Meet Our People

We are a collaboratory committed to Indigenous peoples, thought, and movements.

Director (On leave until July 1st, 2025)
Dr. Maile is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholar, organizer, and practitioner from Maunawili, Oʻahu and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. He is finishing a book on the development of settler colonial capitalism in Hawaii, and how Kanaka Maoli (the Indigenous people of Hawaiʻi) issue gifts of sovereignty to overturn it by balancing relations between kanaka and aina—between people and the land who feeds.
As Director in Ziibiing Lab, their work focuses on the unique yet shared struggles Indigenous peoples face against colonial dispossession and for decolonization and dignified life. Dr. Maile is developing international and transnational research to balance the local and global toward unsettling a homogenization of Indigenous peoples and politics.
He enjoys cooking, karaoke, and a good cup of coffee.

Acting Director
Dr. Turner is Teme-Augama Anishinaabe, an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Centre for Indigenous Studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science. In July of 2022, Professor Dale Turner was appointed to a three-year term as the Academic Advisor of Indigenous Research to the Provost. His research interests include Indigenous politics, contemporary Indigenous intellectual culture, contemporary political theory, and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Lab Coordinator
Indira is a Peruvian Ph.D. student with Quechua roots and fellow researcher in the Educational Leadership and Policy (ELP) program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE – UofT). She holds an M.Ed. from OISE and a Political Science B.A. from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Indira is a co-founder and member of the Kuskalla Abya Yala organization, an Indigenous-led nonprofit based in Canada, the USA, and Peru. She balances her studies, research, and consultancy work with advocacy and active participation in community-led organizations.

She loves outdoor activities, nature, photography, reading, and dancing.

Affiliate Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Nikolaeva is currently working on the research project which analyzes the processes and politics of Indigenization within extractivist industry, focusing on diamonds and diamond-mining in Sakha Republic. Her second project will explore gendered knowledge in land-based education.
Dr. Nikolaeva's other research interests include politics of recognition, socialist Indigenous women’s activism, Second World feminisms, and Soviet/post-Soviet Indigenous Arctic.
She enjoys reading; her favorite genre is the Soviet-era science fiction, especially works by the Brothers Strugatsky..

Governing Council