Reimagining Resistance Beyond Colonies

Chelsea Vowel is Métis from so-called Canada from the community of manitow-sâkahikan (Lac Ste. Anne) Alberta, currently residing in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). Parent to six children, she has a BEd, LLB, and MA. Chelsea is a queer, disabled, nêhiyawêwin (Cree) language instructor, public intellectual, writer, and activist educator whose work intersects language, gender, Métis self-determination, futurisms, and resurgence.

Author of Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit in Canada and the short-story collection Buffalo is the New Buffalo, she and her co-host Molly Swain produce the Indigenous feminist sci-fi podcast Métis in Space, and co-founded the Métis in Space Land Trust.

Jesse Wente is a husband and father, as well as an award-winning writer and speaker. Born and raised in Toronto, his family comes from Chicago and Genaabaajing Anishinaabek and he is an off-reserve member of the Serpent River First Nation. Jesse spent more than two decades as a columnist for CBC Radio’s Metro Morning. Jesse’s worked with the Toronto International Film Festival as a curator for a decade, including leading the film and gallery programming at the Tiff Lightbox. Jesse was the founding director of the Indigenous Screen Office and is the first Indigenous person to serve as Chair of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Jesse released his first children’s book, Danger Eagle last year, and is currently serving as Storyteller in Residence at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Quill Christie-Peters is an Anishinaabe educator, author and self-taught visual artist. She is the founder and director of the Indigenous Youth Residency Program, an artist residency for Indigenous youth that engages land-based creative practices through Anishinaabe artistic methodologies. She holds a Masters degree in Indigenous Governance on Anishinaabe art-making as a process of falling in love and is the author of On Wholeness: Anishinaabe pathways to embodiment and collective liberation, published by house of anansi. She is also a mother, beadwork artist and traditional tattoo practitioner following the protocols of her community. Her work can be found at @raunchykwe.  

Dr Mykaela Saunders is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, teacher and researcher, and the editor of This All Come Back Now, the Aurealis Award–winning, world-first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction (UQP, 2022). Always Will Be won the 2022 David Unaipon Award. Mykaela’s novel manuscript Last Rites of Spring was also shortlisted for the Unaipon Award in 2020, and received a Next Chapter Fellowship in 2021. Mykaela has won the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, the National Indigenous Story Award, the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Prize for creative non-fiction and the University of Sydney’s Sister Alison Bush Graduate Medal for Indigenous research. Of Dharug descent, Mykaela belongs to the Tweed Goori community through her Bundjalung and South Sea Islander family. Mykaela has worked in Aboriginal education since 2003, and at the tertiary level since 2012. They are currently an Indigenous postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie University, researching First Nations speculative fiction.