David R. Gray is a Fitzhenry and Whiteside author.

Nancy J. Turner is an ethnobotanist, and Distinguished Professor Emerita, School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, Canada. She has worked with First Nations elders and cultural specialists in northwestern North America for over 50 years, helping to document, retain and promote their traditional knowledge of plants and environments, including Indigenous foods, materials and traditional medicines. Her two-volume book, Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge (July, 2014; McGill-Queen’s University Press), integrates her long term research. She has authored or co-authored/co-edited 30 other books, including: Plants of Haida Gwaii; The Earth’s Blanket; “Keeping it Living” (with Doug Deur); Saanich Ethnobotany (with Richard Hebda), and Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples, and over 150 book chapters and papers. Her latest edited book is Plants, People and Places: the Roles of Ethnobotany and Ethnoecology in Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rights in Canada and Beyond (2020). She has received a number of awards for her work, including membership in Order of British Columbia (1999) and the Order of Canada (2009), honorary degrees from University of British Columbia, University of Northern British Columbia and Vancouver Island and Simon Fraser Universities.

Robert D. Turner has been researching, photographing and writing about transportation history for over forty years. His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Canadian Railroad Historical Association’s Lifetime Turner Achievement Award and the American Association for State and Local History’s Award of Merit. A retired heritage consultant and a curator emeritus at the Royal British Museum, Turner has travelled widely around the world photographing the last steam railways and early industries while documenting the people, places and stories of this disappearing history and culture. He is receiving an honorary doctorate degree from Simon Fraser University in June 2022. He lives near Nanaimo, BC.