Aanii, boozhoo, Jonathan Ferrier ndizhinikaaz, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeinini ndow. Nimoshek, Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, Treaty 19 ndoonjibaa.
Jonathan Ferrier, PhD, BSc, BA, is a Mississauga, Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) scientist and a Biology professor at Dalhousie University. He was a postdoctoral fellow and graduate student at the University of Ottawa, Department of Biology, The Montreal Botanical Garden, The New York Botanical Garden, The Ottawa Hospital, and Bruker BioSpin. His Indigenous heritage informs his work in food, medicine, material culture and ethnolinguistics. He studies maternal fetal medicine metabolomics and the phytochemistry of native medicine for preeclampsia, diabetes, and cancer. Ferrier continues with research and development contributions since 2008, collaborating in 16 countries.
He has tested methods for assessing organism evolution using metabolomics and bioinformatics and has worked with clinicians and computational biologists for personalized medicine in healthcare billing systems in Ontario.
The Ferrier Lab is dedicated to ethnobotany, ethnolinguistics, taxonomy, ecotoxicology, conservation biology, phytochemistry, ethnopharmacology, metabolomics, disease diagnostics, for contributions to Indigenous rights, education, and appropriate healthcare.
Our creative and academic research practices that supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation.
Mapping dialect patterns enhances the way communities visualize and connect to their language. Maps assist storytellers, weaving together narratives of how dialects emerge across the landscape and how those patterns depict geographic barriers, political boundaries, regional biodiversity, migration routes, settlements, territorial land grabs, and contact between groups. Nishnaabeg identity is related to the land, and protecting our identity prevents biodiversity loss. Presenting Nishnaabemwin ethnobiology terms can strengthen linkages between people, their dialects, and Indigenous biodiverse territories. Linguistic diversity is linked to biodiversity. Extinction of an Nishnaabeg dialect would mean losing information and life in rare and fragile biodiverse hotspots in Nishnaabewaki (the people’s country) and Canada (Carrygusegunececoning [Place Where a Small Kind of Turtle Lays its Eggs] and Mixed Woodland Plains or Carolinian zones). Like decolonizing Indigenous language space, there is a need to displace colonial mapping and increase Indigenous leadership in mapmaking. Indigenous voices mapping from the ground up (counter mapping) utilize digital icons to represent linguistic, ecological, and territory themes. Counter maps are different from featureless colonial green zones. It can reframe the ways landscapes have been mapped (and seen from a neocolonial and nationalist driven perspective) to a Nishnaabeg centred worldview. This removes the barrier of who produces that knowledge allowing for a Nishnaabe sense of identity, place and being to be mapped as decided by them. Counter maps communicate the indigenous vision and reinforce land and linguistic biodiversity connections to decrease land grabs in Eurocentric frameworks.
Learning and mapping my family’s traditional territory and migration habitats
