Angela Mark had spent more than three decades living the dream she had set out to build: designing clothes, growing her own fashion business, and helping professional women feel more confident. But as the business approached its 30th year, she began asking whether her work still felt meaningful in the grand scheme of things.
That turning point came in 2016, as Indigenous communities declared states of emergency over youth suicide rates. The crisis hit close to home for Mark, whose brother, cousin, and uncle had all died by suicide. She began to think differently about the skills, opportunities, and confidence that had shaped her own path, and about what meaningful work might look like if it were directed toward supporting Indigenous people and communities. Within months, she had closed the business she had spent more than 30 years building.
A wider conversation
Mark, now director of research at the Canadian Council for Indigenous Business (CCIB), delivered the opening keynote at Ivey-IARIMOS 2026, the fourth annual meeting of the global research community exploring Indigenous themes in management and organization studies. The IARIMOS Conference was held Oct. 30 to Nov. 1 at the Spencer Hotel & Conference Centre and Ivey Business School. Mark's keynote was followed by a panel moderated by Ivey professor and conference organizer Oana Branzei.
Organized by Ivey’s Centre for Building Sustainable Value and livestreamed by the Network for Business Sustainability, the Conference was held in partnership with the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership, the John F. Wood Centre for Innovation in Business Education, Lawrence National Centre for Policy and Management, and the Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship Powered by Ivey. The three streams included keynotes, paper presentations, discussions, two-eyed seeing gatherings, case-writing sessions, and an Indigenous Fellows stream.
More than 100 people took part online and in person across the research track, case-writing track, and roundtables, joining from across Canada and internationally, from Argentina to Australia. The Conference was part of IARIMOS – the International Academy of Research in Indigenous Management and Organizational Studies – a rotating international workshop hosted each year by a different university business school.
In her keynote, Mark described how that turning point led her back to her Anishinaabe family and community, where she began learning language and ceremony and eventually completed an honours degree in Indigenous Studies focused on Indigenous women’s entrepreneurship. That journey led directly to her current work at CCIB, where she helps advance research on Indigenous business, economic self-determination, and reconciliation.
Her remarks led into a candid panel conversation about how business schools, researchers, and leaders might better integrate Indigenous ways of knowing into teaching, research, and decision-making. The panel featured Nicole Haggerty, Acting Dean of Ivey Business School; Christy Bressette, Western University’s vice-provost and associate vice-president (Indigenous Initiatives); and Alizabeth George-Antone, EMBA ’26.
What business schools need to change
Haggerty, who spoke about her Métis family history, reflected on the challenge of reconciling a long-established business school model with Indigenous perspectives. She suggested that a business school built from scratch through a two-eyed seeing lens would look very different from one shaped by more than a century of Western assumptions about business, education, and value creation. Meaningful change, she said, requires more than symbolic commitments.
“Business schools need to be interested and need to be committed and need to be thinking about how they uphold ways of knowing,” she said.
Haggerty said that work means bringing the right voices into the room, rethinking what is taught and how it is taught, and questioning some of the deeper assumptions behind business education, including ideas about capitalism, growth, profit, time, extraction, and stewardship. She connected that work to Ivey’s purpose of inspiring leaders for a sustainable and prosperous world.
“We have to have the right voices. We can’t attend to how we reconcile business schools if we are talking to ourselves,” she said.
The alumni perspective
George-Antone, who graduated from Ivey’s EMBA program the week before the conference, spoke as a recent Indigenous student about both the value of the experience and the barriers Indigenous students can face in accessing business education. She said she felt isolated as the only Indigenous learner in her cohort.
“When you’re the only Indigenous person in the classroom, sometimes it’s hard to find your people,” she said.
George-Antone said tuition was an even bigger barrier, especially when travel and accommodation costs had to be covered out of pocket. She called for stronger financial support and more intentional pathways so Indigenous students could enter programs together, rather than navigating them alone.
At the same time, George-Antone said being in a class with non-Indigenous students also gave her a better sense of the systems and assumptions that shape Western business education.
“It was good that I got to see where everyone else is coming from,” she said. “And I know that I challenged them.”
Towards allyship
Bressette spoke about the broader truth and reconciliation work happening across post-secondary education. She said allyship begins with a stronger understanding among non-Indigenous people of their responsibilities within treaty relationships, and that many were never taught the colonial history that shapes those responsibilities.
“We’re all treaty people,” she said. “The people who understand themselves in relation to the treaties are step one in terms of becoming a good ally.”
She also spoke about relationship-based approaches to Indigenous research and education, pointing to Western University resources including Braiding Truth, a guide to Indigenous allyship, and a companion guide to conducting Indigenous research rooted in relationship, respect, and shared responsibility. She said Indigenous knowledge is not just about representation, but about finding different ways to tackle long-standing problems.
“We have to bring Indigenous knowledge into the centre of the room, so that everybody is seen and everybody is heard,” she said.
One shared wish
Branzei closed the session by asking each panelist for one wish. Bressette’s was that people would recognize that “we’re all relations,” including the more-than-human world. Haggerty’s was that those who uphold colonial structures would pause and rethink. George-Antone pointed to the importance of bringing a seven-generations lens to governance and decision-making. Mark said she hoped people would try to live by the Seven Grandfather Teachings, an Anishinaabe framework for living with wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility, and truth.
“I think overnight this could overturn everything,” she said.
