I’m a rural mostly white settler horse nerd living in the Kootenay mountains, where I work and play at the intersections of land-based futurism, anti-colonial support work and bio-psycho-social wellness. I’ve worked with horses as a job since I was 10, hold a PhD in Anthrozoology and recently finished a post-doc in Indigenizing Equine Assisted Wellness, working with Syilx Okanagan folks in Canada. I’ve also worked in youth mental health, wildland firefighting, Indigenous land-management policy and have a side hustle in niche somatic life-coaching.

Particularly relevant to NCC: I hold an Equine Assisted Psychotherapy accreditation from E.A.G.A.L.A. and have had the honour of being schooled in anti-colonial relational perspectives by a handful of Indigenous North American “Horse Medicine” providers and wild horse stewards (mostly Syilx, Umatilla, Nimiipuu, and Oglala Sioux). While I don’t purport to use Indigenous methods, this has helped me learn to encourage folks to consider wellness in the context of a network of relations with land and community. I love supporting people to step into and reflect on their embodied connections to ecosystem, culture, human and non-human others and themselves through spending time exploring relationships with horses. And it’s often pretty fun. Joy and play are resistance.

As a queer, neurodivergent, economically marginal first generation (mostly) Irish immigrant, I offer a sensitivity to the structural oppression, as well as the individual internal challenges that are at play when we engage with therapeutic modalities. I’m a graduate of the NCC Camp and believe that diverse people stepping into connected and caretaking relationships with land is crucial to our collective survival.