Steph Eva Wood

“It’s really good to be here and to be brown today,” said Rosemary Georgeson. “I love it.” Georgeson sat at a booth for Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services Society (VACFSS). Beside her, teens sold traditional teas and salves they had made. In front of the booth stood a tall model of a Te Smailetl, also known as a Sasquatch (Te Smailetl means "Wild People" in the Squamish language). A group of children involved in their programs made the Te Smailetl, who they named Jonathan.

Chief Leah George-Wilson was calm and sure-footed as she addressed a news conference on Tuesday. Not even two hours had passed since the prime minister announced the federal government’s approval of the Trans Mountain expansion project. She already had the nation’s answer. “We will be appealing this decision to the Federal Court of Appeal,” she said. “Tsleil-Waututh Nation continues to withhold our free, prior and informed consent."

Vanessa Campbell is working with the garden to teach people plant names in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓. More importantly, she says, she is helping build relationships between the garden and the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm community.

Eugene Victor went fishing for the first time when he was 17 years old. It was also the first time he met his biological father after growing up in foster care. They went to the Fraser River for the occasion, near Yale First Nation, just north of Hope, B.C. “Right away I was like, this is where I belong. This is me. I feel at home here,” Victor says.

Ta'kaiya Blaney stepped into a canoe sitting on the steps of Vancouver's Convention Centre, before a group of men lifted her on their shoulders and carried her down the waterfront, as Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) singers and council members led the way. “It’s not enough to take a look at the problem that we have across Indian Country with our relatives disappearing, and in the same breath, be approving pipelines that invite that violence into our lands,” she said.

As an actor, Kim Senklip Harvey was tired of playing traumatized, tragic Indigenous women onstage. "I stepped into directing because I found that I was craving something that was not happening in the Euro-settler normative way of working, in that I wanted to Indigenize it entirely," says Harvey, who has Sylix, Tsilhqot'in, Ktunaxa, and Dakelh ancestry.

The Sḵwx̱wú7mesh stelmexw have lived along this coast for millennia. Slhá7an̓ was once a seasonal village, and today it’s a reserve community sitting close to the shoreline in North Vancouver. The mudflats that once existed around False Creek were called Skwácháy̓s, meaning “water coming up from ground beneath.” At what is now called Stanley Park, people lived in a village called X̱wáy̓x̱way.

Dalbir Kaur’s son Joga Singh went missing in 1982. He was 18. “We went to the Batala police station to find out what happened. We were given a police report, but we never received the body,” Kaur said in an interview with journalist Abhishek Madhukar.

"We're not developing a strategy that's going to sit on a shelf somewhere," said Doug White. "We're developing a strategy that will be guiding the work of every single person in the criminal justice system in this province."

“I fear we may have temporarily fallen back into a less audacious, less meaningful conversation...the federal government has fallen back once again into a pattern of trying to ‘manage the problem’ with Indigenous peoples and make incremental, intermittent shifts rather than reforming the status quo,” said Wilson-Raybould.

Flo Ranville sat by the window of a narrow art gallery in Vancouver’s Chinatown, surrounded by a series of photographs of faceless people. Ranville pointed out a photo of a person standing behind a park bench. Ranville said the woman, who uses the alias 'Betty Boop,' is from a northern Indigenous community. She and her family were ostracized after she was diagnosed with HIV.

Point Louisa is a common clamming spot for harvesters from the Tlingit and Haida tribes, as well as the Filipino community in Juneau. But since last summer, levels of paralytic shellfish poison (PSP) in butter clams at the beach have persistently been above the federal limit.

When Andrew Crist tried the "Blown Away" bike trail on Mount McIntyre a few weeks ago, he worried about running into bears. He yelled a bit on the way down to ward any off. One thing Crist didn't think he had to worry about was nearly being shot by a stranger with a hunting rifle.

Yukon has limited hotel rooms, no shortage of road-weary travellers, and a sense of pride in people's hospitality. That may be why the territory came first place in Canada for host ratings on Airbnb. Whitehorse has an average rating of 4.8 of five stars.

Bessie Kèyishí Cooley has been a Tlingit teacher and translator for many years. "Sometimes you have to dig deep to remember the words they're asking you," she said of teaching adults. "It's just great being able to speak."

We had believed that going to the Downtown Eastside with good intentions would enable us to report with sensitivity and respect for the community. But we were wrong to think it’d be that simple.

"I'm just really excited to be meeting new designers. Doing Vancouver Indigenous Fashion week, having to find new talent is something that I'm looking for — and Adäka definitely has it," said founder of Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week, Joleen Mitton.

About 30 kilometres southeast of Bella Bella in the Central Coast region of British Columbia, there is a low-lying clay deposit off quiet Kisameet Bay. The Haiłzaqv people have used the fine, pale-green clay for many generations.

"A lot of them can't string sentences together the same way anymore but if you put them in a canoe then the muscle memory is still there, and they just get so much pleasure out of that," said Julia Wilson. She said one resident spoke for the first time in months while out on the canoe.

Megan Breen, her fiancé, and their three children are due to be out of their rental home by June 30. But after a year of searching in Whitehorse, she hasn't been able to find an affordable home that can accommodate her family.