T'uy't'tanat Cease Wyss appears on the City of Vancouver's final 2026 candidate list for Park Board, with ballot number 203. The City records the affiliation as COPE.
The party page describes Wyss as an Indigenous matriarch of the Skwxwu7mesh, Sto:lo and Hawaiian people. The party page says Wyss has practised for 30 years as an ethnobotanist, a person who studies how communities use plants, and as an artist, activist and educator. The party page says Wyss works to share Indigenous customs and teachings for cultural and environmental preservation.
Daily Hive's published ballot order lists Cease Wyss at number 203 for Park Board with COPE.
COPE nominated its 2026 slate in May 2026. Mike Howell of Vancouver Is Awesome named Cease Wyss, described as an Indigenous ethnobotanist, as one of COPE's park board candidates.
Charlie Smith wrote in Pancouver in March 2025 that Cease Wyss is an Indigenous matriarch of Skwxwu7mesh, Sto:lo and Kanaka Maoli descent, with Irish-Metis and Swiss heritage, and works as a multimedia artist, ethnobotanist, educator, weaver, beekeeper and curator.
Wikipedia's article describes an interdisciplinary practice of more than thirty years covering visual art, fibre arts, ethnobotany, storytelling and community education, and names Raven and Hummingbird Tea Co as a business co-owned by Cease Wyss.
Wikipedia records three awards: the City of Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award in 2010, an honorary doctorate from Emily Carr University in 2022, and a VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation in 2024. Pancouver reports the VIVA Award carried a $15,000 prize.
COPE's park board page says Cease Wyss has thirty years of work as an ethnobotanist, artist, activist and educator, centred on Indigenous plant restoration and cultural preservation.
COPE's own May 12, 2026 nomination release names Wyss among three Park Board nominees, alongside Sacia Burton and Jamie Han, chosen at a May 11 meeting at the Rio Theatre in East Vancouver. COPE added a fourth Park Board candidate, Tamiko Suzuki, in a separate announcement in August 2026.
An October 8, 2014 Georgia Straight article reports that Wyss ran for Park Board with COPE in that year's election too, chosen by the party's Indigenous caucus for a seat COPE had reserved for an Indigenous candidate. She told the paper she wanted to use Vancouver's parks to build a stronger relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the city. The City of Vancouver's official 2014 results, read through an Internet Archive copy, show she received 21,249 votes and placed 17th of 31 candidates for seven seats, so she was not elected. The seventh elected commissioner, Michael Wiebe, received 55,607 votes.
Wikipedia's article, read in full, gives Wyss's ancestral name, T'uy't'tanat, as meaning "woman who travels by canoe to gather medicines for all people," and records a 2017 to 2019 public art project, A Constellation of Remediation, made with artist Anne Riley.
The City of Vancouver's own Public Art Program page confirms A Constellation of Remediation as a two-year project selected through the program's 2017 Artist-Initiated Public Call. It planted Indigenous remediation gardens on vacant lots and at the Strathcona Park fieldhouse, with the artists working alongside City and Parks staff.
221A's own project page for the New Growth garden at 271 Union Street states Wyss's fellowship ran from June 2018 to August 2019, and a related post on the same site records a public welcoming and blanket ceremony for the garden, led by Wyss, on September 7, 2019. The project was supported in part by the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation.
The Museum of Vancouver's own page for its Unity Indigenous Plant Garden credits Wyss for the garden's design and planting, and separately thanks a named Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation staff member for supplying the Indigenous plants used in it. The page gives no date for when the garden was completed.
Mike Howell of Vancouver Is Awesome interviewed Wyss for a September 28, 2026 article on the small number of Indigenous candidates in this election. She told him it is hard for Indigenous people to get nominated and to win, and named racism and the cost of running for office as reasons. The article reports that, if elected, she wants to focus on protecting parks and on keeping community centres and pools at a reasonable cost, because low-income people depend on them.
The same article reports that Wyss won an artist residency at the Stanley Park Field House in 2023. The Vancouver Art Gallery's event page says the residency runs for four years and that she is a resident artist there now. The Roundhouse Community Centre's page for the exhibition On Unceded Territory, which runs from September 25 to October 4, 2026 and shows her work, describes the Field House cultural residency as part of the Vancouver Park Board's Fieldhouse Activation Program.
The Vancouver and District Labour Council's endorsement list, dated June 25, 2026, names Wyss among the seven Park Board candidates it endorses.
The City's Park Board candidate list gives her Instagram account, @cedarcopperwoman, as her social media link. Two posts on that account in September 2026, shared jointly with other accounts, one of them COPE's, list the COPE Park Board team's aims for shorelines and creeks.
voche.me assembled this profile from the official candidate list and the campaign material linked under Sources. The campaign has not been contacted, and no candidate-supplied content appears on this page.
