Mercedes Peters

Profile

Email: mercedes.peters@smu.ca

Mercedes Peters (she/her) is a Mi’kmaw PhD Candidate in History at the University of British Columbia. Mercedes is a band member of Glooscap First Nation, and she completed her MA in history at Dalhousie, where her 2018 thesis, entitled We’ve Always Been Here: Tracing Shifts in the Portrayal of Status, Agency and Mi’kmaw Women’s Activism in the Micmac News, 1971-1979, was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal.

Right now Mercedes’ PhD research focuses on Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik women’s grassroots activism, organizing, and sovereignty assertion as a central, but often ignored, pillar of what would become known as the Red Power movement. She is interested mainly in how Indigenous nations assert sovereignty through everyday action, and in places where settler states like Canada can’t necessarily see or recognize them doing so. She is also passionate about decolonizing learning and education, and most recently authored the Grade 8 textbook for the NS Social Studies curriculum unit on 20th and 21st century Indigenous rights. The textbook is part of Rubicon publishing’s Interlink series and is titled Indigenous Rights and Advocacy (2021).