Shiri Pasternak is the co-founder and former research director at Yellowhead Institute, currently on a research leave from the Institute. She is an Assistant Professor in Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her book, Grounded Authority, published by the University of Minnesota Press, is an in-depth critique of the federal land claims policy in Canada from the perspective of Algonquin law, and was published in 2017. It won the Canadian Studies Network Book Prize in 2017 and the Western Political Science Association Clay Morgan Award for Best Book in Environmental Political Theory. It also won an honourable mention from the Association & Anthropology, Legal Studies Association Book Prize. Pasternak is the co-author of three major Indigenous policy analysis reports published by the Yellowhead Institute, as well as numerous briefs on issues like critical infrastructure, international law, and abolition. She is a frequent contributor to national newspapers and magazines, receiving an honourable mention this year by the Digital Publishing Awards for her writing on the Wet’suwet’en conflict in 2020. She has also published academic writing in the South Atlantic Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, Antipode, The New Brunswick Journal of Law, and Environment and Planning D. She writes about resource extraction, Crown-First Nations fiscal relations, police, and the relationships between capitalism and colonialism.
