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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

The Scarlette Ibis, wearing burgundy curls, a red leather corset, and matching heels, strode across the pub floor to the buoyant electro beat of Kim Petras’s “Slut Pop.” She briefly disappeared as she hit the floor in a confident roll. If she wobbled slightly on the rebound, the crowd only cheered harder. Shockingly, the February 2023 show, at Vancouver’s University of British Columbia (UBC) campus, was The Scarlette Ibis’s drag debut—it seemed like she’d been doing this forever.

Cheers from one table rose above the rest. They were from members of UBC’s Trans Coalition, a new group campaigning to add gender-affirming care to UBC’s student health-care plan. The Scarlette Ibis, also known as Oliver McDonald, is one of the coalition’s most outspoken organizers. McDonald is transmasc, two-spirit and Cree from Peguis First Nation in Treaty 1—all of which shape his drag and advocacy.

The coalition formed because UBC’s student health-care plan did not include trans health care. Paying out of pocket for hormones, surgery, and other treatments was a staggering burden for many trans students already struggling under the rising costs of living. “People’s lives are at risk, including my own,” McDonald said in an address to the UBC student council in February.

A month after the show, the coalition succeeded: UBC will now insure trans health care. Drag performers—both in and out of makeup—were a vital force for advocacy and queer joy during a tense campaign.

Gender-affirming care can be an issue of life and death. A 2020 U.S. study of 20,619 trans adults found that of those, 3,494 had wanted pubertal suppression at some point in their lives. Amongst that segment of the population, those who had received puberty blockers were 15 percent less likely to consider suicide than those who hadn’t.

But council members and student executives had reservations. UBC’s student insurance plan is financially strained, and adding gender-affirming care to the plan would require an $8 increase in student fees. Ultimately, the student body voted to raise their health fees to add gender-affirming care to the insurance plan. “I hope that with this win it lets other activist groups … see that it is possible,” McDonald says.

UBC’s gender-affirming care campaign represents just one facet of a bigger fight for trans rights occurring across the continent. Trans health care in Canada is notoriously underfunded and inaccessible, and transphobic discrimination is on the rise. Last year, protestors harassed over 15 drag queen story hours across Canada.

Although McDonald is new to drag, he has always been a performer, and he used to sing in choir. That changed when he medically transitioned. “Testosterone changed my voice, so I can’t sing like I could before,” he says. “It pushed me out of my comfort zone.” Lip syncing to femme-fronted anthems has been one workaround.

“[The Scarlette Ibis] is about expressing that fun, very feminine persona which, as a transmasc person, it’s not always easy to express,” McDonald says.

The Scarlette Ibis was born when McDonald was a volunteer at the Vancouver Aquarium. As a self-described biology nerd, he felt a special resonance with scarlet ibises—a vibrant red-orange bird related to flamingos. “That’s me in every way—the drama, the poofiness, the colour … they also love shrimp,” he says.

The Scarlette Ibis is not the only alter ego McDonald has up his sleeve. King Colin Izer is McDonald’s latest drag persona, intended to challenge settler Canadian masculinity by laughing at it.

King Colin Izer looks like moose-patterned boxer shorts, red flannel and miniature Canadian flag props waved with a sinister swagger. Before he struts onto the floor, he breaks character to tell audiences “not to be afraid to boo.”

McDonald described this new act, which he performed for the first time at the end of March, as a way to process and play with “mixed confusion” as a light-skinned person with Cree and settler ancestry.

“I want to have a look that’s iconically Canadian, that calls back to this very white working-class … thing,” McDonald says. “People who have a lot of misconceptions about Indigenous people—I really love playing with that.”

He also plans to do more performances that represent his Cree culture. McDonald emphasizes that his drag career builds off of the Indigenous and two-spirit drag performers who came before him and created a thriving scene in Vancouver. He hopes to pay it forward through organizing drag events to platform other Indigenous drag performers, with the principle of ensuring that all get paid equitably for their work.

“Performing is really fun and I love it, but the more important thing is [to make sure] that other Indigenous people can show their stuff,” he said.

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.”

Art by Valerie Thai

When recent university graduate Michelle Martins returned to her hometown of Kitimat, a town in northern B.C. with a population reported to be about 9,000 people, she didn’t plan to stay for long.

“I came back to Kitimat. I gave myself a year. And I feel like Kitimat is kind of like the Bermuda Triangle of the north … you just get sucked in.” Almost exactly 10 years ago, in March 2011, she saw an ad in the local paper for a child and youth counselling position with non-profit Tamitik Status of Women. By June, she was hired, and she hasn’t looked back since.

A lot has changed over the past decade. Martins is now executive director of Tamitik, a role she took over in August 2020. The organization itself has expanded, too. Over 40 years ago, it began as a group of women sitting around a table, plotting the path to gender equity in their community; now they operate nine intersecting services, including a sexual assault response team, counselling services, a homelessness prevention program, and multiple shelters. Next year they plan to open the first 24-hour daycare in the province.

The pandemic has brought renewed focus to the issue of intimate partner violence as reports that both its frequency and severity had spiked came out in May 2020, increases that have continued into 2021. With that came a commitment of $100 million in emergency federal funding to support domestic violence survivors and their children, much of it to add spaces in transition shelters (meant for stays of up to a month) and second-stage shelters (meant for stays from six months to two years, depending on the shelter).

But according to experts, advocates, and women on the front lines of the problem, more second-stage shelter beds in some ways are only a stop-gap solution to the wider cycle of abuse at play: that of a growing affordability issue that is affecting domestic violence in Canada. Without permanent housing options, temporary solutions are forced to fill the widening gap.

In many ways, B.C. is leading the charge in providing supports for women leaving violent situations. The province actually hosted the first second-stage shelter in the country, when support workers in 1970s Vancouver identified the need for a housing solution that offered a length of stay and emotional and financial support beyond the more traditional short-term women’s shelter. These shelters are life-saving for the women who use them.

“It really is that time and space that gives survivors the chance to get back on their feet,” explains Krys Maki, who published a national study on second-stage shelters in September 2020. “Because of the support that’s given at second-stage [housing] during that time, where they can heal, they can connect, they can build community, they can set themselves up for success.”

Those shelters are in dire need of more funding, per Maki’s research—not just to stay afloat, but to provide crucial counselling and housing support programming, while they often have to fundraise simply to pay employee salaries.

Though Tamitik continues to be on a trajectory of consistent growth, it can often feel like they are constantly playing catch-up, never truly getting ahead of the problem of violence against women (VAW), Martins explains. During the first few months of 2020 they were only able to move two women out of second-stage housing, but every one of their half-dozen tenants is ready to move to long-term housing.

“I don’t think it’s a lack of life skills that is keeping them in second stage right now,” Martins says. “But rather, it is the lack of affordable housing in the private market.”

Of course, this isn’t a local problem: across the country, transition and second-stage shelters are not intended as lengthy stopovers, and yet women leaving violence are living for years in conditions meant for temporary use, simply because they have no other place to go. According to Statistics Canada data from 2019, 77 percent of violence against women shelters in Canada reported that the top challenge facing residents was “a lack of affordable and appropriate long-term housing options upon departure.”

Kitimat is emblematic of the crisis playing out in communities across B.C. The site of massive infrastructure projects (most recently the $17-billion LNG Canada plant), each production boom has brought more prosperity in some respects, but not everyone benefits in the same ways. It has raised the cost of living in the area and, reportedly, the rate of violence. The influx of mostly male LNG workers—at the peak of the project, almost 7,000 of them—has raised concerns from community members about harassment from strangers. What we know for sure is that when a woman wants to leave her abusive partner, she can no longer afford to, a goal that might have once been within her reach.

In a community with a five-digit population, 100 women and four children were turned away in 2020 alone, according to data from Tamitik’s transition house, Dunmore Place.

The vast inequality at play is creating a large fissure, and women are falling into it. Those who are disabled, racialized, low-income or otherwise marginalized are not only more likely to need to access the second-stage shelter system, but more likely to face homelessness to boot.

The massive discrepancies in Kitimat—and resulting power differentials—caused by social and economic inequality are felt most acutely by the Haisla Nation, the First Nations band whose traditional territory includes the area in and around Kitimat.

Martins says that typically Tamitik’s clients are 70 to 80 percent Indigenous women. This is a stat mirrored nationally: according to an extensive literary review by researcher and homelessness expert Kaitlin Schwan, aptly titled “The State of Women’s Housing Need and Homelessness in Canada,” Indigenous women are overrepresented in domestic violence shelters by five times their representation in the Canadian population.

These issues likely feel all too familiar to residents of famously expensive Vancouver, just over a 1,400 kilometre drive south from Kitimat. Tanyss Knowles, project manager with the BC Society of Transition Houses, is one of those residents, and has been pushing the province to take the issue seriously for a while. These days she is focused on the Getting Home Project, a three-year, community-based partnership with BC Housing that focuses on reducing barriers to safe, secure, and affordable housing for women experiencing violence.

“The provincial government that we’ve been working with has been very responsive to our organizations, to what we have had to say about this issue. And BC Housing in particular has, I think, taken a real leadership role in terms of across Canada, what’s happening around these issues,” she says.

The past few years have accelerated action on the issue: the province now has a Priority Placement Program to help women leaving violent situations find housing quickly with BC Housing’s directly-managed units. In 2018, B.C. also announced the Women’s Transition Housing Fund, which is going to build 1,500 spaces over 10 years for women leaving violence at a cost of $734 million. But it has taken work from grassroots activists and organizers such as Knowles to keep things moving.

Angela Marie MacDougall, who has been executive director of Battered Women’s Support Services (BWSS) for almost 20 years, is another one of those people. We can’t let the positivity of new investment overshadow the work that needs to be done, she says, especially in “recognizing that real estate is a way to generate wealth, and private and corporate ownership of land and real estate is at the heart of why we continue to struggle to see investment in local housing, in large part because there’s no money in it.”

The cost of not taking domestic violence and the resulting housing issues seriously is stark. “One of the leading causes of women’s homelessness is domestic violence or intimate partner violence. So, that is a clean, clear indicator of how housing-precarious folks living with their abusers are,” explains Maki.

The topic of women’s homelessness is under-researched and misunderstood. Schwan’s literary review found that “homelessness is uniquely dangerous for women and gender diverse peoples. When we fail to prevent or end housing need or homelessness for women, we ensure repeated cycles of violence and housing precarity.” As co-chair of the Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network, Schwan has years of insight into the issue.

As outlined in Schwan’s report, women are systematically undercounted when researchers use “snapshot” methods, which typically measure street-based homelessness and homeless shelter usage, both of which tend to be male-dominated. Instead, women will choose options they view as safer than a shelter system that may retraumatize them, like sleeping on friends’ couches.

Even if affordable housing was readily available, not everyone has the same experience trying to secure it. Landlords discriminate against women on financial assistance, single mothers, racialized women, and disabled women.

The particular difficulties Indigenous women have trying to secure housing are well-documented. Martins explains that, recently, a homelessness prevention worker at Tamitik tried to help an Indigenous woman with a monthly income of $4,000 secure an apartment. The pair viewed 12 different options with no success. But soon after, the employee was able to get a white woman with a $2,000 monthly income into one of the same apartments the Indigenous woman was turned away from.

Schwan’s research confirms that this wasn’t an isolated incident. “Indigenous women, girls, and gender diverse peoples experience the most egregious housing conditions throughout Canada and remain the most underserved in both the VAW and homelessness sectors,” creating the condition of “inter-generational homelessness.”

At the national level, Maki sees a lot of potential in two developing plans to help address these issues, if done properly. One is the National Action Plan on Gender-Based Violence; the other is the National Housing Strategy, a 10-year, $70+ billion plan announced in November 2017.

They recommend the government appoint a gender-based violence liaison within the National Housing Strategy to coordinate with shelters from coast to coast. “We’re breaking down those divides between these sectors, and we’re bringing everyone together, so that everyone’s on the same page and knows what’s happening. We can all work better together that way.”

There’s a lot of promise in how years of work and millions of dollars in funding could change the experience of women leaving violent situations. But for many on the front lines of this crisis today, they need real solutions, in real time.

“Even though these buildings are being funded, and they’re currently under construction, and there are lots of housing affordability projects going on, we also need to have solutions for women right now. Because it takes time to develop bricks and mortar,” Knowles says.

Martins knows that all too well. Tamitik’s upcoming housing development, which is being funded through BC Housing’s Building BC: Women’s Transition Housing Fund to the tune of over $10 million, will boast 18 transition housing beds, 10 second-stage housing units and 20 units of affordable housing, and act as a hub for Tamitik’s programming. The project has been in progress since 2016, but Martins’ predecessor, Linda Slanina, actually had the dream of a mixed-use housing project 25 years ago.

Knowles feels positive about the progress made in the province, and praises B.C. for continuing to work to make the issue a priority. But she urges other areas of Canada to think about this issue sooner rather than later.

“It’s unfortunate that we live in a province with such a housing crisis that makes it hard to feel like we’re getting ahead of it.… I would say to provinces that don’t have as long a history of housing unaffordability: you have an opportunity to get ahead of the curve.”

The smallest First Nations Public Library (FNPL) I’ve heard of consists of two shelves. Yes, two shelves, not stacks. Michipicoten First Nation has a FNPL and fewer than 75 on-reserve residents. The largest FNPL is the Six Nations Public Library, where I am the CEO and director of library services; it houses a collection of close to 40,000 items. Yet, despite this collection’s size, two-thirds of that material sits in a shipping container in the parking lot because there is no physical room to store it. Regardless of size, there are many trials and tribulations which this group of libraries experiences. Still, these libraries provide a service—some might argue an essential service—to their communities.

A large majority of Canadians do not think about their libraries. Most cities, towns, and hamlets have one. Of the 133 First Nations reserves in Ontario, only 46 have libraries. In working for a FNPL, I’ve discovered that the majority of non-Indigenous people don’t even realize that First Nation Public Libraries exist. Yet, they do, and some have served their communities for over 60 years.

Two of the very first FNPLs to serve their communities were in geographically opposite regions of Ontario. One was in Northern Ontario, in Moose Factory, which is a Cree community near the coast of James Bay. This library got started in 1959. The other is Six Nations Public Library, located near Brantford, southwest of Toronto. According to librarians in the FNPL system who organized before me, these libraries started a trend and by 1985 there were five FNPLs in Ontario. By 1987, there were over 30, and in 1994 there were 44 First Nation Public Libraries. (At one point, between 1994 and 2002, there were over 50 FNPLs!)

Ontario is quite unique in that it is the only province in Canada to recognize the First Nation Public Libraries via legislation. FNPLs are included in the Public Libraries Act (PLA) of Ontario. This piece of legislation governs all public libraries in Ontario. Despite being recognized within the PLA, funding for FNPLs is paltry at best. This was discussed at a meeting of the First Nation public librarians of Ontario, where it came up that while funding for all public libraries, FNPL included, comes from the Ministry of Heritage, Sport, Tourism, and Culture Industries, funding for FNPLs from the government is quite different and substantially less than funding received by municipal libraries. For example, the First Nation Salary Supplement is $13,000 and the portion of the Public Library Operating Grant of less than $1,000 per year, based on the on-reserve population. Imagine: wages, purchasing new books, paying for hydro, telephone service, maybe the internet, possibly rent, plus a myriad of other bills, all on less than $14,000 annually!

Nonetheless, FNPLs are resilient and full of strength. This is exhibited in their First Nation Public Libraries’ vision statement: “Public libraries provide an essential service to First Nation communities. Our Chiefs and Councils lead our communities in recognizing and supporting our public libraries as vital contributors to growth and change. With current and culturally relevant collections and services, First Nation public libraries welcome all community members and support their needs for access to information, personal empowerment and self-affirmation. In partnership with other community programs, our public libraries contribute to our social and economic well-being by nurturing our spirits, preserving our traditions, cultures, and languages, and encouraging lifelong learning and literacy.”

The reality is that FNPLs exist in a balance between two worlds. On one hand, they must act and offer the materials and services which municipal public libraries offer. On the other, they are hubs for cultural and language revitalization, preserving and promoting our culture. That is to say, FNPLs have dual identities: they represent Canadian cultural norms in terms of their fiction, non-fiction, and other collections, but also act as a doorway to the cultures and traditions of their Nation.

It is through the support and advocacy of agencies like the Ontario Library Association (OLA), Southern Ontario Library Service (SOLS), Ontario Library Service – North (OLS-N), and the Federation of Public Libraries that an increased awareness of FNPLs is taking shape, and there have been some notable movements to further support FNPLs.

However, it has been the First Nations Public Librarians themselves, over the past 60 years, who have advocated for their community libraries, helped to increase literacy rates, and worked hard to increase financial support to maintain and establish new libraries. They have done this by creating a series of committees, under different names, all serving the same purpose: to increase awareness, financial, and other supports of FNPLs and First Nation librarians. At in-person meetings of the First Nations Public Librarians of Ontario and through former First Nations public librarians, I learned that in 1995, the First Nations Library Advisory Committee was formed to further the plight of FNPLs in Ontario. In 2004, First Nation librarians started to fundraise for a representative association: the First Nations Libraries Association (FNLA).

In 2010, a small group of librarians formed the National Aboriginal Public Library Organization (NAPLO) to seek out and secure funding and support for all First Nation libraries (FNPLs are divided geographically, with 29 operating in Northern Ontario, under OLS-N and 18 in Southern Ontario under SOLS. Hence the drive to support all FNPLs.)

First Nation public librarians continue to work to have all people recognize the value of Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous knowledge. This mandate was established and grew out of a series of meetings in both Canada and the U.S. The ones I am most familiar with are the National Reading Campaign’s Aboriginal Roundtables which ran annually from 2013 to 2015. At the 2015 Halifax roundtable, the third annual roundtable, the Draft Business Plan for a National Aboriginal Library Association (NALA) was established.

With the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the 94 Calls to Action, First Nation Public Libraries have established partnerships with other cultural memory institutions and are in the process of forming the National Indigenous Knowledge and Language Alliance (NIKLA). Though this organization is in its infancy, it has been a long time in the making. I am excited to be a part of this movement, and to continue the work of all the remarkable FNPL librarians that have come before me. I’m equally excited to help create something that will help retain the voices and knowledge of the past for those who come after me.

Image: iStock/JPA1999; Design: Valerie Thai

“Indigenous nations are their own sovereign nations.” It’s a rhetoric stated consistently in a variety of arenas, both political and non-political. It is a truthful rhetoric at that.

Being Anishinaabe, and also raising an Anishinaabe/Nehiyaw/Nakoda daughter, has further affirmed the truth that we are, 100 percent, our own sovereign nations as Indigenous Peoples. It has affirmed this truth within myself as I think about the future my daughter will have growing up on the political landscape that exists today, constantly having to fight for the truth of her inherent rights.

As such, we as Indigenous nations have absolutely no business in voting within a political system founded and grounded on the continued genocidal, assimilative practices and policies that make up “Canada” today.

When my ancestors made treaty  with the Crown, the original intent and outcome was never based on the idea that we, as Indigenous nations, would assimilate to the point that we would deem our own political and traditional governance systems irrelevant and dissolvable.

With this knowledge, I know that in order to have strong, healthy nations, I must raise my daughter with the knowledge of the original intent and outcome of those treaties. This, in turn, aids in the reminder of the immortality of treaty.

The fact is, treaties are of international stature. Canada has created a false narrative that these treaties have already been “fulfilled,” and even the idea that it is time for, the colonially named, “new nation to nation relationship.” And so many of our people are cattle to that idea. The idea, framed in other words, really just means that Canada is ready to enact their next stage of their assimilation policies.

I, for one, am not for these processes. I stand firm in who I am, and where I come from, as an Anishinaabe person on these lands. And with that knowing any ideas or commitments that come from this “new nation to nation relationship” are as void as any identity colonial governments have given me in my lifetime.

Another fact is that only sovereign nations can make treaty. They are agreements made between two nations, an eternal commitment. And many people forget that.

What many people are also forgetting—or aren’t even learning about—is that treaties, 1 to 11 specifically, created an agreement between Indigenous nations and the Crown that gave permission to the queen to enact her government, which eventually took the shape of Canada.

Also, Canada holds absolutely no title to the land. Even though they place it out like they do. Indigenous Peoples, and our nations, were, and are, the ones who gave that permission for Canada to even be what it is today. Settlers who live on these lands today are only here because of the permission that was given when those treaties were signed.

That doesn’t mean I’m going around reminding settlers on who allowed them to build their lives and families on these lands, unless of course their racism creates the space for me to. It is simply a piece of knowledge that must be made known to all people when learning about the history of these lands on which we live.

So, here we are, in a space where Canada attempts to define our peoples as domestic ethnic minorities, rather than the sovereign nations that we are. The trauma that colonialism inflicted on our peoples, and that it continues to attempt to inflict, has confused the collective mind of many Indigenous Peoples. The colonially created trauma that was deeply rooted in my childhood was a direct outcome of Canada attempting to define who my family was, as Anishinaabe peoples, and doing everything they can to control us.

This confusion has led many families to follow the concept of “pan-Aboriginalism,” and the “Aboriginal Canadian” that abides by, complies with, and conforms to Canadian perspectives of how an Indigenous person is to conduct themselves. We see this being fulfilled when Indigenous Peoples, of their own sovereign nations, are becoming political members within another nation’s (Canada’s) political system.

Me, as an Indigenous person—from an Indigenous nation—participating, and becoming a part of Canadian federal, provincial, and municipal politics would be like Donald Trump coming into Canada’s system and becoming a member of parliament.
It doesn’t make it any sense.

So why have we allowed it to make sense for our people today?

Some people make the suggestion of a “First Nations,” or “Aboriginal” political party.

A First Nations political party will only create an inheritance of this debt to ourselves as Indigenous Peoples, when in reality, that debt is not even ours to carry in the first place.

Because of treaties, Canada is in debt to us, as Indigenous Peoples. The goal is to treat us like ethnic minorities in order to alleviate that debt. To relieve that debt, they must assimilate us as Indigenous Peoples, and many of our people are falling for it. The narrative has brainwashed a lot of our peoples to the point where reinstating our original traditional governance systems have become a no-go zone. Going to that no-go zone is what our children, as Indigenous Peoples, need in the times of crises that we are constantly facing today.

I am doing my best to raise my daughter with that knowledge, and to equip her with the tools to speak up when people state otherwise.

John A. Macdonald has been quoted saying that “we must take the Indian out of the child” in order to “solve the Indian problem.” This is a concept that is still publicly being practiced today. In fact, the concept of “the Indian problem” didn’t ever go away in the eyes of Canada, it was just transformed into the debt problem. Every colonial political party aims to relive that debt in some way, shape, or form.

With this genocidal history in mind, and with the attempts being ongoing today, I continue to restate the truth that there never was an “Indian problem” in the first place. Because from the lens of Indigenous systems, there is only the problem of colonialism.

So for myself, voting in Canada represents me justifying and agreeing with the unlawful and colonial perceptions of the treaty relationship, along with all the assimilation processes that have, and are continuing to, take place today. Ultimately, it would be compromising what my ancestors had put their lives into, and what they prayed about, specifically in relation to treaty.

The solutions to our struggles as a result of colonialism are not in a vote every four years in a system that created these problems. The solutions are in the revival of our kinship systems, the protection of our children, and the affirmation of who we have always been as Indigenous Peoples. It is in the reoccupation of our lands and governing systems, which worked for us for generations prior to colonialism.

The aim is to manipulate the next generations of our peoples to forget about that. And we are seeing that in the form of policies and programs targeting Indigenous youth.

The reality is both the Canadian and Indigenous Peoples are blaming the results of the Indian Act for what treaty was supposed to be, rather than what Canada has made it to be.

So rather than investing my time and energy in a system that has created the problems we are facing in the first place, I would rather invest my time and energy in strengthening our communities to our continuing nations through the work of healing our traumas and restoring our kinship systems, and ultimately, how we as Indigenous Peoples relate to our children.

I will always practice strengthening our own Indigenous systems, rather than complying with systems that colonialism has lethally placed
against us.

Because that, in itself, is where our uprising begins.