Education and Training

Alana Fletcher Print Email

Alana Fletcher is a policy and project officer at the House of Commons of Canada. Alana has long been interested in Indigenous cultures and especially in Indigenous views of our relationship with the non-human world. She completed her PhD at Queen’s University in 2015, where her dissertation focused on the way the community of Déline used particular kinds of language, various media and genres of argumentation, and adapted federal government processes to address their concerns about mining on Great Bear Lake. The book manuscript based on this dissertation has been accepted for publication by McGill-Queen’s University Press. As part of this project Alana travelled to Déline twice, in the summers of 2014 and 2015, to meet community members and better understand their connection to the land and water around them. She is very grateful for the friendships and partnerships she has made through this research, and for the community orientation they have given her work.

Two community-based projects have grown out of Alana’s doctoral research. One is a collection of oral histories that Alana is co-editing with Morris Neyelle, titled The Man Who Lived with a Giant: Stories from Johnny Neyelle, Dene Elder. This collection marks the realization of many years of work on Morris’s part to share his father’s knowledge with a wider audience. The book is forthcoming in Spring 2019 from the University of Alberta Press. The other project is the Sahtu Libraries Project, which is an effort in partnership with the Sahtu Renewable Resource Board. This project entails creating a database of Sahtu-related research that will be accessible for community members and approved researchers. We hope this database will let Sahtu people know about historic and current work done around their region.