Watch the video recording below:
Jessica Wood, known as Si Sityaawks (Woman who creates change), from the Gitxsan and Tsimshian First Nations with roots among the Tahltan and Nisga’a Nations, engaged in dialogue for a 5-part series called Matriarch Illuminations in November and December 2020. Jessica Wood is the current Policy Practitioner Fellow at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia and she will host fellow Matriarchs from across Turtle Island.
Students, staff, faculty and community members were invited to pour themselves a cup of tea and sit around the virtual table to listen.
Format: A 45 min discussion, 15 min Q&A from 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm on various evenings on Zoom
Audience: All are welcome. Questions will be prioritized from Indigenous, Black and People of Colour attendees.
Guest Speaker: Tanya Talaga, Canadian Journalist and Author
Theme: “Storytelling as Guidance”
Student Host: Tasha Carruthers, Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs
Guest Speaker Bio: Tanya Talaga is an Anishinaabe journalist and speaker. Talaga’s mother’s family is from Fort William First Nation and her father was Polish-Canadian.
For more than 20 years, she was a journalist at the Toronto Star covering everything from health to education, investigations and Queen’s Park. She’s been nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism and been part of teams that won two National Newspaper Awards for Project of the Year.
Her first book, Seven Fallen Feathers, is a national bestseller, winning the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nation Communities Read Award: Young Adult/Adult. The book was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction.
Her second book, All Our Relations: Finding The Path Forward, is also a national bestseller, finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and a finalist for the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.
Talaga was the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy and the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer, the first Anishinaabe woman to be so.
Talaga heads up Makwa Creative Inc., a production company focused on amplifying Indigenous voices through documentary films, TV and podcasts. She holds an honorary doctorate from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay.
Listen to her Seven Truths podcoast on Audible.ca.
Learn more about the Matriarch Illuminations series here.
For technical assistance, please email tina.alexander(at)ubc.ca
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