Beau Dick (November 23, 1955 – March 27, 2017) was acclaimed as one of the Northwest Coast’s most versatile and talented carvers. Reaching out beyond the confines of his own Kwakwaka’wakw culture, Dick explored new formats and techniques in his work, including painting and drawing. His work can be found in private collections as well as museums, including the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau, QC), the Heard Museum (Phoenix, AZ), the Burke Museum (Seattle, WA), the UBC Museum of Anthropology and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Dick’s work has been exhibited most recently in Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (2013) at the Belkin Art Gallery, Sakahan: International Indigenous Art (2013) at the National Gallery of Canada, 75 Years of Collecting: First Nations: Myths and Realities (2006) at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Supernatural with Neil Campbell (2004) at the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). In 2012, Dick received the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award for Visual Arts. (2018)

Linnea Dick was born December 9, 1991 to Pamela Bevan and Beau Dick. She carries the Kwakwaka’wakw name Malidi, meaning to always find a purpose and path in life. She is of Kwakwaka’wakw, Nisga’a and Tsimshian heritage. She spent her early childhood in Alert Bay, later relocating to Vancouver along with her sister Geraldine. Between 2004 and 2005, Linnea spent time experiencing Haida culture and tradition in Haida Gwaii, where her two older sisters live. Her ambitions in life are to help people and she aims to one day establish a wellness centre for women and children. Her creative abilities include writing and painting. (2018)

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 UBC Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery where she develops programs that increase outreach and integration of the Belkin Gallery both within the University community and the Vancouver community at large. She is a Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies Associate and sits on the Board of Directors at the Western Front.  She received her PhD from the Department of English at Brown University and has taught at Brown, Wesleyan and UBC. Her research interests include discourses of the Black Atlantic, critical theory, narrative, performativity and issues in contemporary art and museum theory. (2018)

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)