Research Bio

Cheryl Suzack is a professor of Indigenous and Native American Studies. Her research focuses on Indigenous law and literature, Indigenous governance, Indigenous feminisms, transitional justice, and studies of settler colonialism, decolonization, and Indigenous resurgence. She is the author of Indigenous Women's Writing and the Cultural Study of Law (2017), and a co-editor and contributor to the award-winning collection Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (2010). Her research collaborations include a community-responsible research project with members of Heiltsuk Nation, "Heiltsuk Women as Architects of Governance," and a project exploring truth commissions and reconciliation, "Aesthetic Education: A North-South Dialogue," with members of the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto. Publications associated with this research have appeared in "Countering the Criminalization of Indigenous Land Defenders," Law & Critique/Recht & Kritik, ed. Greta Olson (forthcoming), and in "Truth and Reconciliation Practices in a Comparative Perspective," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (2018).

Suzack's work highlights the role of women and gender in Indigenous governance and uses interdisciplinary analysis to illuminate the social and political dimensions of Indigenous law and storytelling. She examines how legal and literary narratives intersect in the representation of Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and cultural survival, bridging literary studies, legal theory, and Indigenous methodologies to advocate for decolonization and justice. Her research into law, culture, and human rights has appeared in "Visualizing Violence against Indigenous Women: Documentary Film as Disruption in Finding Dawn and American Outrage," Raven's Talking: Indigenous Feminist Legal Studies (2025), "Equality for Indigenous Women--McIvor v. Canada," Frontiers of Gender Equality--Transnational Legal Perspectives (2023), and "Human Rights and Indigenous Feminisms," Handbook of Indigenous Peoples' Rights (2016). 

Suzack has published articles in American Literary History, Canadian Review of American Studies, NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, Transitional Justice Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, CR: New Centennial Review, and Postcolonial Text. She has presented lectures related to her research into Indigenous women's climate justice activism and violence against Indigenous women at Jagiellonian University, Krakow, the oldest university in Poland, University of Silesia, Katowice, and Sapienza University of Rome. 

Suzack is an alumnus of the College of the Royal Society of Canada, and a recipient of the 2023 Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize in the category of Influential Leader from the University of Toronto. She is a member of the Batchewana First Nation. 

Research Expertise and Interest

indigenous studies, Indigenous law and humanities, Indigenous feminisms, transnational Indigenous studies, comparative race and gender, literature and culture