Dr. Lucy Bell

Credentials

PhD

Biography

Dr. Sdahl Ḵ’awaas (Lucy Bell) is a Haida museologist with 30 years of experience grounded in Haida values and community leadership. She has co-led the return of hundreds of ancestors and belongings from museums around the world and co-authored both the Indigenous Repatriation Handbook and From Stealing to Healing: Repatriation and BC First Nations. Lucy called out systemic racism at the Royal BC Museum, an action that helped drive sector-wide conversations about decolonizing museum practice. She received the BC Reconciliation Award and the Sterling Prize for Controversy for this work. She recently completed her PhD, Tla Yahda: Haida Museology Makes Things Right, which offers a Haida-led framework for museology and was written as a love letter to her daughter, an emerging museologist. Lucy is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University, where she is advancing research on a national repatriation framework. She also serves on the Board of the Canadian Museums Association.