Heather George was appointed to the role of Executive Director of Woodland Cultural Centre (WCC) last week.

George, who has been working with WCC as the guest curator for the past year and a half, called the appointment a "whirlwind" experience. But she says she hopes that her ties to the community and experience with the centre and other organizations within the community will leave her ahead of the curve. George has previous work experience with organizations like Chiefswood National Historic Site and Six Nations Tourism.

Currently, she's working on her PhD in Haudenosaunee history with the focus on the different approaches to view practice to help understand how traditional values, languages and philosophies inform the work that gets done in cultural centres.

"What I'm focusing on is actually Haudenosaunee approaches to view practice. So I really want to understand how our values, philosophies and our language inform the work that we do in cultural centre's and how that might be a bit different than a lot of the common practices in the museum field and really the glam sector at large, so galleries, libraries, archives and museums." She said "woodland has always kind of been a leader in that work," she said.

George is excited to be able to share the work the she and the rest of the staff of WCC have been working on.

"It's really important for us to not just do this great work, but share the great work that we have done and that continue to do to our funders and to our donors, so that we can really revitalize Woodland and continue on this amazing path that we've been on for the last fifty years," she said.

The WCC is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and with that George says the museum hopes to continue showcase it's vast catalogs from the past but also introducing contemporary stories to be displayed. Recently, the WCC in partnership with the Art Gallery of Hamilton debuted their Radical Design Fashion Show. The event showcased Indigenous fashion designers from across Turtle Island.

"It's not necessarily moving away what we've done for the last fifty years but it's finding sort of new ways of doing that and new ways of providing access to all of this really beautiful and powerful material, culture and stories that we are care taking," she said.

George spoke on her hopes to be able to excite and engage community members, and to offer a space where they can have conversations whether that be celebratory or more complex ones.

"I think my main goal is to just have people be really excited and engaged with Woodland. I want people to know that Woodland is their space, people from our communities, and to see themselves reflected in the exhibition work that we do," she said. "I think that cultural centre's and museums play this really important role within society of being these spaces where we can have difficult conversations, we can have celebratory conversations. And especially for our communities I think cultural centre's play a really important role in healing from various traumas that our communities have experienced. I really believe that art is really important tool in that healing."

George took over as executive director of Woodland Cultural Centre when former executive director Janis Monture was appointed executive director and CEO of the Canadian Museums Association in February.

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