The project was co-founded by artist photographer Nancy Bleck, world-renowned mountaineer John Clarke and Squamish Nation Hereditary Chief Bill Williams in order to bring the public onto the land, in a contested part of the Squamish Nation territory in a non-violent way.
This part of the territory was known at the time as "Tree Farm License 38" (TFL38) and was threatened with logging.
The project ran out of the Roundhouse Community Centre in Vancouver, also founded in 1997, and was featured as one of its first programs, with Nancy Bleck their first artist in residence.
Originally meant to last one summer, the project ended up running for 10 years, involving 10,000 people, and ultimately was successful at preserving the area from logging, and bringing it under protection through the Squamish Nation Sacred Land Use Plan.
Picturing Transformation Nexw-áyantsut[2] was written by Katherine Dodds with Nancy Bleck and Chief Bill Williams and describes how the project helped not only protect the area from logging, but returned it to its ancestral name of Nexw-áyantsut, which means 'place of transformation' in the Squamish language.