SFU professor and archaeologist Dana Lepofsky’s commitment to research partnerships with First Nations communities has earned her SFU’s inaugural Warren Gill Award for Community Impact 2017.
She has spent more than two decades at SFU. Her teaching and research focus on the relationships of Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples to their environments, in the past and the present.
She was among the first archaeologists in the region to include First Nations communities as equal partners in research programs, leading to strengthened capacities in these communities for deciphering, appreciating, conserving, and educating future generations about their past.
Significantly, First Nations communities with which she has worked supported her nomination for the Gill award. They include the Gitga’ata of northern coastal B.C., the Heiltsuk of the Central Coast, the Tla’amin of the Sunshine Coast, and the Sts’ailes of the Harrison River in the Fraser Valley.
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