About Onowa

Dr. Onowa McIvor (she/her) is maskiko-nehinaw (Swampy Cree) and Scottish-Canadian. Her nehinaw family is from kinosao sipi (Norway House) and Pimicikimak (Cross Lake) in northern Manitoba, and her settler family were farmers in southern Saskatchewan for many generations. Dr. McIvor is a full Professor in the Department of Indigenous Education at the University of Victoria (UVic), where her contributions to the fields of Indigenous Education and Language Revitalization research earned her the President’s Chair, the UVic’s highest internal honour.

Like many Indigenous peoples today, Dr. McIvor should have learned the language of her ancestors from her mother, who should have learned it from her parents. However, this intergenerational transfer did not occur and rather the severance, which is so common, has fed her passion for the revival of Indigenous languages for more than 20 years. Dr. McIvor’s passion and vision is one of hope and empowerment for Indigenous peoples’ right to hear and speak their language in the lands commonly referred to as Canada.

Dr. McIvor has built a vast interdisciplinary research program focused on the revival and continuation of Indigenous languages in many forms, from researching adult language learning programs to the collaborative creation of an open-source language assessment tool. Dr. McIvor’s research advances the field of Indigenous language pedagogy, assessment, language policy, and language planned. Her research is entirely community-based. She currently leads a $2.5 million national project to support and expand language revitalization efforts across Canada in collaboration with nine Indigenous partners in six provinces and territories, in addition to many other interrelated projects.