Dr. Dawn Lavell Harvard, Ph.D., is a proud member of the Wikwemikong First Nation, the first Aboriginal Trudeau Scholar, and has worked to advance the rights of Aboriginal women as the President of the Ontario Native Women’s Association since she was first elected in 2003.
Dawn has been the Director for First Peoples House of Learning at Trent University since 2016, having left her previous role as President of the Native Women’s Association of Canada in order to return to her roots as an educator.
Dawn is a full-time mother of three girls. Following in the footsteps of her mother Jeannette Corbiere Lavell, a noted advocate for Indigenous women’s rights, Dawn has been working toward the empowerment of Aboriginal women and their families ever since joining the Board of the Ontario Native Women Association as a youth director back in 1994. She is also a co-editor of the original volume on Indigenous Mothering, “Until Our Hearts Are on the Ground: Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth,” and has released a book along with Kim Anderson, “Mothers of the Nations.” Recently, Dawn co-edited a book with Jennifer Brant, entitled “Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada.”
