Chief Beau Dick (1955-2017), Walas Gwa’yam, was a Kwakwaka’wakw (Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nation) artist and activist who was acclaimed as one of the Northwest Coast’s most versatile and talented carvers. He was born in the community of Alert Bay, BC, and lived in Kingcome Inlet, Vancouver and Victoria before returning to Alert Bay to live and work. He began carving at an early age, studying under his father, Benjamin Dick, his grandfather, James Dick, and other renowned artists such as Henry Hunt and Doug Cranmer. He also worked alongside master carvers Robert Davidson, Tony Hunt and Bill Reid. In support of the Idle No More movement, Dick performed two spiritual and political copper-breaking ceremonies on the steps of the British Columbia legislature in Victoria in 2013, and on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in 2014. Dick created several important public works, including a transformation mask for the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 86 in Vancouver and the Ga’akstalas Totem Pole for Stanley Park, carved with Wayne Alfred and raised in 1991. His work has been shown in exhibitions locally and internationally, including Canada House, London, UK (1998); the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2010); documenta 14 in Athens, GR, and Kassel, DE (2017); and White Columns, New York (2019). He was the recipient of the 2012 VIVA Award and was artist-in-residence at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory from 2013 to 2017.

Linnea Jericho Watts (née Dick) (1991-2023) was a writer, orator, activist and knowledge-keeper from the Kwakwaka’wakw, Nisga’a and Tsimshian nations in Canada. She carries the Kwakwaka’wakw name Malidi, meaning to always find a purpose and path in life. The daughter of Pam Bevan and the late Beau Dick, Watts was particularly active in supporting and advocating for Indigenous youth. Watts worked closely with her father as a speaker, writer and collaborator, in particular during the Belkin’s 2016  exhibition Lalakenis/All Directions: A Journey of Truth and Unity.

Born in Masset, BC as Gary Edenshaw, Guujaaw is a traditional Haida singer, carver, environmentalist, activist and leader from the Raven Clan of Skedans. Guujaaw has worked throughout his life for the protection of Haida land, the establishment of the rights of the Haida people and their economic stability and freedom, taking part in the blockades on Lyell Island in the 1980s to protect it from logging. As President of the Haida Nation from 2000 to 2012, he fought to protect Haida Gwaii from logging and offshore drilling, and was instrumental in establishing Gwaii Hanaas National Park Reserve. Guujaaw oversaw the return of the Haida Gwaii forestry into the hands of his people, helped end the black bear hunt on the Misty Isles and successfully got the BC government to legally recognize the Queen Charlotte Islands as Haida Gwaii, the area’s traditional Haida name. Guujaaw means “drum,” a name given to him at a potlatch at the northern village of Kiusta. (2018)

Gyauustees, whose name means “the one who gets things done,” is a member of the tribal people of the Nuu-chah-nulth Snuneymuxw Skokomish Kwakwaka’wakw with strong family ties to Secwepemc. His people are alive and well on the Pacific Northwest Coast of what is now called North America. Gyauustees, through his connection to the Spirit of Unity, Peace and Dignity, has been on an incredible journey of acceptance, forgiveness and personal redemption from what he can only describe as the attempted genocide of his people. Only through peace of heart was he able to overcome adversity and be united – one heart, one mind – and then able to lift others up with dignity and reenter the sacred circle of life. (2018)

Tarah Hogue is a curator and writer of Dutch, French and Métis ancestry originally from the Prairies. She holds an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies (UBC). Since 2014 Hogue has been the Aboriginal Curatorial Resident at grunt gallery, and is lead curator on #callresponse, a series of site-specific and socially engaged works that will be followed by an exhibition at grunt gallery in October 2016. Current projects include Unsettled Sites at SFU Gallery (May 2016), Audain Aboriginal Curatorial Fellow with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, writer-in-residence with VIVO Media Arts, and she has forthcoming texts for Inuit Art Quarterly, MICE Magazine and the 2016 MFA Graduate Exhibition at UBC. Hogue has curated exhibitions at the Satellite Gallery, Or Gallery and was co-curator on Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and NET-ETH: Going Out of the Darkness, organized by Malaspina Printmakers. In 2009 she co-founded the Gam Gallery, a Vancouver exhibition space, studio and boutique. (2018)

Chief Robert Joseph is Hereditary Chief of the Gwawaenuk First Nation and Ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and a member of the National Assembly of First Nations Elders Council. He was formerly the Executive Director of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society and is an honourary witness to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As Chairman of the Native American Leadership Alliance for Peace and Reconciliation and Ambassador for Peace and Reconciliation with the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IFWP), Chief Joseph has sat with the leaders of South Africa, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia and Washington, DC to learn from and share his understanding of faith, hope, healing and reconciliation. (2018)

Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinabe-kwe image and word warrior, teacher, curator, community animator and organizer and arts consultant from Beausoleil First Nation. She is currently Guest Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Recently, Nanibush was Curator in Residence at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery where she curated KWE: The work of Rebecca Belmore (2014), and the 2013 Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Visitor at University of Toronto. She has published extensively, including essays in The Winter we Danced (2014) and Women in a Globalizing World: Equality, Development, Diversity and Peace (2013), as well as catalogue essays on artists Jeff Thomas, Adrian Stimson and Rebecca Belmore. Nanibush has over twenty years arts sector experience through working with media arts organizations that include ImagineNATIVE, LIFT, Optic Nerve Film Festival, Reframe Film Festival, the Ontario Arts Council and Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. (2018)

Shelly Rosenblum is Curator of Academic Programs at the Belkin. Inaugurating this position at the Belkin, Rosenblum’s role is to develop programs that increase myriad forms of civic and academic engagement at UBC, the wider Vancouver community and beyond. Rosenblum received her PhD at Brown University and has taught at Brown, Wesleyan and UBC. Her awards include fellowships from the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University and a multi-year Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Department of English, UBC. She was selected for the Summer Leadership Institute of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (2014). Her research interests include issues in contemporary art and museum theory, discourses of the Black Atlantic, critical theory, narrative and performativity. Her teaching covers the 17th to the 21st centuries. She remains active in professional associations related to academic museums and cultural studies, attending international conferences and workshops, and recently completing two terms (six years) on the Board of Directors at the Western Front, Vancouver, including serving as Board President. At UBC, Rosenblum is an Affiliate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

Charlotte Townsend-Gault is a Professor in the Department of Art History and a Faculty Associate in the Department of Anthropology at UBC. She has published widely on the history and politics of response to Indigenous arts and culture in North America since the early 1980s. Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas, co-edited with Jennifer Kramer and Ki-ke-in, is due in September 2013 from UBC Press. Exhibitions curated include: Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada (with Diana Nemiroff and Robert Houle) (1992) and, at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on your Colonialist Reservations (1995); Rebecca Belmore: The Named and the Un-named (2003); and Backstory: Nuuchaanulth Ceremonial Curtains and the Work of Ḳi-ḳe-in (2010). (2018)