Abigail Burgess

Abigail Burgess (she/they) is a member of the Eskasoni Band of the Mi’kmaq First Nations community in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She is a junior at Dartmouth College, studying Native American and Indigenous Studies and Psychology. At Dartmouth, she currently serves as Social Coordinator on the Native Americans at Dartmouth Executive Board, organizing events for the Indigenous community on campus. She spent the previous calendar year serving as Native American Council Representative, advocating for the needs of students to the administration. Abigail also runs a peer-led grief support group for students who have lost a parent, sibling, or family member. Outside of Dartmouth, she works as a teaching assistant at a day-care in Norwich with infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. In her spare time, she loves to read, bead, paint, collage, and spend time outside.

Through the Indigenous Correspondents Program, Abigail aims to capture the historical and modern manifestations of her community’s term Netukulimk. Netukulimk navigates the Mi’kmaq peoples’ relationship with msit no’kmaq - all our relations, or our emotional, social, and spiritual relationship with the physical land, human beings, nature, and everything belonging to Wskitqamu (Mother Earth). Netukulimk incorporates the spirit, mind, heart, and body in relation with levels of interconnectedness: self, family, community, and environment. Through her work, Abigail seeks to investigate this complicated relationship of the revitalization of cultural concepts in a post-colonial era, especially Netukulimk.

NETUKULIMK: Indigenous moose harvesting in Unama’ki (2024 Storyfest Finalist in the Best Video by a Non-Media Student Category)