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Journalism students across Canada are learning to share stories that are rooted in reciprocity with Indigenous communities in new ways.

Created by Indigenous faculty and designed in partnership with local communities, students in journalism programs at Carleton University, the University of King’s College and others are taking experiential learning courses that involve spending time with Indigenous people and reporting stories that are important to them.

At Carleton, the Reporting in Indigenous Communities course, created by Anishinaabe journalist and professor Duncan McCue, was offered for the first time in winter 2024. While new to Carleton, McCue is building on his work at the University of British Columbia, where he launched his course in 2011 in collaboration with the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, the Tsawwassen First Nation, the Squamish First Nation, and others. The goal was to teach students about the unique cultures that are thriving in each First Nation today, and how to respect and prioritize them in their reporting.

In McCue’s course at Carleton, students worked with the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation, the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne, and the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, learning about the stories that matter most to these communities. The theme for stories this year was Adaawe: Stories of Indigenous Economy, with students learning about the spirit of Indigenous entrepreneurship and business innovation.

McCue says the course was also an opportunity for students to learn more about the diversity within and between First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities. “Indigenous people are not homogenous…A Dene is not a Cree is not a Mi’kmaw, and they certainly have very different lived experiences if they grew up in the city versus growing up on the reserve versus growing up in a hamlet. It’s really important for students to understand that.”

At King’s, the Reporting in Mi’kma’ki course, co-created and taught by Miʹkmaw professor Trina Roache, introduces journalism students to the depth and diversity within local Miʹkmaq communities. Miʹkma’ki is the ancestral and unceded land of the Mi’kmaq, colonially known as most of Atlantic Canada and parts of Quebec.

Launched in 2021, the course aims to encourage students to go from reporting stories about the trauma experienced by Mi’kmaq communities to sharing stories that reflect their resilience instead. “Stories are a way of building that relationship and focusing on things that the community wants to celebrate and wants to put out there about how they see themselves,” Roache says of this approach. “It doesn’t mean you don’t do other stories. But you have to do all the stories—you can’t just do the negative ones.”

McCue says these courses are especially important for non-Indigenous students, who continue to be a majority within both programs. “I think it’s important that non-Indigenous journalism students learn and have a baseline of cultural competency when it comes to reporting in Indigenous communities [because] if you are a journalist in Canada, you are going to, at some point in your career, be reporting on Indigenous issues,” McCue says. “I think it is important that non-Indigenous students are exposed to this in a safe setting of a classroom where they can get feedback, and not under the pressure of a deadline in a massive newsroom.”

However, McCue and Roache also acknowledged other barriers, such as funding support, that make their reporting courses—and, in a larger sense, journalism programs—inaccessible to young Indigenous people. “The challenge is that Miʹkmaq, and I think other Indigenous young people, don’t see themselves in journalism [and] that’s something we’re working hard to change,” Roache says. “It’s going to take time and we have to play the long game.”

For both McCue and Roache, an important next step is ensuring the journalism programs they are part of actively recruit and train the next generation of Indigenous journalists. At Carleton, McCue says the work looks like hosting a video and audio course for Indigenous storytellers over the summer in partnership with local First Nations colleges and institutes. At King’s, Roache says the journalism program has created three fully funded scholarships for Miʹkmaq students, the first cohort of which will begin their studies this fall. It was created in partnership with Ann Sylliboy of the Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey, the educational authority for 12 of Nova Scotia’s 13 Mi’kmaq First Nations. The university also pledged a $600,000 investment to support Indigenous students.

According to Roache, the increased funding and scholarships are but one step in King’s University’s approach to holding space at the urging of journalism students, who have been demanding diversity in faculty, staff and curriculum in the journalism program since 2015.

For Catriona Koenig, a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation who grew up in Ottawa and a former Carleton student who took McCue’s course, it’s important to make courses on responsibly reporting about Indigenous communities mandatory for journalism students. Taking experiential learning courses created and taught by Indigenous faculty, she says, is an opportunity to learn how to be a “storyteller and not a story-taker.”

“For so long, journalists would go into Indigenous communities and tell their story, and then just leave and burn bridges and not continue relationships and not strengthen partnerships,” she says. “[It’s important] to make sure to continue these partnerships with communities, keep in touch, and maintain the relationship.”

Photo Courtesy of Somia Sadiq

For Somia Sadiq, a registered professional planner and founder of Winnipeg-based impact assessment consulting firm Narratives Inc., we don’t tell ourselves stories in order to live. Rather, we live in order to carry them. To pass them along.

The government of Canada’s website defines impact assessment as a tool used by those spearheading major projects, such as mining or dam-building, to determine the effects of their proposed endeavour, whether positive or negative. Sadiq had been working in the field of impact assessment for private and government agencies for 20 years before she found herself jaded by their cold bureaucracy. “One of the key challenges that I was seeing was in how the world of planning approaches works with communities,” she says, talking about the people and lands potentially housing, or impacted by, the projects.

In Sadiq’s view, the traditional way of planning and consultation replicates the extractionary, perfunctory, and rigid currents of the overarching colonial and patriarchal systems within which consulting works. “Something as simple as offering an honorarium to an Elder who has spent time with you, sharing their knowledge, meant 10 hours of conversation with my VP of finance,” she says. She felt she could do things differently, and so eight years ago, she founded Narratives, a consulting firm that focuses on people, the land they live on, and their relationships to it.

Narratives privileges clients’ stories in its creation of psychosocial impact assessment plans, community plans, or land relations plans. They work with communities to establish for the courts that an organization’s project may harm that community’s wellbeing, or they help the community to undertake their own projects, providing them with the tools to represent themselves in court or move through colonial municipal, provincial, or federal systems in a way that empowers them.

Traditional impact assessments in Canada, Sadiq says, focus on a proposed project’s impact on the biophysical environment. Sometimes, it also considers the impact on the human environment, and “it may or may not consider the interface between those,” she explains. “We may not consider the health impacts. It all depends on which province you’re in, the nature of the project, and so on.”

Narratives, meanwhile, takes a holistic approach to impact assessments. The firm works primarily with Indigenous communities neglected by traditional planning by assisting with community planning, impact assessment, landscape design, and research and analysis, providing these as tools that people can implement and benefit from. The firm’s goal is to advance its clients’ goals, whether it be reestablishing identity, reclaiming identity, or reclaiming sovereignty.

Narratives’ work is built on the foundation of what it has learned from the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and, according to their site, “the principles of storywork,” which include respect, reciprocity, responsibility, synergy, and holism. This foundation guides how Narratives creates impact assessments. A key to their work is recognizing that identity is tied to the land. Ultimately, Narratives works to achieve its goals through listening, something Sadiq has been doing all her life.

“I’m Punjabi and Kashmiri by background and grew up in a world very rich in storywork,” she says. “We were taught through stories and allegories and folk songs and everything in between. That’s how our parents and grandparents taught us any lessons in life.”

Narratives creates something called an all-encompassing impact assessment plan, which, Sadiq says, is a fancy term for thinking about everything. “When we’re thinking about the impact on people, we need to think about the psychological and sociological impact of not just the project, but historically as well. So if you have a community that has significant layers of trauma that they’ve experienced and you’re adding yet another event to that scale that may amplify that, then it’s going to be a problem.”

Sadiq explains that it can even out the playing field when people are given space to share their stories. “It’s harder for someone to answer the question, how did something impact you? And easier for them to tell you a story about what happened.”

One of Narratives’ clients is the Niiwin Wendaanimok Partnership, a group of four Anishinaabe communities that provides construction contracting and environmental monitoring in Treaty 3 territory. The firm is working on a study compiling historic and current data on land and resource use to guide the Niiwin Wendaanimok’s project of twinning a highway through Manitoba and Ontario. Narratives has worked with the Niiwin Wendaanimok for many projects, both in the background with harmonized impact assessment or with community planning. The Elders of one of the four communities, the Wauzhushk Oniqum Nation, also initiated an investigation into a residential school that was on their reserve. Narratives provided support by offering trauma-informed planning support.

Cultural stories aren’t a tool for Sadiq; rather, they’re alive. “Really making sure that the work that we do is community led means that it’s inherently a really beautiful mechanism for the communities to uphold their ceremonies, do the work in a good way with us, essentially just in the background, facilitating the process and serving as technicians more than anything else,” she says. “Ideally by the end, they’ll feel the pride and they’ll be able to continue to do the work on their own.”

Photo by sakarin14 via Adobe Stock

Arctic Canada is filling with puddles.

Springtime in the Yukon looks astonishingly similar to June in Ontario. The days are long. Deer bite the heads off flowers deep in the forest. Icy mountains still loom in the distance, but here in the city of Whitehorse, wet mud squishes with every step. People wear shorts and t-shirts. Trucks are parked in nearly every driveway, dried clay caked onto their tires. Spring in Whitehorse is beautiful, if you forget that it comes at the cost of a forever-changed climate.

Annual mean temperatures in northern Canada have increased by 2.3 C from 1948 to 2016, with temperatures rising most rapidly in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. By 2019, a new report from Environment and Climate Change Canada revealed that northern Canada, specifically the Yukon, is warming three times faster than anywhere else because of Arctic amplification.

Arctic amplification is like a magnifying glass reflecting off a mirror: heat from the sun bounces off the bright landscape, which then mixes with warm water vapour in the atmosphere. This heat isn’t being absorbed in the ground because of the ice, so it has nowhere to go: heat rises, but it becomes trapped in the atmosphere. As more ice melts, more vapour is created, which then causes the ice to melt even further. Essentially, Arctic amplification means that the region is caught in an intense greenhouse gas effect leading to biodiversity loss, habitat degradation, and mudslides.

For residents of northern Canada, the effects of the climate crisis are being felt faster and more aggressively than any policy can take effect. They’re threatening Indigenous ways of life that have been in place for thousands of years, making it increasingly difficult to pass down spiritual and cultural customs to young people. They’re also threatening the very ground the North is built on. But the climate crisis isn’t exclusive to the Yukon—if the oldest (and coldest) parts of the Earth are heating up, it signifies a dangerous warning to the rest of the world.

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Indigenous communities throughout the Yukon and Alaska regions have depended on Chinook salmon as a key food source for millennia, moving along the 3,190 kilometre-long Yukon River to fish. Brooke Woods, a Koyukon Dene woman, is a tribal citizen of Rampart Village and grew up on the Alaska side of the Yukon River. She spent six years as executive chair for the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and currently works for the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Alaska, focusing on climate policy and fisheries management. She stresses that the salmon aren’t just food for her community; salmon fishing is also a livelihood with a deep spiritual connection. It’s important to people to use all parts of the fish, and it’s common to find salmon skeletons mounted above Dene doorways. “[Our] communities are along the Yukon River for a reason. We are salmon-dependant people,” she says.

But now, climate change is leading to the continued loss of the salmon: an essential part of the Yukon River’s ecosystem that was once abundant along its stretch. And Indigenous people in the area have largely resorted to buying salmon from other areas or trying to harvest other fish due to the decline. “So many parts of our life have changed because of the salmon declines…impacting us mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually and culturally,” Woods says.

Chinook salmon differ from Atlantic salmon on the other side of the country because of one key factor: they die less than a month after spawning. They also take up to eight years to reach maturity and reproduce. Though salmon live most of their life in saltwater, their eggs need freshwater to hatch. Because of this, the adult salmon usually return to their own birthplace to release the next generation of spawn, with females laying between 2,000 to 10,000 eggs. However, climate change is altering these freshwater rivers quickly, and the salmon eggs are soft and highly sensitive to temperature and environment. When the water is too warm, too polluted, too salty, or just too different from what it used to be, the hatchlings can’t survive. Right now, only about one percent of chinook salmon eggs survive to adulthood. In other words, climate change is a factor in degrading the salmon’s habitat beyond survivability.

Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. believe warmer waters make it harder for Chinook salmon in the river to keep a healthy diet and stabilize their metabolism. According to the NOAA, salmon grow faster in warmer water but struggle to find prey—like other small fish or invertebrates—meaning they will lay fewer eggs and have a lower chance of survival. Warmer rivers are also causing salmon to die from heat stress, according to a study from the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also reports that as temperatures rise, it’s harder for water to retain its oxygen levels. Salmon—like all forms of aquatic life—need stable oxygen levels to survive. When the water gets too warm and the oxygen levels deplete too much, salmon suffocate and die.

In April 2024, the U.S. and Canadian federal governments teamed up to create a historic—yet controversial—agreement: ban all Chinook salmon fishing in the Yukon and Alaska for seven years in an effort to grow the population. According to the ban, both First Nation and Tribal subsistence fisheries—the method of harvesting fish specifically involving Indigenous knowledge and traditions—is prohibited “when there are fewer than 71,000 adult Chinook salmon.” Once this number is met, limited commercial, personal, and sport fishing could begin again. The salmon are counted by sonar at several sites in the region, and in 2023, only around 14,000 Chinook were counted at the Eagle sonar site near the Canadian border.

Detailed tracking of the Chinook salmon population began in the 1980s. According to the EPA, in 1984, around 1.2 million Chinook were tracked at the southernmost part of their migration—the Salish Sea region of the Pacific Ocean. With over 3,000 kilometres of migration from the Yukon River, through the Bering Sea, down to the Salish Sea before coming back up the Yukon River again, Chinook salmon have some of the largest migration patterns in the world. But fewer and fewer Chinook are surviving this migration for long enough to make it to their spawning grounds.

The 2024 Yukon River Chinook salmon run—the annual migration of salmon along the river to spawn—was the third-lowest in history, with fewer than 65,000 salmon making the voyage to the Pilot Station—the closest sonar site to the mouth of the river. Of those fish, an estimated 24,112 passed through the Eagle Sonar site near the Yukon border. The worst year on record was 2022, when an astonishing total of 12,025 Chinook salmon were counted for the season through the Eagle sonar site. This number is 80 percent lower than the historical average; some previous years have seen up to 500,000.

At the heart of the salmon run is Whitehorse. Whitehorse holds the world’s longest wooden fish ladder, a structure crucial for letting salmon pass through to their spawning grounds. It looks like a winding staircase filled with flowing water: salmon instinctively migrate and seek out changing currents. The water attracts the salmon, who swim upstream, jumping from step to step. Just like a staircase, these ladders have steps that allow the fish to “climb” upwards: this is especially helpful if parts of the river are blocked by dams or other predators waiting for their next meal. Conservation groups monitor the Whitehorse fish ladder yearly and use sonars to track how many fish pass through.

Jordan Blay has lived in the Yukon since 1985, and grew up fishing in Annie Lake 50 kilometres outside Whitehorse. He notes salmon, halibut and several types of trout among the fish he could catch around the Yukon and Alaska. “The record was 18 castes, 18 fish,” he says. However, in recent years, he says there are considerably fewer fish in large bodies of water, like the Yukon River.

Blay describes the spring of 2022 as “abysmal” for salmon. “If I remember right, it was something like six fish went through the ladder,” he says. Hardly any fish were seen on some days. Blay’s estimation isn’t far off: fish ladder supervisor Amy Jacobsen told the CBC that only 13 salmon passed through by August 10, 2023. More fish passed through after this, but August is the height of their travels.

When numbers are low, Fisheries and Oceans Canada prohibits sport fishing. Depending on the numbers and body of water, a prohibition can affect both personal fishing and Indigenous subsistence fishing. However, even if not explicitly stated by Canadian or Alaskan governments, First Nations leaders often voluntarily ask their citizens to refrain from fishing when the populations are in decline.

Historically, Indigenous-operated fisheries have had more robust fish populations than modern commercial fisheries due to longstanding practices of environmental reciprocity and continued traditions surrounding the Earth’s seasonal cycles. Woods explains that the salmon decline is a relatively new phenomenon. “We do have 10,000 years of relationship with salmon, and we have always maintained our cultural values when it comes to harvesting king [Chinook] salmon,” she says. “That has been successful, that has kept salmon runs alive and well.”

Woods says the low salmon population could have disastrous effects on future generations, noting that cultural traditions and education are passed down from older family members, and how she learned from her mother and grandmother when fishing. “Growing up, we had multi-generational family members coming together to harvest, process and share salmon,” she says. She’s concerned younger community members won’t be able to learn in the same way she did, which will pose serious challenges to their health and culture.

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Apart from warming the Yukon River, climate change means the physical landscape of the Yukon is shifting. Deep below the surface of the Earth in northern Canada is permafrost: permanently frozen soil and sediment held together by ice. The Yukon has some of the oldest pieces of permafrost in the world, with scientists estimating it’s been in place for three million years. In Whitehorse, permafrost accounts for up to 50 percent of the ground’s surface, according to Yukon University. Because of climate change, the permafrost is now melting.

“One of the biggest ways we see issues with permafrost in our human environment is probably through infrastructure and the highways,” says Alison Perrin, a senior research professional at Yukon University’s Research Centre. Perrin has been researching climate change and climate change policy in the North for the last 10 years. “It’s kind of like the supporting foundation of the North.”

In the same way a foundation provides stability for a house, permafrost creates stability on the ground in northern Canada. The crumbling permafrost threatens the livelihood of the communities—like the Kluane First Nation—that have existed in these remote areas for thousands of years before Canada was colonized.

Shirley Smith is an Indigenous Elder from the Kwanlin Dün First Nation. Their traditional land is located in what’s alsoknown as Whitehorse. One of her biggest worries is how the next generation will be able to learn about cultural traditions and living off the land sustainably. Warmer winters with increased precipitation meant that one winter, she had six feet of snow alongside her house, making it difficult to get to cultural and sacred sites.

Climate change presents a real threat to Indigenous communities’ abilities to pass their cultures and spiritual practices on to next generations. Smith says that the best place to teach younger generations about climate change is on the land, recalling that some of her traditional knowledge about hunting and fishing sustainably was passed down by her father on trips. But these lessons aren’t being taught as much anymore, she says. Still, any time at all learning from older people is deeply valuable for younger ones. “Even if they just go for two days, three days, teach them or show them how to live off the land,” she says.

Alongside threatening Indigenous ways of life and knowing, warming ice can also mean physical danger. Communities in northern Canada are remote and far between, leaving people with few options when it comes to emergency evacuations. Perrin uses Nunavut as an example of one place in the North where people’s ability to survive in the winter depends on stability below them in the forms of ice and permafrost. Communities in the North are mobile, moving to different locations to fish, trap, hunt. It’s about survival, tradition, spirituality, culture and lineage all at once. But this mobility isn’t possible when the ice cracks: suddenly, a longstanding tradition of walking across a frozen river doesn’t guarantee safety. And yet, “their lives depend on going out on the ice,” she says.

Only 30 kilometres outside of Whitehorse, reports have been made about tears in the Earth from the permafrost melting, causing trees to collapse as the dirt breaks open. These physical changes can mean less stability on the Alaska Highway, a 2,400-kilometre road that runs through B.C., the Yukon and Alaska. The highway is an essential method of transportation connecting remote First Nations communities and importing goods to northern areas. If parts of it become unusable, it could seriously threaten these communities’ health and wellbeing.

Further, melting permafrost can cause other issues: methane, carbon dioxide or potentially toxic microbes are often found within the sediment, furthering the overall problem of climate change, Perrin explains. “As permafrost thaws, it contributes to greenhouse gas effect,” she says.

Part of Perrin’s research investigates how climate change affects the Yukon over long periods. One report she coauthored, titled “Yukon climate change indicators and key findings,” published in 2022 by Yukon University’s Research Centre, looks at how the volume of Arctic sea ice has decreased since 1979. With a melting rate of about 300 cubic kilometres per year, the report estimates that most ice that was there in total has melted within the past decade.

Permafrost thaw, warmer temperatures and wildfires can cause extreme events like the landslides in Whitehorse, something that would have been unheard of until just a few years ago. For residents, the North is quickly becoming unrecognizable. Willow Brewster, a paramedic who’s lived in Whitehorse since she was a toddler in the 1990s, says she remembers long, frigid days too cold to hold a snowball. Now, she says, there’s sometimes slush in December and landslides by spring. In July 2024, a landslide caused by massive amounts of rain—another symptom of climate change—caused an 82-kilometre highway closure. While no one was hurt, it left people unable to travel between Carcross, Yukon and Fraser, B.C. Landslides are one result of climate-change related permafrost melting, according to a 2023 Simon Fraser University and Yukon Geological Survey report.

“I was driving through puddles in December because all of the snow was melting because it was plus five [degrees],” Brewster says. “It’s [an] eerie kind of feeling where it just feels kind of wrong.”

Brewster also sees injuries becoming more frequent. Her grandmother, who has lived in the Yukon for several decades, fell in the ice in 2016. In 2022, two people fell into icy water when crossing a seemingly frozen river near Pilot Station, Alaska, resulting in one death. Brewster describes freezing temperatures as “sporadic,” and says you can’t always expect the ice to be consistently frozen anymore. Routine ice trips are increasingly deadly in February, when the ice should be sturdiest.

In December 2023, the Yukon government’s official response to climate change noted 42 new actions to fight it, specifically noting green energy, wildfire protections, and smart electric heating systems. There is no mention of salmon specifically, but there is an action saying the government will “work with First Nations and communities to address a gap in lake-monitoring to capture changes in water in order to support fish habitat protection and community safety.” While permafrost is not mentioned either, there is a promise to undertake “flood risk hazard assessments for Yukon campgrounds and other key public infrastructure in territorial parks.”

When it comes to climate change, even a two-degree temperature increase can have significant overall effects. It can be the difference between freezing and melting; an animal living or dying. Canada is currently a part of the Paris Agreement—the international treaty created by the United Nations wherein countries pledge to limit their emissions to avoid a two-degree increase. Yet the Yukon’s average temperature is three degrees warmer than it’s ever been.

Both our shared physical environment and entire ways of being that have been in place since time immemorial are under threat. Bans on salmon fishing and government incentives on green tech will not solve this in and of themselves. Instead, there needs to be a priority on centring the skills passed down through generations from Indigenous knowledge-keepers, living in balance with the land, and a focus on sustainability as a continuous way of life. There is irrefutable evidence that global warming changes every part of the world: from the tiniest oxygen molecules in the water to the vast permafrost in the Earth. And what’s happening in the Yukon is foreshadowing for everywhere else: the climate can’t change so drastically while everything else stays the same.

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Indigenous communities have long been crucial to climate protection. According to the United Nations, Indigenous people have prioritized the environment for generations, meaning their contributions to the scientific community cannot be ignored. A pivot to two-eyed seeing is deeply necessary.

There are over a dozen First Nations in the Yukon, each with its own distinct cultural practices and communities. One initiative, called the Yukon First Nations Climate Action Fellowship, is trying to combine cultural traditions across the different nations with the fight against climate change by teaching young adults about biodiversity and living in harmony with the land. Dustin McKenzie-Hubbard, a member of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, loves being one of the 13 fellows because it inspires him to make the world better for his daughter.

McKenzie-Hubbard says the fellowship has focused on turning away from a colonialist and consumerist mindset and that a strong sense of community is essential in dealing with these problems. Addressing climate change means centring Indigenous people’s calls for climate protection and understanding. “Everything you do affects someone else and everything,” he says. “We have to be mindful of what our impacts will do for ourselves in the next seven generations.”

Woods stresses the importance of incorporating Indigenous knowledge into conservation efforts, something she says is “disregarded in so many management spaces.”

“We do have 10,000 years of stewardship that is not incorporated into the current Western science and governance structure,” she says, describing how important it is for knowledge to be passed down from Elders to the younger generations, especially when it comes to the salmon. “I want to be able to fish the same way my grandmother taught my mom, and the way that I’ll teach my children.”

Photo by TJ Rak

Rosie Archie knew she wanted to be a skater when she was 12 years old. Her older sister Charmie was already good enough to land tricks, and Archie was not far behind. There were no skate parks in Canim Lake, a Tsq̓éscen̓ First Nation reserve in interior B.C., so the sisters would travel to nearby towns to skate, where they were often the only girls—and always the only Indigenous girls.

Skateboarding became an escape of sorts for Archie. “There was funeral after funeral on my reserve when I was a kid. I was always surrounded by sadness and alcoholism and suicides. I would just go pick up my skateboard because it got me away from what was going on around me, and it made me focus on me, what my body was doing, how my board was flipping,” Archie says. “It calmed down my nervous system, just gliding down the road, listening to my wheels.”

In late 2019, after her sister’s passing, Archie had a vision: she wanted to use skateboarding as a way to reach youth in remote Indigenous communities and talk about mental health and their culture.

Nations Skate Youth was born in her living room, after a conversation with fellow skaters and co-founders Joe Buffalo, Dustin Henry, and Tristan Henry. The organization is based on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples–Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations. Its mission is “to give kids hope, and to remind them that they’re loved, and to remind them that they matter,” says Archie. “To tell them to be proud of who they are and where they come from.”

In the four years since, Nations Skate Youth has done just that, hosting skating events and donating skating equipment across Canada, and more recently, the U.S. As a non-profit, the organization is supported by donations and sponsorships from skateboarding brands, such as Dime and Vans. Using skateboarding as a conduit for connection, Archie and her co-founders set the stage of vulnerability by sharing their own stories with youth, who are anywhere from toddler age to teenagers. “It has to come from the heart,” says Archie. “Kids see the truth.”

According to the 2021 census, more than 1.8 million people in Canada identify themselves as Indigenous, making up about five percent of the total population. It’s the fastest-growing and youngest population in Canada. For Nations Skate Youth, sharing stories and lessons can empower and set a positive example of what Indigeneity looks like for these young people.

“The work that we do with the youth is giving our time and listening to them,” Archie says. “And they will often tell you stories that will make you cry on the spot or will inspire you to change how you think.”

Nations Skate Youth also uses skateboarding as a way to build self-esteem and leadership skills. Recent research indicates that there’s something to this: a 2020 study by the University of Southern California (funded by Tony Hawk’s The Skatepark Project) found that skateboarding improves mental health, helps people build community, and promotes resilience. It also found that racialized skaters felt safer in skateboarding communities than they did in other contexts. The sport has a unique ability to channel complex emotions. There’s a certain sense of infallible perseverance required when it comes to learning how to land a trick—fall down five times, get back up six. And for young people, working at something over and over again until you get it right builds an unshakable sort of confidence.

“A lot of kids say that, ‘I’m usually pretty angry. But when I’m skateboarding, I don’t feel like that,’” says Archie, who now gets regular requests from communities across North America to come visit. This year, members of the organization plan to travel to Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and for the first time, Kansas City. Archie has her eye farther afield too: her dream is to bring Nations Skate Youth to visit Indigenous communities in Australia and New Zealand.

Archie feels a connection to colonized spaces around the world, where Indigenous communities are collectively learning to re-embrace their cultures amidst the aftershocks of intergenerational trauma. When working with Nations Skate Youth in places like Hawaii or the Yukon, Archie gets to observe kids relearn their languages, their dances, or even be proud of their braids and names. It’s something special.

“The effects of colonization are still happening,” Archie says. “The intergenerational trauma is still going on. And that’s reminding us [that] there’s no right or wrong [time to] learn your language, learn your culture.”

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?

*

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.”

*

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.

*

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 by North Island College

Seaweed, a traditional food for many coastal First Nations in B.C., is experiencing a renaissance, thanks to its untapped carbon sequestration potential. In recent years, multiple First Nations have partnered with private companies like Cascadia Seaweed to lead this growing industry. But unlike other coastal First Nations in B.C., the Kwiakah First Nation—a small band of 21 registered members located near Phillips Arm and Frederick Arm—has not signed production agreements with seaweed companies. That’s because conserving kelp forests, instead of making a profit from farming them, is the main factor driving the Kwiakah members’ work.

“I don’t think, if we don’t do the kelp thing right … that our coast can survive another industrial onslaught,” cautions the band’s administrator and economic development officer, Frank Voelker, describing decades of gold mining, logging, and fish farming.

The Kwiakah Nation is unique in that it does not receive as much federal funding as some other nations since it does not have a residential reservation, Voelker explains. “Over the decades, the band members just adjusted to that and became self-reliant,” he says, adding that the nation turned a “huge disadvantage” into a positive.

As a result, not only are the Kwiakah in a stronger position to say no to companies that promise jobs at the expense of the environment, but they can learn how to become better kelp farmers through smaller-scale initiatives, rather than jumping headfirst into uncertain new ventures under the pressure to generate jobs.

RESISTING PRESSURES TO SCALE UP

The Kwiakah are currently repurposing an old fish farm into a kelp farm—including establishing pre-processing facilities, where kelp would be dried before transport—and a research centre.

Despite having a good research relationship with industrial actor Cascadia Seaweed, the Kwiakah Nation has not rushed to sign any production agreements; its traditional territory in the Phillips and Frederick Arm region has long experienced serious, irreparable environmental damage from B.C.’s extraction industry.

As mentioned, one reason kelp farming has been of great interest in B.C. in recent years is due to the ability of kelp forests to sequester and store carbon. The carbon stored in coastal ecosystems is called “blue carbon” and is often touted as a way to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

But because of the Earth’s changing climate and rising ocean temperatures, carbon-sequestering species like kelp are dwindling in number without human intervention.

Given the potential of blue carbon, communities might be tempted to grow kelp in many B.C. inlets, but undertaking any such activity on a large scale has to be approached with caution, Voelker says.

This is why the Kwiakah are working closely with sister tribes within the Laich-Kwil-Tach First Nation and speaking with elders to understand traditional methods of cultivation, including learning how much kelp has historically grown in the region and working to match those quantities, not exceed them.

KELP CULTIVATION VS. KELP FARMING

Kelp farming isn’t the only way to reap the environmental benefits of kelp and generate income.

One promising solution is for the Kwiakah to participate in seaweed cultivation for its own sake, which will enrich the marine ecosystem and absorb carbon dioxide, and for which the community can be compensated through a carbon scheme.

“That would be my dream scenario,” Voelker muses, “purely carbon sequestration and [the community] getting paid for it.”

Every Canadian knows the caribou. The animal can be found on the back of the quarter, millions of which are circulated every year. Yet, the iconic species is on the brink of extinction, and, according to ecologists and activists, not much is being done to stop that.

Across Canada, caribou are declining as a result of forestry, oil and gas activities, mining, and road-building. And it’s not just the caribou that we’re losing. Because they have such specific habitat conditions, woodland caribou are considered an “umbrella species,” which means their well-being provides important insight into the well-being of their environment. Protecting the caribou means protecting the habitat of other species, and their health is therefore an indicator for the health of their forests as a whole.

While the species’ numbers have been dwindling throughout the country, the debate surrounding the caribou has been growing increasingly heated in Quebec. Over the last few months, the declining situation of caribou in the province has resulted in growing backlash against a lack of action, criticism of industry lobbies, and lawsuits against the provincial government. On December 9, 2021, the Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs (MFFP) released its latest inventory numbers for herds in the Gaspésie, Manicouagan, and Charlevoix regions of Quebec. At the time of the report, there were only 17 forest caribou left in Charlevoix, only one of which was a fawn. Just 14 years ago, that number was over 80. And in Gaspésie, where the last native herd in southern Quebec is found, only 32 to 36 mountain caribou remain. Both forest and mountain caribou are subtypes of woodland caribou, the only type of caribou found in Quebec.

Caribou need old-growth forests to survive. Human development, especially forestry activity such as commercial logging, has fractured and destroyed much of its habitat. In Charlevoix, for example, as much as 89 percent of the caribou’s habitat has been disturbed. These younger forests attract moose that eat new plant growth, which, in turn, brings in predators such as wolves. While the moose is a wolf’s natural prey, a caribou is an easier catch. This is further facilitated by the creation of logging roads and hiking trails, which allow predators to move more freely across the caribou’s habitat.

“The scientific community agrees that, ultimately, the cause of the decline of the majority of the forest and woodland caribou populations is the management of our forests,” explains Marianne Caouette, project manager of Protected Areas and Biodiversity at Nature Québec. “It’s really the harvesting of wood that removes old growth from the forests and will create environments that are favourable to predators, such as wolves or coyotes.”

After delaying the unveiling of its strategy against the decline of the woodland caribou in 2019, François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government once again pushed the plan’s release date from 2021 to 2023, and in the meantime created an independent commission. The MFFP stated in a press release that the commission will be headed by Nancy Gélinas, dean of the faculty of forestry, geography, and geomatics at Université Laval and a researcher in forest economics, rather than any ecologists or conservation experts.

In a press conference held on March 17, 2022, Gélinas stated that the goal of the commission is not to look at the reasons of the caribou’s decline, but “to add the layer of socio-economic impacts.” She says she believes that Quebec must make a choice that considers the protection of the caribou and the consequences that such protection would have on the regions outside of metropolitan areas, the industry, and the treasury.

Marie-Hélène Ouellet D’Amours, an environmental and sustainable development advisor for the Conseil régional de l’environnement du Bas-Saint-Laurent (CREBSL), considers the questions that comprise the independent commission’s consultation biased toward minimizing economic impacts. Currently, she believes, the ministry considers the environment, society, and the economy as separate entities that talk to each other. “The realistic way of looking at it would be to see the environment as supporting society and the economy,” she says. “There is a kind of conceptualization of things that is different from a real understanding of sustainable development, and I think that’s where the problem is.”

In the meantime, the government is capturing and confining both the Charlevoix and Gaspésie herds, a relatively new practice in Quebec. The capture of the Charlevoix herd has already been completed, and its members will be held in captivity indefinitely, making it the second herd in Quebec after that of Val d’Or to be held in captivity, which has been enclosed since 2020. The capture of the Gaspésie herd has been postponed to next year, but the plan involves enclosing its pregnant females and releasing them a few months after they have given birth to their fawns. Predators who approach the animals can be trapped and killed.

According to the ministry, the enclosure is a temporary solution that needs to be implemented to stop the decline of these isolated populations until the government’s caribou strategy is adopted in 2023. Many environmentalists, however, argue that the government is merely buying time. “It’s like putting them on life support,” says Caouette.

Ouellet D’Amours believes that culling predators and caribou enclosures would not have been necessary if the government had acted earlier. “It’s a measure that is being taken to make up for decades of inaction.” And it’s not without risk. When caribou are put in enclosures, explains Steeve Côté, a professor of biology and ecologist at the Université Laval, they don’t learn how to survive in the wild. Côté says animals born in these facilities won’t be used to finding proper habitat for themselves. They’ll also be naive toward predators, he adds, as they won’t have encountered any while in captivity. Côté explains that predator control and enclosures will only be effective if the caribou’s habitat is protected and restored while they’re in pens. Otherwise, they’ll simply be re-entering a dangerous environment that is still conducive to predators.

For Louis Lesage, Director of the office of Nionwentsïo of the Huron-Wendat Nation in Wendake, Quebec, the decision is emblematic of the government’s lack of consultation with Indigenous communities regarding caribou protection. “The government, without consulting us, without asking for our opinion, pulled this solution out of a magic hat and unilaterally put our caribou in pens,” says Lesage. The office has been collaborating with the MFFP for the last seven years on re-establishing the local caribou population, but it hasn’t always been easy.

Indigenous communities across Turtle Island have strong ties to the caribou. In Wendake, before their populations began dwindling, caribou were used for food, clothing, and artisanal production. “Caribou were essential to Huron-Wendat arts and culture,” says Lesage. Their leather, for instance, was used to make coats, and their hooves were used to create wall pockets, a speciality of the Huron-Wendat that involved decorating the hoof and using it as a support for different objects.

Yet Indigenous Peoples have largely been left out of the conservation process. In an opinion piece in the Narwhal, Adrienne Jérôme, Chief of the Lac Simon First Nation, and Christy Ferguson, executive director of Greenpeace Canada, criticize the provincial government’s response: “Not only the lack of action for caribou recovery, but the lack of real dialogue or meaningful efforts to listen to Indigenous perspectives is in itself a form of environmental racism. Through the inaction and inertia of the Government of Quebec, the ancestral rights of Indigenous Peoples have been and are still widely violated.”

Some Innu communities have also begun taking legal action against the Quebec government, stating that the government has failed to adequately consult with Indigenous Peoples regarding caribou protection. The Essipit and Mashteuiatsh First Nations filed a motion with the Quebec Superior Court on February 24, 2022, writing in a statement that they “demand respect for [their] Aboriginal rights and immediate measures to protect the caribou and its habitat, based on Innu and scientific knowledge.” The following week, the Canadian Press reported that Innu Council of Pessamit’s Chief, Jean-Marie Vollant, said that he’s willing to follow suit to enforce action.

According to Lesage, “collaboration is never a given [for the government]. You have to want it deeply and you have to convince the government that we have to help each other to act in the same direction, and then we end up convincing the government that by joining our efforts we will succeed in certain cases.”

The province can look to British Columbia, where a caribou herd bordering on extinction tripled its numbers in less than a decade, thanks to the work of the Saulteau and West Moberly First Nations. While their community-led effort included putting caribou in enclosures and culling wolves, it most importantly also involved protecting the herd’s habitat. In 2020, the federal government and British Columbia agreed to protect and restore 8,100 square kilometres of natural caribou habitat in the area, halting a planned resource extraction project.

The Huron-Wendat Nation worked on the creation of the Ya’nienhonhndeh protected area for over a decade and finally reached a partnership with the provincial government in 2021. The Legault government agreed to protect 300 square kilometers last June, and up to 750 square kilometers over the span of the pilot project. Ya’nienhonhndeh means “the place where medicinal plants are gathered” in the Wendat language. The protected area will not only help with caribou conservation efforts, but will also protect rare plants, chimney swifts, and other species at risk on the territory. Ya’nienhonhndeh will be one of the rare protected old-growth forests in the province.

The MFFP confirms that habitat loss is a major driver of caribou decline, and states that forestry practices are being adapted by following interim measures aimed at restoring caribou habitat. Yet, in February 2022, the ministry announced a plan to cut trees in an area bordering the caribou’s habitat in Gaspésie as part of a management plan for the recovery of wood affected by the spruce budworm. “It raises real questions about how the ministry thinks about protected species. There’s a mentality that needs to evolve,” says Ouellet D’Amours.

That same month, it was announced that 83 protected area projects in southern Quebec were rejected, amounting to 20,000 square kilometres of land. All of the rejected projects were in territories where the government allows commercial logging. “The forestry industry and the short-term profits it creates are often prioritized over protecting biodiversity in Quebec,” says Caouette. “We’ve seen this in the last few months [with the creation of protected areas]. The industry has a strong lobby in southern Quebec that will ultimately slow down or be an obstacle to the creation of any protected areas in that region.”

In March 2021, an investigative report by CBC/Radio-Canada unveiled just how intensely the MFFP is under the forestry industry’s influence. To attain its goal of preserving 17 percent of its territory in 2020, the government created 34 new protected areas in Northern Quebec, where forests don’t have much commercial value and commercial logging is mainly outlawed. Forestry projects in the southern parts of the province, where the Charlevoix and Gaspésie herds are located, keep being approved. An anonymous source working for the MFFP interviewed by CBC/Radio-Canada claimed that many rejected protected areas in southern Quebec were originally greenlit by officials, but caused concern for the industry.

A shift is needed. Quebec’s economy is still reliant on the forestry industry: it made up 1.6 percent of Quebec’s total GDP in 2019, and thousands of Quebecers are employed as loggers, technicians, field supervisors, and more. “We need to think of the economic development of the regions outside of metropolitan areas in a different way. This is the question that we’re asking ourselves, and that we must ask ourselves as a society,” says Ouellet D’Amours.

For environmentalists like Côté, the outlook for meaningful action by the government is grim. “There’s no reason why the government would [act] now when they haven’t for the last 20 years, even though they knew about [the decline of the caribou]. Everybody knows about it in this country. There’s no desire to do anything,” he says.

In order to make a difference, Ouellet D’Amours believes in the power of citizen action: “Write to your MP, go to public consultations, and stay informed.” She senses that the tides are turning: “People are more and more informed about what’s happening, and are more responsive to our messaging. That gives me hope.”

Photos courtesy Jennifer David & Waubgeshig Rice

When Jennifer David decided to start Storykeepers, a podcast that spotlights Indigenous literature, she knew Waubgeshig Rice was her only choice for a co-host. He was an experienced journalist with CBC, a published author—most recently of the bestseller Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press, 2018)—and they were both passionate about uplifting Indigenous voices.

However, the first time David approached Rice about co-hosting in 2018, he had to decline. Although he was excited about the idea, he couldn’t take on a new project. He was working full-time at CBC and he had a new baby.

“I shelved it because I never pictured any other co-host. I did not want to go ahead unless I was going to go ahead with Waub,” David says.

David sees herself as a communicator. She has a background in journalism, she’s an experienced facilitator, and she’s the author of two books, including the podcast’s namesake, Story Keepers: Conversations with Aboriginal Writers (Ningwakwe Learning Press, 2004). She’s spent her career promoting Indigenous voices on television, radio, and in literature.

Early in 2021, David heard Rice was leaving CBC so he could write full-time. She approached him again and asked if this was a better time for him to co-host the podcast. He said yes. Right away, they got to work. They successfully applied for funding with the Ontario Arts Council, hammered out the details of what they’d like the podcast to be, and started planning the first season. The first episode aired in March 2021.

Rather than the typical radio show where authors are interviewed about their books, David wanted to do something different. Storykeepers is more like a book club, with a book being discussed in depth without the author present. They record one episode per month. The entire focus of Storykeepers is Indigenous voices: they discuss Indigenous writing across genres—fiction, memoir, plays, and poetry—with an Indigenous guest host.

“It’s a bit of a challenge to transpose that book club kind of vibe,” Rice says. “How we approach each episode is very informal and casual.”

Although they read the books, take notes, and discuss topics ahead of time, David and Rice keep the actual episodes unscripted. For Rice, the podcast was an exciting challenge after working at CBC for so long, where almost everything was scripted.

When planning the season, David and Rice started with a list of books they wanted to discuss, and then they made a list of potential guest hosts. Afterwards, they tried to match them up.

“What we try to do is identify somebody who has some sort of personal or professional connection to that book or to that author or to the Indigenous nation that it’s about just to open our eyes to perspectives we may not have considered either,” Rice says. They bring in voices from Anishinaabe, Cree, Inuit, Métis, and Two-Spirit backgrounds, among others.

They recorded 10 episodes for the first season, including a discussion with Cherie Dimaline about Eden Robinson’s Return of the Trickster, Duncan McCue about Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk, Rosanna Deerchild about Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, and more. To encourage listeners to engage with the podcast and interact with them online as if it is a book club, Storykeepers offers book giveaways. At the end of the season, David and Rice were thrilled when they realized the podcast had over 47,000 downloads.

Season two kicked off in January 2022 with a discussion of Katherena Vermette’s The Strangers with guest host Jamie Morse. Rice has taken a slight step back for season two, as he will be a judge for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize and he’s editing his forthcoming novel. Instead of participating in every episode, he’ll be co-hosting every second episode.

“I didn’t want to spread myself too thin. I want to do the books we feature in the podcast properly,” Rice says.

He expects to return to co-hosting every episode in fall 2022.

Listeners can look forward to hearing about an exciting lineup this season, including Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians, and the podcast’s first episode featuring a graphic novel, This Place: 150 Years Retold.

David hopes the new season reaches even more listeners. She would like people to come to them and tell them what they’re reading. She’d be thrilled to hear from Indigenous writers and artists interested in being a guest host on the show.

“We can do this for 10, 20 years and still not get through all the books by Indigenous authors,” David says. “I feel like I kind of owe it to Indigenous authors to keep this going so that they can see themselves and their books in here. We’ve just touched the surface.”

Photo by XURZON; Design by Valerie Thai

At least 595 people died in B.C. from heat-related deaths during the summer of 2021. Most of these occurred during the province’s “heat dome” event, which took place from June 25 to July 1, and saw temperatures rise as high as 49.6 degrees Celsius. Many climate activists and researchers believe that was just a taste of what’s to come as extreme weather events cause mass death with increasing frequency.

When climate-related mass deaths come, they’re expected to affect disabled people in greater numbers. While a full coroner’s report detailing how many of those who died in the 2021 heat wave were disabled has yet to be released, Sébastien Jodoin, a Canada Research Chair in Human Rights, Health, and the Environment at McGill University in Montreal and the founding director of the Disability-Inclusive Climate Action Research Program (DICARP), expects it to mirror the coroner’s data from Montreal’s 2018 heat wave. That event killed 66 people, 72 percent of whom were chronically ill.

“When you looked at the coroner’s report of people who died,” says Jodoin, “they found that a quarter had schizophrenia.”

Jodoin, who pivoted his research to looking at how disabled people are left out of climate planning after he developed multiple sclerosis (MS) at 33 years old, notes that a common medication that schizophrenics take makes them more sensitive to heat. However, he believes that what ultimately increases schizophrenics’ risk is that they are often poor, isolated, and harder to reach when it comes to government communication.

“They actually would have needed some sort of additional measures to be safe during this period and there was nothing in place to protect them,” Jodoin explains. “So, it kind of illustrates both that there’s vulnerability and … lack of planning.”

Climate change is currently affecting disabled people in Canada and around the world especially hard. Rolling blackouts caused by overtaxed power grids are disrupting the use of ventilators or other assistive devices, extreme temperatures and smog are causing flare-ups for people who have respiratory or autoimmune disabilities, and emergency response planning for extreme weather events often do not consider the needs or particular vulnerabilities of disabled people. Even increases in the toxicity of controlled drugs causing more disabled people to die from overdoses can be linked to the climate, since climate change has been linked to increased drug use. The climate future is likely to be filled with preventable deaths of disabled people. Yet, climate change planning rarely includes disabled people, many of whom are vulnerable in multiple ways because of poverty or other intersecting marginalizations.

Jodoin, who has analyzed climate adaptation policies around the world, found that disability was rarely mentioned in these critical national and international documents. What’s more, disabled people are sometimes physically excluded from the negotiation table.

“[Climate negotiations are] not accessible sometimes to wheelchair users,” Jodoin says. “There was an incident last November where an Israeli minister [Karine Elharrar] … was not able to enter the negotiation room because she was a wheelchair user.”

Jodoin notes that disabled people aren’t discussed in most of Canada’s national adaptation policies for climate change, the set of government publications that cover everything from policy frameworks, to platforms, to in-depth plans for specific departments or ministries. He says these frameworks do, however, often mention Indigenous people and women as potentially being more at risk.

That omission means that disabled people will be less likely to get centred in planning. But Susana Deranger, a climate and disability activist of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and a member of the Indigenous Climate Action steering committee, an Indigenous-led organization working to find solutions to climate change, also believes it neglects the fact that disabled people are disproportionately Indigenous.

“Systemic racism makes experiences of disability much worse,” they say. “Thirty percent of Indigenous people are disabled…. That’s an extremely high number.”

Deranger worries that climate change or climate emergencies will make it harder for disabled Indigenous people to access health care, traditional foods, and even medical care and supplies in remote Indigenous communities.

Deranger isn’t surprised that disabled BIPOC people are being left out of these plans. They believe that the same forces that motivate ableist beliefs that disabled people are disposable are also what led us to the climate catastrophe—the colonial belief that the land and people are important only in how they’re instrumental to capitalism.

“Capitalism and colonialism go hand in hand and are linked to everything that’s wrong,” they say.

Andrea McDowell, who works on air quality and climate change at the municipal level, believes more preparation needs to go into protecting disabled people from climate impacts.

“Disabled people are the largest minority group in Canada,” she says. “That’s a very large number of people who are being left out of important and even life-saving work.”

McDowell’s 18-year-old, Echo McDowell, has a rare form of dwarfism and worries about the ways she’s already being left out of emergency planning. Echo recalls an example where she was left behind during a school fire drill because no one knew what to do to get her to safety.

“I had to spend a while making specific plans with the administration so that they wouldn’t end up leaving me in the building,” she explains.

Being left behind in an emergency is McDowell’s fear for all disabled people. “You look at Hurricane Katrina and the people who died were often disabled and that was largely because the response didn’t take … the needs of disabled people into account,” she says. “If the response isn’t accessible, then disabled people will die.”

It seems like governments aren’t making evacuating disabled people a priority, are creating emergency shelters that aren’t accessible, are not planning for medical care or vital medicines, and are stockpiling food that disabled people with dietary requirements can’t eat. There are so few ways that disabled people’s needs are being included in climate emergency planning.

“[People often say] we need to consider disabled people. But there’s so little representation in the organizations and the committees that are making those decisions,” says McDowell.

While a diverse representation of disabled people should be centred in climate movements, disabled people are not just often left out—they’re also sometimes seen as the problem.

For example, bans on plastic straws have trampled over disabled people’s needs, single-use plastics that save disabled people’s lives are often demonized, and one Ontario doctor has called for a reduction in inhaler prescriptions to combat climate change. Climate movements often target the things disabled people need to survive—something that’s been referred to as “eco-ableism.”

“My life is dependent on single-use plastics,” says McDowell, who is a Type 1 diabetic (T1D). “So, I spent a lot of time thinking about the environmental movement … and ableism.” Due to the use of testing strips and needles, managing T1D requires the use of a significant amount of single-use plastics.

She believes that climate justice and environmental groups need to do more to reach out. “Look around the table. Recognize that there’s a very large and important constituency that’s not being included, and fix it,” she says. “We have completely overlooked disability for the past several decades or centuries. Maybe it’s time we find some local visibility initiatives relating to the environment or climate and support them.”

Deranger agrees that the environmental movement is not doing enough to make space for disabled people—or to include those who are marginalized in other ways and who are also disabled. Despite efforts to include more Indigenous people and people of colour in climate activism, they say it often leaves out disabled people in those groups. “There’s nothing like Braille or ASL or anything for them to participate,” they explain. “When they’re planning venues, they’re not thinking about disabled people. If there’s rallies and marches and people can’t walk very far with them, they’re never planned [for].”

Deranger doesn’t believe it has to be that way, citing an experience at a rally in Mexico where there was a truck participants could hop onto if they couldn’t walk or got tired. “But I don’t see that [here],” they say.

The movement loses out when it doesn’t include everyone, according to Deranger. “The solution to climate justice is to listen to Indigenous Peoples but listen to Indigenous disabled people as well,” they assert. “[Inclusion is seen as] another burden to fighting rallies, fighting marches, planning events.… It’s already overwhelming. So … we can’t add that on. We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the capacity. Well, make it.”

In 2020, American disability activist Alice Wong gave a talk called “The Last Disabled Oracle.” In it, she discussed how disabled people sounded the alarm during the pandemic about the importance of masks, accessibility, and interdependence.

“It became very clear who was considered disposable and who was not,” she said in her talk. “The casual ableism, racism, and ageism went unchecked in debates around restarting the economy with terms such as ‘acceptable losses’ and ‘high risk’ as if those lives weren’t worth living or saving.”

Wong later tweeted: “Disabled people know what it means to be vulnerable and interdependent. We are modern-day oracles. It’s time people listened to us.”

Many activists are worried that the disregard public health officials are showing to the concerns of disabled people during the pandemic will be mirrored in the climate future. But, that future could be made easier if only more people listened to disabled people. Rather than being sidelined, many disabled activists argue, they should be leading government efforts to adapt to a changing climate.

“[As a disabled person,] you’re already existing in an environment that is hostile towards you, and that’s not an experience that abled people have,” says McDowell. “I think there’s a lot to learn there about the kind of adaptability and resourcefulness and problem solving that disabled people often need to do just to exist in the world.”

Deranger also sees disabled people as holders of wisdom others could benefit from. “Everybody has to realize that disability is … a social justice issue just like climate change is,” they say. “Listen to disabled people—disabled people live with and recognize climate change just as much as anyone else andif you want to learn about coping mechanisms and resilience, go to disabled people, listen, and learn.”

Photo by byNRQEMI; Design by Valerie Thai

Over a century since their introduction, cars dominate the streets of cities and towns across Canada to such a degree that many people feel there is no real alternative. In January 2022, Turo Canada in partnership with Léger found that 83 percent of Canadians have their own or lease a vehicle and 81 percent of vehicle owners feel it would be impossible not to. There’s a reason for that: car-dependent communities are the product of decades of collaboration between industry and government.

Today, the supremacy of the automobile can feel like an immutable reality—but it wasn’t always that way. In 1913, there were only about 50,000 motor vehicles on Canadian roads, but the year prior, the Canadian Highway Association had already started pushing for a national highway system. By 1919, they were starting to get their way. The government of Robert Borden passed the Canadian Highway Act that year, directing highway funding to the provinces, followed by even more during the Great Depression. Finally, in 1949, the government of Louis St. Laurent passed what became known as the Trans-Canada Highway Act to set federal standards and provide federal funding, which reached up to 90 percent on some segments. The Trans-Canada Highway was considered complete, as per the Act, in 1971.

The history of highway funding is one example of the central role that governments have played in enabling the automobile-dependent society we live in today, but it is not the only one. Over the years, federal and provincial governments expanded road networks, provided incentives for automotive manufacturing, and created the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation to make mortgages more accessible to people, while setting standards that encouraged suburban development. This partnership between industry and government was mutually beneficial, but it hasn’t been without consequences.

Vehicle ownership costs on average between $8,600 and $13,000 a year, according to the Canadian Automobile Association, and that was before recent inflation. Meanwhile, 1,762 people were killed by motor vehicles in 2019, and another 8,917 people were seriously injured. The environmental toll is also significant, with suburban living having a bigger carbon footprint than urban dwelling, and transportation accounting for 25 percent of national emissions in 2019, second only to the oil and gas sector. Those emissions grew by 54 percent between 1990 and 2019, in part because of the increased number of large trucks and SUVs on Canadian roads.

To address the transport sector’s contribution to climate change, the Canadian government and its provincial counterparts have coalesced around a plan to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles, with a goal of reaching 100 percent of passenger car and truck sales by 2035. To incentivize that shift, the federal government is offering rebates of up to $5,000 for the purchase of a zero-emissions vehicle, subsidies for the construction of electric vehicle chargers, and is working with industry to ensure production facilities are in place.

On its face, electrification seems universally positive since it will be essential to any transition in the transportation sector—but it also signals a lack of vision. “Automobility as a technology and as a set of desires is never fundamentally challenged,” explains James Wilt, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk. Instead, Wilt says, the government’s policy assumes “all you need to do is get people out of an internal combustion engine vehicle and into an electric battery vehicle.”

That is in part because of a common assumption that electric vehicles are without environmental cost since they do not produce tailpipe emissions. It can be seen in the language of “zero emissions.” Yet, as Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) professor John Sandlos says, “To conceive of those vehicles as being ‘green,’ wholly green, and without cost, that would be a mistake.” In most scenarios, an electric vehicle has a lower emissions footprint than one powered by gas or diesel, but that does not mean they do not have an adverse impact of their own. A greater share of their emissions are generated in the production stage rather than from their use, and their batteries account for a significant portion of that environmental cost.

As part of the federal government’s push to grow electric vehicle production, it wants Canada to become a key node in the mineral supply chain for the batteries that power them. Former Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry Navdeep Bains calls this Canada’s “competitive advantage,” explaining that “we are the only nation in the western hemisphere with an abundance of cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel, the minerals needed to make next-generation electric batteries.” The 2021 federal budget was praised by the Mining Association for introducing new funding and tax incentives under the government’s Mines to Mobility initiative. U.S. officials have also referred to Canada as a “51st state” for minerals after a concerted push by the Liberals for an integrated supply chain.

For government, the expansion of domestic mining is positioned as a significant economic opportunity, while “the mining industry sees that as an opportunity to portray themselves as clean and green,” says Sandlos. But in order to lay the groundwork for increased extraction, the costs are being downplayed. “Part of the problem goes back to our measures of what is economic success,” explains MiningWatch Canada communications and outreach coordinator Jamie Kneen. “The reason that these things look like good economic options to governments is that there are big dollars invested and high-paying jobs are created, but not that many jobs, and a lot of the real costs of mining are externalized.”

According to Wilt, such a plan “is premised on the continued dispossession and underdevelopment of Indigenous nations, especially in the North.” While mining can provide opportunities like high-paid jobs and training, it also comes with many consequences, and communities—be they Indigenous or non-Indigenous—are not always able to effectively assert their rights to ensure mining developments minimize the harms and deliver the promised benefits.

The government is championing its strategy, but it’s still early days. Kneen explains that opposition to lithium and graphite projects in Quebec is already mounting, and most existing Canadian mining is still for minerals that wouldn’t be going into batteries. That means there’s time to ensure mining projects must meet a more rigorous standard. “It’s a question of having much stricter and much more effective regulations in place,” says Kneen, “including things like free, prior, and informed consent for Indigenous communities and processes that provide meaningful democratic engagement and that respect Indigenous authorities and their decision-making, so that people are not being asked to sacrifice beyond what’s already been stolen from them.”

Sandlos warns against “a Wild West rush” for battery minerals and asserts the need to learn from the mistakes made during the oil boom earlier in the 2000s. In her book Fossilized: Environmental Policy in Canada’s Petro-Provinces, University of Waterloo professor Angela Carter describes that period as one in which provinces were “neglecting the environmental risks and impacts of oil extraction in their rush to capture the spoils.” In her research, Carter outlines how, in seeking to capitalize on high oil prices, governments subsidized oil companies, rolled back environmental regulations, and even stifled environmental research. Those actions not only had impacts on local environments and the climate, they were also accompanied by the oil industry having greater influence over policy and growing inequality, particularly in the provinces where that extraction was taking place.

As we look forward to a potential mining boom driven by electric vehicles, an environmental assessment process that gives people real power over resource developments could be one way to avoid a similar fate. “If there are communities near a mining development, those communities should be involved in the planning,” Sandlos explains, “especially if this mining is happening in the proximity of Indigenous communities which have particular rights to land, and culturally I think they would say they have certain obligations to the land as well.” In his view, that process could require companies to sign agreements that create community-controlled oversight bodies to audit the mines.

Each of these projects should also have to do a full accounting of their costs, says Arn Keeling, an MUN professor and collaborator with Sandlos on the Toxic Legacies Project. “If we’re going to talk about electrification, what’s the true cost?” he asks. “Well, the true cost means paying every dime” of the social, environmental, and infrastructural costs, not being distracted by “promises of windfall profits that usually get privatized anyway.” There will be opposition to higher standards for mining projects, but they are essential to responsible development. “The neoliberal way of thinking about this is to see all this as red tape,” says Sandlos, but “it’s the way of imposing a land ethic on doing this kind of development and being willing to put the brakes on developments that don’t make sense.”

Beyond ensuring mining is done in a more responsible way, the government’s transport policy needs a broader rethink. “The first of the three Rs is reduce,” says Kneen. “Reducing demand through efficiency and technology is great, but we also need to look at the structures of the way we do things.” The suburban, auto-oriented communities we have today are the product of decades of government policy that encouraged us to live that way, and a transport policy that meets the scale of the climate crisis requires a similar level of ambition. “I wouldn’t want to see electric vehicles become an excuse for more suburban development,” says Sandlos.

As an alternative to requiring most Canadians to buy electric vehicles, Wilt argues for a “radical decommodification of transportation” where governments prioritize policies and investments that encourage people to ditch their cars—whether gas, diesel, or electric—in favour of taking public transit, riding a bicycle, or walking where it’s feasible. In practice, that means directing significantly more funding to expand transit systems and cycling infrastructure in urban, suburban, and even rural communities across the country. It also requires federal and provincial governments to not just pay the capital costs of buying new buses or building new subway lines, but subsidize the daily operating costs usually shouldered by cash-strapped municipal governments.

Finding success with such a transport policy requires thinking about the broader community too, in the same way the automobile incentivized suburbanization. “All levels of government are focused on profit opportunities for shareholders,” explains Kneen, “and it’s not a policy that’s really responding to people’s needs.” Instead, Wilt argues such a shift “requires densification and socialization of housing” to ensure investments in transit, cycling, and pedestrian infrastructure don’t just serve to further gentrify cities with new condo developments and prices that many people can’t afford. “It really does revolve around understanding mobility as a fundamental right and responsibility for all of us to collectively share,” he says.

The government is embarking on a project that continues to centre automobiles, while requiring a significant increase in resource extraction at home and abroad—extraction that will have consequences for communities and local environments. It’s a policy that doesn’t fundamentally challenge the status quo, other than swapping internal combustion engines for batteries, even as our reliance on automobiles has created inequities and harms that this transition offers us the chance to address. The transition away from fossil fuels will require minerals, but the amount depends on the path we ultimately pursue—and one that reorients mobility toward public transit is far less resource-intensive than one where many Canadians continue to rely on automobiles.

As Wilt puts it, “The question is not so much whether the policy can or will be effective, it’s more, ‘Is this the future that we want?’” We have a rare opportunity to think seriously about how we want to live in the century to come. It would be a shame to let mining and automotive companies make that decision for us.