When you visit Chris Anderson’s office in Pembina Hall, the door is already open — you just knock and walk in.
We sit at the corner of a large table. His desk is covered with papers, he explains — though in truth he seems more comfortable around a table than at a desk. He leans back in his chair and folds his hands across his chest.
Chris wouldn’t describe himself as a typical dean, and says that leadership is a skill he’s had to learn. He’s disarming and approachable. He’s as funny as he is serious — our conversation ranges from Twitter rants to his internationally acclaimed research to his start as dean.
Chris arrived at the U of A 21 years ago as a sociology grad student. Today, he leads the only freestanding Faculty of Native Studies in the country. I sat down with him to talk about his journey to Alberta, truth and reconciliation, the challenges of deanship, and the evolution of his faculty and discipline.
You officially started the role on July 1, 2017 — how have the first months been?
I was interim dean for a year and a half before, so I already had a good sense of what the job entailed — in fact, I probably wouldn’t have done as well in my job interview if I hadn’t had basically a year to train for it. The first six months were really about continuing the things that I had done in the previous 18 months, but with the full weight of knowing that I’m the permanent dean.
Before you came to the U of A, you studied at Queen’s University. Is Ontario home for you?
No — Saskatchewan. I went to Queen’s to play football, actually. I didn’t even know it was a good university until I got there. It turns out I’m a terrible football player, but not a bad student — so I did my undergrad and my master’s there, and then came back here to do my PhD in sociology and never left.
What brought you to Alberta and the U of A?
I have family just west of here in Whitecourt. The sociology program was a really top-rated program for the research I thought I was going to do at the time. It seemed like an excellent fit for me in terms of the intellectual scope and the funding package, and the geographical location. I’m also very much a prairie person.
You’ve now been at the U of A for 21 years. How has the university changed in that time?
I’m sure it’s changed in various ways, as all universities do. But for me, the night-and-day change has been the commitment of the President’s Office and the Provost’s office — and the university generally — to implementing the TRC Calls to Action. That’s been a sea-change in terms of the resources that have been put into these issues, but also how people on campus have taken up the challenge in a whole bunch of different administrative and intellectual contexts.
What was the impact of the TRC like within your faculty?
The impact of the TRC has been dynamite for us, but it’s also meant that we have to do a better job of understanding who we are, and getting other people to understand who we are. When you’re a new discipline at any university in North America, you have to be able to differentiate yourself. We’ve seen a lot of different people turn their eyes towards doing Indigenous stuff, which is fantastic. But some of them have started to call what they do Indigenous studies — this is an actual discipline.
You’ve led the development of both Master’s and PhD programs in the Faculty of Native Studies. Why are graduate programs so important to the faculty?
Everybody in the faculty at the moment has a PhD in something other than Indigenous studies. Indigenous studies is a pretty young discipline — there aren’t more than a handful of PhD programs across the world. So it’s crucially important to have graduate programs to build up the discipline, institutionally and intellectually.
You’re the only freestanding Faculty of Native Studies in North America. Does that also impact your role in an emerging discipline?
We are one of the best Indigenous studies units in the world — but it’s like saying we’re one of the tallest sky-scrapers on Prince Edward Island. It’s true, but in relative terms it’s not really that tall. So what we’re trying to do is continue to put out top research and teaching — we have fantastic support staff here — and we’re also in a position now where we can reach out to other Indigenous studies units that aren’t as privileged as we are to help them out. We’re starting up a regional Indigenous studies network with the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Manitoba.
This is part of my vision going forward: to build up regional networks and international networks, and not worry so much about the national networks (which is what people normally focus on).
Why the preference for regional over national?
When I talk about doing regional or international stuff, I’m talking about building up the institutional base of Indigenous studies as a discipline. I think we centre Canada too much in Indigenous studies when we talk about who Indigenous people are — I’m as guilty of doing that as anybody. We don’t spend enough time talking about what our relationships are to the places we actually live in. That’s what the regional network is meant to do.
One of the things that makes the University of Alberta great is its people — its people at the university, but also our local connections to place. Indigenous studies is interested in Indigenous connections to place.
What is your vision for the Faculty of Native Studies over the next few years?
Our big overall goal over the next five years is to build community engagement into our teaching and our research. How do we build stronger relationships with local Indigenous communities? How do we get our students out of the classrooms and onto the land? And how do we get people who are experts on the land into our classrooms?
We’re also continuing to build up the PhD program, and building the regional network. Experiential learning is going to be another big one — both in the context of land-based work, but also online blended learning. And we have to put in a lower-level, history-of-the-discipline class, which we don’t currently have.
These are all beginning steps as we go forward.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.