RUEBEN GEORGE is Sundance Chief and a member of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (TWN). After working as a family counsellor for twenty years, he became manager of the TWN’s Sacred Trust initiative to protect the unceded Tsleil-Waututh lands and waters from the proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion. Over the past decade, he has travelled across the world and built alliances with Indigenous people fighting for water, land, and human rights, and has become an internationally renowned voice for such issues. Rueben has been adopted and made a Sun Dance Chief by two Lakota families, and incorporates his cultural and spiritual teachings in all aspects of his life and work, including his work as a consultant to All Nations Cannabis.

JEN SOOKFONG LEE was born and raised in Vancouver’s East Side, and she now lives with her son in North Burnaby. Her books include The Conjoined, nominated for International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, The End of East, The Shadow List, and Finding Home. Jen acquires and edits for ECW Press and co-hosts the literary podcast Can’t Lit.

JONI LOW is a curator and writer whose practice explores interconnection, intercultural conversations, collaboration and sensory experience. Working in non-profit visual arts organizations for over 15 years, independently she has curated exhibitions at Galerie de L’UQAM, Montréal, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown, and Burnaby Art Gallery, VIVO Media Arts Centre and Or Gallery, Vancouver. Recent curatorial projects include Afterlives: Germaine Koh and Aron Louis Cohen, Charles Campbell’s Actor Boy: Travels in Birdsong, Hank Bull: Connexion and the symposium Underground in the Aether. Low’s essays and criticism are published in catalogues and numerous art periodicals; she is an editorial board member of The Capilano Review. As a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts, her research focuses on artists sensing otherwise towards different ways of knowing, and synaesthetic resonances across art, neuroscience, somatics and the humanities.

JEFF O’BRIEN is an art historian. His research explores the political and visual representation of displaced and disappeared populations in Lebanon and Palestine. From 2018 to 2019 he was a fellow in residence of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art at Darat al Funun in Amman, Jordan. In addition to publishing widely, he has presented his work and given lectures in Jordan, Palestine, the United States and Canada. He is currently working on a book of his photographs from Lifta, one of the last remaining extant Palestinian villages within the 1948 border after Nakba. He holds a PhD in art history and works at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

MICHAEL SIMPSON is Lecturer in the School of Geography & Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

C.A. TANAKA is a multiracial trans writer, artist and librarian challenging the binaries continually reconstructed between self and other while exploring archive and memory in a socio-political context. They are a creative writing graduate of The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University and have a BFA in Intermedia from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. Their first YA book, Baby Drag Queen was published with Orca Books in April 2023. They’ve also published work in Resonance: Essays on the Craft of Life and Writing with Anvil Press and This Will Only Take A Minute: Canadian Flash Fiction with Guernica Editions.

HENRY TSANG is an artist who explores the spatial politics of history, language, community, food, and cultural translation in relationship to place. His artworks take the form of gallery exhibitions, 360-degree video walking tours, curated dinners, and public art. Henry teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver.