Opening Keynote: Matika Wilbur
Matika Wilbur, a visual storyteller from the Swinomish and Tulalip peoples of coastal Washington, for the past five years has been traveling and photographing Indian Country in pursuit of one goal: To Change the Way We See Native America.
Matika began her career in fashion and commercial work in Los Angeles after completing the prestigious Brooks Institute of Photography. Though in high demand professionally, Matika realized that she wanted a different path as a photographer: to create portrait art that deeply communicated people’s lives and experiences. She was especially drawn to remarkable personalities from the nation’s indigenous communities, who typically in massive media and the popular consciousness have been grossly neglected or stereotyped.
Matika chose to devote herself to photography as a creator and messenger, soon producing multiple acclaimed exhibitions in leading museums and other venues of her striking portraits of Pacific Northwest and other Native peoples.
She also began offering Native youth of her own community training and inspiration to explore and create visual art as a certified k-12 teacher; but she found that the representation of First Peoples in traditional curricula and the media as “leathered and feathered”, dying races undermined her students’ sense of identity and potential. Thus began Project 562’s mission to photograph and collect stories of Native Americans from each federally-recognized Indian tribe in the United States to create comprehensive visual curricula and publications representing contemporary Native America.
Matika has in this endeavor visited members of over 300 sovereign nations throughout 40 states, from Tlingits in Alaska to the Pima in Arizona, Pomos in California to Wampanoags on Cape Cod. Through her lens, we are able to see the diversity, vibrancy and realness of Indian Country, and in seeing, challenge and surpass stereotypical representations and refresh the national conversation about contemporary Native America.
Visit Matika’s website to learn more about her projects.
Closing Keynote: Rhiana Gunn-Wright
“As an architect of the Green New Deal, Rhiana has presented one of the most important policy initiatives to address, arguably, the most crucial issues in the world right now.” —Chris Benner, director of the Institute for Social Transformation.
In 2019, Rhiana Gunn-Wright was included in Time magazine’s list of the “15 Women Leading the Fight Against Climate Change.” She is currently the Director of Climate Policy at the Roosevelt Institute, and a member of the Evergreen Advisory Board. Rhiana started a career in public policy after graduating from Yale magna cum laude in 2011. In the summer of 2013, she served as a White House policy intern in First Lady Michelle Obama’s Office, and in 2015, she became a Design Research Fellow at Educational Credit Management Corporation in Minneapolis. Rhiana also worked as the Policy Analyst for the Detroit Health Department headed by Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, and then served as the Policy Director for El-Sayed’s 2018 Michigan gubernatorial campaign. After El-Sayed’s loss, she joined New Consensus, a D.C.-based think tank founded by Demond Drummer, a Chicago-based grassroots organizer, and Saikat Chakrabarti, former Chief of Staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
As the policy lead for New Consensus, Rhiana was one of the intellectual architects of the Green New Deal. In February 2019, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts formally introduced a non-binding congressional resolution which called for a ten-year Green New Deal plan to tackle climate change, create clean energy jobs while promoting social and environmental justice. In April 2021, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey reintroduced the resolution to the congress.
Rhiana’s senior thesis, “Breaking the Brood Mare: Representation, Welfare Policy and Teen Pregnancy in New Haven,” earned several awards at Yale, including the Steere Prize in Women’s Studies. In 2013, she received the Rhodes Scholarship from the University of Oxford, where she obtained an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy in 2015. Rhiana is the author of the critically acclaimed essay “The Green New Deal for All of Us,” and she has written pieces for the New York Times and TeenVogue.