My current projects study how incentives, institutional design, and community ties shape Indigenous education, language continuity, and economic opportunity. The central question is how policy can expand access and achievement while keeping education and development compatible with language, identity, place, and future community service.
The research program combines formal models of signaling, incentives, and coordination with Canadian administrative and community-level evidence. Its initial empirical focus is Western and Northern Canada.
Current research program — updated July 2026
This research studies postsecondary persistence when education is both a human-capital investment and a socially interpreted action. The first paper distinguishes financial aid from institutional design. Scholarships reduce the private cost of education, while Indigenous governance, mentoring, language programming, community-linked curricula, local delivery, and return pathways also make educational persistence visibly compatible with community belonging and future service.
A companion project studies preparation, effort, and “support with standards.” It treats access funding, academic readiness, institutional support, and credible progression requirements as complements rather than substitutes. The objective is to understand which combinations of financial and institutional support improve persistence and completion without weakening academic incentives.
The empirical agenda begins with British Columbia and comparable provincial systems, using variation in student support, transition programs, emergency assistance, Indigenous resource centres, and Indigenous-controlled institutions.
When Persistence Signals Exit: Identity, Legitimacy, and Indigenous Educational Persistence
Working paper, July 2026
[Working Paper PDF]
Transfers with Standards: Readiness, Effort, and Incentive Design in Indigenous Postsecondary Persistence
Companion project in development
This project studies why intergenerational language transmission may decline even when community members value their language, and which institutions can reverse that decline. The theoretical focus is a dynamic coordination problem: the incentive of families to transmit a language depends on the expected future number of speakers and on whether the language has meaningful roles in education, administration, employment, media, and digital life.
The empirical component will update and extend an existing panel of First Nations communities, distinguishing cross-sectional differences associated with remoteness from changes occurring within communities over time. The objective is to identify policies that make bilingualism, language continuity, education, and economic opportunity complementary rather than competing goals.
Particular attention will be given to intergenerational transmission, educational materials, language use in new media and public institutions, and community control over language policy.
This developing project examines how geography, housing, connectivity, access to education, and local institutional capacity jointly shape Indigenous community outcomes. It also asks whether conventional measures based primarily on income, employment, housing, and formal education omit dimensions that communities value, including language continuity, land-based activity, social connectedness, local governance, and the ability to remain in or return to the community.
The objective is to construct a theoretically disciplined model of multidimensional community well-being, identify the relevant trade-offs and complementarities, and study how these relationships vary with remoteness.
Research Partnerships
I am interested in research partnerships with Indigenous-controlled educational institutions, communities, public agencies, and researchers working with education pathways, language vitality, program rollouts, or place-based administrative data. I am particularly interested in opportunities involving British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Northern Canada.
Research involving community-level information should be developed in partnership with the relevant Indigenous communities and institutions from the design stage onward.