Healing & Reconciliation Institute

Maija West

Innovations Director

Maija has worked in nearly every public and private sector in almost every industry in her life; that coupled with her legal training and background allows her to be highly effective as a leadership coach and facilitator. She has the ability to precisely and clearly guide her clients towards actual feasible solutions. She loves to help her clients to fulfill their passions, while tempering these goals in reality. Her role in this work is to advocate for reconciliation as a tool for social change, and help White and Euro identified ancestry folks connect to their personal role in this new curriculum.

Briana Bellamy

Theater and Wilderness  Director

A deep commitment to celebrating the diversity of human experience informs Briana’s work both in the U.S. and abroad. Trained as a Professional Integral Coach, her coaching is also influenced by years of immersing herself in diverse worldviews around the globe. This has led her to explore modalities of leadership development through somatic practices, nature-connected inquiry, adult development, mindfulness, and, of course, cross-cultural communication and relationship building. Through this work, she remains committed to supporting others to step more fully into their own unique brilliance.

Siana Sonoquie

Creative Director

Siana is the founder of Hoop Creative Projects. Hoop Creative Projects is a visual design company that provides design services for socially minded projects and non-profits. Through their work, they fund an ongoing series of non-profit projects bringing artists, entrepreneurs and educators together with underserved communities to increase access and empower those in need.

Louellyn White

Reparations Director 

Louellyn White is Mohawk from Akwesasne. She is an Associate Professor of First Peoples Studies at Concordia University in Montreal where she focuses on Indigenous education, language revitalization, Indigenous community based participatory research, Indigenous research methodologies, and residential and boarding school history. Her book, "Free to Be Mohawk: Indigenous Education at the Akwesasne Freedom School," is centered around Indigenous holistic education. Her recent research on the Carlisle Indian School is informed by her grandfather and other family members experiences of forced assimilation. She published a chapter about her family in the collection, "Carlisle Indian School: Histories, Memories, and Reclamations." Her forthcoming article in the Journal of American Indian Education is centered around the inter-generational impacts of Carlisle and how descendants are re-narrating boarding school stories in their own ways. She is also consulting with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) for whom she is researching burial locations of Carlisle students. Louellyn has an MA in Counseling Psychology and has worked in the fields of experiential education, wilderness education, service learning, and Indigenous mental health. She grew up in her traditional homelands of the Mohawk Valley in Central New York and lived in the southwest for fifteen years before returning to the northeast.