On September 18, 2025, at 1:00 p.m. at Mount Royal University, Frances Widdowson will be facilitating a Spectrum Street Epistemology session on the claim “‘Indigenous science is not science”.
The reason why this claim has been chosen is because of a cirumstance that unfolded in 2020-2021, which resulted in Widdowson’s employment relationship with MRU being declared “unviable”. This circumstance began when MRU professor Gabrielle Lindstrom (who now goes by her maiden name Gabrielle Weasel Head) stated that Widdowson’s assertion that “indigenous science is not science”, allegedly made at a talk in September 2019, was “racist and discriminatory”.
Lindstrom’s opinion that this was “racist and discriminatory” was one of the allegations in a harassment complaint that she filed against Widdowson in October 2020.
Although this allegation was not found to be harassing, the matter was raised again on March 5, 2021, when it was claimed that indigenous scholars were leaving MRU because they did not “feel safe”. As Gabrielle Lindstrom had left MRU in December 2020 because she had claimed this, Widdowson asked the question whether saying that indigenous science was not science was a reason why indigenous scholars didn’t feel safe. This resulted in Widdowson being attacked by a number of colleagues, and then Widdowson was blamed for “disrupting” the meeting.
On December 20, 2021, when Widdowson was terminated, “disrupting” this meeting was given as one of the reasons why her employment relationship with Mount Royal University was no longer viable.
The whole sequence of events that transpired concerning the claim “indigenous science is not science” was documented in the video produced with Daniel Page “Mount Royal University Murders Academic Freedom”.
All this is the fallout of colonialism in my view. On both sides. No one is immune. A-ho! universities, the courts and authorities are mostly to blame, they refuse to get involved in a meaningful way. Miigwetch