2026 Keynotes & Speakers | Our Cultural Landscape

Keynote

Ernestine Hayes

Ernestine Hayes will reflect on the relevance of ancient stories to today’s challenges, focusing on lessons of our shared history and exploring the opportunities of our shared future. Through the elements in the story, A Woman Who Married a Bear, Hayes will explore indigenous intellectual authority, indigenous sciences, the validity of oral history, and the sophistication of indigenous cultures before colonial notice. Her message of indigenous cultural strength carries the reminder that the future we work towards will be one that communities share together.

Ernestine Hayes belongs to the Kaagwaantaan clan of the Tlingit nation. Recipient of a Rasmuson Distinguished Artist Award (2021), United States Artists Fellowship (2023), Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship (2024), and Alaska Writer Laureate 2016-2018, Hayes’ works include Blonde Indian, an Alaska Native Memoir, The Tao of Raven, essays and poetry in Studies in American Indian Literature, Yellow Medicine Review, Wicazo Sa Review, and Waterstone Review, as well as other journals and anthologies.

She has been invited speaker at events for Native Arts and Culture Foundation, Power and Privilege Symposium, Alaska Can! Education Conference, Princeton University Museum Symposium, Native Movement JustTransition, Indigepalooza, and other venues.

University of Alaska professor emerita, Hayes makes her home in Juneau not far from the Juneau Indian Village where she was born.

Featured Speaker Panel

Equitably and Joyfully Braiding Epistemologies in Science and Science Education

Culturally-responsive teaching across multiple ways of knowing begins with knowing yourself — including your cultural, personal, and pedagogical roots. Dr. Lauren Eckert (settler conservation scientist) and Nasya Moore (Nisga'a and Leq'a:mel scientist and educator)—both affiliated with the Centre for Indigenous Fisheries at UBC—will reflect on positionality, reflexivity, and equitable approaches to weaving Indigenous and Western knowledges. Together, they will share what these approaches look like in practice across scientific research and education: through land-based learning, youth science camps, graduate classrooms, and hands-on activities participants can bring back to their own classrooms.

Dr. Lauren Eckert

Dr. Lauren Eckert is a conservation scientist, storyteller, and postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Indigenous Fisheries (University of British Columbia), fundamentally interested in equitable science and practice that embraces multiple disciplines, knowledges, and approaches. Her research collaboratively weaves Indigenous and Western knowledges across contexts, including Indigenous-led marine management and fisheries justice, and through the partnered application of Etuaptmumk/Two-Eyed Seeing. She is also a Board Member for the Alaska Whale Foundation.

Nasya Mo’osk’im gibuu Moore

Nasya Mo’osk’im gibuu Moore is a scientist from the Leq'a:mel First Nation and Nisga’a Nation. She is a graduate of the University of British Columbia, where she studied Indigenous Food Systems. Her work is informed by curiosity and land-led learning, and a belief in ancestral food systems of care as necessary for healthy lands and people.