-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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. A settler scholar and Indigenous ally, she researches and publishes in the areas of Canadian Indigenous children’s texts and Indigenous content in early and middle years education and curriculum. In 2014, Wolf organized an intensive, week-long Summer Institute at the University of Winnipeg to explore how to use Pīsim Finds Her Miskanaw in early and middle-years classrooms. Since 2017, with the formal beginning of the Six Season Project and SSHRC Partnership Grant, she has led the curriculum team working closely with the team’s community lead, Margaret Dumas.
-
Margaret Dumas
Curriculum Team
Margaret Dumas is a woman of Cree and Austrian ancestry. She is a mother to four children and a grandmother to thirteen grandchildren. Margaret was born in Churchill, Manitoba but was mostly raised in a little Cree and Métis town along the Hudson Bay line called Pikwitonei. Margaret has lived in the North most of her life and has been an educator in both the North and South for over 30 years.
Margaret has a 5-year Bachelor of education degree from Brandon University. She received her grade 12 from Frontier Collegiate at Cranberry Portage and later received her TESL (Teaching English Second Language) certificate from KCC which is now UCN. Margaret was and is still very involved in the revitalization of the Cree language and with the development of the Cree language curriculum and community school in Thompson and throughout other parts of Manitoba. Her interests have always been with Indigenous education, with the reform, and in the revitalization of the Cree language and culture. Margaret is a Cree Bilingual teacher at Wapanohk Community School with Mystery Lake School Division. She hopes to pass the importance of the language and culture to all the youth she teaches and hopes that her children and grandchildren will carry on her work in the future.
In her free time, she also enjoys working on committees and facilitating workshops on Cree culture and worldview. In addition, she loves to play her guitar and sing in both Cree and English, often performs at local coffee houses, and as well enjoys cooking, baking, writing and camping.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
