About The Project | PROJECT TEAM
Below is a collection of community members and participants that made this project possible. Click on each photo thumbnail to learn more about each person.
Kate Hennessy
Co-curator, Project Co-coordinator, Media Anthropologist, Youth Production Mentor
I grew up on Galiano Island, B.C, and have been working for the last several years as a visual anthropologist and media consultant. I have experience teaching documentary video and multimedia design, as well as funding and managing oral history and multimedia education projects in my home community and with northern First Nations like Doig River. I received an MA in the Anthropology of Media from the University of London, SOAS, and I am currently working towards a PhD in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. My projects with First Nations communities in northern British Columbia, Alberta, and the Yukon use methods of participatory ethnography while facilitating collaborative community media projects as video production instructor and multimedia producer.
I was first introduced to Dane-zaa culture and history in 1992 as a student of ethnographer Robin Ridington at UBC. In 2003, Amber Ridington and I partnered with Doig River Youth and Elders to create Hadaa ka nadzaat- The Dane-zaa Moose Hunt. The success of that project, and the community dialogue and storytelling that it initiated, were a major source of inspiration for this collaborative website, Dane Wajich- Dane-zaa Stories and Song: Dreamers and the Land.
I offer my sincerest thanks to the Doig River community for their support and dedication to this project. Gary Oker, with elders like Tommy Attachie, Billy Attachie, and Sam Acko, weighed the possibilities for developing this website and expressed in the most beautiful and articulate way what they saw as the best direction for the production process and the content of the site. The youth video team showed patience, skill, and creativity in dealing with challenging filming environments, and long days of travel and recording. Billy Attachie, Madeline Oker, and Eddie Apsassin worked countless hours with Pat Moore and Julia Miller to translate and transcribe the extensive Beaver language resources that you will find on this site. My warmest thanks to my ‘Grandma' Margaret Attachie for always making a home for me at Doig.
You can find out more about me at https://www.sfu.ca/siat/people/research-faculty/kate-hennessy.html