Professor Aimée Craft has been awarded the University of Ottawa’s 2020 Early Career Researcher of the Year Award in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts and literature category. She is recognized alongside Professor Janet Squires of the Faculty of Health Sciences, who has received the award in the pure and applied sciences category.
Since beginning her career as a researcher at the University of Manitoba in 2014, Professor Craft has devoted her research to deepening our collective understanding of Anishinaabe ways of knowing. This has involved working within Indigenous communities on community and land-based research, and making research accessible to other Indigenous communities, governments, industry and the general public.
In addition to an extensive record of research project leadership, which boasts funding from all three research councils (SSHRC, CIHR and NSERC), Professor Craft has published highly significant research contributions. In 2013, for example, she published an award-winning book, Breathing Life Into the Stone Fort Treaty, which focuses on understanding and interpreting treaties from an Anishinaabe inaakonigewin (legal) perspective. And in 2020, she co-edited, with Dr. Paulette Regan, a collection entitled Pathways of Reconciliation: Indigenous and Settler Approaches to Implementing the TRC’s Calls to Action, which demonstrates the importance of trying and learning from new and creative approaches to thinking about and practicing reconciliation, illustrating the complexities of the reconciliation process itself.
The Early Career Researcher of the Year Award is presented annually to faculty members who have made exceptional contributions to research at the University of Ottawa. The distinction is awarded in two categories: Humanities, Social Sciences, Fine Arts and Literature; and Pure and Applied Science. The award includes of a bursary of $10,000 to go towards the remuneration of a graduate student supervised by the recipient.
Earlier this year, Professor Craft was awarded the Canadian Bar Association’s President’s Award, recognizing her significant contribution to the legal profession and to the public life of Canada.
Congratulations to Professor Craft on this exceptional and well-deserved achievement!