Crosspost: Meet 2 Innu women trailblazers in astrophysics and land guardianship

By Edzi'u Loverin, for CBC News

Rousseau-Nepton (left) at a
Canadian Astronomical Society conference
in Toronto (Photo: CBC).

Laurie Rousseau-Nepton says she wants to understand the very large and the very small, and that's why she became the first Indigenous woman in Canada to earn a PhD in astrophysics. 

Rousseau-Nepton received her PhD in 2017 from Université Laval in Quebec City. She said that at the time she wasn't aware she was the first Indigenous woman in Canada to do that.

But she said she did realize that ancestral knowledge from her community was missing in the study of the stars.

"I made it a quest to find it back, to retrieve that knowledge and reconnect it," Rousseau-Nepton said.

Valérie Courtois, who is also Innu from Mashteuiatsh in Quebec, became the third person to receive the Shackleton Medal, and the first Indigenous person, when she was awarded the prize earlier this year. 

The Shackleton outdoor clothing company launched the medal and £10,000 prize in 2022, awarding it for "courage, determination, ingenuity and leadership" in protecting the world's polar regions.

Read more at

https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/innu-science-women-trailblazers-1.7238537