Makere Stewart-Harawira

Makere Stewart-Harawira (born Margaret Stewart in 1945 ) is a Canadian–New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at the University of Alberta, specialising in Indigenous knowledge, globalization and water rights. She is a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Commission on Ecosystem Management, and a national board member of the Keepers of the Water.

Academic career

Stewart-Harawira is an enrolled member of the Waitaha ki Te Waipounamu iwi in Aotearoa New Zealand.

In 1993 Stewart-Harawira earned a Bachelor of Arts in education and Māori studies, followed by a Master of Arts with honours in education in 1995, both at the University of Auckland. She went on to complete a PhD titled Globalisation and the Return to Empire: an Indigenous Response = Te torino whakahaere, whakamuri, also at the University of Auckland. Her doctoral research was supervised by Michael Peters and Graham Smith.

Stewart-Harawira worked at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, where she was acting Head of Graduate Studies and a lecturer in the Department of Postgraduate Studies. She was a research fellow at the Woolf Fisher Research Institute at Auckland, and then moved to Canada in 2004. Stewart-Harawira is a full professor at the University of Alberta, where she researches Indigenous water rights and environmentalism. She is a board member of the Canadian NGO Keepers of the Water, contributed to the IPCC 6th Global Assessment, and is a member of both the Commission on Ecosystem Management and the joint Specialist Group on Indigenous Peoples, Customary & Environmental Laws and Human Rights for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Professor of Māori Studies Mason Durie described it as "a thorough and scholarly examination of indigeneity in a global environment and [Makere Stewart-Harawira] has made a valuable and major contribution to the indigenous literature".

In 2020 Makere-Stewart co-founded the I-STEAM Pathways programme at the University of Alberta. The programme offers paid internships to First Nations, Métis and Inuit youth to conduct interdisciplinary research in fields such as biology, technology, environmental engineering, policy and law. The programme is the first such initiative in Canada, and came about after the Provincial Court of Alberta ordered the Obed Mountain Mine to fund environmental research as recompense for a 2013 spill into the Athabasca River.

Awards Makere-Stewart co-wrote a paper that was runner-up in the Environmental Politics Article of the Year Award in 2021, "Multispecies justice: theories, challenges, and a research agenda for environmental politics". In 2022 Makere-Stewart and the other co-founders of I-STEAM won the Social Innovation – Programs Promoting Indigenous People category of the ASTech Awards. In 2023 Makere-Stewart was awarded for Outstanding Achievement in Social Innovation: Programs Promoting Indigenous People by the University of Alberta.

Selected works