Bio
Terry Mitchell is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, in the faculty of Science, at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is a registered psychologist with a private practice and is director of the Laurier Indigenous Health and Social Justice Research Group. Her research focuses on the impacts of colonial trauma, Aboriginal rights and governance issues.
She received her Ph.D. in Community Psychology and her Masters in Counselling from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral dissertation "Old Wounds: New Beginnings" was based on her work with First Nations in the Yukon in 1991. She was an Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Medicine from 1998-2001 and worked as a Social Scientist for the Ontario Breast Cancer Community Research Initiative at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto from 2001-2003, before taking a faculty position at Laurier in 2003. She served as the Coordinator of Laurier’s Community Psychology Program from 2007-2010 and the Executive Director of the Laurier Centre for Community Research Learning and Action from 2008-2012. With First Nations in Prince Edward Island, she developed ASH (Aboriginal Survivors for Healing), a center for survivors of residential schools funded by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (1998).
Terry conducted a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) study focusing on the health of vulnerable populations and its relation to cancer rates among Indigenous peoples and developed IC-Hope, an Indigenous cancer network with the support of CIHR (Canadian Institutes of Health Research) funding. Terry has worked as a visiting scholar at the Institute of Indigenous Studies at the Universidad de La Frontera, in Chile where they employ her work on colonial trauma.
She is currently leading a collaborative research project on the internationalization of indigenous rights.