World Water Night: Readings & Film Screening

Readings by Lee Maracle & Michael Blackstock
Screening of Samaqan: Water Stories, with Director Jeff Bear

Lee Maracle, granddaughter of Chief Dan George, is one of the most prolific aboriginal authors in Canada. Her books include Daughters Are Forever (fiction, Raincoast, 2002), Will’s Garden (Theytus, 2002), Bent Box (poetry, Theytus Books, 2000), Sojourners & Sundogs (fiction, Press Gang, 1999), Ravensong (Press Gang, 1993), I Am Woman (nonfiction, Press Gang, 1988) and Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel (fiction, Women’s Press, 1975). She has received the J.T. Stewart Voices of Change Award, and she contributed to First Fish, First People, which won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. Maracle has taught at the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo, Western Washington University, South Oregon University, and many more places.

Michael Blackstock is an independent scholar, poet, artist, and forester who has served as a member of the UNESCO-IHP Expert Advisory Group on Water and Cultural Diversity. He has published two books of poetry: Salmon Run: A Florilegium of Aboriginal Ecological Poetry and Oceaness. Of Gitxsan (Hazelton) and Euro-Canadian descent, Blackstock has a MA in First Nations Studies. His first book, Faces in the Forest (McGill-Queen’s UP), examines tree art in conjunction with First Nations cosmology, citing carvings, paintings and writings on trees within Gitxsan, Nisga’a, Tlingit, Carrier and Dene traditional territories.

Jeff Bear (Maliseet) produces, writes and directs independent documentaries  with director Marianne Jones (Haida) at Urban Rez Productions  in Vancouver. Since 2000 Urban Rez has produced the 26-part series  Ravens and Eagles, for broadcast on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, as well as Storytellers in Motion, a 39 part documentary series about indigenous storytellers, and currently, Samaqan: Water Stories. The first documentary that Bear and Jones shot together, Burnt Church: Obstruction of Justice won the 2001 Telefilm/APTN award for Best English Language Production.

Bear has worked in video and television steadily for the last  24 years. He received the  2000 Leo Award for Best Information Series as the producer of  First Story, an aboriginal current affairs program broadcast in Canada on CTV. A past editor-in-chief of Kahtou magazine, he has written widely about indigenous political and cultural representation in Canada. Bear speaks the Maliseet language fluently and was raised in Tobique First Nation, New Brunswick.