Janelle Marie Baker is Associate Professor in Anthropology and the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies programs at Athabasca University in what is now known as northern Alberta, Canada. 

She is the 2024 recipient of the Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations 2024 Distinguished Academic Early Career Award. Her research is on traditional wild food and medicine security and sovereignty. Since 2006, she has studied sakâwiyiniwak (Northern Bush Cree) experiences with contamination of wild foods in Treaty No. 8 territory, which is an area of extreme extraction of oil and forests.

In this context, Dr. Baker collaborates with Bigstone Cree Nation environmental monitors using community-based methods and ethnoecology to test moose, water, fish, and plant foods and medicine samples, while partnering with toxicologists and microbiologists who study sources of harmful contaminants.

Janelle is also co-PI with Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd on a project that is restor(y)ing land use governance and bull trout population health in a contested area of the Rocky Mountain foothills in Alberta, Canada through podcasts and an upcoming museum exhibit. This work has grown into a Canadian Institute of Health Research funded project working with Stoney Nakoda Women to test traditional foods for high selenium content.

Dr. Baker is a Co-Editor of Ethnobiology Letters, a diamond open-access online peer-reviewed journal and is the Vice President Elect for the International Society of Ethnobiology Board of Directors. She is the winner of the 2019 Canadian Association for Graduate Studies – ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences category.