Laurie Rousseau-Nepton, an astronomer and storyteller, is the first Indigenous woman in Canada to earn a PhD in astrophysics.Jennifer Roberts
Even before spring unfurls its earthly splendour – buds swelling on woody shrubs, the first calls of returning songbirds, young green shoots pushing through the thawing ground – Laurie Rousseau-Nepton can look up at the night sky and notice a quiet shift beginning. The great celestial canoe rises higher each evening.
In the vast night sky, two bright constellations stand in a neat row, forming part of this enormous canoe. It is steered by Kuekuatsheu, the Wolverine (Orion), with Utshek, the Fisher Cat (Big Dipper), keeping watch at the bow. “In January, when the canoe in the sky starts dipping toward the horizon, it announces that the days will also slow down and get longer. Spring is coming,” she says.
In 2017, Rousseau-Nepton, a member of the Innu Pekuakamiulnuatsh First Nation in the Saguenay – Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec, became the first Indigenous woman in Canada to earn a PhD in astrophysics.
And yet, she only recently learned this ancestral story. One of many based-in-science tales passed down for generations, it was at risk of being lost, but Rousseau-Nepton is doing her best to keep it alive.
As an astronomer and a storyteller of the sky, Rousseau-Nepton sees her work as a continuation of a lineage that stretches from her ancestors who watched the stars to the cutting-edge observatories where she deciphers the light of distant galaxies. For her, science and ancestral knowledge are complementary ways of understanding the universe.
She studies the formation of stars – their birth, evolution and legacy – drawing parallels to our ancestors and ourselves. Stars don’t just disappear, she explains. When they reach the end of their life cycle, they enrich the universe by chemically transforming it and creating the heavier elements essential for life. Over billions of years, this cycle has led to the creation of stars like our sun, the planets that orbit them and, ultimately, everything we know.
“We come from the stars and return to them,” says Rousseau-Nepton, reflecting on the Innu belief. Realizing how closely this saying aligns with astrophysics felt like a revelation.
“It’s not a religion,” she says. “It’s more like an intuition – something our ancestors understood in a way that turns out to be true.”
The very instruments she builds – specialized cameras that help astronomers see what stars and gases are made of – now confirm the wisdom her people have carried for thousands of years. “It’s just this beautiful loop that closes,” she reflects. “And it fulfills me to know I’m somehow connected to it, even though I didn’t know it before.”
Rousseau-Nepton’s link to the stars was woven into her earliest memories, like summers at her family’s lakeside cabin. On clear nights, she and her sister would stretch out on the bow of their Innu father’s fishing boat, floating in the middle of the lake, surrounded by darkness. With no light pollution to obscure their view, they could watch shooting stars during a Perseid meteor shower. On rare occasions, they could see the aurora borealis.
In the fall, those quiet nights under the stars gave way to mornings deep in the forests of traditional hunting territories where Rousseau-Nepton learned from her dad how to read the land. Before she was two, she was setting hare traps – an early lesson in patience and observation. Those same skills now guide her as she studies the cosmos, applying careful attention to celestial details just as she once tracked wildlife and shifting seasons.
Her career has taken her to some of the world’s most advanced telescopes, a journey captured in the 2023 National Film Board documentary North Star, which followed her from hunting trips in Ashuapmushuan to Quebec’s Mount Mégantic and Hawaii’s Mauna Kea.
For Rousseau-Nepton, science and ancestral knowledge are complementary ways of understanding the universe.Jennifer Roberts
After serving as resident astronomer at the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, she joined the University of Toronto (U of T) and the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics as an assistant professor. There, she leads an international project called SIGNALS – the Star Formation, Ionized Gas, and Nebular Abundances Legacy Survey.
Using an instrument called SITELLE, which Rousseau-Nepton helped develop during her PhD at Laval University, the project has captured data from more than 50,000 star-forming regions across 40 nearby galaxies. By studying how young star clusters evolve in different environments, her work sheds light on the forces shaping the cosmos – continuing humanity’s long tradition of looking to the stars for answers.
At U of T, Rousseau-Nepton is also developing a new tool to help astronomers see the universe with greater clarity; a powerful imaging device that will capture sharper, more detailed views of distant stars and galaxies.
At the same time, she’s expanding access to astronomy with an international program called Astronomy for a Better World, which will bring stargazing and science education to Indigenous communities across Canada. Even during maternity leave with her second daughter this past year, she turned her gaze back to Earth, exploring ancient North American sites and uncovering astro-archaeological traces of celestial knowledge she hopes to publish soon.
At home in Toronto, Rousseau-Nepton weaves ancestral knowledge into her family’s tradition, sharing the wonder of the night sky with her daughters. Her father, an artist and civil engineer, recently crafted a cluster of four dreamcatchers to place next to her baby’s crib – a symbol of protection but also an orientation in the void of space. The delicate hoops woven together instantly reminded Rousseau-Nepton of a galaxy collision, the cosmic dance of celestial bodies merging and reshaping the universe.
Just as her ancestors passed down their knowledge, Rousseau-Nepton now shares these teachings with the next generation, including the story of the celestial canoe. Stepping into the role of storyteller of the stars is a profound responsibility, she says.
While she’ll always share her own journey, she still wrestles with the question: “Is it mine to tell the foundational myths of my community? Probably not all of them,” she admits. “But I’m here to tell some of them – ones that will make sense in time.”
