Marianne Ignace

Education

• PhD, Anthropology, Simon Fraser University
  

Biography

Dr. Ignace has a joint appointment with Indigenous Studies and Director, Indigenous Languages Centre. Dr. Ignace completed her Ph.D. dissertation on the politics of Haida symbols which was published as The Curtain Within: Haida Social and Symbolic Discourse. She has also published articles on Haida oratory and Potlatching.

For the past twenty years, Dr. Ignace has focused her research on the Secwepemc (Shuswap) people of the Plateau, where her interests are aboriginal land use and occupancy, ethnobotany, traditional ecological knowledge, ethnohistory, and the linguistic and anthropological analysis of Aboriginal language discourse. She has authored and co-authored papers in various journals and books on these topics, and has also carried out research in the field of Aboriginal language revitalization, some of which is published in the Handbook for Aboriginal Language Program Planning in B.C. In recent years, she has worked with First Nations communities and elders on various language revitalization projects, including Secwepemctsin, St’at’imcets, Heiltsuk, Nuxalk, Haida and Sm’algyax.