Maureen Matthews is the Curator of Cultural Anthropology at the Manitoba Museum where her most recent exhibit "We Are All Treaty People", developed in collaboration with Manitoba First Nations elders, won a national award for exhibit excellence. In November 2017 Dr. Matthews received the Governor Generals History Award for Museum Excellence an outreach project Spirit Lines and an International Guardians of Culture and Lifeways Award from the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums for the same language and literacy project. Before joining the museum, Dr. Matthews worked at CBC radio and over a period of more than 20 years won five Canadian Association of Journalism awards for Investigative Journalism. She built her current museum anthropology practice on journalistic projects which emphasized the importance of native languages and has used audio to bring out the wisdom and humour of Anishinaabe, Anishinini and Ininiwak peoples. Her theoretical work has a dual Anishinaabe and anthropological focus bringing together strands of Anishinaabe philosophical and metaphorical thinking with contemporary anthropological work on the nature of personhood and the animacy and agency of artefacts. Her recent book, Naamiwan’s Drum: the Story of a Contested Repatriation of Anishinaabe Artefacts, won the 2017 Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction at the Manitoba Book Awards.