Dr. Lara Rosenoff Gauvin is a mother, activist scholar, and Associate Professor of Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the University of Manitoba. She is currently co-chair of the University of Manitoba’s Respectful Rematriation and Repatriation Ceremony. The Ceremony is proactive, Indigenous Elder-led, and concerns Ancestors, belongings, human biological materials and tangible and intangible cultural expressions that were stewarded by the University without proper consent and protocol since its founding. She also continues longstanding relationships with one extended family in Acoliland, Northern Uganda, working together on radio-based public dialogues about Acoli Indigenous governance, law, and land rights’ protections.
Experience as a Trudeau scholar:
The Trudeau Scholarship has challenged me with possibility- the possibility of how I practice research, the possibility of engagement, the possibility of collaboration, and the possibility of knowledge mobilization. This space and support for visioning what research should and can do, and how one should and can do it, has been formative in my development as an academic, but also more generally as a human being.
I found much of the impetus, courage, and guts to engage in the challenge of possibility through my relationships with other Trudeau Scholars, Mentors and Fellows, as well as with host community members, and advocacy and academic allies found around the world. These relationships were greatly facilitated by the Annual Travel and Networking Allowance.
The academic world can be frightfully oppressive and competitive, squashing out the ideal of a collaborative pursuit of knowledge to better the world. Yet, it is in the Trudeau community that this ideal is consistently pursued. This challenge, and the generous financial, social, and intellectual support to engage with it, is the legacy of my Trudeau Scholarship.
Making home alive again after war: Acoli Kaka’s Indigenous land sovereignties in Northern Uganda
2024
After the war between the Ugandan government and the Lord's Resistance Army (1986-2006), 90 per cent of the displaced rural population in Northern Uganda returned to small-scale farming on their ancestral lands and their systems of communal land stewardship. At the time, there was much debate about transitional justice interventions to address war's violence, but in that same period over 85 per cent of Acoli chiefdoms saw affiliated clans, or kin-based political communities (kaka), negotiate to write down their Indigenous governance constitutions for the first time. Acoli Kaka’s return to their ancestral lands and small-scale farming, and subsequent engagements with tekwaro – Indigenous knowledge – through constitution writing, served to strengthen Indigenous governance and law after their weakening in contexts of war and displacement. It is argued here that these engagements and negotiations rooted in the land, regardless of their outcomes, served to orient relationships away from the fragmenting, unprecedented, forced Acoli-on-Acoli violence experienced during the war. A resurgence of Acoli Kaka’s Indigenous law and governance rooted in communal land stewardship is linked to relational repair and supports calls for transitional justice processes to nurture and respect Indigenous land rights. These ethnographic arguments also lend support to kaka’s ongoing efforts towards clan unity (ribbe kaka) and to secure communal land sovereignties.
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Messy Ethics in Human Rights Work
2023
Human rights work takes place everywhere, every day, and in every way, but good intentions don’t always bring good results. Those who work to promote the dignity, opportunities, and quality of life of vulnerable and marginalized people are confronted daily with irresolvable ethical dilemmas.
Messy Ethics in Human Rights Work invites readers into a series of overlapping conversations, as activists, researchers, artists, and others reflect on the complex disorderliness of ethics in practice, and the implications for human rights work both within and beyond academia. Although professional, institutional, or even organic codes of conduct can be useful, their focus on avoiding ethical problems often misses the point. Human rights work entails intricate relationships of social, political, and economic power and responsibility that emerge only in the process of doing the work itself.
Contributors share situations when they were ethically stuck between a rock and hard place. What happened? How did they evaluate the situation and the options available to resolve it? Where did or didn’t they seek guidance? What would they do differently next time? This honest, thoughtful work proposes that personal reflection and collective, sometimes uncomfortable discussion are essential components of critical human rights practice.
Academics, researchers, practitioners, activists, and students working within human rights contexts will all find themselves within the pages of this honest and necessary work.
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“But Where Is the Violence?”: Reflections on Honouring Relationships and Troubling Academia
2023
This chapter dwells in the spaces between research, relationships, and responsibility. Specifically, I attend to questions around why I ultimately decided that my research should amplify community aspirations of reconciliation and ribbe kaka (clan unity), rather than brutally exposing continuing internal divisions or highlighting ongoing clan disagreements. I also reflect on other academics' reactions to my choice, and their feelings of being "troubled" by my personal and activist location.
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