Joseph Weiss is a sociocultural and political anthropologist.  His work explores the intersections between time, ecology, and Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Dr. Weiss has been conducting fieldwork with the Haida community of Old Massett since 2010, where has also worked as a full-time volunteer teaching assistant and occasional school play director. His first book, Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii: Life Beyond Settler Colonialism (University of British Columbia Press, 2018) is based on this fieldwork, exploring how the Indigenous Haida Nation in Western Canada addresses political and social change through a series of different future-oriented cultural strategies. Dr. Weiss’s current research projects include a comparative exploration of the ways in which military occupations conceal themselves under settler colonialism and a new project attempting to understand the emerging relationships of solidarity and kinship between the islands of Ireland and Indigenous communities in North America. He also maintains abiding interests in commissions of inquiry, the production of political legitimacy, and research ethics in the social sciences. His research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American Philosophical Society, the Canadian Museum of History, and the University of Chicago. Dr. Weiss is formerly Curator of Western Ethnology at the Canadian Museum of History.

Representative publications:

Monographs:

2018. Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii: Life Beyond Settler Colonialism. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 

Articles:

2022. w/ Hilary Morgan Leathem. "Sovereign Graffiti on Haida Gwaii: A Photo Essay." BC Studies 214 (Summer 2022): 9-27. https://doi.org/10.14288/bcs.no214.196174

2022. "The Era of Endless Repatriation: Respectful Relationality and the Reconfiguration of Colonial Authority." Anthropologica, 63(2). https://doi.org/10.18357/anthropologica6322021360

2021. “Not Built to Last: Military Occupation and Ruination under Settler Colonialism.” Cultural Anthropology 36, no. 3: 484–508. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.10.

2020. "Giving Back the Queen Charlotte Islands: The Politics of Names and Naming between Canada and the Haida Nation." Native American and Indigenous Studies 7.1: 62-86. muse.jhu.edu/article/761798.

2018. w/ Virginia R. Dominguez and Alaka Wali. "Anthropologists and Museums: An Interview with Joseph Weiss." American Anthropologist 120 (4):808-812.  https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13137

2015. "Challenging Reconciliation: Indeterminacy, Disagreement, and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools’ Truth and Reconciliation Commission." International Journal of Canadian Studies 51:27-55. https://doi.org/10.3138/ijcs.51.27

Short Essays:

2019. "King of the Post-Anthropocene." Geist 113. https://www.geist.com/fact/columns/king-of-the-post-anthropocene/

2019. "The Erotics of Destruction and the End of the Anthropocene." Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights, October 1. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/godzilla-and-camille-the-erotics-of-destruction-and-the-end-of-the-anthropocene

2019. "Who Gets to have Eco-Anxiety?" Edge Effects, April 25. https://edgeeffects.net/who-gets-to-have-ecoanxiety/