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William Dumas
Story Team
William Dumas is an asiniskaw īthiniw Knowledge Keeper and acclaimed storyteller from O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation (OPCN). He has been an educator all his life and is passionate about Cree language and culture. He is Co-Leader of the Story Team for the Six Seasons of the Asiniskaw Īthiniwak project. Dumas is experienced as a Northern educator and administrator, having worked as a coordinator for the Culture and Language Program for Nisichawayasi Nehetho Culture and Education Authority, as a First Nations Language & Culture Specialist (Cree) at the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre (MFNERC), Cree Language and Culture Consultant in the Mystery Lake and Frontier School Divisions, as the Director of Education for Fox Lake Education Authority in Nelson House, and as the Executive Director for Northern Nishnabe Education Council. Dumas is the author of the award-winning picture book Pīsim Finds Her Miskanow (2013), which is the first book in the Six Seasons of Asiniskaw Īthiniwak series. He is also the author of The Gift of the Little People (2022).
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Warren Cariou
Story Team
Warren Cariou was born into a family of Métis and European ancestry in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan. He has published works of fiction and memoir as well as critical writing about Indigenous storytelling, literature and environmental philosophy. He has also created two films about Indigenous communities in western Canada’s tar sands region, and he has written numerous articles, stories and poems about Indigeneity and petroleum. His visual art project, Petrography, uses tar sands bitumen as a photographic medium. He is a Professor of English at the University of Manitoba, where he directs the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture. He is a Co-Leader of the Story Team for the Six Seasons of the Asiniskaw Īthiniwak project.
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Mavis Reimer
Production Team
Mavis Reimer is Project Director of the SSHRC Partnership Project, Six Seasons of the Asiniskaw Īthiniwak: Reclamation, Regeneration, and Reconciliation. She is Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg. She was the Canada Research Chair in Young People’s Texts and Cultures between 2005 and 2015, lead editor of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures between 2009 and 2015, and President of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature between 2011 and 2015. She is the founding director of the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures (CRYTC) at the University of Winnipeg and founding President of the Association for Research in Young People’s Cultures.
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Doris Wolf
Curriculum Team
Doris Wolf is an Associate Professor in the University of Winnipeg’s Department of English and Faculty of Education- Access Program. She researches and publishes in the areas of Canadian Indigenous children’s texts and Indigenous content in early and middle years education and curriculum. Wolf has collaborated on the Six Seasons project since 2014 when she organized an intensive, week-long Summer Institute how to use Pīsim Finds Her Miskanow in Early and Middle Years classrooms.
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Audrey Barkman Hill
Curriculum Team
Audrey Barkman Hill brings a PhD that focuses on the teaching of literature, a thirty-year career in education, and a love of reading and writing to her current role as Writing Lead on the Six Seasons Curriculum Writing team. Her professional interest is in the impact of literature on identity construction and on the norms and values by which we construct societies. “Artistically,” she says, “my interest in literature is the aesthetics, or the reflection of art, culture and nature, by which writers create a version of themselves and their worlds.”
Audrey says she is pleased to be working with the Six Seasons writing team on creating a curricular guide that offers educators an exciting and productive way to teach historically and culturally accurate materials on a specific Indigenous group -the asiniskaw īthiniwak. Her hope is that the lessons and activities developed by the writing team for māskīkīy miskanaw: The Medicine Way will promote interactive student partnerships, reflective personal thinking and active engagement with Six Seasons narratives.
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Jill Taylor-Hollings
Archaeology Team
Currently, Jill is an adjunct professor and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Lakehead University with the Six Seasons of the Asiniskaw Īthiniwak SSHRC partnership grant project. She works on building archaeological information for interpretive sidebars in the books, teachers’ guides, and apps. She is also researching some of the pottery from the Manitoba Museum that was found in Asiniskaw Īthiniwak traditional territory.
Since moving to NW Ontario in 2001, Jill has been working for Lakehead University in different capacities including sessional lecturing and research assistantships while occasionally taking on cultural resource management projects. She is also President-Elect for the Ontario Archaeological Society and previously was on the executive of the Thunder Bay Chapter since 2007.
Jill is passionate about studying, protecting, and promoting Canada’s heritage. Her PhD (University of Alberta, 2017) focused on archaeological research with Lac Seul, Little Grand Rapids, and Pikangikum Anishinaabe communities and Ontario Parks personnel along the Miskweyaabiziibee (Bloodvein River) in Woodland Caribou Provincial Park, which is now part of the Pimachiowin Aki UNESCO World Heritage site. She also completed a Masters of Arts at the University of Saskatchewan and Bachelor of Arts Honours at Brandon University in archaeology. Her research interests include precontact pottery, Indigenous archaeology, and lithic raw material studies. Jill also enjoys replicating traditional technology such as pottery, other containers, textiles, beading, and leatherwork. She has over 25 years of academic, CRM, and museum experience in four Canadian provinces and Tasmania.
When not working, Jill enjoys raising champion Standard Long-haired Dachshunds and drivable artifacts - owning a rare 1969 Acadian 350 SS car. She is married to Peter Hollings, who is a geology professor at Lakehead University. Jill has a mixed Euro-Canadian and Indigenous background, originally hailing from southern Manitoba.
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Scott Hamilton
Archaeology Team
Scott Hamilton is a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at Lakehead University. He specializes in the pre-contact archaeology and post-contact ethnohistory of northern Plains and Subarctic. His research also includes community-based heritage research with northern Ontario First Nations communities, and has recently expanded to address the utility of new technologies in archaeology.
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Roland Bohr
History Team
Roland Bohr is the Director of the Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies at the University of Winnipeg, where he also teaches North American Indigenous history. Bohr’s interdisciplinary research specializes in Indigenous material culture of the fur trade period and involves manufacturing functional reproductions of Indigenous bows and arrows, based on information obtained from examining surviving Indigenous artifacts in museums, working with Indigenous Elders and analyzing fur trader’s journals and travel accounts.
