Conference Schedule

The Indigenous Museum Cousins (IMC) is a growing collective of Indigenous museum professionals from across BC working within the GLAM sector. We came together primarily to support one another, creating a dedicated space to connect, share experiences, and navigate a sector that continues to be challenging for Indigenous professionals.

Formed in response to ongoing experiences of isolation, racism, and structural barriers, the IMC centres relationships, accountability, and lived experience. This session shares the development of the IMC as an Indigenous-led network grounded in care, laughter, strength, and mutual support. Drawing from decades of combined experience in repatriation, museum leadership, and community-based work, the presenters will speak to the realities Indigenous professionals face within institutions, including navigating systemic inequities, carrying heavy cultural responsibilities, and holding space for change.
The IMC is not a group created to do the decolonizing and reconciliation work for museums. Rather, it exists to uphold and strengthen Indigenous professionals within the sector. Our focus is on building collective strength, sharing strategies, and ensuring Indigenous voices and leadership are supported, visible, and sustained.

Participants will gain insight into how Indigenous-led networks can strengthen both individuals and institutions by creating safe and relational professional spaces, identifying gaps in institutional supports, and fostering collective voice. Participants will be invited into facilitated discussion to consider how they can better support Indigenous colleagues and contribute to meaningful change within their own organizations.

By the end of the session, participants will have a clearer understanding of the role Indigenous-led networks play in strengthening the GLAM sector, along with practical ways to support Indigenous staff, build respectful relationships, and move from intention to action.

You’re involved with a small museum, that has a minuscule staff – only one or two people – including a CEO who has been there for years, knows everything about the organization, can handle any task that comes along, and somehow miraculously achieves the great and wonderful things that have made your museum the success it is. She’s the lifeblood of your museum – and now she’s announced that she’s leaving. You’re being asked to figure out how to deal with that, and it’s the most terrifying thing you’ve ever had to do.

The Creston Museum has had to deal twice with the sudden and unexpected (although temporary) absence of its own beloved long-term CEO, and has learned a lot about what to do – and what not to do – to make that transition as smooth as possible. Now that their CEO is nearing retirement, they’re working to apply those lessons for a permanent hand-over. This session will walk you through the practical, day-to-day strategies the Creston Museum is implementing to manage their upcoming succession.

If you’re facing a similar situation, don’t panic. You got this. You can pass that torch – without burning anything down.

Philanthropy is about more than asking people for money. It is about building meaningful relationships with people who care about your museum, your community, and the stories and places you preserve.

The Power of Place: Turning Heritage into Philanthropy will explore practical and creative ways small museums and heritage organizations can engage supporters and build a sustainable culture of philanthropy. Even with limited budgets, small staff teams and volunteer capacity, organizations can develop meaningful connections and make the most of the resources they already have.

This session will cover the key elements of a successful fundraising program, including:

· Monthly giving

· Annual giving

· Special events

· Legacy giving

· Major gifts

· Donor engagement and stewardship

Together, we will explore how staff, volunteers, board members, and community supporters can harness their existing relationships, networks, stories, and local connections to strengthen philanthropy.

Participants will leave with practical ideas and inspiration to begin—or grow—a fundraising program that is authentic to their organization, their community, and their unique sense of place.

This walking session explores the layered histories of Nanaimo’s historic Chinatown through place-based storytelling, archival interpretation, and public art. Led by Dr. Imogene Lim and Dr. Melissa Karmen Lee, the tour invites participants to experience how museums and scholars can activate historic sites outside traditional gallery spaces.

Once home to one of British Columbia’s most vibrant Chinese communities, Nanaimo’s Chinatown was central to the economic and social life of Chinese migrants who worked in coal mining, commerce, and service industries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, only fragments of this once-thriving neighbourhood remain visible in the urban landscape. Through a guided walking tour, participants will explore how archival research, archaeological scholarship, and community memory can be mobilized to interpret places where physical traces have largely disappeared.

The tour will visit two key historic locations associated with Nanaimo’s former Chinatown, using photographs, maps, and stories to reconstruct the neighborhood’s social life, businesses, and institutions. Participants will also encounter a contemporary public artwork by artist Jackie Wong that reflects on the histories and afterlives of Chinese Canadian communities in the region. This stop will serve as a point of discussion about how contemporary artists interpret diasporic histories and how public art can function as a form of community storytelling.

The session will also touch on the literary representation of Nanaimo’s Chinatown in Denise Chong’s landmark memoir The Concubine’s Children, which vividly recounts the experiences of Chinese migrant families and highlights Nanaimo as an important setting within Chinese Canadian history. By connecting literary narrative with physical landscape, the session demonstrates how historical memory circulates across multiple forms—archives, literature, archaeology, and community knowledge.

Rather than presenting Chinatown solely as a vanished past, the walking tour foregrounds ongoing questions of heritage, erasure, and belonging. Participants will consider how museums and cultural institutions can engage with dispersed histories in ways that are collaborative, accessible, and grounded in place. The session will also address practical approaches to designing walking tours as interpretive tools that extend museum practice beyond the walls of institutions.

Through this immersive experience, the session encourages museum professionals to think creatively about how public history can be activated in urban landscapes where communities have been displaced, rebuilt, or forgotten. By walking the former streets of Nanaimo’s Chinatown together, participants will gain insight into how storytelling, scholarship, and public art can bring hidden histories back into public view.

Travelling exhibitions offer powerful opportunities to share national stories across multiple communities. Yet the most effective touring projects are not simply replicated from venue to venue—they evolve. Local museums reinterpret and contextualize exhibitions through the lens of their own regional histories, audiences, and collections.
This panel brings together museum professionals from Nanaimo Museum, BC Forest Discovery Centre, and Victoria Chinatown Museum Society to explore how the travelling exhibition A Seat at the Table has been adapted in different communities across Vancouver Island.

Originally developed by the Chinese Canadian Museum, MOV, and UBC INSTRCC, A Seat at the Table uses food and restaurants as an entry point into exploring the history of Chinese Canadians to present times, including entrepreneurship, cultural exchange, and belonging. As the exhibition travels, host institutions have expanded its themes by incorporating local stories that reflect the specific histories of Chinese communities in their regions.

At the BC Forest Discovery Centre in the Cowichan Valley, the exhibition intersects with the region’s logging history, exploring the role Chinese workers and families played in forestry communities while also establishing restaurants and local businesses.

At the Nanaimo Museum, the exhibition is contextualized through the history of Nanaimo’s once-thriving Chinatown and the legacy of Chinese restaurants that served as community gathering places. The session will examine how museums interpret histories tied to neighbourhoods that have largely disappeared but remain deeply embedded in local memory.

Meanwhile, the Victoria Chinatown Museum Society adapted the exhibition to highlight a Victoria’s historic Chinese bakery—an important yet often overlooked part of Chinatown’s food culture and economic life.
Together, the panel will explore how travelling exhibitions can become platforms for local storytelling, allowing regional museums to integrate community memory, labour histories, and foodways into broader national narratives about Chinese Canadian life.

Moderated by the Chinese Canadian Museum

The Port Hardy Museum and Archives is situated on Northern Vancouver Island on Kwakiutl territory. Defined by both resource extraction industries and Kwakwaka’wakw histories, Port Hardy is the home of diverse narratives with local and global impacts. Through a three-panel discussion with PHM staff, we will address our museum’s approach to care, community, and our role as GLAM (Gallery, Library, Archives, and Museum) workers in tackling the legacies of colonial histories and harms.

Rural and remote small community museums play a unique role in our communities. We act as essential hubs for arts, culture and heritage, often with small budgets and limited staffing. The PHM has seen a shift in our demand that we can’t ignore: because many cultural spaces are centrally located and serve as community third spaces, GLAM workers are finding themselves in roles that differ from what the sector has traditionally looked like. In addition to our archival, programming and curatorial work, we are now responding to a community in crisis. 911 phone calls and community support have become a part of our everyday lives.

In grappling with these legacies, there comes a mental and physical toll. The panelists will discuss the importance of a disability justice-centred framework and care for museum staff, encouraging wellness, rest, and health. We reflect on the ways this work has transformed and become intertwined with our museum practices in our programming, exhibits, and approach to consultation, the webs of relation and care embedded throughout our work; the personal is political.

In the face of funding cuts for arts and culture and a general lack of awareness or caring from the general public, museums have had to spend a lot of time thinking about resiliency and survival. This is especially true for small community or municipal museums, some of whom are just barely keeping their heads above water.

Enter: the community partnership. One of the best ways for a museum to practice resiliency is to make themselves more relevant within their community. Partnering and collaborating with other community organizations is mutually beneficial. It opens up the museum and the other organizations to new audiences, it encourages creative thinking, and it encourages the public to think about their own history in a new, intersectional way. Most importantly, it creates allies within the community, who are more likely to support the museum when it comes to advocating for themselves. It’s also a free or low-cost (though not necessarily low-effort) way to encourage the public to care about and engage with their local museum.

Abby Lizee of Maple Ridge Museum and Leanne Koehn of Ridge Meadows Recycling Society have collaborated to speak about the strengths and benefits of community partnerships, particularly the ones you wouldn’t expect. These two organizations have collaborated several times, including Earth Day celebrations, Repair Cafes, social media campaigns, and museum exhibits (they also started the AGM Social Club in order to encourage quorum at local non-profit AGMs). The presentation will talk about establishing their own partnership, how it has spread to other community organizations, and how this has led to a network of local cultural organizations coming together to collaborate and support each other. Speaking from experience, they will discuss how their partnership network has led to higher engagement at events and on social media, and has led to increased foot traffic to the museum.

Abby Lizee of Maple Ridge Museum and Leanne Koehn of Ridge Meadows Recycling Society want to give a presentation about the strengths and benefits of community partnerships, particularly the ones you wouldn’t expect. These two organizations have collaborated several times, including Earth Day celebrations, Repair Cafes, social media campaigns, and museum exhibits (they also started the AGM Social Club in order to encourage quorum at local non-profit AGMs). The presentation will talk about establishing their own partnership, how it has spread to other community organizations, and how this has led to a network of local cultural organizations coming together to collaborate and support each other. Speaking from experience, we will discuss how our partnership network has led to higher engagement at events and on social media, and has led to increased foot traffic to the museum.

We are hoping to have a Q&A in order to give space for other museums, particularly the small ones that often do not have much of a voice at these events, to talk about how to strengthen their connections to their own community and get themselves out there in a way that is maximum impact for minimum financial cost.

Volunteers are powerful partners who bring our stories to life. Join Charlene Dishaw for an interactive workshop focused on fresh ideas for retaining volunteers and strengthening existing retention strategies. Together, we’ll explore practical opportunities to elevate the volunteer experience and stand out as the volunteer opportunity of choice in your community. This is an active, participatory session—come ready to connect with colleagues, share ideas, and imagine new, creative ways to build lasting volunteer engagement.

This panel will cover the content, evolution, and impact of the Métis Culture Talks (MCT) program, a virtual workshop and learning series hosted by the Amelia Douglas Institute (ADI) in partnership with Métis Nation British Columbia (MNBC).

The program offers interactive sessions online that explore Métis culture, history, and contemporary and heritage artistic practices. Sessions are facilitated by a Métis artist, Elder, Knowledge Carrier, scholar, or cultural practitioners, and may include hands-on kit-based activities, presentations, storytelling, demonstrations, and group discussion. Topics range from beadwork, music, dance, and material culture to genealogy, language, and Métis history. The program is designed to be accessible, engaging, and welcoming for Métis people across British Columbia, including those who may be connecting with their culture for the first time. Sessions are open to MNBC Citizens and self-identified Métis people in BC.

The Amelia Douglas Institute’s Program Assistant (Laura Carpentier) will facilitate the panel with other ADI staff, including the ADI Manager (Thomas Long) and Cultural Coordinator (Hannah Denton), to highlight different aspects and staff perspectives of the program, from creation, to funding, to execution.

This presentation and panel will discuss how Métis Culture Talks fosters meaningful virtual community-building and cultural connection opportunities for Métis people spread across BC. Gathering online supports connection between participants, but also with Métis artists, Elders, and Knowledge Carriers, creating welcoming space for learning and relationship-building. This session will also reflect on participant feedback and experiences, including how paid opportunities for facilitation uplift Métis artists and cultural practitioners. We will discuss the successes and ongoing challenges of honouring Métis cultural protocols and practices in digital spaces and offer insight into what it means to gather for culture with care and intention in an online environment. Community-driven arts and heritage programming that combine traditional knowledge with contemporary approaches can inspire pride, strengthen identity, and create meaningful connections across generations.

Details coming soon.