Grant: Indigenous Centres for STBBI Research

Since 2020, the Feast Centre for Indigenous STBBI Research has grown into a national, Indigenous-led research hub where ceremony, culture, and science meet to heal our peoples. We have seeded vital shifts in governance, ethics, mentorship, and land-based research practices that have transformed Indigenous STBBI research in Canada. This application presents a new vision of Indigenous sexual futurisms that is premised on sovereignty, land-based knowledge, cultural resurgence, and futurity (Jackson, forthcoming; Nixon, 2020). The Feast Centre is co-led by Dr. Randy Jackson (NPI; McMaster University) and Margaret Kisikaw-Piyesis (PKU; Communities, Alliances & Networks CAAN) and is supported by Council of Elders that includes First Nations, Inuit and Metis Elders and who are diverse in gender and sexuality. In the next five years, the Feast Centre will: (1) Deepen cross-nation and international research collaborations, ensuring that First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities co-lead all projects; (2) Ground our support for trainees and researchers in Indigenous ways of knowing by developing a course on Indigenous STBBI research and purposefully integrating land-based learning; (3) Advance policy and practice interventions that integrate Indigenous sexual health futurisms, centre thrivance, land, and kinship; (4) Respond to urgent public health crises, including the Prairie HIV/syphilis outbreaks and climate change-driven displacement, with rapid, culturally grounded interventions; (5) Extend our work on aging and gender to address intersectional determinants of health, highlighting projects aimed at aging with HIV and other STBBI. Our renewal request is not discretionary - it is a commitment to honour the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Call to Action #65, the MMIWG Calls to Justice, and the UNDRIP Act. Without renewal at our current level, Canada risks repeating past harms and losing years of hard-won progress in Indigenous health equity.