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Enemies of the State: How spying on Indigenous activists became a priority at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service
The Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice (ICCJ) kindly invites you to attend the ICCJ Winter 2026 colloquium, “Enemies of the State: How spying on Indigenous activists became a priority at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service”. This event is a joint presentation and conversation between Brett Forester and renowned Indigenous activist, author, and filmmaker Ellen Gabriel.
Event date and time: Monday, April 13, 2026 from 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm
Event location: RC 4400, SJC Resource Centre, Richcraft Hall
Event Description:
How much time and effort has Canada spent spying on Indigenous activists? In 2022, Brett Forester of CBC Indigenous in Ottawa set out to answer that question. It proved easy enough to ask but nearly impossible to answer. It took three years, four formal access to information requests, one informal request, three complaints to the federal information commissioner and one court challenge, but after all this wrangling we can begin to confirm the long-suspected truth: Snooping on Indigenous peoples has been a priority for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service almost since its inception.
After reviewing more than 1,000 pages of declassified documents, Forester found surveillance that began in Labrador in 1988 with Cold War paranoia about Soviet meddling had by 1998 evolved into a national counterterrorism project monitoring Indigenous dissent as a form of domestic extremism. In this talk, Forester will explain why and how this came to be, as he offers a behind-the-scenes look at his investigation into more than a decade of CSIS’s self-styled “Native extremism” operations. This event is a joint presentation and conversation between Brett Forester and renowned Indigenous activist, author, and filmmaker Ellen Gabriel.
This event is co-sponsored with Law and Legal Students, NPSIA, Journalism and Communications, and Indigenous Studies.
Space will be limited for this event. Please register using the form on the event page, linked below.