Sarah Moritz

Sarah Moritz
Position
Visiting Post-Doc

Sarah C. Moritz is a visiting Post-Doctoral fellow at the Centre for Global studies, a Banting (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow, and sociocultural anthropologist at Concordia University (Department of Geography, Environment and Planning), Montréal, Canada. Her doctoral research (McGill University, Department of Anthropology) examined the social relationality and Boasian anthropology of Interior Salish St‘át‘imc fisheries and water governance and associated notions of a ‘good life’ in the Fraser River Valley of today’s British Columbia. Her postdoctoral research titled “Honouring Salmon: Relational Ecologies across Salish Worlds in the Pacific Northwest,” investigates how Interior and Coast Salish peoples, especially matriarchs, have traditionally related to and interacted with wild salmon and their ongoing cultural legacy across freshwater and saltwater realms and combines community-based action anthropological, archival, collaborative ethnographic and Salish research methods toward the creation of a multilingual living oral history atlas that emphasizes and bolsters connections and stories across time and space. She also researches and teaches Indigenous rights, human-animal relationships, stewardship practices, decolonial research methods and the history of anthropology and science in Salish and Arctic home places. She is the co-author of three books on environmental anthropology and Salish studies and has written numerous peer-reviewed contributions and children's books on Indigenous language, land and legal revitalization especially regarding salmon and water. The wild salmon life cycle is her guiding metaphor that accompanies her through rivers, ocean, research, teaching and community-based advocacy and action.