David Gaertner is a settler scholar and Associate Professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia, and an Associate Member of the Department of English Language and Literatures. Trained as a literary scholar and grounded in Indigenous studies, he researches and teaches new media, digital storytelling, and generative AI, with attention to the relationships among story, technology, power, and the systems through which subjects become legible and governable.

He is the author of The Theatre of Regret: Art, Literature, and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada (UBC Press, 2020), editor of Sôhkêyihta: The Poetry of Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe, and co-editor of Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Literature from Turtle Island and the forthcoming Indigenous X (all Wilfrid Laurier University Press), as well as Relational Technologies, a special issue of BC Studies. His essay on #HonouringIndigenousWriters received the 2026 Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies. His current work examines generative AI, extraction, and the politics of computational interpretation.