Dana Claxton (Lakota, Canadian, b.1959) is a multidisciplinary artist born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan and based in Vancouver. Drawing on Lakota cultural values, history and language, Claxton questions the multifaceted layers of identity inherent to indigenous ways of being. Issues surrounding indigenous labour and resistance, resource extraction and capital feature prominently in her latest research and work on the Service, Office and Retail Worker’s Union of Canada’s (SORWUC’s) 1978 protest action against the Muckamuck Restaurant.

Claxton’s work has been shown internationally at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Walker Art Centre, Sundance Film Festival, Eiteljorg Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), and held in several major Canadian public collections. Her awards include the VIVA Award and the Eiteljorg Fellowship. Her work was selected for the Sydney Biennial (2010), Biennale de Montréal (2007), Biennale d’art contemporain du Havre, France (2006), Micro Wave, Hong Kong (2005) Art Star Biennale, Ottawa (2005), and Wro 03 Media Arts Biennale Wroclaw Poland (2003).

Christine D’Onofrio (Canadian, b. 1978) is a visual artist based in Vancouver who works in photography, video, digital media, interactive media, printmaking, sculpture, book works and installation. Her work employs a critical lens to address feminist strategies, influences and discourses pertaining to structures of exploitation, humiliation and power. Exploring the contradictions and ambiguities of liberty, especially under capitalism, her work frequently juxtaposes consumer culture and mass media with art historical references.

D’Onofrio holds a BFA from York University, Toronto and an MFA from the University of British Columbia. She has shown extensively throughout Canada in solo and group exhibitions and has received several Canada Council for the Arts Visual Arts and Research/Creation grants. She currently teaches at UBC in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory and is the recipient of several teaching awards and grants including the Killam Teaching Prize in 2018 and the Teaching Learning Enhancement Fund in 2015-17 and 2018-20.

Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin, b.1988) is an artist whose practice is concerned with Indigeneity-in-politics, community engagement and productive disruption. Her interdisciplinary approach uses performance, photography, sound and textiles to deconstruct the history of materials and investigate their relationship to trade, ceremonial regalia and the politics of Indigenous representation. Frei Njooti is a founding member of the ReMatriate Collective.

Frei Njootli completed her MFA at University of British Columbia in 2017. Her recent solo exhibitions have been shown by Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2018), Artspace, Peterborough, ON (2018), Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2017), and Definitely Superior Art Gallery, Thunderbay ON (2017). In 2018 she was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award. She is the recipient of the Contemporary Art Society Vancouver Artist Prize (2017) and the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists (2016).

Heather Kai Smith (Canadian, b. 1988) is an artist from Calgary, Alberta, currently living and working in Vancouver. Rooted in drawing as a practice, her work includes animation, illustration, and printmaking. Recent bodies of work engage with legacies of feminist protests, such as the Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment (1983-94). Through hand drawing and installation, Smith seeks to activate historical, archival images as a way to rearticulate revolutionary desires and activism in a contemporary context.

Smith completed her MFA at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2017, and graduated with a BFA in Drawing from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2009, Calgary, AB. Her work has been shown at Access Gallery (Vancouver), Contemporary Calgary, Jarvis Hall Fine Art, TRUCK Contemporary Art (Calgary), and DNA Artspace (London, ON). Smith is the founder of Great Women Animators, an online database aimed at educating, disseminating and championing the work of an international group of women animators from the last century.

Adeline Lorenzetto, Shxw’ōwhámél
Mary Peters, Seabird Island
Annabel Stewart, Skwah

The Salish Weavers Guild was a group of mostly women from First Nations communities in the Fraser Valley – those known as the Stó:lō, or people of the river – who joined in relearning the ways of their ancestors, experimenting with fibre-processing, natural dyes and patterns. In 1971, the group formally incorporated as a cooperative association with the express purpose to revitalize the ancient practice of Salish wool weaving. In June 1972, their shop and headquarters opened on the grounds of the former Coqualeetza Institute, a residential school (1886–1940) and Indian Hospital (1941–1969) since reclaimed by the local First Nations (1969–present). Over sixty women, and some men, were once involved in the Guild in varying capacities.

The women of the Guild were creating more than weavings; they were generating agency in a period of expansive cultural and economic revival, while strengthening relationships across Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. While the Guild’s collective activities and sales wound down by the mid-1980s, Salish weaving continues to flourish, connecting people throughout Salish territories.

Kelly Edzerza-Bapty (Tahltan, Canadian, b. 1982)
Jeneen Frei-Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin, b.1988)
Tsēmā Igharas (Tahltan, Canadian, b. 1984)
Denver Lynxleg (Tootinaowaziibeeng, Canadian, b. 1986)

First initiated in 2014 as an online discussion in response to the gross misrepresentation of Indigenous womxn in the media, the ReMatriate Collective formed in 2015. ReMatriate’s name is a play on the term repatriation, which describes the return of cultural belongings to their rightful communities. An important process of decolonization, the etymology of the word repatriation reflects non-Indigenous concepts and relationships to belongings, place, land and ownership. ReMatriate challenges this framework by re-centering Indigenous matriarchs, womxn, Elders, non-gender binary and Two-Spirited individuals in their practice.

ReMatriate is dedicated to honouring Indigenous women, and to the strengthening of future generations through positive self-representation. They realize these goals through the dissemination of public visual and text based works and exhibitions, including an online and social media photo campaign that uplifts and celebrates Indigenous women everywhere by offering hands-on workshops that include traditional practices and practical skill development, and through resisting and educating the public on critical Indigenous women’s issues.