Annual CONFERENCE & EVENTS

Pricing & Registration

Pricing
Full conference	$375
Concession	$250
Banquet only	$50
Pre-conference Workshop	$100

Concession Pricing is for:

• Indigenous Elders
• Full time students
• Volunteers of the Museum of the Cariboo-Chilcotin and BC Cowboy Hall of Fame Society

Included in full conference registration:

• All presentations, including keynote
• Field trip
• Film screening
• 1 banquet ticket 

Optional:

• Pre-conference workshop (12 spots)
• Vendor table
• Extra banquet tickets 

Free to attend:

• Annual General Meeting

Schedule at a Glance

Note: The schedule may be subject to change. 

Thursday, May 1	Friday, May 2	Saturday, May 3	Sunday, May 4
	8:30 am morning coffee	8:30 am morning coffee
	9:00 am presentation	9:00 am presentation
	10:15 am break	10:15 am break	10:00 am film screening
	10:30 am presentation	10:30 am presentation
	11:45 am lunch on your own	11:45 am lunch on your own
1:00 pm workshop	1:00 pm keynote presentation	1:00 pm field trip
	2:15 pm AGM
	3:30 pm presentation
	4:30 pm dinner on your own
6:30 pm reception	6:30 pm discussion	6:30 pm awards banquet

Pre-conference workshop

1:00 - 4:00 pm
Central Cariboo Arts Centre
12 participants max
$100

Storage Best Practices for Heritage Collections

Join Anna Irwin, Collections Manager from the Royal BC Museum, as she shares preventative conservation tips and best practices for storing your artifacts, treasures, and inherited belongings. During the three-hour workshop, you'll learn what supplies ensure optimal preservation without breaking your budget and you will have a chance to make your own storage box out of coroplast, customized to your object’s unique needs and dimensions. Ask questions, network, and share best practices, tips, and tricks. 

Evening event

6:30 - 8:30 pm
Museum

Welcome Reception

Receive a warm welcome from our hosts at the Museum of the Cariboo-Chilcotin and BC Cowboy Hall of Fame Society. Connect with other delegates and locals while visiting the museum, cowboy hall of fame, and visitor centre. Enjoy refreshments while the host committee will share their extensive knowledge of ranching life with an interactive branding demonstration.  

Pick up your delegate package at our registration table. 

Presentation

9:15 - 10:15 am
Museum

Francophone Ranching Histories

In 2019, the Société historique francophone de la Colombia-Britannique received a grant from Digital Museums Canada (DMC) to launch onsite research in the Cariboo and the Okanagan on the history of Francophones who launched ranches in those regions in the 1860s-70s, to hold oral history interviews with the descendants of these families, and to create from the results a bilingual digital exhibition available on the website of DMC, in both official languages.

Maurice Guibord, the Society’s Executive Director, will share findings from this research, which includes new and sometimes staggering facts that came to light where members of mixed ancestry triumphed over a succession of difficult paths.  

Presentation

10:30 - 11:30 am
Museum

The Importance of Repatriation

This presentation will show the importance of museum repatriations to Indigenous communities, featuring the 2024 Museum of Vancouver repatriation to the Tŝilhqot’in Nation. As part of this presentation will be a screening of a 15-minute documentary.  

Shane Doddridge is the Cultural Heritage Coordinator for the Tŝilhqot’in National Government. His work at TNG has been focused on bringing a holistic approach to heritage management, emphasizing balance between protection, understanding, celebration, and practices of both tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

Shane will be joined by Loretta Jeff Combs who is a Women's Council Representative for Tlesqox and currently serves as the Chief's Assistant for her community. Her work focuses on advancing Tsilhqot'in sovereignty, preserving culture, and fostering community well-being through policy, education, and traditional practices.

Photograph courtesy of Jeremy Williams.

Keynote Presentation

1:00 - 2:00 pm
Museum

Phyllis Webstad, Orange Shirt Society

As Founder of Orange Shirt Day and Ambassador for Orange Shirt Society, Phyllis Webstad facilitates dialogue around the Indian Residential School system and creates space for education, awareness and healing. Orange Shirt Day – National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, recognized annually on September 30, is a day to honour residential school survivors and their families and to remember those that never made it home.  It is a day for people to reflect, educate themselves and commit to Truth and Reconciliation.

The Orange Shirt Society was created as a legacy to Phyllis’ Orange Shirt Day. The non-profit organization is located in Williams Lake, British Columbia, and the board of directors consists of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous members. Phyllis works full-time with the society.

Over Phyllis’s career she has acquired diplomas in both Business Administration from Nicola Valley Institute of Technology and Accounting from Thompson Rivers University (TRU). She received the TRU Distinguished Alumni Award in 2017 for her unprecedented impact on local, provincial, national and international communities through the sharing of her orange shirt story.

Meeting

2:15 - 3:15 pm
Museum

Annual General Meeting of the BC Historical Federation

This is the business meeting of the membership of the BC Historical Federation. The meeting will be live streamed for members around the province. 

Presentation

3:30 - 4:30 pm
Museum

The routes of the fur trade from New Caledonia to the Pacific, 1821 to 1864

The Hudson’s Bay Company developed a unique system of transportation from its northern BC fur trade posts in what became known as New Caledonia to its southern terminus, originally Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, then later Fort Langley on the Fraser River. Ken Favrholdt will use historical maps to show the various routes this system used, while providing excerpts from the HBC fur trade journals describing the travel ways between 1821 and 1864, after which new routes such as the Cariboo Wagon Road, supplanted the fur trade system. He will touch on the use of both the Fraser River and what has come to be called the HBC Brigade Trail through the interior of British Columbia and will focus on the role of Fort Alexandria which served as a link between the river and trail parts of this fur trade system. 

Ken is the Archivist for Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc and has worked as a researcher for several First Nations with a focus on Indigenous trails. Ken has managed other museums including the Osoyoos and District Museum and the Claresholm and District Museum in Alberta, and he has held executive positions with the BC Museums Association and the Archives Association of BC. 

Evening event

6:30 pm
Museum

Conversations in Chinese Canadian History

Sponsored by the Chinese Canadian Museum. Description coming soon. 

Presentation

9:00 - 10:00 am
Museum

Interim Report of Findings the St. Joseph’s Mission Indian Residential School and Onward Ranch Investigation

Description coming soon. 

Presentation

10:30 - 11:30 am
Museum

Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching and Rural Living

Marion McKinnon Crook received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Seattle University and worked as a public health nurse in the Cariboo until 1986 and in the Fraser Valley until 1989. Those were the days of treacherous roads, severe and dangerous weather and wide-spread populations. Her original nursing district encompassed 3600 square miles. During her nursing career in the Cariboo, she wrote and published with trade publishers: ten novels for young adult and middle grade readers. She also researched, wrote and published non-fiction around teen problems such as suicide, eating disorders and adoption.

Marion achieved a Masters degree in Liberal Studies from Simon Fraser University and a PhD in Education from UBC. She taught nursing at university for eleven years but is now back writing full time. Writing as Emma Dakin, her latest adult mystery with Camel Press Storms in the Cotswolds, the sixth in The British Book Tour Mysteries. Her memoirs Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching and Rural living and Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin have proven to be a popular read. She is presently working on a biography, Bloomsbury to Barkerville: The Life of Miss Florence Wilson. 

Field Trip

1:00 - 4:00 pm
Meet at Museum

Sugar Cane Reserve and 153 Mile Store

Delegates will be welcomed on board a chartered bus that will make two stops where they will learn more about the unique history, culture, and heritage of the region. 

We will stop at Sugar Cane Reserve for a guided tour by the Williams Lake First Nation of the grounds of the former St. Joseph's Mission Residential School.

The second stop will be to the 153 Mile House, 20 minutes outside of Williams Lake. In the early 1900's, the 153 Mile Store was built by Italian settler Louis Crosina and supplied food and goods to gold prospectors along the Gold Rush Trail. We’ll meet with Alison Patenaude whose family has lived on and operated the 153 Mile Ranch for three generations.

If you do not wish to attend the bus trip, visit shops and restaurants of Williams Lake or take a self-guided walking tour of the city's murals. 

Evening Event

6:30 - 9:00 pm
Chances Signal Point

Gala Awards Banquet

The Gala Awards Banquet is a celebratory way to wrap up the conference. Over three hours you will network with colleagues and new friends while enjoying a buffet dinner and having an opportunity to place a bid on local history books in the Society’s silent auction. The awards presentation acknowledges recipients of BCHF prizes like the appreciation, recognition, and merit awards, scholarship winners, Centennial Legacy Fund grant recipients, and culminates with the announcement of the 2025 Lieutenant Governor's Medal for Historical Writing recipient.

Sunday, May 4, 2025

Film Screening

10:00 am
Paradise Cinemas

SUGARCANE

A stunning tribute to the resilience of Indigenous people and their way of life – SUGARCANE, the documentary from Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie – is an epic cinematic portrait of a community during a moment of international reckoning. Set amidst a ground-breaking investigation into abuse and death at St. Joseph's Indian residential school in Williams Lake, the film empowers participants to break cycles of intergenerational trauma by bearing witness to painful, long-ignored truths – and the love that endures within their families despite the revelation of genocide.  

SUGARCANE premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Directing Award: U.S. Documentary and has since garnered over a dozen awards. It is currently nominated for an Academy Award.