Reder comes from a Cree speaking Métis family born in Saskatchewan. Her family comes from La Ronge, Île-à-la-Crosse and Lac Doré, Quebec. Her father was a member of the army and the family lived off an army base until Reder was five years old. Her parents did not graduate high school and preferred that Reder speak English over the Indigenous tongue. Reder says she began to see the importance of accurately representing Indigenous people in the media when her mother read "Halfbreed" by Maria Campbell. She stated this was the only book she saw her mother read and her mother was excited to read a book that accurately represented her life. Growing up, Reder says the only Native literature she read was Pauline Johnson's book “The Song my Paddle Sings." While attending York University for her Masters of Arts, Reder chose to focus on Aboriginal literature but found it difficult to find courses. She instead chose to focus on nineteenth-century Canadian literature. She was disappointed to learn that these studies focused on white women and lacked information on Indigenous authors. After earning her MA, Reder took a leave of absence from school to deal with her family. When she returned for her PhD in 2001, the school curriculum now included more Aboriginal focused content. In response to the Kimelman Report, Reder wrote that adult adoptees who were affected by these policies have begun to speak out about their losses: loss of their cultural identity, lost contact with their natural families, barred access from medical histories, and for status Indian children, the loss of their status.
Career
In 2010, Reder published "Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations" with Linda M. Morra through Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Troubling Tricksters was a collection of text revolving around the trickster discourse in Indigenous literature. In 2012, Reder was one of the core faculty members involved with the introduction of a new First Nations studies program at SFU. The new program, which became effective in April 2012, included certificates in First Nations studies research and major, minor, and joint major with archaeology and linguistics. The following year, Reder was part of a council of Indigenous and settler scholars that created the Indigenous Literary Studies Association. As president of ILSA, she coordinated with Sam McKegney at Queen’s to organize a literary award recognizing Indigenous authors in Canada. In 2015, she became a Co-Investigator with Daniel Heath Justice and Margery Fee on a SSHRC-funded project called The People And The Text. The project aimed to collected ignored texts and literature from Indigenous Canadians during the time of British colonization. Two years later, Reder edited Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island with Sophie McCall, David Gaertner, and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill. In 2018, Reder and Alix Shield published documents that had been omitted from "Halfbreed" as they had been deemed libellous. The documents were Campbell's account of being raped by Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers as a youth. She was also elected a member of the College of New Scholars of the Royal Society of Canada. She sits on the Board of Directors of the non-profit Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. In June 2019, Reder was part of the committee that elected to remove a piece of art that misrepresented Aboriginal people as passive in the European colonization period of British Columbia.
