Professor Cheryl Suzack (Batchewana First Nation) researches and teaches in the areas of Indigenous law and literature, transnational Indigenous studies, Indigenous feminisms, transitional justice, and settler colonial and decolonial studies. She received her PhD from the University of Alberta in 2004 and has held visiting fellowships at the University of Napoli (2023), Smith College (2018), and McGill University (2014). In 2018, she was a Fulbright Fellow at Georgetown University, and from 2016 to 2019, she served as a research collaborator with the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.
Professor Suzack is a Chancellor’s Professor. In 2023, she was awarded the Ludwik & Estelle Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize in the category of Influential Leader at the University of Toronto.
Professor Suzack’s research employs interdisciplinary frameworks informed by race, gender, and sexuality studies to examine how Indigenous communities are located and politically contained through multi-levelled practices of gender and racialization. Her monograph, Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Cultural Study of Law (University of Toronto Press, 2017), analyzed the multi-juridical lived realities that Indigenous women’s storytelling asserts, redirecting attention from literary nationalism, out of which the field of Indigenous literary studies evolved, to the inter- and intra-tribal relationships to which Indigenous women writers address their storytelling traditions. Her book highlighted the trans-local effects of tribal membership discrimination, the removal of Indigenous children, imposed blood quantum categories, and colonial forms of land dispossession as issues of injustice entangled with Indigenous self-determination.
Her current research develops these critical frameworks and methods through a monograph that centers on US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s Indian law decisions. Focusing on the historical entanglements of legal discourses with civil rights, tribal rights, and Indian self-determination, it employs a law and humanities lens to develop a legal and literary corpus through which to analyze the tribal-activist voices in literary texts by Indigenous authors that emerged in tandem with legal dispossession during the settlement and allotment periods. A second book project focuses on Indigenous peoples’ land defense practices to explore how documentary film engages with Indigenous land defenders’ human rights.
Professor Suzack’s current research is forthcoming in Law & Critique/Recht & Kritik, edited by Margareta Olson (De Gruyter Press) and in Ravens Talking: Indigenous Feminist Legal Studies, edited by Rebecca Johnson, Debra McKenzie, Val Napoleon, and Emily Snyder (University of Toronto Press). Her interdisciplinary research on Indigenous law has appeared in the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature, edited by Robert Spoo and Simon Stern;
Frontiers of Gender Equality: Transnational Legal Perspectives, edited by Rebecca Cook (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023); and NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research (2015).
