81)
Once children were in the state system, they were often subject to further violence and exploitation, which was the case for Perrier. She was placed in a CAS group home, and one evening one of
the residents told her that they were going out to make money. Under guidance from these peers, she
became a sex worker and frequently ran away from the group home. When the police brought her
back, she would run away again. She was recruited by a woman who ran two brothels, one in
Thunder Bay and one in Halifax. Perrier reports that the madame used bribery and flattery to keep
her there. She paid a lot of attention to the young Indigenous girl, bought her things, paid her
compliments, and allowed her to stay as long as she wanted. Perrier felt that this woman understood
her better than anyone else had in her short life. But it was not long before Perrier experienced
violence and exploitation in the sex trafficking business in downtown Thunder Bay. In the decade
that she was exploited, Perrier says she was careful not to say she was an Indigenous woman because
she knew that would heighten her risk of violence as Indigenous women experience the most
violence in the sex trade (Johnson, 2019).
In the 2019 Canadian report, Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report on MMIWG which
was the result of a 4-year public inquiry, Chapter 8 examined the sex industry, sexual exploitation,
and human trafficking. The chapter begins by noting that gathering information about the involvement of Indigenous women in the sex industry is very difficult as stigma and fear hinder identification. Nevertheless, organizations working on behalf of sex workers report that Indigenous women
and girls are the majority in street-level sex work in Canada. Reading this National Report, it is very
evident that Bridgett Perrier’s story is far from unique. The National Report notes that there is a
strong correlation between young Indigenous girls involved first with the child welfare system then
become involved in sexual exploitation, sex trafficking, and survival/street-level sex work (streetlevel sex work is the exchange of sexual services for resources such as shelter, food, health care, and
essential commodities; Hall et al., 2020). In the report, there are descriptions of many young
Indigenous women being phased out of care with a paid bus ticket to a large city (such as Winnipeg
or Montreal). Pimps are aware of this and they position themselves at bus stations, in airports,
outside group homes and detention centers, and in medical travel areas watching for runaways or
early discharged girls to recruit into the sex industry. They seem able to operate with impunity and
are rarely observed, stopped, or questioned. Thus, the lack of infrastructure (such as available means
of transportation, adequate staffing for wrap around care, safe housing, and income assistance)
results in conditions that support sex trafficking and exploitation of sex workers (Reclaiming Power
and Place, 2019).
This path that Perrier followed is a familiar story to social workers and the related care systems
such as the CAS. And yet it seems that no effective action has been implemented. In her journey
through the violence of racism, sexual exploitation, and abuse, Perrier experienced isolation and
epistemic injustice. Did the CAS not know that pimps and predators were waiting outside their group
homes to snatch vulnerable girls? Did Perrier and other girls report their experiences of violence or
exploitation after returning from their first outing? Or was there little receptivity to the stories that
Johnstone and Lee
9
they had to tell? Were social workers aware that pimps were waiting at bus stations watching for
vulnerable young Indigenous women who were exiting from the system with a discharge plan that
consisted of only a bus ticket? From Perrier’s testimony, it appears that her experience was ignored
by those who had a duty to care for her, and she may have recognized that her insider knowledge of
transracial Indigenous adoption, being a ward of the CAS and being a victim of sex trafficking, was
not understood by her caretakers. That is all the phases of her journey are hermeneutic gaps in the
collective resource. This means that she would not have had the vocabulary or conceptual tools to
report what was happening to her to the persons who were responsible for her care.
Fricker points out that hermeneutic impoverishment impacts differently on different groups as
there is usually a power asymmetry at play. In this case, the injustice and harm were borne by Perrier
and the social workers who had greater power were unharmed. Fricker says that hermeneutic
injustice is a kind of structural discrimination: “the primary harm of hermeneutic injustice concerns
exclusion from the pooling of knowledge owing to structural identity prejudice on the part of the
hearer” (p. 162). Social workers and caregivers working in group foster care often work from a
behavioral analytic perspective where a medical model meta-narrative (structural identity prejudice)
explains running away in deficit-based narratives such as incorrigible, untreatable, and uncontrollable and this is the dominant discourse (Crosland & Dunlop, 2015; Hall et al., 2020; Lin, 2012;
Reclaiming Power and Place, 2019). Interventions mounted by the caregivers are premised on a
belief that they are the experts and their wards have nothing to offer. Listening to individual accounts
and working collaboratively with these young women to better understand their experience and to
build a hermeneutic resource base of shared understanding could contribute to generating shared
solutions and preferred pathways. A reflective self-examination of their own internalized prejudices
regarding Indigenous girls by the caregivers should also be part of the route to epistemic justice.
The social work profession has a long history of complicity in colonial violence in their work with
Indigenous communities. Early involvement in residential school placements has been documented
by the TRC (2016). Social workers took a prominent position in the transition from residential
schools to what became known as the Sixties Scoop, where large numbers of Indigenous children
were apprehended into foster care following the reduction in the use of residential schools (Johnston,
1983; Sinclair, 2009). Social workers became service actors in transracial adoptions and the foster
care system as well as in carceral policing work, not just historically but up to the present (Sinclair
et al., 2009). Social worker’s collusion with prevalent pervasive discourses of moral superiority and
white civility blended with a belief in their own expert knowledge and helping expertise has justified
this complicit participation in perpetuating colonial violence (Author 1, 2015; Chapman & Withers,
2019).
Indigenous Woman, Indigenous Resistance, and Indigenous Intelligence
Perrier exited the sex trade in 1999, and she entered transitional housing at Nekenaan Second Stage
Housing. From there, she completed her high school diploma and enrolled in the social work
program at George Brown College (Johnson, 2019). Perrier has now become an anti-sex trade
advocate and is one of the founders of Sex trade 101, a Toronto-based nonprofit organization
committed to protecting the rights of women who have been involved in the sex industry. The
agency is staffed with women who have exited the sex trade industry including Natasha Falle, who
was also forcibly prostituted as an adolescent girl and is a fellow graduate of the social services
program at George Brown College. This organization is dedicated to supporting women to exit the
sex industry and is politically active in an abolitionist campaign to end prostitution. Natasha Falle is
a Canadian Professor at Humber College, and her organization works closely with the Toronto
Police Services sex crimes unit and is active in public education, police training, and prevention
work in high schools. In 2012, Perrier and Falle launched Restart in Owen Sound, a mentorship
10
Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work XX(X)
program modeled on Sex trade 101, set up to help women at risk of sexual victimization and to help
women exit the sex industry. They recognized that rural communities are common settings for young
women to be groomed into prostitution. Collectively, these women have begun to pool the knowledge from their lived experiences and to build a new hermeneutic resource as the foundation for the
work they are doing. This kind of epistemic resistance opens the doors for change, new directions,
and heightened awareness of not only the prevalence of sex trafficking in our communities but also
the pathways that lead to this occupation.
Victories of Indigenous Resistance: The National Inquiry Into MMIWG
The NWAC was founded by a group of Indigenous women in 1974 with a mission to advance
legislative and policy reforms to preserve Indigenous culture and advance the well-being of Indigenous women, girls, and gender diverse people as well as their families and communities. NWAC
were concerned about the MMIWG in Canada, especially around both the absence of police
response and the lack of public awareness and state responsibilities. They partnered with Amnesty
International who were launching an antiviolence against women campaign. Out of this coalition
came the Amnesty Report, Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights response to Discrimination and Violence
against Indigenous Women in Canada released in 2004. The publicity that this report generated
resulted in the federal government financing the Sisters in Spirit Campaign which ran from 2004 to
2010.
The overarching objective of this collective of Indigenous women was to stop the violence and
they set out estimating the number of women who were missing or murdered and documenting their
lives. They wanted to raise public concern and provide public education which they hoped would
prompt constructive action from those who could make a difference such as police, social workers,
courts, medical officials, and Indigenous leaders (Saramo, 2016). However, when their funding
agreement ended in 2010, the conservative federal government stopped the funding. In 2011, the
House of Commons and the Standing Committee on the Status of Women produced an interim report
on violence against Indigenous women, stating that the root cause was poverty, racism, Canada’s
colonial history, and systemic police failure. This report stimulated the Canadian Feminist Alliance
for International Action, an alliance of more than 80 Canadian women’s organizations, to take up the
baton. They submitted claims of the federal government’s violation of the Convention on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination and initiated an inquiry with the Convention on the Discrimination against Women. In 2013, Human Rights Watch released a report, which documented the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s failure to investigate disappearances and suspected murders of
Indigenous women. Calls for a national inquiry began mounting up, and in April 2013, Canada’s
provincial Aboriginal affairs ministers said that a national inquiry must examine why Aboriginal
women were 7 times more likely to die of violence than other Canadian women. In the last 15 years,
several United Nations human rights treaty committees, Amnesty International, and Human Rights
Watch have all written critical reports on missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, and
many of these advocates called for a national inquiry (Nagy, 2016).
However, the former Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2007–2015) insisted that “we should not
view this as a sociological issue” but as “crime”: “It is a crime against innocent people” he stated and
“it needs to be addressed as such.” Then, in a radio interview in December 2014, he stated that the
issue of MMIWG “isn’t really high on our radar, to be honest” (cited in Bourgeois, 2018, pp. 65, 66).
He clearly denied the existence of systemic violence (dismissed it as a sociological issue) and
reframed it as individual bad luck or a few bad people committing crimes. Fricker (2010) identifies
that persistent cases of epistemic exclusion such as this clear example can severely injure the identity
of an individual and that in many cases these persons do not have access to a community to find
resources for resistance. Furthermore, she states:
Johnstone and Lee
11
A culture in which some groups are separated off from that aspect of personhood by the experience of
repeated exclusions from the spread of knowledge is seriously defective both epistemically and ethically.
Knowledge and other rational input they have to offer are missed by others and sometimes literally lost
by the subjects themselves; and they suffer a sustained assault in respect of a defining human capacity, an
essential attribute of personhood. Such a culture would indeed be one in which a species of epistemic
injustice has taken on the proportion of oppression. (pp. 58, 59)
It was not until the Trudeau government came into power in 2015 that the tenacious advocacy of
Indigenous and non-Indigenous women was recognized, and an inquiry was mounted (Kubik &
Bourassa, 2016). The National Inquiry into Missing Indigenous Women and Girls was conducted
between 2016 and 2019 and the inquiry traveled across Canada gathering the testimonies of
bereaved Indigenous families. The final report is a vast document of over 1,000 pages which
assembles the material into three broad sections: establishing a new framework; encountering
oppression; and healing families, communities, and nations, with a supplementary report which is
a legal analysis of genocide.
In the news release for the final report presented to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on June 3,
2019, Commissioner Michèle Audette states that
To put an end to this tragedy, the rightful power and place of women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people
must be reinstated, which requires dismantling the structures of colonialism within Canadian society.
This is not just a job for governments and politicians. It is incumbent on all Canadians to hold our leaders
to account. (news ref. 2019)
The report not only made recommendations for action but also included the judgment that Canada
was responsible for a genocide against the First Nations people. The report stated that:
Canada’s failure to listen to Indigenous perspectives and to address flagrant violations of their most basic
human rights, and in particular those related to violence against Indigenous women, girls, and
2SLGBTQQIA people, has been remarkable. The so-called champion of multiculturalism and fundamental human rights has lamentably and willingly failed to act upon numerous recommendations that
have been made over time, through myriad different actors, including the commissions it itself established. (p. 26)
This damning indictment of Canadian settler violence notably points to the dissonance of a public
image of championing human rights and promoting multiculturalism while practicing genocide on
the Indigenous people to whom we owe the land we stand on. Despite this monumental revelation,
this finding has generated only a single statement from the Canadian Social Work Profession. The
Canadian Association of Social Workers announced that they supported and endorsed the findings of
the report and stated that they welcomed the recommendations specific to child welfare and the role
of the social determinants of health and the role of Canada’s social and political systems in ending
the violence and colonial genocide. They declared that they are currently reviewing their foundational documents in their code of ethics and guidelines for practice to ensure they are grounded in the
principles of reconciliation (Canadian Association of Social Work, 2019). From our reading, there is
an odd sense of distance and detachment in the statement as though somehow social workers are not
implicated in the findings.
In his book Narrative Social Work: Theory and Application, Baldwin (2013) notes that our
personal stories are our linguistic capital and that “if one has only a few isolated stories then these
may not be sufficient to challenge the meta-narrative of a dominant group, but if one has access to
many stories this may position one strongly in such a challenge” (p. 43). Like the TRC’s inquiry into
residential schools, the National Inquiry into MMIWG assembled multiple stories of grief, loss, and
12
Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work XX(X)
despair from Indigenous families across Canada. This pooling of stories has created a collective
hermeneutical resource, we suggest, beginning the work of filling in the hermeneutic gap and
opening discussion, analysis, and reflection on the hidden intersectional crisis of MMIWG in
Canada. These many stories are providing a new knowledge resource to challenge the pervasive
dominant colonial meta-narratives that deny a history of violence and egregious wrongdoing and
victim-blaming.
Our analysis has drawn from the recent collections of scholarly writing on this topic that have
been published since the Inquiry began with many submissions written by feminist Indigenous
scholars (Anderson et al., 2018; Levell-Harvard & Brandt, 2016). This article is another example
of a narrative construction to join with the meta-narrative of resistance to demand social justice for
Indigenous people and all women who have been subject to violence.
Discussion
Social workers across Canada dominate child welfare services which are identified in the inquiry as
significant contributory factors in the MMIWG epidemic. Indigenous Canadian social work scholar
and activist Cindy Blackstock was a primary informant in this section of the inquiry and she spoke
eloquently of the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in all parts of the child welfare care
system, the lack of recognition of the rights of the child, and the role of underfunding, poverty, and
marginalization on parenting abilities. Blackstock identified the poor outcomes after the violence of
child apprehension, which links with the journey of Bridgett Perrier described in this article
(Reclaiming Power and Place, 2019).
As non-Indigenous social workers, it is imperative to critically reflect on one’s own privileges
and how this sociopolitical position works for or against social justice, equity, and inclusiveness. A
descendent of Labrador Innuit and Indigenous social work theorist Gail Baikie (2009) points out that
colonizing influences can operate consciously and more insidiously below conscious awareness.
This means that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous social workers can become active agents in
colonization as well as in decolonization. Baikie suggests that a critical consciousness is imperative
to maximize opportunities and minimize risks in the endeavor to decolonize social work. Furthermore, she argues for the importance of developing an Indigenous-centered social work which is
autonomous and “situates their knowledge base within the broader national and international collectivity of Indigenous social work knowing, and positions Euro-western social work as a choice not
an absolute requirement” (p. 61).
Baikie astutely points out that mainstream Euro-Western social work has been constructed in a
colonial context, such that the current practice reality is a complex array of responding to devastating
social problems using social work responses. And these social work approaches are deeply rooted in
a network of interjurisdictional social welfare environments that have emerged as a direct result of
colonization. To navigate this complex historical juncture, the social work profession must listen
intently and attend to Indigenous colleagues and Indigenous clients. For this listening, we found the
epistemic framework—where the speaker’s testimony and hermeneutic experiences are valued—
invaluable.
Fricker (2010) identifies that achieving hermeneutical justice is more challenging than achieving
testimonial justice. Practicing testimonial justice requires that the hearer/social worker listen attentively and nonjudgmentally to the lived experience of a service user. This means ensuring that we are
not listening through the lens of professional meta-narratives such as medicalized symptomology or
expert knowledge on the nature of an addict or a criminal or an incorrigible adolescent and that we
facilitate the sharing of ideas and reflections in a climate of collaboration. This does not mean that
we must approve of whatever we hear but rather that we provide a space where what is shared can be
considered collaboratively and nonjudgmentally and preferred options can be explored.
Johnstone and Lee
13
Hermeneutic justice requires an even higher level of skill as the hearer must be able to appreciate
that the interlocutor may be trying to express something that they have not yet fully understood
themselves. It is easy to dismiss what might appear to be nonsense while a storyteller is trying to
express something that is not yet in the hermeneutic resource. It requires intelligence and sensitivity
as well as a reflexive awareness in the hearer to be able to discern what is being expressed. Fricker
(2010) says that “The virtuous hearer, then, must be reflexively aware of how the relation between
her social identity and that of the speaker is impacting on the intelligibility to her of what she is
saying and how she is saying it” (p. 169).
This principle of socially aware, context-sensitive listening involves listening as much to what is
not said as to what is said (Fricker, 2010)—a core principle of social work that attends to the voices
of the marginalized. It may require that the hearer seek corroborating evidence or support from other
stories to establish credibility. Here, reserving judgment is essential while remaining open to new
social understandings. What if social workers in the residential home where Perrier was running
away from were aware of the predators out there strategically picking up Indigenous girls? What if
they incorporated this knowledge while listening to her story and helped her to see the systemic
pipeline for ongoing exploitation of Indigenous women? We hope that this article documenting
Indigenous resistance will encourage social workers to pause and critically reflect on their own
biases and work toward filling hermeneutic gaps while joining with and honoring Indigenous
resistance.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Marjorie Johnstone
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9680-8327
References
Anderson, K., Campbell, M., & Belcourt, C. (Eds.) (2018). Keetsahnak. Our missing and murdered indigenous
sisters. University of Alberta Press.
Arvin, M., Tuck, E., & Morrill, A. (2013). Decolonising feminism: Challenging connections between settler
colonialism and heteropatriarchy. Feminist Formations, 25(1), 8–34.
Baikie, G. (2009). Indigenous-centred social work: Theorizing a social work way-of-being In R. Sinclair, M. A.
Hart, & G. Bruyere (Eds.), Wichitowin. Aboriginal social work in Canada (pp. 42–65). Fernwood
Publishing.
Bailey, K. (2020). Indigenous students: Resilient and empowered in the midst of racism and lateral violence.
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43(6), 1032–1051.
Baldwin, C. (2013). Narrative social work. Theory and application. The Policy Press.
Barker, J. (2006). Gender, sovereignty, and the discourse of rights in native women’s activism. Meridians,
Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 7(1), 127–161.
Bourgeois, R. (2018). The historical and sociological context of missing and murdered indigenous women and
girls. In K. Anderson, M. Campbell, & C. Belcourt (Eds.), Keetsahnak. Our missing and murdered indigenous sisters (pp. 65–89). University of Alberta Press.
Canadian Association of Social Work (Casw-acts). (2019). https://www.casw-acts.ca/en/casw-statement-finalreport-national-inquiry-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-and-girls
Chapman, C., & Withers, A. J. (2019). A violent history of benevolence. University of Toronto Press.
14
Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work XX(X)
Crosland, K., & Dunlap, G. (2015). Running away from foster care: What do we know and what do we do?
Child Family Studies, 24, 1697–1706.
Daschuk, J. (2019). Clearing the plains: Disease, politics of starvation, and the loss of Indigenous life.
University of Regina Press.
Fournier, S., & Crey, E. (1997). Stolen from our embrace. The abduction of First Nations children and the
restoration of aboriginal communities. Douglas and McIntyre.
Fricker, M. (2010). Epistemic injustice. Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.
Good, M. (2018). Dehumanization, stereotyping, and Indigenous women. In K. Anderson, M. Campbell, & C.
Belcourt (Eds.), Keetsahnak. Our missing and murdered Indigenous sisters. University of Alberta Press.
Green, J. (Ed.) (2007). Making space for Indigenous feminisms. Fernwood Publishing.
Hall, J., Donelle, L., Rudman, D., Bauman, J., Weaver, H., Jones, R., Sauve, M., Jenkins, K., & Trudell, A.
(2020). “It is important for everyone as humans to feel important, right?” Findings from a community-based
participatory needs assessment with street level sex workers. Social Work in Public Health, 35(1–2), 33–46.
Hart, M. (2010). Indigenous worldviews, knowledge, and research: The development of an indigenous research
paradigm. Journal of Indigenous Voices in Social Work, 1(1), 1–16.
Johnson, R. (2019, June). Human trafficking survivor says indigenous women and girls especially at risk. Now
an anti-sex trafficking lobbyist Bridget Perrier shares her story. CBC news. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indi
genous/bridget-perrier-human-trafficking-mmiwg-1.5189625
Johnston, P. (1983). Native children and the child welfare system. James Lorimer & Company.
Johnstone, M. (2016). The pervasive presence of the discourse of white civility in early Canadian Social Work
in immigration services (1900-1930). British Journal of Social Work, 46(6), 1724–1740.
Johnstone, M. (2018). Settler feminism, race making and early social work in Canada. Affilia: Journal of
Women and Social Work, 33(3), 331–345.
Johnstone, M., & Lee, E. (2019). Shaping Canadian citizens: An historical study of Canadian multiculturalism
and social work. International Journal of Social Welfare, 29, 71–82.
Kubik, W., & Bourassa, C. (2016). Stolen sisters: The politics, policies, and travesty of missing and murdered
women in Canada. In D. Lavell-Harvard & J. Brandt (Eds.), Forever loved. Exposing the hidden crisis of
missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in Canada (pp. 17–34). Demeter Press
Kuokkanen, R. (2012). Self-determination and indigenous women’s rights at the intersection of international
human rights. Human Rights Quarterly, 34(1), 225–250.
Kuokkanen, R. (2015). Gendered violence and politics in indigenous communities: The cases of aboriginal
women in Canada and Sámi women in Scandinavia. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17, 271–288.
Lavell-Harvard, D., & Brandt, J. (Eds.). (2016). Forever loved. Exposing the hidden crisis of missing and
murdered indigenous women and girls in Canada. Demeter Press.
Lawrence, B. (2002). Rewriting histories of the land: Colonization and indigenous resistance in eastern Canada.
In S. Razack (Ed.), Race, space and the law. Unmapping a white settler society (pp. 21–47). Between the
Lines.
Lawrence, B., & Dua, E. (2005). Race, racism and empire: Reflections on Canada. Social Justice, 32(4),
120–143.
Lin, C. H. (2012). Children who run away from foster care: Who are the children and what are the risk factors?
Children and Youth Services Review, 34, 807–813.
Maracle, L. (1996). I am woman. A native perspective on sociology and feminism. Press Gang.
Maracle, L. (2015). Memory serves. Oratories. Ne West Press.
Medina, J. (2013). The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and
resistant imaginations. Oxford University Press.
Nagy, R. (2016). Transnational advocacy for the missing and murdered indigenous women. In D. LavellHarvard & J. Brandt (Eds.), Forever loved. Exposing the hidden crisis of missing and murdered indigenous
women and girls in Canada. Demeter Press.
Nickel, S. & Fehr, A. (Eds). (2020). In good relation. University of Manitoba Press.
Johnstone and Lee
15
Razack, S. (2002). The murder of Pamela George. In S. Razack (Ed.), Race, space and the law. Unmapping a
white settler society (pp. 121–157). Between the lines.
Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous
Women and Girls. (2019). Volume 1a. file:///C:/Users/mr268949/Desktop/indigenous%20women/Final_
Report_Vol_1a-.pdf
Saramo, S. (2016). Unsettling places: Grassroots responses to Canada’s missing and murdered indigenous
women during the Harper Government years. Comparative American Studies. An International Journal,
14(3–4), 204–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2016.1267311
Silman, J. (1987). Enough is enough. Aboriginal women speak out. The Women’s Press.
Simpson, L. B. (2016). Centring resurgence. Taking on colonial gender violence in indigenous nation building.
In K. Anderson, M. Campbell, & C. Belcourt (Eds.), Keetsahnak. Our missing and murdered indigenous
sisters. The University of Alberta Press.
Sinclair, R. (2009). Identity or racism? aboriginal transracial adoption. In R. Sinclair, M. Hart, & G. Bruyere
(Eds.), Witchitowin. Aboriginal social work in Canada (pp. 89–112). Fernwood Publishing.
Sinclair, R., Hart, M. & Bruyere, G. (Eds). (2009). Witchitowin. Aboriginal social work in Canada. Fernwood
Publishing.
Talaga, T. (2017). Seven fallen feathers. Racism, death, and hard truths in a northern city. Anansi.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada. (2016). http://www.trc.ca/notsurewhatyouwanthereperhapsaddtheweblink?
Tsosie, R. (2012). Indigenous peoples and epistemic injustice science, ethics and human rights. Washington
Law Review, 87, 1133–1152.
Tsosie, R. (2019). Indigenous peoples, anthropology, and the legacy of epistemic injustice. In I. J. Kidd, J.
Medina, & G. Pohlhausm (2020). The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice. Routledge.
Wilson-Raybould, J. (2019). From where I stand. Rebuilding indigenous nations for a stronger. Canada. Purich
Books.
Wingard, B. (2010). A conversation with lateral violence. International Journal of Narrative Therapy and
Community Work, 1, 13–17.
Wolfe, P. (2016). Traces of history. Elementary structures of race. Verso.
Author Biographies
Marjorie Johnstone is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at Dalhousie University. Her
research interests include feminisms, history of Canadian social work, critical studies and mental health.
Eunjung Lee is an associate professor in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto. Her research
interests include social work practice, cross cultural social work, critical studies, and mental health.