Student Affiliate
Natalie Joy Gale is a PhD student and Cundill Fellow in History at McGill University. Her doctoral research traces photography’s mediation of the tensions and coalitions between two rural, land-based activist lineages in the United States since 1970: first, Indigenous groups organizing for land rematriation and sovereignty, and second, queer communal, agrarian, and utopian intentional communities. Making their own photographs is an integral part of Natalie’s research practice and serves as a form of embodied engagement with image archives as well as experimentation with (de)colonial representation of land.
Natalie graduated from Harvard College in 2021 with a joint undergraduate degree in History & Literature and Art, Film, & Visual Studies. Before coming to McGill, she spent four years working as a freelance historical researcher, sensitivity reader, and ghostwriter in the public history space. From 2022-2024, they also operated a small-scale film lab in Granada, Spain. A settler with deep roots in the Wabanaki land known as Maine, she is a student of Indigenous ways of knowing, relating to, and caring for the land that she calls home.
