LISTENING ONCE AGAIN TO OUR GREAT MOTHER
By Elder Bill Jones and Karen Moe
8 Oct – 7pm
Listening Once Again to Our Great Mother
By Elder Bill Jones and Karen Moe
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Author Talk: Thursday 8 October, 7pm
Events Pavilion at the Sooke Region Museum
“Elder Bill Jones breaks our hearts open with his deeply personal exposé of the ongoing trauma inflicted on Indigenous people and their beautiful ancestral forests.” — Suzanne Simard, author of When the Forest Breathes
“Inspirational … essential teaching for our time.” — Elizabeth May, O.C., M.P.
An inspiring personal transformation through rediscovery of Indigenous self.
“I was lost before I was born”: the starting point of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones’ lifelong journey of decolonization. “You were all Indigenous once”: the starting point for ending a world based on exploitation and greed.
In 2020–2021, settlers and First Nations people held what became Canada’s largest act of civil disobedience — the Fairy Creek Blockades — in Port Renfrew, British Columbia. During this fight to save some of the province’s and the world’s last remaining old-growth forest, the protesters experienced a collective transformation and were reacquainted with our Great Mother. As Elder Bill sat in a tent during a West Coast storm at the height of the Blockades, he experienced the final phase of his personal decolonization when he had a realization that has informed his life ever since.
Weaving together the stories of Elder Bill’s personal life and those of his ancestors with Elder teachings, settler feminism, and the story of the Blockades, Listening Once Again to Our Great Mother shares wisdom that will inspire readers to reach their own self-awakening, now and for generations to come..
PAST AUTHOR TALKS
A FALSE AND FATAL CLAIM: A LANE WINSLOW MYSTERY
By Iona Whishaw
29 July – 7pm
A False and Fatal Claim: A Lane Winslow Mystery
By Iona Whishaw
Publisher: Touchwood Editions
Author Talk: Wednesday 29 July, 7pm
Events Pavilion at the Sooke Region Museum
About the Author:
Iona Whishaw has been a youth worker, social worker, teacher and an award winning High School Principal, who continued with her writing throughout her working life. Receiving her Masters in Creative writing from UBC, Iona has published short fiction, poetry, poetry translation and one children’s book, Henry and the Cow Problem. The Lane Winslow mystery series is her first foray into adult fiction.
Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific
By Coll Thrush
Thursday 22 January – 7pm
Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific
By Coll Thrush
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Author Talk: Thursday 22 January, 7pm
Events Pavilion at the Sooke Region Museum
In this provocative retelling of shipwreck tales from the coasts of Vancouver Island, Washington, and Oregon, historian and author Coll Thrush uses maritime misfortune to think about larger themes of history on the Northwest Coast. From a Spanish galleon wrecked in 1693 to an empty tanker broken on the shore in 1999, Wrecked is a new history of an iconic element of regional history, mythology, and identity.
Books will be available for purchase and signing after the presentation.
About the Author:
Coll Thrush (born 1970) is a settler historian who was raised in Auburn, Washington, in the treaty territory of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe. A graduate of Fairhaven College at Western Washington University in Bellingham and the University of Washington in Seattle, Coll is professor of history and associate faculty in critical Indigenous studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, on unceded Musqueam territory. In 2021, Coll was named a UBC Killam teaching laureate. He is also the founding co-editor of the Indigenous Confluences book series at the University of Washington Press.
Coll is a scholar of Indigenous and colonial histories, usually with a focus on the northwest coast of North America (but including a major diversion to London, England). Notions of place and belonging animate virtually all his projects. What, for example, does it mean to have an allegiance to a territory in the context of empire and settler colonialism? And how do the stories we tell about our shared pasts in place give meaning to our collective presents and potential futures? Whether writing about Seattle or London, ghosts or earthquakes, food or shipwrecks, Coll is concerned with crafting engaging narratives that examine place, power, and meaning.
Poetry Reading, The Wreck of the SS Valencia
Opening the event, we are pleased to feature a poetry reading of the heritage poem “The Wreck of the SS Valencia” by Doni Eve, which debuted at the museum’s 2025 Sooke Spook event, among several poems performed by Sooke Writers’ Collective authors.
About the Author: Doni Eve
DK Eve is a multiple award-winning poet and author inspired by the people and places of southern Vancouver Island in T’Sou-ke traditional territory. Her work is featured in eleven Sooke Writers’ Collective anthologies, the latest Writings from the Living Edge (Sooke Writers’ Collective, 2025) as well as Reflex Press (2022 UK), Archetype Journal (2022 Toronto), Miramichi Flash (2022 NB), Subjectiv journal (2021 Portland, OR), and many others.
PAST TALKS
