Keynotes
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 conference has been cancelled. The 2022 conference is currently being planned.
Friday Keynote: TBA
Saturday Keynote: TANYA TALAGA
An award-winning journalist and author, and the first Ojibwe woman to deliver the CBC Massey Lectures, Tanya Talaga is an acclaimed storyteller. Her book Seven Fallen Feathers, a national bestseller that introduced us to seven Indigenous high school students who mysteriously died in Thunder Bay, won the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize. In her powerful keynotes, Tanya shares Indigenous stories from across Canada and the world, humanizing the legacy of residential schools and colonization, and sharing her hope for a more inclusive and equitable future. Tanya is of Polish and Indigenous descent. Her great-grandmother was a residential school survivor and her great-grandfather was an Ojibwe trapper and labourer. For the past 20 years, Tanya has worked as a journalist, and is now a columnist for the Toronto Star. She has been nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism. From 2017-2018, Tanya was the Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy through the Canadian Journalism Foundation. Tanya is the bestselling author of two books: All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward and Seven Fallen Feathers.