Dr. Mary Beth Doucette on the Evolution of the Purdy Crawford Chair in Indigenous Business Studies

When Dr. Mary Beth Doucette looks at the landscape of post-secondary business education in Canada, she sees an environment undergoing rapid transition. For Doucette, an Associate Professor in the Shannon School of Business and the Purdy Crawford Chair in Indigenous Business Studies at Cape Breton University, the work is rooted in community reality, policy reform and an ongoing drive to equip students with practical skills that directly support Indigenous economic sovereignty.

The Purdy Crawford Chair was established in 2010 to support Indigenous business studies through research, student mentorship and curriculum development. While that core mission remains steady, the operational structure and research focus have evolved significantly since the early days of the seat. 

A Decade of Evolution

When Dr. Keith Brown initially held the Chair, the initiative operated on an expansive national scale with dedicated staff and regional programming. Doucette was involved from the inception, serving as Associate Chair and later as Executive Director. At the time, initiatives like the In.Business mentorship program connected hundreds of Indigenous high school students across Canada with business mentors to explore post-secondary studies, running alongside large-scale curriculum milestones such as the 2017 textbook Indigenous Business in Canada: Principles and Practices and a repository of 60 business case studies.

When Doucette formally stepped into the Chairholder role in 2017, the model shifted.

“In the last five years, the Purdy Crawford Chair became just me,” says Doucette. “When Keith was chair, it was mostly focused on Indigenous economic development nationally, developing In.Business and developing a textbook on our findings. When I took over, it was still about research, mentorship and curriculum development, but with a more targeted focus on reconciliation.”

Following the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report in 2015, non-Indigenous corporations and institutions nationwide began seeking guidance on reconciliation. Doucette spent years examining that changing environment through multi-million-dollar tri-council research projects, such as the A SHARED Future renewable energy initiative, tracking how mainstream business sectors were engaging with Indigenous communities.

Clarifying the Academic Mission

At CBU, the Purdy Crawford Chair works in close harmony with Unama’ki College, CBU’s department for Indigenous student services and supports, while maintaining a distinct academic mandate. Embedded directly within the Shannon School of Business, the Chair functions as a dedicated academic appointment focused specifically on business scholarship, pedagogy and curriculum reform.

“The Crawford Chair focuses on business education, it focuses on business students and it is an institutional commitment to do this,” says Doucette. “It’s a different model that isn’t practiced anywhere else I’ve seen.”

That distinct structure is part of why Doucette says CBU is the ideal home for this kind of work.

“Part of the reason why I’m so committed to CBU is because I see things happening here that can’t happen anywhere else or haven’t happened anywhere else because we’re able to work and do things in a small school,” Doucette says. “What I love about CBU is our MBA. It’s our BBA, it’s our small class sizes, it’s the relationships that students have, it’s knowing that you can go out and do stuff with the community.” 

Within CBU, Doucette continues to teach in the Shannon School of Business, working with undergraduate learners and guiding grad students through MBA in Community Economic Development, often specifically supporting the First Nations option.

Reality Grounded Community Research

Rather than centering her work on abstract academic questions, Doucette’s research agenda for the Chair is deliberately responsive to the immediate needs of Indigenous governing bodies and economic development corporations. She recalls conversations with local First Nations community leadership, including Membertou Chief Terry Paul, regarding the real-world demands placed on local organizations.

She says that leaders do not need business schools focused exclusively on churning out theoretical papers, they need graduates who can read an audit, manage multi-million dollar band enterprises, understand banking structures and navigate complex treaty agreements.

“Indigenous businesses are dying for people to be qualified to be able to run them and be able to hire people who understand policy and law and all the issues they are dealing with,” Doucette says. “We need a curriculum in our business schools so that when people graduate, they’re ready to work on this.”

A clear example of this approach is research Doucette is doing with colleagues Luke Phelps (CBU) and Ryan Stack (Acadia U) examining the landmark acquisition of Clearwater Seafoods by a coalition of Mi’kmaw communities alongside Premium Brands. Where mainstream business analysis often reduces the deal to a standard corporate buyout, they are focused on the structural legal and financial precedents behind it.

“It’s about being able to study, in depth, the complexity of what Indigenous organizations and businesses are doing,” Doucette says.

“They didn’t just buy Clearwater,” Doucette continues. “They partnered with a non-Indigenous organization and created a consortium, which has never happened before. They also went through the First Nations Finance Authority (FNFA) to get funding and it was the largest loan FNFA had ever offered.”

She notes that these achievements required long-term capacity building, often not recognized in analysis.

“Everybody looks at Membertou now and all they’ve accomplished, but they forget to look at what they went through in the 1980s and 1990s to get them to a breaking point,” she continued. “It took 20 years to develop the competencies required to be able to do this.” 

National Reach and the Path Forward

That commitment is already shifting business education well beyond the shores of Cape Breton/Unama’ki. Doucette recently collaborated with education publisher McGraw-Hill to integrate Indigenous perspectives directly into their mainstream Canadian business textbooks. Doucette led a team of contributors to author dedicated sections embedding Indigenous worldviews into foundational chapters on marketing, finance and management. Discussions are also underway for a comprehensive stand-alone textbook project in the coming years. 

Looking ahead, Doucette’s focus is aligning the Chair’s research and teaching to map the broader landscape of Indigenous enterprise across Canada, identifying where systemic gaps remain and where new opportunities are emerging.

“The vision going forward is an integrated plan that shows the true scope of the Indigenous economy in Canada, across all different sectors and regions,” says Doucette. “We need to map where the opportunities are, where the gaps are, and make sure that when our graduates walk into community boardrooms and band enterprises, they are equipped to lead.”