Assistant Professor

Jas Morgan

I am an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Communication, Identity and Community at the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University. My areas of expertise include kinship, Indigenous narratives in film and television, Indigenous documentary cultures, Indigenous social media and internet, digital media, digital publishing, cultural heritage and governance, Indigenous feminist policy, and TransNDN thought.

I began my professional media career between 2017 until 2020, when I held the position of Editor-at-Large for Canadian Art, which was the oldest arts publication of record in Canada. During my tenure at Canadian Art, I wrote several digital and print articles, features, and essays that critiqued international galleries, museums, and art festivals for Indigenous identity fraud and appropriation, and for their imperialist and colonial governance and funding structures. My Indigenous policy think tank paper “Cultures of Exploitations” discussed the exploitative relationship between the Canadian arts and culture sector and Indigenous communities.

I was the lead editor of a 2017 issue of Canadian Art on the theme of Indigenous “Kinship,” which garnered a National Magazine Award nomination. I also worked as a freelance cultural journalist during this time. My article for The Walrus addressing the #MeToo movement in Indigenous communities received a National Magazine Award.

In 2022, I was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Digital Wahkohtowin and Cultural Governance. I facilitated a research lab that collaborated with Indigenous artists, film and television makers, and social media content creators to produce digital media. The Digital Wahkohtowin and Cultural Governance lab shared 2LGBTIA+ Indigenous stories to counter stigma in media and policy and erasure within the humanities, and provided foundations for a decolonial humanities and cultural heritage grounded by Indigenous governance. The lab’s digital outputs have been featured by media and academic journals nationally and internationally.

My book chapter “Cultures of Indigenous Futurism” argued that Indigenous trans and Two-Spirit peoples use digital media methods to vision their realities, express kinship, and imagine better possible futures for their communities. I’ve also championed collaboration, rather than “study,” in research with Indigenous and trans peoples, and explored how digital media can provide a method for reflexive and collaborative research with communities (The Conversation 2022).

As a co-investigator of the Digital Democracies Institute at SFU, I am currently developing a digital policy platform focusing on Indigenous women’s, queer, and trans leadership and governance at the intersections of unceded, Treaty, and modern Treaty processes in the West.

In 2018 and 2019, I held a lectureship at McGill University in the Indigenous Studies Program, when I was still a Ph.D. candidate in the Art History and Communications department at McGill University. From 2020 until 2023, I was as an Assistant Professor in Toronto Metropolitan University’s Department of English.

My cultural criticism and critical theory have received many accolades. I have published 1 book, 4 peer-reviewed book chapters, and 3 peer-reviewed papers. My book nîtisânak (Metonymy Press, 2018) won the 2019 Dayne Ogilive Prize and a 2019 Quebec Writer’s Federation first book prize, and has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and an Indigenous Voices Literary Award. I was awarded a National Magazine Award in the essay category for my Canadian Art essay about the failures of institutional reconciliation and the work of Annie Pootoogook,“Stories Not Told.” I have written 68 features, articles, interviews, and essays for over 30 publications nationally and internationally. I have given lectures, presentations, and talks at over 50 international and national conferences and events. I have consulted not-for-profits, governing associations, museums and archives, and governmental bodies such as arts and culture funders on decolonization and equity. I was an invitee of the honorable Governor General Mary Simon for her 2024 symposium on social media and violence in Ottawa. In 2019, I spoke at the Canadian consulate in the UK about the art and work of Sonny Assu.

My current academic book project delves into the evolution of national and international Indigenous art governance, exploring two distinct periods: the portrayal of Indigenous Art through a lens of masculinism and the emergence of Indigenous Aesthetics as a means of identity expression. Additionally, it examines a burgeoning countermovement led by community-based trans Indigenous digital media creators, who forge creative kinship beyond institutional confines.

I focus my academic service on creating professional standards for peer-review and quality of digital outputs. I am the owner of Sewing Circle productions, an Indigenous production company that produces films and series centering the stories of Indigenous 2LGBTIA+ characters. Sewing Circle produced KIN—a web series about queer and trans Indigenous people living in Toronto—which premiered at ImagineNative in October 2023. I am part of the editorial board that revived and rebranded the feminist digital magazine GUTS in 2021, and remain on the editorial board. My curatorial work centering Indigenous 2LGBTIA+ digital media has appeared in galleries nationally. I am the producer, writer, and publisher of Just Fem Things: a podcast about feminist and Indigenous relationships to objects.

I am Cree-Métis-Saulteaux and a registered member of Tootinaowaziibeeng First Nation. My Métis relatives are too numerous to name but my closest kin are the McKays from around Prince Albert, Saskatchewan and the Demerias from around Brandon and Winnipeg, Manitoba.

BOOKS

• Nixon, Lindsay. (2017). Nîtisanâk. Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Metonymy Press. ISBN: 0994047177

BOOK CHAPTERS

• Morgan, Jas. (2024). “‘I Was Jumped:’ ‘Queer’ and Trans Indigenous Feminist Micro-Influence on TikTok.” In “The Women, They Hold the Ground”: Indigenous Women’s Digital Media in North America. Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States: University of Minnesota Press. (Forthcoming)
• Morgan, Jas. (2022). “A Circle of Rocks: Cannibal Culture, Kinship, and Indigenous Youth in the Saskatchewan Public School System.” In White Benevolence: Racism and Colonial Violence in the Helping Professions. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Fernwood Publishing. ISBN: 9781773635224
• Nixon, Lindsay. (2020). "Toward an Indigenous Relational Aesthetics: Making Native Love, Still." In Good Relation: History, Gender, and Kinship in Indigenous Feminisms. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: University of Manitoba Press. ISBN: 978-0-88755-851-1
• Nixon, Lindsay. (2020). “Cultures of Indigenous Futurism.” Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness. Black Outdoors, Durham, United States: Duke University Press. DOI: 10.1215/9781478012023.

PAPERS

• Nixon, Lindsay. (2019). “Distorted Love: Mapplethorpe, the Neo/Classical Sculptural Black Nude, and Visual Cultures of Transatlantic Enslavement.” Imaginations 10(1), 295-324. DOI: 10.17742/IMAGE.CR.10.1.10.
• Nixon, Lindsay. (2019). “On ‘the Reconciliation Year’.” FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Criticism 12/13. ISSN 2694-0094.
• Nixon, Lindsay. (2018). “‘I Wonder Where They Went’: Post-Reality Multiplicities and Counter-Resurgent Narratives in Thirza Cuthand’s Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory.” Canadian Theatre Review 175, 47–51. DOI: 10.3138/ctr.175.009.