2022 Jeanne Clarke Awards

Service Award Winner

Kym Gouchie was honoured with the 2022 Jeanne Clarke Service Award. Gouchie is a multidisciplinary Indigenous musician, visual artist, and playwright. She uses her gifts to tell the stories, struggles, and strengths of her ancestors, bringing awareness to Northern BC and the world through her songs and spoken words. Her passions are far reaching and include being a cultural liaison for a multitude of organizations. She is an incredible storyteller who weaves language learnings into her music. This is demonstrated by the interactive videos she made in partnership with School District 57 that help to preserve Lheidli T’enneh history, culture, Dakelh language, and music in a genuine and playful way that gets kids dancing and singing along.

Publication Award Winner

The 2022 Publication Award was bestowed to Wendy Proverbs for her novel Aggie and Mudgy: The Journey of Two Kaska Dena Children, published in 2021. Proverbs’ novel focuses not on the sisters’ experience in residential school, but on the harrowing 1,600-kilometre expedition that took the sisters from their home in Daylu (Lower Post) to Lejac Residential School on the shores of Fraser Lake. The girls, aged eight and six, travel by riverboat, truck, paddle wheeler, steamship and train. Aggie and Mudgy offers a glimpse into the act of being physically uprooted and transported far away from loved ones. It captures the breakdown of family by the forces of colonialism, but also celebrates the survival and perseverance of the descendants of residential school survivors in re-establishing the bonds of family.

Publication Finalists

A mountain of change, 1960-2020 : Hudson Bay Mountain, Smithers, BC by Lynn MacNeil, Jeannette Malkow, Connie Scott, Debi Lyn Smith.

Wagon road north : the saga of the Cariboo Gold Rush by Art Downs

British Columbia in flames : stories from a blazing summer by Claudia Cornwall

Aggie and Mudgy : the journey of two Kaska Dena children by Wendy Proverbs

In my own moccasins : a memoir of resilience by Helen Knott

Murders on the Skeena : true crime in the old Canadian West, 1884-1914 by Geoff Mynett