Each month, we profile someone connected to CBRC, featuring them in The Update, our monthly newsletter. Check out the June 2026 newsletter here.
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Ella Dufault (she/he/they) is CBRC’s new Two-Spirit Program Knowledge Translation Coordinator. She is a member of the Kaska Dena First Nation. Ella has also been a drag entertainer for over 15 years, and uses her platform to advocate for Two-Spirit folks.
Growing up in the ‘90s in the Yukon, Ella shares that “being queer or being a boy and presenting feminine was very shameful. You were told you couldn’t present that way because it was ‘weak’.” Later in life, at a friend’s drag party, she decided to try drag. “I thought, ‘I'm going to do this. I'm going to have a good time.’ I dressed up and had such an amazing time feeling free with my friends, being able to express gender, identity, and my femininity.”
Around the same time Ella started doing drag in 2008, she also started reconnecting with her culture. “Learning what Two-Spirit meant, things in my life just started to click,” she recalls. That's when anti-colonialism began to show up as a central theme in her drag performances. Now, she focuses on what she can bring back to community through drag. After 200+ graves were found in Kamloops, she co-hosted Indigenous and Proud, a drag fundraiser for the Indian Residential School Survivors Society, which has been organized every year since.
Ella is also the creator and host of the Dénht'ā podcast. As part of the Two-Spirit Symposium in 2024, she was invited by the Two-Spirit Program Team to do a live podcast recording, featuring guests Connie Merasty and Lucas Corbin. “I started my podcast because there are so many Indigenous stories out there.” Each episode, Ella invites a guest to talk about lived experiences as Indigenous people. “It’s about how we keep ceremony and culture alive while navigating this colonial world and staying authentically ourselves.”
When she was invited to a Two-Spirit Celebration Day event a few years ago by Jaylene McRae, Two-Spirit Research Coordinator at CBRC, Ella was captivated by the intentionality in sharing knowledge and bringing Two-Spirit folks together. “I was just blown away with the amount of heart given to the work.”
In her role, Ella works to disrupt extractive research practices that have defined the way many non-Indigenous researchers approach study design. “Growing up, we'd have all these people come into our reserve, ask all these questions, and get people excited about potential outcomes, but we would see nothing. Nothing would happen, no updates would be given.”
Because of this, she enjoys translating knowledge from clinical contexts into more accessible ways of relating. Her past and current projects with the Two-Spirit Team at CBRC include facilitating talking circles with Indigenous community members around their knowledge of HPV as well as Planting Seeds, a rural health capacity-building and mentorship project.
Photo: Ella Dufault
“ For the longest time, research has been very extractive for Indigenous communities. As an artist, every time I go into a scene, I never want to feel like I am taking—I always want to add to the community.”
