Photo by Katie Rainbow via Pexels

On a cloudy February day in Edmonton, Alberta, a giant trans pride flag flies over Dr. Wilbert McIntyre Park, marking the meeting place for a rally in support of the trans community. It’s days after Premier Danielle Smith, in a seven-minute video posted online, announced the most restrictive gender policies in Canada under the guise of “preserving choice for children and youth.” Alongside my 15-year-old daughter, who has many non-binary friends at school, and my best friend, whose child is gender diverse, I join the growing stream of people heading to the gazebo at the centre of the park.

The crowd eventually balloons to over 1,000 people as we wait to hear from the speakers—politicians, Two Spirit Elders, and organizations fighting for trans rights and reminding us to celebrate trans joy. Everywhere are Pride and trans colours and handmade cardboard signs. Some are cheekier than others, like the one that says, Someone come get your ‘Auntie’ Marlaina, she’s harassing the youth again. Marlaina is the premier’s given first name, but she prefers to go by Danielle—an irony she failed to appreciate while telling Alberta’s youth that all name and pronoun changes at school need to be approved by their parents.

While it’s a scary time for young trans and gender-diverse kids and their families, protests like the one happening today show how much solidarity there is in the community, letting these students know they’re not alone. There’s also a clear message that, no matter what policy the province tries to implement, those who know and love them will not stop seeing them for who they are. All around us, clusters of teachers hold signs saying they will never out their students. We run into the parents of a trans kid who lives in our neighbourhood and have a big group hug.

We’re all in need of comfort. At their AGM in November 2023, the United Conservative Party (UCP) overwhelmingly adopted three policies all related to “parental choice.” An opt-in consent for “any subjects of a religious or sexual nature,” including enrolment in extracurriculars or distribution of instructional materials relating to them; one supporting parents’ rights to be informed of and in charge of all decisions to do with all services paid for by the province; and the requirement for parental consent for name or pronoun changes for anyone under 16.

The UCP government wants to take things even further. They are proposing legislation to restrict gender-affirming healthcare for minors—no puberty blockers for anyone under 15 years of age and no gender-affirming surgeries for anyone under 18.

In her video, Smith said that gender-affirming care “poses a risk to [children’s] futures that I, as premier, am not comfortable permitting in our province.” It’s horrifying to know that Smith believes her feelings override actual medical evidence and best practices, or that parents, doctors and minor patients need her permission to choose the right treatment plan for any health concern.

There is a real fear, echoed by many health-care associations and gender-supportive services across Canada, that these policies will result in more harm to this vulnerable and at-risk community. In the Canadian Paediatric Society’s position statement on caring for trans and gender-diverse youth, they clearly state that adolescents who have access to gender-affirming medications have “lower odds of suicidal ideation over the life course.” Denying trans and gender-diverse youth access to the care they need when they need it is the real risk to these children’s futures.

Regardless of Smith’s position on the matter, many caring adults know this, and are fighting for students’ rights to be themselves. In a powerful member statement on the first day of the spring legislature session, Brooks Arcand-Paul, Alberta New Democrat MLA for Edmonton-West Henday and a Two Spirit person, stood proudly, wearing a floral and rainbow ribbon skirt gifted to him by his community, and condemned these policies and the divisiveness they are stoking.

Arcand-Paul says he’s pleased that many Albertans and organizations like labour unions are coming together to support the trans community. The vice president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association spoke at the rally in February, and the United Steelworkers, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees and the Canadian Union of Public Employees all came out with strongly worded statements denouncing the proposed policies.

But Arcand-Paul also warns, “if this government intends to take rights away from one group, it’s certainly not going to stop there.” He says Albertans need to continue to contact their MLAs and voice their concerns about the proposed policies. “Sometimes we say something once and think it’s good enough, but we have to keep pushing the gas on this one and we can’t lose steam.” Arcand-Paul suggests people donate to organizations like Skipping Stone and Egale Canada, who are establishing legal advocacy funds and gearing up to challenge these policies in the courts if necessary.

As we left the rally, I still had the progressive Pride flag pinned to my jacket. We headed to the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market for a pre departure coffee. Within minutes, three people stopped me, curious about the flag and the rally. I gladly answered their questions. It made me realize how powerful the simple act of showing up can be—and that we can’t assume everyone knows what’s happening in Alberta politics, or that they don’t care.

The queer and trans community have been fighting for their rights for a long time, but for some of us, this is new territory. It’s imperative that progressive Albertans continue to show up and commit to defending the Charter and human rights of all people, and to keep the pressure on this government with individual calls and letters, attendance at rallies and protests, and donations to the grassroots organizations leading these actions.

Given their track record, it’s hard to say if these actions will be enough to force the UCP government to change its course. But we have to try.

Image by Hendra via Adobe Stock

On October 7, 2023, I was just about three months pregnant. As a genocide unfolded before our eyes in the weeks that followed, I reflected a lot on the parallel lives mothers live on both sides of this dystopian world.

Like many others, my social media feed exposed me to countless images of the Israeli military’s atrocities in Palestine. Images of shrapnel seared into the bodies of innocent Gazans are seared into my brain like scars: a woman silently mourning as she tightly hugs a child-sized body bag. A damaged incubator containing shrivelling babies. A girl hanging limp over the window of her destroyed home. Wide-eyed toddlers shaking uncontrollably as they begin to process the trauma that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Many of these images were censored, black squares politely asking me whether I still wanted to view the photos that they concealed. Apparently their contents were too heinous to set eyes on, and yet not heinous enough to end in reality. There was always the occasional image that slipped by uncensored. In those moments, I wished I had not logged on. I cried often. I was pregnant, but these tears were not hormonal. They were human. I often had to force myself to move away from the screen to limit the horrors I was viscerally absorbing, as if to protect the baby that was living through me.

It was an unusual time to be pregnant, to be growing a new life as I witnessed the lives of others being ended so mercilessly. Over the span of three months of genocide, 20,000 babies were born in Gaza. As I planned for my son’s future, over 16,000 children were killed, futures completely obliterated. Of the nearly 1.1 million children in Gaza, those that survived now faced malnutrition, disease, physical disability, and psychological trauma. As I received excellent care in Toronto through regular prenatal appointments, I read about the horrific and life-threatening conditions that 50,000 expectant mothers in Gaza endured, birthing in unsanitary conditions on rubble-filled floors with limited access to medication. As I felt the pain from the stitches of my C-section for weeks, I remembered the mothers who were forced to have emergency C-sections with no anesthesia. I cannot conceive of their unfathomable pain and the trauma that will forever be bound to the memories of how they welcomed their babies into the world. As one mother from Gaza, Um Raed, told Al Jazeera, “Since the birth, I’ve not known whether I should be focusing on my contractions or on the sound of warplanes overhead. Should I be worrying about my baby, or should I be afraid of whatever attacks are happening at that moment?”

Though my pregnancy felt challenging, my baby boy arrived, healthy and present. When I caressed and gently wrapped his little body in soft swaddles, I kept getting intrusive flashbacks of those babies whose tiny bodies were maimed before their first birthdays, and of those who did not even reach this milestone at all, wrapped in white shrouds. While I had the privilege of enjoying my baby’s first winter through a festive holiday season, I also got chills thinking about the infants in Gaza who have frozen to death.

I often wondered about the purpose of bringing new life into this world full of anger and injustice and pain. But if there is anything I have learned from the Palestinian people, it is their deep-rooted resilience, one that stems from the same faith that I share with them as a Muslim, but has been put to the test in ways I can’t comprehend. They provide us with an important lesson on finding purpose in a world littered with inhumanity: we all have a responsibility to be active agents, building a more just world for all. From the articles and poems we read and write to the dinner table conversations we partake in using the knowledge we choose to seek, from the silent donning of a keffiyeh to the ways in which we raise and speak to our children about the world and its people, we all have, within our own skillsets and capacities, in our respective spheres of life, the ability to partake in this global, growing tide of activism.

Over the course of a year, we contributed what we could. Never has the world been so vocal in its support for a free Palestine. Boycotts have proven successful, careers have been put at stake, and a new media outlet, Zeteo, has emerged, questioning the status quo and bringing challenging conversations to the forefront so that we no longer have to tiptoe carefully around the subject of an ongoing genocide.

Despite the signing of a ceasefire deal 465 days later, we will continue to learn, speak, cry, create, call out, and call it like it is. In doing so, we will watch the tide continue to rise, from the river to the sea, in all ages and stages of life, until injustice is entirely swept away.

Art by Valerie Thai

Ronnie Riley learned through social media that their first novel was facing censorship. Riley was scrolling late one evening when they saw what appeared to be a leaked school memo. Their middle-grade book about a non-binary pre-teen named Jude was one of four 2SLGBTQIA+ books that Ontario’s Waterloo Catholic District School Board was trying to get out of students’ hands.

The book wasn’t explicitly banned, but there were enough hurdles for kids to access the novel that Danny Ramadan, the chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, called the decision a “shadow ban” in an interview with the Toronto Star. (Ramadan’s book Salma Writes a Book, part of his children’s series about a young immigrant, was also challenged by the school board.)

Riley, whose work so far is most prominent in the Canadian children’s literary scene, says that while they anticipated having some issues in the U.S., it’s difficult to acknowledge that Canada is not immune to book bans. “In the States…they’re more vocal,” Riley says. “But I do believe that it’s happening in Canada, just very quietly.”

Advocacy groups in the U.S.—Parents’ Rights in Education, Citizens Defending Freedom and Moms for Liberty are three of the most vocal organizations—represent a growing trend of censorship there. By re-framing language as advocating for parental rights rather than literary censorship, groups like these have been able to successfully ban books. This harms children by suppressing their ability to access information, though advocacy groups often claim that they’re trying to protect children from explicit and inappropriate materials. And, though in its characteristically slower, slightly quieter way, the same has been happening in Canada, with an increase in book ban requests here in recent years.

It’s not just these authors’ books that are at risk. Without them, children have fewer opportunities to learn about other people and customs, and about themselves. Children’s education and exposure to different ways of life are under threat, and public libraries may be, too.

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In the U.S., recent data from the American Library Association (ALA) found that “[books] targeted for censorship at public libraries grew by 92 percent from 2022 to 2023,” and “47 percent of challenged materials represent the voices and experiences of those in the LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC community.” In Texas, 578 books were banned in the 2021-22 school year, 424 in Pennsylvania, and 401 in Florida.

Moms For Liberty, a so-called parental rights group that reports having over 130,000 members, has often made the news due to its continuous calls to ban children’s books in libraries and schools across the country. In July 2023, they were successful in getting five books banned across Leon County schools in Tallahassee, Florida. The books had characters dealing with HIV, sexual assault, leukemia, and life after death.

While parental calls to ban books aren’t always successful, the ones that are can set off a political ripple effect for other parts of the country. “What we know to be true in several states is that they’ve been following each other in a race to the bottom about how many books you can ban in how many different ways,” says John Chrastka, executive director and founder of EveryLibrary, a non-profit political action organization focused on fighting book bans in the U.S.

Chrastka references data from the Unpacking 2023 Legislation of Concern for Libraries report, created by EveryLibrary to examine the status of bills in the U.S. aiming to censor access to books in both school and public libraries. Chrastka says that EveryLibrary was able to track that some bills, despite being in different states, were using the same language as one another to ban books. “That cut and paste job—that copycat—is sometimes very explicit,” he says. “And sometimes it’s based on the intent of the law: how can we make it easier to call a book criminal, call a book obscene, call a book harmful?”

There’s a clear “feedback loop,” Chrastka says, between groups like Moms For Liberty and politicians when it comes to banning books, meaning that citizen organizations and political leaders are influencing each other. “It is a witch’s brew of interest groups that are utilizing a fairly soft target—public libraries—which are intended to be, under law, under Supreme Court precedent, public forums, and the materials are available for all—as long as they’re legal,” he says. “If you can say that those books about those human beings are obscene or criminal or harmful, you can make an attack on those populations by proxy, whether it’s LGBTQ or Black and Brown communities.”

When libraries refuse to remove books from their shelves, parents sometimes push to remove their funding altogether in retaliation. Chrastka says that while not every library will lose funding from continuing to stock challenged books, there have been and continue to be states where this is the case. In Alabama, a legislative code change, enacted this past May, made $6.6 million in state funding for public libraries contingent on their compliance with the Alabama Public Library Service Board’s guidelines about restricting access to books deemed inappropriate for certain ages.

This isn’t just happening in southern states. In Michigan, the Patmos Library nearly lost 84 percent of its funding after the town’s residents voted twice that taxpayer money shouldn’t support the library as long as it continued to supply 2SLGBTQIA+ books. But library staff would not remove the books, and after a third vote, the library will remain open.

When asked whether parental requests for libraries to censor 2SLGBTQIA+ materials could lead to budget concerns, the ALA told This Magazine in a written statement that while they don’t have national data to validate this correlation, they felt this outcome was unlikely: “Although it is challenging to quantify, these incidents emphasize the ongoing importance of defending libraries as vital community resources,” the statement reads.

As Chrastka says, though, “This is not a casual social interaction. This is a political movement.” It’s a movement that’s travelling north of the border, and in an unprecedented way.

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Fully banning a book in Canada is a tough task, and it’s not always clear how it can be done. Public libraries, though funded by municipalities, are run by independent boards which have jurisdiction over the contents of their shelves. Libraries usually respond to disputes by following their challenge policies or request for reconsideration policies. In Canadian schools, the process for vetting books often involves the board developing selection methods through training with librarians, and then trusting librarians to implement those methods. Curricula are set by provinces, and teachers decide how best to meet the curricula. It’s not the role of school boards to police individual books, though parents sometimes appeal to them in attempts to bypass any formal selection and reconsideration processes that boards entrust librarians to follow. When these policies do not exist—and they often don’t—it’s often board members and administrators who end up handling the issue and responding to parental pressures.

Shadowbanning, though, is easier to accomplish. It can include what happened to Riley, where their book was moved to a shelf inaccessible by students and “a teacher must provide the Catholic context” before students are allowed to borrow the book. Basically, citizens and school districts are finding other ways to get books out of people’s hands rather than outright banning them. In the words of Fin Leary, the program manager at We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit organization focused on making the publishing industry more diverse, the goal is to “not have them seen as often.” He says it’s much harder to fight this kind of censorship.

Regardless of whether or not a book is challenged in a public library or a school, book bans affect both readers and authors. A November 2023 statement from the Ontario Library Association said that a diverse representation of books helps students “learn how to navigate differences and develop critical awareness of their environments.” The largest worry, according to Canadian School Libraries, is that groups calling for censorship in the U.S. will continue to inspire Canadians to use similar organization tactics.

According to data from the Canadian Library Challenges Database (CLCD), Canadian libraries facing the most calls for censorship are the Edmonton Public Library (143 requests), the Ottawa Public Library (127 requests) and the Toronto Public Library (101 requests). While the database has information from as early as 1998, some libraries have only reported censorship requests from recent years.

Michael Nyby, the chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations, said in an article published on Freedom To Read’s website that library challenges from September 2002 to August 2023 represent the highest number ever recorded in Canada in a twelve-month period. According to data from the CLCD, books and events with 2SLGBTQIA+ content made up 38 percent of all challenges in 2022. (Between 2015 to 2021, less than 10 percent of all challenges were connected to 2SLGBTQIA+ matters.) Books surrounding sexual content (19 percent) and racism (16 percent) made up the next highest percentages. The influence of library censorship in the U.S. also extends to books on drug use, abuse, violence, grief, and death.

Though Riley’s novel’s shadow ban was overturned after public outcry, concerns about a rise in book censorship in Canada, and calls to defund in the event that it doesn’t happen, aren’t without reason. At the Prairie Rose School Division (PRSD), a Manitoba-based school board, 11 requests for books to be banned were made in just 2023. Among them were 2SLGBTQIA+ books like Juno Dawson’s This Book is Gay. Dawson, who spent seven years working as a sex-ed teacher, described the nonfiction book as “essentially a textbook.” Each chapter of the book focuses on a different aspect of queer life, including definitions of 2SLGBTQIA+ identities, the history of HIV/AIDS, and sex. The book also addresses the importance of queer dating apps and using sexual protection. According to the PRSD, parents proposed banning this book (among multiple others) for reasons of pornography— though the book teaches children about bodies, and is not pornography. The school board said there was “some connection with the Concerned Citizens Canada Twitter account,” but not whether the parents proposing the ban were part of the group, which self-describes as “addressing sexually explicit materials being made available to children in our public libraries.” Still, the group’s account falsely tweeted that This Book is Gay was encouraging minors to solicit sex from adults on Grindr. The school board did not end up removing Dawson’s book (or the others proposed in the ban), but Concerned Citizens Canada is just one of many social and political groups that continue to advocate for book censorship.

In the summer of 2022, Manitoba’s South Central Regional Library was also pressured to remove three books about puberty and consent from shelves. Residents protested a library board meeting, flooded city council meetings, and said public library funding should be removed if the books weren’t, calling them “child pornography.” However, both Cathy Ching, the library services director, and local city councillor Marvin Plett both denied these claims. “Calling books pornographic does not make it so,” Plett said at a Winkler council meeting in July 2023. “Censuring books based on content that some find objectionable can have far-reaching and unintended implications.”

Around the same time, in Chilliwack, B.C., the RCMP were called to investigate after books there were reported for alleged child pornography in schools, too. Also in 2023, library picture books about gender in Red Deer, Alberta were vandalized. A page about using a singular “they” pronoun for nonbinary people was ripped out, according to a news report from the Red Deer Advocate.

Though the case in Chilliwack was dismissed and the books in Red Deer were replaced, parents’ calls to defund the Manitoba library if certain books aren’t removed echoes bills proposed by American lawmakers stressing that libraries should lose funding if bans aren’t enacted. And while books aren’t being overtly removed from shelves in Canada very often, there are other, sometimes more insidious impacts this attitude is having on queer and racialized youth.

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The Toronto Public Library (TPL) is Canada’s largest public library system. When asked about whether groups like those in the U.S. seeking to defund libraries for not removing 2SLGBTQIA+ material could affect what happens in Toronto, the media team at TPL said in an emailed statement that its budget is not affected by these groups. “We are governed by a library board and while our budget is ultimately approved by City Council, our materials selection is governed by our Board policies,” the email reads.

TPL’s Intellectual Freedom Challenges – 2023 Annual Report states that none of the requests to remove books from its shelves were successful that year. However, the same report also acknowledges that there are other issues at play. “TPL has experienced objections to 2SLGBTQ+ content outside of the formal request for reconsideration process, with opposition to Drag Queen Story Time programs at five branches and protests at three of them; damage to Progress Pride decals at eight branches; vandalized Pride Celebration displays at two branches; and vandalized 2SLGBTQ+ books at one branch.”

Historical book banning represents violence and censorship. Current book bans, though they may be disguised as parental rights, are more of the same. Vandalism of Pride displays at TPL is another form of violence, and while it may not be physical in nature, it has lasting effects that can harm queer youth for years beyond the act itself.

Banning queer and trans people’s books sends the message that these folks shouldn’t exist, at least not publicly. Ideas like these contribute to the state of widespread violence against them. Recent data from Statistics Canada found that around two thirds of 2SLGBTQIA+ Canadians had experienced physical or sexual violence. However, this number could be much higher: data from the same report found that around 80 percent of physical assaults against this group within the year prior to the survey didn’t “[come] to the attention of the police.”

Many 2SLGBTQIA+ people also struggle with feelings of suicidality. In the U.S., data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that 29 percent of trans youth have attempted suicide. In Canada, researchers at the University of Montreal and Egale Canada reported that 36 percent of trans people in Ontario experience feelings of suicidal ideation. Systemic discrimination, erasure, and invalidation contributes to this, and book banning is part of this wider package of behaviours that harms the community.

Canadian author Robin Stevenson was interviewed for PEN Canada about her children’s rhyming picture books, Pride Colors and Pride Puppy!, being targeted by the recent wave of book censorship in the U.S. and Canada. “Book banners say that they want to protect children, but they are doing real harm to the very children they claim to protect,” Stevenson said, explaining that “learning to hate yourself was far more dangerous than any book could ever be.”

Leary says that removing these types of books from libraries can send a message to publishers: if they notice that titles aren’t making it to school libraries or are banned, it could discourage them from publishing and promoting them. “As much as the book bans are horrifying, they also are so much scarier when you consider the larger context of why they’re happening—because it’s to legislate folks out of existence, or to legislate folks out of having an education about these topics.”

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Representation matters because it helps reduce stereotypes. Books with diverse representation are vital. They can help teach empathy and understanding, while also showing readers that they aren’t alone in their experiences. Diverse books also teach a fuller picture of history, sharing stories previously overlooked. They are a key aspect of a well-rounded education.

While it is a terrifying moment for queer and racialized writers, authors are not silencing themselves as a result of the pushback. Protecting their work from the possibility of being banned, though, will take a concerted effort on the part of anyone hoping to support them.

Riley believes that the shadow ban of their novel at the Waterloo Catholic District School Board was only overturned because of statements from not only their publisher, but other authors as well. They say they had a sound support system, and that helped.

That kind of unified support is crucial to fostering an environment that permits the continuation of freedom in publishing. Leary says that from an advocacy standpoint, parents opposing book censorship have the most power when they stick together. “Our voices are stronger when we are collectively organizing, and it also kind of allows parents to have each other to lean on,” he says. One way to do this is by communicating with school board members and going to community meetings that include opportunities to speak to these issues.

Riley keeps their final advice to anyone passionate about this issue simple and blunt. “Keep speaking out,” they say. “Keep making sure that books get into the hands of kids—especially queer books.”

Art by Valerie Thai

Robin had been ready to start school for a year. On the first day, she was prepared, wearing a blue dress with pink hearts and carrying a giant backpack that tugged at her mother’s heart.

Robin’s parents both came to drop her off. As they left, they waved goodbye to their oldest child and called out: “Ona!” Goodbye in Mohawk. Robin wasn’t starting at just any elementary school. She was starting at a Mohawk language immersion school, or more specifically, the Language Nest program, Totáhne, run by Tsi Tyónnheht Onkwawén:na (TTO), the Language and Cultural Centre in Tyendinaga.

“It was a really good feeling,” Robin’s mom, Alyssa Bardy, says, smiling when she remembers that morning. “To drop her off, and say hello and greet the teachers in Mohawk.”

TTO was established in 2000, by a group of community members concerned with the revitalization of the Mohawk language in Tyendinaga. The name means keeping the words alive. Their services include a Mohawk immersion elementary school and an adult learning program. For the youngest community members, there’s the nursery program, or Language Nest, which includes language learning, culture-based learning, and lots of outdoor play.

Bardy is Upper Cayuga of Six Nations and mixed settler. She belongs to Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte (she’s also my cousin—we’re related through our Dutch-Canadian mothers). She and her husband, Markus, decided to send Robin to the TTO because “it’s kind of a way that we can take back the parts of our culture that were taken away from us,” Bardy says. “On my dad’s side, we have family members who did attend residential school. Specifically we have stories in our family in which, at the residential schools, children were punished physically for speaking the language.”

That’s the fire that motivates her, Bardy says, in terms of putting her daughter into Mohawk language immersion school today. “It’s kind of a way to show honour to those people before us, who had a language, which is a key element to culture, taken away… It’s like an act of reclamation.” It’s particularly special because Robin is the first generation in Bardy’s family that’s been able to immerse herself in it. “To me, there’s nothing more important than being able to take [the language] back,” Bardy says.

Bardy’s watched her daughter thrive in the new school, absorbing words and bringing them home for the rest of the family to learn. Alyssa and Markus are planning to keep her in Mohawk language immersion. But currently, the TTO only offers up to Grade 4. After that, Robin will have to switch to a different school. There’s currently no school near the family that offers Mohawk language immersion from kindergarten to Grade 12. For Robin’s family, and for other Indigenous families reclaiming what’s theirs, this causes a very real concern: if their children have to leave immersion school, will they retain the language they’ve learned up to that point—or lose it?

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Over the past couple of decades, many Indigenous groups have been pushing hard for language preservation. Grassroots movements have tried to match the demand from parents and communities for schools that offer language programming. There have been tremendous successes, such as the creation of community led, non-profit organizations across Ontario, like TTO. In Six Nations, Kawenní:io/Gawení:yo Private School (KGPS) recently received their high school accreditation—it’s the only school in Canada that offers Cayuga and Mohawk languages from kindergarten to Grade 12. Some communities have found strength in collaboration, like the First Nations with Schools Collective, a group of eight First Nations in Ontario who work together with the aim of achieving “full control of our lifelong-learning education systems, including schools on reserve.”

Data from Statistics Canada shows that for the 2021-2022 school year (the most recent year for which data is available), there were 59,355 students in Indigenous language programs in public elementary and secondary schools in Canada. An additional 8,238 students were in Indigenous language immersion programs. These numbers do not include private schools. However, whether public or private, nearly all of these schools face challenges, including a lack of first-language speakers, space and funding, and curriculum resources.

“If you want to run an immersion school, you have to be ready to take on a number of things,” says Neil Debassige, an education expert from M’Chigeeng First Nation. He joins the Zoom call smiling, with a long beard, baseball cap, and glasses, sitting in a wood-panelled room. He’s spent his career in First Nations education systems, including as a kindergarten student in one of the earliest immersion programs, and later as a teacher and principal at that same school, Lakeview Elementary School. He ran an immersion program there which he describes as “relatively successful.”

When looking at how education systems are developed, and what they need to be successful, Debassige says they really need to answer four key questions:

1.) Are we clear in what our learners need to know and demonstrate in order to meet our sovereign definition of success?

2.) Are we clear in how students are going to demonstrate their learning?

3.) Are we clear in their response when they don’t learn it?

4.) Are we clear in how the community privileges education?

But even when these questions can be answered, Debassige says, immersion schools are a contentious issue in many communities. “It’s not because people don’t think it’s important,” he says, but because “this colonized process of this system that we’re in, it operates on a divide-and-conquer approach. So if communities can be divided in terms of what they think is important in their education system, it’s easier to defeat them.”

Debassige talks about deprivation theory, how people have been conditioned through dependency and the idea that there’s not enough to go around. When grassroots language programs emerge, they might be seen as competition to mainstream schools on reserves. He says those schools, which follow the Ontario curriculum and receive government funding, are severely underfunded, “but at least it’s some first-level funding.”

Starting an immersion school, Debassige says, means taking on the challenge of being underresourced, and fighting for financial support. While schools on reserve (which may offer Indigenous language programming) can receive government funding, immersion schools, similar to private schools, may not be eligible for the same amount. Their funding can come from a variety of sources, including government grants, community fundraising, or other organizations. The TTO, for example, has received funding through the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians (AIAI), the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte band council (MBQ), and through the province’s Ontario Trillium Commission.

Yet numerous studies show that students who are exposed to a language in an immersive way will exhibit higher levels of fluency. “If you want to get good at something fast, you need to be immersed,” Debassige says. “That makes perfect sense.” But he says it can be a hard choice for parents to decide to put a child in a grassroots language school, especially a newly founded one. If it’s an immersion school, Debassige says, and parents know that they’re underfunded, they have to consider whether they’re willing to risk the chances of their child not having access to equal sports opportunities, special education, and more.

Debassige says he’d rather describe the schools as bilingual or trilingual. The connotations of bilingual programs and students are more positive. Even so, there’s a level of uncertainty with these programs. “We’re not sure if they’re going to work,” Debassige says.

Today, Debassige runs a couple of tourism businesses, including captaining a chartered boat to take people fishing, renting cottages, and co-hosting a TV show that’s produced on the reserve and airs nationally. These are his passions, but he’s still involved in education work through his own consulting business. They do school evaluations, appraisals of principals, and capacity development. It’s obvious that he cares deeply about language schools, but it’s also obvious that the work comes with a great deal of challenge. I ask what keeps him in it, and he softens a little.

“I have a stake in it,” he says. “I’m a parent. I have two daughters.” One goes to McMaster University, and the other is in Grade 12. “We wanted them to be the kids that were the top Ojibwe language students and the valedictorian of their class, and they were that every year,” he says. Proudly, he tells me that when she graduated, his daughter was the first ever Indigenous valedictorian at her provincial high school. “They were proof that it could be done.”

Debassige says the same is possible for every First Nation kid, if they’re dealt a better hand. “You know, if the system supports that, then I think we can get to fluency and I think—we can do literacy in our language, and be literate in English as well at the end of Grade 8. I honestly think that.”

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Cyndie Wemigwans is a fluent Nishnaabemwin speaker from Dooganing (South Bay) Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory. She’s had a varied career: she worked as a chef and as a mechanic before accepting a job as an interpreter at Rainbow District School Board. Recognizing a need for first-language teachers, the board encouraged her to become a certified teacher, and she went through Nipissing University to get her Teacher of Indigenous Language as A Second Language certificate. Now, she’s a teacher at the Wiikwemkoong Board of Education.

Wemigwans teaches her students with Nishnaabemwin immersion, speaking to them about 40 percent in Nishnaabemwin and 60 percent in English at the start of the school year, and shifting toward 80 percent Nishnaabemwin and 20 percent English by the end. She notices a difference between the way she teaches compared to second-language teachers in the school. “I find a lot of teachers are afraid— they’re teaching the curriculum, but they want to infuse the Nishnaabemwin in with the curriculum, but they’re kind of lost on how to go about it.”

Conversely, it can also be tricky for first-language speakers who don’t have teaching experience to teach the language. “For them it’s a little bit difficult, like how to teach the kids, the language itself…It’s hard to find people that have both experience in a school setting and the language.”

In her first year teaching, just before Christmas break, Wemigwans remembers putting her students to the test, asking them to build sentences out of everything they’d learned up to that point. They aced it. Watching them converse in Nishnaabemwin, Wemigwans says, “I had tears coming down. I’ve given them that sentence structure, how to figure out what’s animate, inanimate, the endings… and they understood it. They didn’t have to really think so hard because they understood it.”

Wemigwans says that for her, passing her language on to generations to come is important because “that’s who we are.” She has three kids, including a seven-year-old daughter who is fluent in Nishnaabemwin. “How I explain that to my little one is, when I move on from this world to the next world, if you’re speaking English… I’m not going to understand you,” Wemigwans says. “It’s important that my children speak the language, so that I can still communicate with them.”

Bardy says that the schools play such an important role not only for children, but also for their families. Last January, the Bardys went to a Midwinter Ceremony, a social celebration hosted by Robin’s school to celebrate the beginning of midwinter, an important time of year in the Haudenosaunee calendar. When they got there, Robin and one of her school friends saw each other from across the longhouse. Her friend greeted Robin with her Mohawk name, and the two ran to each other and embraced. The interaction happened completely in Mohawk.

“It was so cool,” Bardy says, “to see that was the first way she was acknowledged, by her Mohawk name, and how Robin responded to that. So inspiring.” Bardy says it’s hard to say at this age how the language might be benefitting her daughter, but “there’s definitely a confidence there.”

“She’s not a shy girl, she’s not afraid to correct us if we say something wrong, or if we say something in English and she feels like it should be said in Mohawk,” Bardy says. “I think it’s instilling a sense of pride in who she is, as maybe a potential language speaker.”

Bardy says the schools play a vital role in reconnecting families to their language and parts of their culture. She worries about Robin losing what she’s learned after immersion school. “We’re going to have to dig deep as a family and do the work to sustain it, and surround ourselves with people who know the languages, and make sure we have everything in place, all the resources that we can possibly have.”

“My biggest fear about that is that we don’t make it a habit of our daily life,” Bardy says, “And it slips away from us.” Though some schools, like Robin’s, currently only offer immersion for younger grades, this could change in the future as First Nations communities, families, parents, and schools continue working to expand. Expansion could include everything from offering more grade levels to expanding their resources and programming. Some parents are just trying to get an immersion school near them.

“We need immersion schools in our communities,” says Tracy Cleland. Cleland is from Wiikwemkoong, Ontario. She’s passionate about the Ojibwe language and was involved in a language nest nearby, Nawewin Gamik, that was started by local elders. Nawewin Gamik ran for about four years, Cleland says, and during that time they had well over 300 attendees, in addition to seven kids and their parents who were there every day. It was forced to close last year due to a lack of funding. Though there are schools that offer a lot of language classes, “it’s not a hundred percent immersion,” Cleland says. “If there was [an Ojibwe school] built in Toronto or something, I literally would move there just to get it. That’s how important I feel it is,” Cleland says. “I’m so close to moving to Wisconsin cause they do have one.” She stresses the importance of dedicated funding for creating immersion schools. “And not just short-term funding—you can’t get things done in a year or six months.”

Part of Debassige’s consulting work with the First Nations with Schools Collective has included developing a new funding formula. They’re trying to negotiate with the federal government to advocate for better access to quality programming. By lobbying for more provincial and federal money, Indigenous language immersion schools could continue doing their work and expand to serve more children. Some schools have also had success at community fundraising, but this can be hard to sustain long term. In the meantime, communities and families are left to find ways to teach their language to the next generations.

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Testimony from Indigenous communities and a growing body of research speaks to the benefits of learning ancestral languages. Language experts say that maintaining Indigenous languages in early childhood helps to preserve culture and identity. Losing the language impacts an entire community’s well-being.

For Bardy, having her daughter learn Mohawk is about something much bigger. “Aside from knowing the language itself, I want [Robin] to know how the language ties into who she is as a Onkwehón:we,” Bardy says. Onkwehón:we translates to original people. Languages can also be a way to share knowledge systems and to shape people’s worldview and relationships with the land. “One word in Mohawk can be like a sentence in English,” Bardy says. “So I want her to have an appreciation of how descriptive and flowery and beautiful the language is, and how it ties into our place in the natural world and here on earth and as Onkwehón:we and as caretakers of the land.”

Robin is now in her second year in the Totáhne. Last autumn, her younger brother also started at the Language Nest, learning more of the Mohawk language along with his sister. He already had a handful of words when he started, thanks to Robin bringing them home.

Their experience with the immersion school so far has been incredible, Bardy says, and she’s really grateful to have that resource in their community. “Watching your child thrive and flourish in the language, it gives me so much pride,” she says. “When you go outside or you’re looking at a book, and your daughter tells you the name of something in Mohawk, it’s a really special moment.”

“Those bits of culture that were taken away—to me, that reclamation is one of the number one priorities in raising my kids. The schools are an extension of how families and Onkwehón:we can take back what was taken away so many years ago.”

Editor’s note: Robin’s name has been changed to protect her privacy 

LEARNING MORE

Want more information about Indigenous language education? Here are some places you can start:

First Nations with Schools Collective

Kingston Indigenous Languages Nest

Six Nations Language Commission

Woodland Cultural Centre

Photo courtesy Kid’s Stuff [Trucs d’enfants]

Gender-neutral clothing is a growing trend in Canadian fashion, and one that is trickling down to the wardrobes of the youngest Canadians.

From chains such as La Tuque, Quebec’s Aubainerie, to small businesses such as Vancouver’s Pley Clothes, options for parents looking to build their children a genderless closet are growing across the country. Brands appear to be thriving in Canada’s larger cities and fashion hubs, including Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.

Ideas of gendered children’s clothing have been evolving since the 19th century, when pastel colours for children came into fashion. Some historians say the idea of “pink for girls, blue for boys” only fully solidified itself in the public sphere in the 1940s.

Now, it seems these old ideals of gendered colours are being given up in favour of attitudes toward clothing that allow for self-expression in any colour or style, regardless of gender.

The industry is still in its early stages and its numbers can fluctuate due to self-reporting among other factors. While there is not much information available about the value of the market in Canada, industry projections see the global market for genderless clothing reaching a worth of $3.2 billion (U.S.) by 2028. Even A-list celebrities such as Megan Fox and Zoe Saldaña are raising their children to wear what they want, without gender stereotypes.

“Colour, clothing, style—everything can be gender neutral. It’s really up to us as adults to see it differently,” says Mary-Jo Dorval, the designer behind the Montreal-based gender- neutral kids’ clothing line, Trucs d’enfants. “By not labelling my clothes it makes it easier for consumers to see it like that as well.”

Dorval began her business producing alternatives to the highly gendered clothing of the fast-fashion industry seven years ago. She said she was inspired by her friend’s difficulties in finding sustainable, locally made genderless clothing for their children. Her website is chock-full of orange, purple and green shirts, pants and overalls. Most items are made from a cotton or bamboo-modal blend, and are modelled by children of all ages displaying the clothes’ stretch and fit as they play or nap.

“I really wanted to break this ‘black- grey-beige’ idea we have of gender- neutral clothing,” Dorval adds. By giving children genderless clothing, Dorval says, she provides them with the option to choose how to express themselves.

This rings true for Markus Harwood- Jones, a YA author and PhD candidate in gender studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He says the decision to raise and dress his child, River, in a gender-open way was an easy one. He says he wants his child to be able to express themself now, and feel comfortable with their gender expression as they grow up, whoever they grow up to be.

“When they get older, if River is really butch, or really femme, or whatever, we want to just make sure that they have pictures that feel like, ‘oh, that’s me,’” Harwood-Jones says. His family often uses an analogy referencing starting babies on solid foods. “You don’t start your kid on solid foods on day one,” Harwood- Jones says. They want River to express their fashion sense as soon as they are developmentally ready for it, and provide River a wardrobe that helps them do just that.

Harwood-Jones adds that children show their preferences earlier than many would think. When River was six months old, Harwood-Jones, his husband and their co-parent would hold up onesies on the changing table so River could choose what they wanted to wear.

Now, at almost two years old, River takes the lead on shopping excursions, asking for purple dresses and tutus. Harwood-Jones says his family often thrifts clothing to keep costs low, but when they do buy new, they lean toward small businesses that are queer owned or gender neutral.

Dorval believes small businesses will continue to bear the torch of clothing designed for everyone once the mainstream sheen wears off. However, if parents want to ignore gender labels in big-box stores, she says they should go for it.

“You can buy a princess skirt for your little boy,” she says. “It doesn’t matter.”

Illustration by Julia Galotta

I’m a young woman, who can, to my knowledge, get pregnant and has long-held dreams of being a mother. When I was a child, I spent my days dutifully caring for my dolls—who were named Baby and Popstar. When I turned 13, I started babysitting the two toddlers who lived next door. When I moved to Ottawa to study, I volunteered at Planned Parenthood, spending my off-time supporting pregnant folks who were looking to explore their options. In other words: I’ve spent my life to date surrounded by themes of reproduction, children, and family planning. But, these days, when I think about being a mother myself in the future, existential anxiety creeps into me—a paralyzing fear of having children in a world in rapid ecological decline.

I am 22 years old. I want to have a child sometime in the next decade. But what will the world be like when my prospective child is growing up?

The planet is in trouble. We know this. Sea levels are continuing to rise, Arctic sea ice is in decline, and the earth just keeps heating up. In 2016, the late Stephen Hawking famously predicted that humans have 1,000 years left on earth. It feels like everything is falling apart around us.

A thousand years is a long time, but I think most conscientious, climate change-believing people, myself included, are less concerned about the number, and more concerned about the symptoms of earthly decline and what it means for the human species. Will my child’s world be plagued with wildfires, floods, and rapidly declining air quality? Will their favourite animals be extinct, and will rural landscapes be covered by skyscrapers and freeways? As the 1,000 year-mark draws closer, what will the symptoms of a climate apocalypse be, and how will this burden weigh on my child?

The crux of pre-parental climate anxiety is extreme uncertainty. Will my child wind up in the care of a spaceship operated by Jeff Bezos to transport eight billion humans to Mars? Or, more realistically, will they be able to afford the likely seven-figure price tag for the Apocalypse Express to escape this dying planet?

The dread of earthly decline is quite terrifying, and this kind of anxiety is hard to prepare for. I’ve had panic attacks over school, family, relationships—all of which can be soothed or reasoned with. But climate anxiety is different. I can talk myself out of alarmism, but the general concern over a dying planet is actually quite rational.

Let’s look at my parents’ generation—was ecological decline even a thought? Probably not. The dominant thinking was clear: so long as you weren’t out of wedlock and had the means to care for a child, you were all set. Granted, abortion access was limited, heterosexuality was compulsory, and the risk of disownment and/or ostracization in the case of having children out of wedlock was actually quite substantial. But still, this is the second terror of climate anxiety— there are really no elders to empathize with you. It’s a first-of-its-kind anxiety. Perhaps if you speak to the Cold War generation, you could get a little bit of insight into apocalyptic anxiety more generally, but the idea of the world dying beneath our feet is a novel prospect.

Cue the resentment. Why did I have to be born in the ’90s, the last generation for which climate wasn’t at the forefront of our tiny little childhood brains? And why does my prospective child have to be born in the 2020s or 2030s, when climate terror is probably going to be seared into their brain in utero? Feeling resentful about this timely predicament is something I’ve come to realize is quite normal. I’ve spoken to my 20-something girlfriends and it’s not unique. If we had been able to have children just one generation earlier, it seems like we could be mothers in blissful ignorance.

So here I am: ability to reproduce, likely. Typical childbearing age, check. Full confidence that my child will have a safe and sustainable environment to grow up in? No. I’m working through it. Alarmist thinking is common with climate anxiety. I don’t think anyone should feel guilty for having a child in 2022. In fact, I think new, unjaded, and change-focused humans are the most likely antidote to climate change. Also, if I’m being honest, these past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have made me even more certain that despite great loss, communal mourning, and pain, humans can make it through. We just need to be on the same page (which is a big feat, I know).

I also can’t ignore the bittersweet side to this climate anxiety: it’s made me infinitely more empathetic to my fellow humans, and to the earth I walk on. I’m grateful for things I don’t think earlier generations even noticed: the air I breathe, the water I drink, and so on. I also use this anxiety to fuel much of my everyday work toward climate justice. I don’t think I would be as interested in living sustainably and building community as I would be without climate anxieties. Climate anxiety and subsequent climate activism have, in many ways, helped me to unlearn the hyper-individualism that capitalism taught me. I can only hope that this belief in community and radical empathy is also passed on to my child and their generation.

So, it’s not all bad, but it can be pretty bad. But let’s be clear—if I didn’t want to work through it, I think that’s okay, too. If I didn’t want kids, then the childfree life would be for me. But that’s not me. I want kids, but I want kids in a world that isn’t doomed. So, until my child is brought into this world, I will be spending my time working toward creating a world where they will be safe and be able to thrive.