LIVE EVENTS
PUBLIC TALK
September 18, 6pm-7:30pm
Making Art in a Changing Climate
This lecture and discussion considers how artists and curators are thinking with a rapidly changing climate. How can art provide a space for more than contemplation and awareness, towards the possibility of transformation? What creative forms and material responses invite us to consider art as a site for urgent action?
Dr. Amanda White is an artist and researcher using art to engage with ecological systems, climate change, and human-nature relationships from a critical white settler lens. A key focus of her work is creative practice and critical plant studies, examining plants as living technologies that regulate climate, sustain ecosystems, and hold cultural significance. She is Canada Research Chair in Sustainability, Ecological Justice, and Climate action in Creative Practices (Tier II) and Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at Emily Carr University.
Laura Kozak
FILM SCREENING
September 19, 6pm-7:30pm
təm kʷaθ nan (Namesake)
Raven’s Cry Theatre
təm kʷaθ nan (Namesake) documents an ongoing conversation between the Tla’amin Nation and the city commonly known as Powell River. The name of the town honours Israel Wood Powell, a government official whose policies helped establish residential schools, criminalize cultural practices, and remove Tla’amin from its home at tiskʷət. The Tla’amin Nation asks the city to consider changing its name, not to erase history but to build a new future together.
Post-screening discussion with Claudia Medina and Peg Campbell.
PUBLIC PROGRAM
September 20, 2pm-4pm
How Water Remembers
Art Activation + Discussion
PUBLIC PROGRAM
September 23, 5pm-6:30pm
Art Talks: Art & Climate Change
Sunshine Coast Arts Centre
We are bringing back Art Talks, a series of discussions that centre on issues and ideas connected to contemporary art in the 21st century. Offered online, they are an opportunity to learn, share and discuss wide ranging topics that intersect with making art at this moment in time. Threading theory, practice and art, these discussions will provide a chance to delve into ideas, unpack understandings, and challenge assumptions. In this first session, we will look at artists and practices that consider a changing climate with a particular focus on our warming oceans.
PUBLIC PROGRAM
September 24, 5pm-6:30pm
Art Talks: Making with the Salish Sea
Sunshine Coast Arts Centre
We are bringing back Art Talks, a series of discussions that centre on issues and ideas connected to contemporary art in the 21st century. Offered onlinehey are an opportunity to learn, share and discuss wide ranging topics that intersect with making art at this moment in time. Threading theory, practice and art, these discussions will provide a chance to delve into ideas, unpack understandings, and challenge assumptions. In the second session we will consider artists, projects and practices around the Salish Sea, and how they help connect audiences to specific sites of climate transformation.
WALKING TOUR
September 25, 2pm-3:30pm
Salish Sea and Me
with Talaysay Tours
We invite you to join us for a walk along the shoreline of ch’atlich to celebrate the many life-giving attributes and rich resources that the ocean has provided Coast Salish peoples since time immemorial. Each Salish Sea and Me experience will be a conversation with the shoreline; a meeting between land, water, and the people who have walked here for generations. Guided by Candace Campo, you’ll explore the rich ecosystems of the Salish Sea, learning how Indigenous communities have lived in balance with these tides for millennia. Coast Salish peoples have shared a profound and enduring connection with the Salish Sea for thousands of years, a relationship that has shaped a beautiful culture, identity and way of life. By highlighting and embracing these Indigenous values, knowledge and practices we welcome a more resilient path towards environmental stewardship, climate resilience and reconciliation.
Start Time: 2:00 pm
End Time: 3:15 pm
Duration: 75 minutes
Accessibility: Wheelchair friendly
Guide: xets’emits’a. Candace Campo
Meeting Location: Friendship Park, Wharf Avenue, Sechelt BC
Ending Location: Friendship Park
Includes: Talaysay Hush Tea
PLAY READING
September 26, 4pm-6pm
Keepers of the Salish Sea
Raven’s Cry Theatre
Join us for a one-night only event in collaboration with Holy Crow Arts Society. Squamish Nation playwright Justin Neal explores the tradition of canoeing in Keepers of the Salish Sea. The play is about finding that path we all seek, a search for meaning in life, to discover answers to existential questions. A probing, searching, hilarious tale infusing Coast Salish traditions — inspired by a phenomenal cultural practice thousands of years old, nearly erased by colonization — with the pressing environmental and social issues of our day. The stage reading is directed by Quelemia Sparrow.
From the late 90s to the 2010s Justin Neal juggled day jobs with amateur theatre at night. In 2013, he took a leap of faith to focus on dramatic writing full-time, relocating to his family’s Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw lands to pursue a joint MFA degree in Creative Writing and Theatre at UBC. His screenplays have placed him in dozens of competitions, programs, and residencies across North America; his feature screenplay The Skins Game will commence filming in 2026. As playwright and founder of Holy Crow Arts, he has premiered new plays, So Damn Proud (2021), and Keepers of the Salish Sea (2024). Neal is an alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre’s Film Program Writers’ Lab and a 2024-25 Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at SFU.
WALKING TOUR
September 27, 2pm-3:30pm
Salish Sea and Me
with Talaysay Tours
We invite you to join us for a walk along the shoreline of ch’atlich to celebrate the many life-giving attributes and rich resources that the ocean has provided Coast Salish peoples since time immemorial. Each Salish Sea and Me experience will be a conversation with the shoreline; a meeting between land, water, and the people who have walked here for generations. Guided by Candace Campo, you’ll explore the rich ecosystems of the Salish Sea, learning how Indigenous communities have lived in balance with these tides for millennia. Coast Salish peoples have shared a profound and enduring connection with the Salish Sea for thousands of years, a relationship that has shaped a beautiful culture, identity and way of life. By highlighting and embracing these Indigenous values, knowledge and practices we welcome a more resilient path towards environmental stewardship, climate resilience and reconciliation.
Start Time: 2:00 pm
End Time: 3:15 pm
Duration: 75 minutes
Accessibility: Wheelchair friendly
Guide: xets’emits’a. Candace Campo
Meeting Location: Friendship Park, Wharf Avenue, Sechelt BC
Ending Location: Friendship Park
Includes: Talaysay Hush Tea
PUBLIC EVENT
September 27, 6pm-8pm
Stories of Rising Waters
Rita Wong, Bella Casey, Tara Blasco and Wanda Nowicki
Join us for a gathering of storytellers, sharing their yarning with water. From poetry and storytelling, to spoken work and play reading, each weaves joy, hope, anger, distress and possibility, inviting us to be with the complex emotions of climate grief and loss.
Rita Wong’s poetry explores the meeting places of life, language, and land—from downtown Vancouver to the headwaters of the Columbia River. Her poems are deeply attentive to places and their names, and especially to the imposition of foreign words on the unceded Indigenous lands of what is otherwise known as British Columbia. Exhorting readers to recognize their responsibilities to the planet and to their communities, Wong’s watershed poetics encompass anger, grief, wit, and hope. Rita teaches in Critical + Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she has developed a humanities course focused on water, with the support of a fellowship from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. She is currently researching the poetics of water, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, Visions of British Columbia (published for an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery), and Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. She has a passion for daylighting buried urban streams and for watershed literacy. Wong can be found on Twitter.
Bella Casey is a writer and cedar weaver from the sunshine coast. She is inspired by her culture, her mixed heritage and the land.
Community Resource
