Beninger, Carling

Education and Credentials

PhD (University of Saskatchewan)
MA (Trent University)
B.S. Hons. (Valley City State University)

Carling Beninger is a settler historian whose research and teaching interests include Canadian history, settler colonialism, Indigenous education, and Indigenous activism. She teaches courses on Canadian, global, and Indigenous history. Before joining Douglas College as faculty, Dr. Beninger was the Visiting Assistant Professor in Indigenous History at Memorial University of Newfoundland, contract faculty in Canadian History at Douglas College, and the Olive Dickason North American Indigenous History Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta. Dr. Beninger is currently revising her manuscript, based on her PhD dissertation, “From Assimilation to Reconciliation: The Evolving Indigenous-Church Relations of the Anglican, Presbyterian, and United Churches of Canada, 1946-2015,” for publication. Her current project, based on her post-doctoral research, “Closing Down the Indian Residential School System: Parent and Community Activism in First Nations Education in Treaty 6 and 7 Territory in Southern Alberta, 1950s-1970s,” investigates the period in which the federal government’s First Nations education policy shifted from segregated residential schools to educating First Nations children in integrated provincial and territorial schools with non-Indigenous children in a process called school integration. Her research examines parent and community activism during a time when Indigenous leaders across Canada were demanding control of education.