Tasha Beeds

Tasha Beeds is a Plains Cree, Scottish-Metis and Bajan academic. She is a Mide-Kwe and a Water Walker. After graduation she worked as a tutor and authored education modules, eventually pursuing graduate studies in order to teach as a professor. She began her studies at USask, relocating to Trent University where she completed a master's degree in Indigenous Studies and Canadian Studies for which she received a CGS SSHRC Grant of $17,000 and a $25,000 Gabriel Dumont Institute Scholarship. She also pursued her PhD studies at Trent. She joined the Indigenous studies program at the University of Sudbury in 2019 and, subsequently, lost her tenure-track position when Laurentian University restructured due to financial duress and the University of Sudbury closed the Indigenous Studies Department, one of the first in the history of the discipline .

As of March 2021, Beeds has walked about 7000 km as a way to raise awareness about the state of water systems in Canada and the United States. Another, which took place in 2017, began in Duluth, Minnesota and ended in Matane, Quebec where water from Lake Superior was joined with water in the St. Lawrence River. She just completed two Water Walks of her own in the summer of 2021: one for Junction Creek in the Sudbury region, where the water's flow ended at Spanish Residential School for a total of 140 km and one for the North Saskatchewan River which saw Beeds and a core team of 8 Water Walkers walk a total of 1100 km in 36 days. Beeds' mentor, Josephine-ba Mandamin, was an Anishinaabe elder known for her work as a water protector.

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