Robin Alison Mueller, PhD

Hi there, I’m Robin.  I am a settler Canadian with mixed European ancestry stemming from England, Norway, Germany, Scotland, and Ireland.  Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were settler Canadian farmers, some with lengthier colonial histories than others.  I grew up on a farm in Treaty 4 territory near Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.  I spent much of my childhood outside, regardless of weather, with my face to the sky and my feet rooted in the soil.  As I grew up, I came to feel like the farm was both mine and a part of me, that it was somehow present in my heartbeat and my breath.  However, I’ve recently realized that this land was never mine, nor my dad’s or my grand-dad’s before him.  It’s Indigenous land.  

I currently live on the land of the ancestors and families of the Snuneymuxw First Nation, colonially known as the city of Nanaimo, where my family and I are uninvited guests.  As a white settler Canadian I am complicit in and have benefitted from the ongoing colonial project; this project has systematically disenfranchised, displaced, and disadvantaged the Indigenous people of Turtle Island. I have lived comfortably for my whole life on stolen land and I have rarely had to justify my presence in any space.  I commit to interrogating this privilege on an ongoing basis so that I can serve as a respectful ally.  It is my goal to engage in explicitly decolonizing practices in both my work and day-to-day life, and to fore-font Indigenous people, voices, ways of knowing, and pedagogies as much as possible.  I aim to live and work in relationship and community.  

I am also a scholar, parent, partner, teacher, researcher, yogi, baker, photographer, and hiker.  I currently work as an associate professor, program head, and school director at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia.  My expertise lies in the contexts, structures, processes, and relationships that characterize North American higher education.  I have a particular interest in learning more about how we might work towards decolonizing higher education systems.