Walker MacKinlay
Illustrator

Walker MacKinlay is Wet’suwet’en and sits with the Tsayu. He is currently attending college to get a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and hopes to pursue a career in the arts. He is very into volunteerism and enjoys giving back to the community. From a young age, he was taught the importance of how working hard in each situation helps one gain experiences, connections with people, and insights. It has allowed him to recognize how lucky he is for every opportunity he has received.

Dr. Sarah de Leeuw
WRITER

Sarah de Leeuw is a professor and the Research Director of the Health Arts Research Centre. Shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award (non-fiction), she holds two CBC Literary Prizes for creative non-fiction and the Dorthey Livesay BC Book Prize for poetry. Author/editor of eleven books, de Leeuw is a Canada Research Chair (Humanities and Health Inequities) with the Northern Medical Program in Prince George, a distributed site of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine. She grew up on Haida Gwaii and now divides her time between Lheidli T’enneh/Dakelh Territory (Prince George) and Syilx Territory (Okanagan Centre), BC.

Lisa Striegler
WRITER

Lisa Striegler is a Research Manager at the Health Arts Research Centre in the Northern Medical Program at UNBC. For the bulk of her career she has been a social justice community educator and counsellor. She is an amateur performing artist, playwright, and poet; and has quite a loyal following comprised of people who share her DNA...

Lisa is a trained Forum Theatre facilitator and, for her Master’s thesis, used that method to explore the effects of anti-Indigenous racism on community health in Saik’uz territories.

Marion Erickson
WRITER

Marion Erickson is a Dakelh woman from the Lhts’umusyoo Clan and a Research Manager at the Health Arts Research Centre. She is a Public Board member on the BC College of Oral Health Professionals and is also on the province of BC’s Anti-Racism Data Committee. Marion enjoys developing teaching tools that utilize the arts in health education. 

Throughout Marion’s experiences, she has recognized that the health and well-being of Indigenous people are connected to the health and well-being of the land; that art is a way of storytelling and that this storytelling is a way to build relationships within our northern communities. This relationship building is necessary to work collectively towards actively addressing health inequalities in the north.