SHOWCASE: 2024 BC & Yukon Book Prize Finalists
Join Massy Arts, and 2024 BC & Yukon Book Finalists Sam George, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, and Jill Yonit Goldberg Thursday, June 20th at 6pm for a showcase and discussion with host Michelle Cyca.
Venue & Accessibility
The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver. We are located in the former MING WO building.
Registration is free or by donation and required for entry. https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/2024-showcase-bc-yukon-book-finalists-tickets-905314509067?aff=oddtdtcreator
The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.
We will have an ASL Interpreter for this event.
Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.
For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility
Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.
About Sam George: Sam George is a Squamish Elder and a survivor of the Canadian Indian Residential School system. A retired longshoreman and semi-retired drug and alcohol counsellor, Sam now works as an educator with the Indian Residential School Survivors Society and speaks with students and community groups about his experiences.
About the Book: The Fire Still Burns is an unflinching look at the horrors of a childhood spent trapped within the Indian Residential School system and the long-term effects on survivors. It illustrates the healing power of one’s culture and the resilience that allows an individual to rebuild a life and a future
Set in the Vancouver area in the late 1940s and through to the present day, this candid account follows Sam from his idyllic childhood growing up on the Eslhá7an (Mission) reserve to the confines of St. Paul’s Indian Residential School and then into a life of addiction and incarceration. But an ember of Sam’s spirit always burned within him, and even in the darkest of places he retained his humour and dignity until he found the strength to face his past.
“My name is Sam George. In spite of everything that happened to me, by the grace of the Creator, I have lived to be an Elder.”
About Jill Yonit Goldberg: Jill Yonit Goldberg is a writer, and a literature and creative writing instructor at Langara College in Vancouver, BC, where she teaches the Writing Lives course in which students collaborate with Indian Residential School survivors who are writing their memoirs. She worked with Sam George to bring his story to the page.
About Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is a visual artist, storyteller and public speaker. Raised on Haida Gwaii, he melds cultural hybridity and his political experiences as an Indigenous person with contemporary graphic literature to produce a unique genre called Haida Manga. His books include Flight of the Hummingbird (Greystone, 2008), A Tale of Two Shamans (Theytus, 2001) and Red (Douglas & McIntyre, 2009). He lives in Canada with his wife and daughter, close to the Two Sisters Mountain on an island in the Salish Sea.
About the book: JAJ With gorgeous imagery, visual artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas brings to life the tumultuous history of first contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples and the early colonization by the Europeans of the northern West Coast.Yahgulanaas uses a blend of traditional and modern art, eschewing the traditional boxes of comic books for the flowing shapes of North Pacific iconography. The panels are filled with colourful and expressive watercolour paintings. The panels of each page, if removed and assembled into one whole image, form a large image reminiscent of a woven robe. The story follows several historical figures, including Johan Adrian Jacobsen (JAJ), who comes to the Haida village of Masset to collect specimens for a German museum, through a time span that includes first contact, the devastation of the smallpox epidemic, and the mass resettlement of disenfranchised peoples, both Indigenous and European.
About the host: Michelle Cyca is a journalist and essayist living on the unceded homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She is an editor with The Narwhal and a contributing writer to The Walrus. Her writing can often be found in Maclean’s, Chatelaine, and The Globe & Mail. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief and co-publisher of SAD Mag. She’s a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Treaty 6, Saskatchewan.