Mike Evans, PhDMike_Evans17791

Professor, Community, Culture and Global Studies

Mike Evans (PhD McMaster 1996) taught at the University of Northern BC, the University of Alberta, and then joined Okanagan University College, later UBC Okanagan (2005).

His primary research relationships are with people in the Métis community in Northern BC, the Métis Nation of BC, the Urban Aboriginal Community of the Okanagan Valley, and the Kingdom of Tonga (in the South Pacific). Dr Evans has been involved in several community based research initiatives, and in particular has a long-term relationship with the Prince George Metis Elders Society. Together with Elders and community leaders in Prince George he put together a Metis Studies curriculum for UNBC and a number of publications including What it is to be a Metis (Evans et al 1999), A Brief History, of the Short Life, of the Island Cache (Evans et al 2004).  He is currently working with the Elders Society and other colleagues on a participatory video project. He has worked extensively with colleagues at the MNBC on a number of research projects over the last few years. He has supervised graduate students working on urban aboriginal issues and topics related to community based Métis history and geography across Western Canada.

His work with people in Tonga on the impact of globalization and transnationalism has also resulted in numerous papers and presentations such as the monograph Persistence of the Gift: Tonga Tradition in Transnational Context (2001), and a co-edited  special issue of Pacific Studies titled Sustainability in the Small Island States of the Pacific (1999), and a co-edited special issue of Human Organization Customs, Commons, Property, and Ecology: Case Studies from Oceania. In addition he has worked with a team of Tongan and Canadian researchers on the health impacts of globalization in Tonga; a number of publications that demonstrate the negative consequences of the trade in health compromising foods (e.g. www.who.int/docstore/bulletin/pdf/2001/issue9/bu1327.pdf) have come from this collaboration. (2008)