Lisa Poirier

Lisa Poirier is a scholar of Native American religions in particular, and religion and colonialism in general.  In her book, Religion, Gender, and Kinship in Colonial New France (Syracuse University Press, 2016), she investigated the ways in which Native men and women of the Wendat Confederacy and French explorers, missionaries and settlers employed kinship-building strategies as they struggled to create new religious orientations that would enable them to survive the life-and-death challenges of early seventeenth-century New France.  Her academic interests do sometimes go beyond the colonial period; for instance, in her most recent article published in the journal Religion and Popular Culture, she explored the ways in which the twentieth-century Kaw/Mvskoki jazz saxophonist Jim Pepper was influenced by the sacred music of the Native American Church.  Poirier's most current research investigates the religious creativity of Native women in Great Lakes environments in the eighteenth century.