Ryan McMahon
As an Anishinaabe creative, comedian, writer, storyteller, and journalist, Ryan has devoted his career to initiatives and opportunities that foster and inspire a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between Indigenous communities and this country.
He’s built an extensive background as a professional communicator, community activator, comedian, award-winning journalist, and creator of groundbreaking documentary works. McMahon’s goal has always been to create accessible and engaging platforms that help people from all backgrounds better understand the Indigenous experience.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. In 2022, Braiding Sweetgrass was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith. This new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us. Robin’s newest book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (November 2024), is a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.
Robin tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. In 2022 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.
Monique Gray Smith
Monique Gray Smith is an award-winning, best-selling author. Her books cover a broad spectrum of ages, topics and emotions. Woven into all of Monique’s writing, speaking engagements and online courses is the teaching that Love is Medicine. In September 2022, she released her 4th children’s picture book, I Hope with Orca Book Publishers. Monique’s most recent book is Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults, which received the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award for 2022. Originally written by Robin Wall Kimmerer and the adaptation includes illustrations by Nicole Neidhardt. Monique’s novel, Tilly and the Crazy Eights was longlisted for Canada Reads 2021. Her newest children’s book, Circle of Love, came out in 2024.
Monique is trained as a Psychiatric Nurse and has worked in various capacities in community and as a consultant since 1990. Her focus has been weaving history, resilience and trauma informed training for educators, social workers, librarians and early childhood teams. She is an appointed member of the Board of Directors of Royal Roads University and the Minister’s Advisory Council for Indigenous Women for the Government of BC and is the elected President of the Board of Directors for the Victoria Native Friendship Centre. In 2019 Monique received the City of Victoria Leadership Award for Reconciliation. Monique is Cree and Scottish and has been sober and involved in her healing journey for over 32 years. She is well known for her storytelling, spirit of generosity and focus on resilience.
Gloria Oshkabewisens McGregor
Gloria served her community of Whitefish River First Nation for nineteen years as a Primary school Educator at Shawanosowe School, and also provided cultural languages-based curriculum. Gloria graduated from Lakehead University’s Native Language Instructor Program and went on to serve as an Elder in Residence for Lakehead University and Waabnode Cambrian College in providing cultural teachings and one on one traditional counseling to staff and post-secondary students for seven years. From 2012-2013, Gloria was an integral part of student lifelong learning through Kenjigewin Teg Educational Institute’s Anishinabek Identity, Mind and Spirit Essential Skills Pilot Program. Gloria continues to be one of KTEI’s esteemed Traditional Knowledge Faculty Members today.
Currently, Gloria is an active member of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine Indigenous Elders Advisory Circle and a member of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation of Mnidoo Mnising Elders Council. Most recently, Gloria has become a member of the Traditional Healing Advisory Circle for the Indigenous Primary Health Care Council (IPHCC), an Indigenous governed,
culturally based organization that supports the advancement and evolution of Indigenous Primary Health Care to address the physical, spiritual, emotional and mental wellbeing of 21 First Nations and Metis, Indigenous primary health care organizations across Ontario.
For the past fourteen years, she has worked as a Traditional Practitioner with Shkakamik Kwe Health Centre, Aboriginal Health Access Centre (AHAC) in Sudbury, Ontario providing traditional healing and wellness services to First Nations and Metis residents and the surrounding First Nations in Northern Ontario.
Gloria continues to service people in her territory and considers herself a helper to her people and community by utilizing the strengths of Indigenous knowledge and gifts and ways of knowing while working with the strengths of western knowledge and ways of knowing.
Michael Yellow Bird
Michael Yellow Bird, PhD, is Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Social Work, University of Manitoba. He has held faculty and admininstrative leadership positions at several universities in the US and Canada. He has served as a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand (2016), a Distinguished Visiting Teaching Scholar at Trent University (2024), and is Faculty Emeritus, Cal Poly Humboldt, Arcata, California. He is a member of the MHA Nation (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) in North Dakota, USA and is a certified, internationally trained mindfulness meditation teacher, professional, and scholar. His mindfulness and contemplative work have been featured on numerous podcasts, websites, magazines, newspapers, and scholarly publications. He is an international thought leader on the effects of colonization, methods of decolonization, Indigenous mindfulness, and the cultural significance of Rez dogs. He is the author of several social work and Indigenous studies scholarly articles, the co-editor of four books, and the co-author of two books. He is nearing completion of two co-authored books: Traditional Arikara Agriculture and Decolonizing the Social Work Curriculum. He is working on three of his own books: The Memoirs of a Mindful Rez Kid; Rez Dog Meditations: Contemplative Practices for Healing Animals, People, and the Planet; and Minding the Indigenous Mind: Stories of brain waves, telomeres, mirror neurons, and healing.
Katsi Cook
Katsi is a member of the St.Regis Mohawk Tribe. She was born and grew up on the territory of Akwesasne along the shores of the Saint Lawrence River. Her Mohawk name, Tekatsi:tsia’kwa, means “she’s picking up flowers”, a good name for an Indigenous midwife to carry.
Serving as an ambassador to the landscape of Indigenous women and girls leadership circles, Katsi holds the values, vision, and purpose of the Spirit Aligned Leadership Program, imparting her knowledge of Indigenous communities and decades of culture-based program design, direction, and implementation. As executive director, she maintains an Advisory Committee and focuses on increasing the representational range of Spirit Aligned by sharing her time, energy, and elder wisdom throughout Indian Country. Katsi partners with the Elders Council of the Indigenous Justice Division of Ontario, in response to the 94 Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and continues her activism in advancing the aims of Indigenous midwifery.
Prior to leading this new work to support the wellbeing and thriving lives of Indigenous women Elders, Katsi’s work spans many worlds and disciplines and demonstrates a life-long career of advancing the superlatives of Indigenous Knowledge. She is an advocate of Indigenous women’s health across the lifecycle, drawing from a longhouse traditionalist perspective the idea of Woman as the First Environment. She has based previous work in the First Environment Collaborative, working at the intersections of environmental health and justice and reproductive health and justice research and policy. Her groundbreaking environmental research of Mohawk mothers’ milk revealed the harmful generational impact of toxic pollutants within the St. Lawrence River. Katsi continues to serve her community as a director of the Akwesasne Health Care Foundation, Inc. that works to restore the Akwesasne environment.
As a professional member of the Interim Regulatory Council of the College of Midwives of Ontario in 1991, Katsi worked with colleagues to implement the exemption for Aboriginal Midwives and Healers in the 1991 Midwifery Act and the Regulated Health Professions Act in Ontario, Canada. In 1992, Katsi became the founding Aboriginal midwife of the Six Nations Birthing Centre, the first and only freestanding birth centre in Canada at that time. Its practices are grounded in the concept of the Haudenosaunee Creation story.
Gloria Oshkabewisens McGregor
Gloria served her community of Whitefish River First Nation for nineteen years as a Primary school Educator at Shawanosowe School, and also provided cultural languages-based curriculum. Gloria graduated from Lakehead University’s Native Language Instructor Program and went on to serve as an Elder in Residence for Lakehead University and Waabnode Cambrian College in providing cultural teachings and one on one traditional counseling to staff and post-secondary students for seven years. From 2012-2013, Gloria was an integral part of student lifelong learning through Kenjigewin Teg Educational Institute’s Anishinabek Identity, Mind and Spirit Essential Skills Pilot Program. Gloria continues to be one of KTEI’s esteemed Traditional Knowledge Faculty Members today.
Currently, Gloria is an active member of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine Indigenous Elders Advisory Circle and a member of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation of Mnidoo Mnising Elders Council. Most recently, Gloria has become a member of the Traditional Healing Advisory Circle for the Indigenous Primary Health Care Council (IPHCC), an Indigenous governed,
culturally based organization that supports the advancement and evolution of Indigenous Primary Health Care to address the physical, spiritual, emotional and mental wellbeing of 21 First Nations and Metis, Indigenous primary health care organizations across Ontario.
For the past fourteen years, she has worked as a Traditional Practitioner with Shkakamik Kwe Health Centre, Aboriginal Health Access Centre (AHAC) in Sudbury, Ontario providing traditional healing and wellness services to First Nations and Metis residents and the surrounding First Nations in Northern Ontario.
Gloria continues to service people in her territory and considers herself a helper to her people and community by utilizing the strengths of Indigenous knowledge and gifts and ways of knowing while working with the strengths of western knowledge and ways of knowing.