Photo by HELEN TANSEY

TORONTO PLAYWRIGHT ANDREA SCOTT started to wonder about the secret lives of her neighbours after watching the U.K. television film I am Slave, based on the true story of a modern-day captive. In the film, Arab militia snatch Mende Nazar from her Sudanese village and sell her into slavery; she eventually lands in England, where she continues her forced bondage. It made Scott question whether similar domestic servitude happened in Canada.

The result of these musings is her play Better Angels: A Parable. In it, Canadian employers strip the protagonist Akosua, a 28-year-old Ghanaian nanny, of her liberties bit by bit: first they take away her passport, then they confine her to the house, and finally they kill her only friend, a spider lodging in her room. But Akosua is not a compliant victim—eventually she frees herself (but no spoilers).

The play hit a chord with audiences and a jury selected it as the Best Production of 2015 at the Summerworks Festival in Toronto, after an eight-day run in August. Summerworks’ artistic producer Michael Rubenfeld praised Scott “for telling the story with wit, cohesion, and a fierce intelligence.” But that’s not all. Better Angels was also performed at the prestigious Athena Festival in Chicago in December. It was the only Canadian play in the festival. “To have people who don’t know me at all say ‘yes’ to my play is very validating,” says Scott.

Especially since her heroine defies racial stereotypes. “I’m a little tired of seeing African lives saved by whites,” says Scott, adding that many playwrights, particularly white ones, often show black women as weak. The strong-minded Akosua is meant to be an antidote to these biases. Scott wanted to create an African character who was empowered, stressing that a woman like Akosua is far from an anomaly in real life. “I have a lot of African friends who are just fine,” she says. “They are financially well-off and don’t need to be saved.”

Better Angels is Scott’s third play. She often returns to the same themes of social injustice and society’s false perceptions of black women. In Eating Pomegranates Naked, her second play, Scott confronted the stereotype of the black maternal figure. The heroine in Pomegranates is happily married but unapologetically childless. Scott hopes her plays will help audiences readjust their racial constructions. “I would really like for people to see women of color,” she says, “as people who have lives as valid as theirs.”

Scott has been writing since age seven, back when she scoured the dictionary for interesting words. As a young adult, she decided to focus on acting and went on to earn both an undergraduate and a master’s degree in drama at the University of Toronto. It wasn’t until 2009 that she took her childhood writing dream out of mothballs and wrote her first play, Damaged, about the life of a transgender woman.

Currently, Scott works 17-hour days and finds it hard to sleep because she has so many ideas. She is now working on a new play to be performed at Summerworks next year. Don’t Talk to Me Like I’m Your Wife weaves through time, flashing from France in 1917 through to 2016. The play chronicles the last 12 hours of the convicted spy Matahari, who was ultimately executed by a firing squad. It also examines the progression of slut shaming throughout history.

Since her award for Better Angels, Scott has also taught a playwriting workshop for high school students in Toronto at the Young Voices Conference held by the Toronto Public Library. She believes in the power of mentorship, particularly for racialized teens. “I would love to play that role to those who haven’t been allowed to be heard,” she says. “If I can start them off having confidence in their writing, I’m doing something good.”

Illustration by Hannah Wilson

YOU DON’T EXPECT the word “amazing” to come out of someone’s mouth so often when they speak about difficult issues every day. Splitting her time between New York and Toronto, Kim Katrin Milan is an an educator, writer, artist, yoga instructor, and activist. She does so much that a casual viewer would be forgiven for thinking her website is about a collective group, not one person. But Milan does it all herself—and with a positive attitude. All her work is purposefully connected: when speaking about social justice with one community, for instance, she may spend the first half of the workshop doing yoga. Everything she does covers the same themes of activism, leadership, equity, and justice.

These themes have always been part of Milan’s life. She intentionally surrounds herself with diversity. Her work itself allows her to be good to the people in her life. Take her studies in transgender issues, for example, says Milan. Her husband, Tiq, a writer and activist, is also a transgender man—Kim says her work allows her “to be a better partner and a better support” for him. Milan speaks about her community often, but what she really means is communities, plural: the LGBTQ community, the feminist community, the Black community—she wants them all to have support and equality.

When Milan was 17, she worked at Transition, an organization for students leaving high school. It was then that she realized how many people need support. Later, in her early 20s, she launched the People Project with Natalyn Tremblay, an independent artist whose work explores identity. The organization provides alternative education, mostly in Toronto, to various communities and uses art to help those communities speak about difficult subjects in creative ways. In 2015, it launched the Pride Community Mural Project and invited queer and trans newcomers, immigrants, refugees, and non-status people to contribute to the mural, showcasing the diverse challenges of those who are new to the city.

Independently, Milan runs workshops all over North America. People and organizations reach out to her when they want to speak about difficult subjects, like racism and sexism. She recently ran a workshop at McMaster University with her husband on the politicsof desire and consent. She likes to open each workshop by speaking broadly about a subject (How do we work across difference?) before narrowing her focus to specifically address her audience (What are some examples of ways people are changing the world?). Often, she’ll look at a specific social or political culture, such as rape culture, and eventually build toward breaking down systems of oppression on a smaller scale—and confronting how to “interrupt those systems.”

After her recent workshop with Tiq, a 17-year old boy approached Milan to admit his realization that sexism played a big role in his cultural background. Listening to her, he had decided to talk to other men and challenge rape culture. This is one of the many times Milan has seen her work make a difference. She wants the people she speaks with to know that they can affect change, even on a small scale. She still keeps in touch with the student and says he kept his word to open conversations with other men.

For Milan, it’s important that she continue to connect with youth—no matter how big her work or her profile become. She wants “that 16-year-old gay boy in Ohio who sends me a message to still feel like he can” and “that young girl in Indonesia who is queer and just coming out to still send me a tweet and know that I will hit her back and be like: ‘I got you.’”
She speaks excitedly about her part ownership of the Glad Day Bookshop, the oldest LGBTQ bookstore in the world, adding that she is the daughter of a librarian. She is currently working on her own book, which she thinks will help take her social justice work to a new level.

Creativity is the string that runs through everything Milan does. It especially shows through in the art and performance shows she curates—like with “Fan the Flames: Queer Positions in Photography,” which was at the AGO in 2014. She wants to educate people, but in an artistic way. “It’s like people don’t know that they’re learning things but they really are,” she laughs, “and they have a really beautiful experience at the same time.” This year at Pride in Toronto, Milan hosted the Cipher Cabaret with the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. They used fast-paced presentations on the topics of queer culture through theatre and technology to “spark some conversations and connection” and to “re/define queerness for the 21st century.”

When asked how she does it all, she responds using hummingbirds as an analogy; Milan has them tattooed on her wrist. When she was young, she had conversations with her grandmother about the way the birds flap their tiny wings so hard that at the end of the day “they almost have a heart attack, they are going so intensely—but that’s just how they’re made up.” She is, she believes, the type of person who excels by doing many different things. She adds that she loves the people she works with and doesn’t look at it as a job. To her, it is a calling.

Still, she’s incredibly busy. During one week, she did a TEDx Talk in London, Ont., then flew to New York for the Out100 Awards, then held meetings with new colleagues, and finally did a workshop on social entrepreneurship and women’s leadership. “Every day,” she says, “is profoundly different.” But it is all part of her lived experience.

While reflecting on her life, she remarks that youth are always asked what they want to be when they grow up. What they are really asking, she says, is “How do you want to make money?” What we should be asking, she says, is: “What kind of person do you want to be?”

Illustration by Antony Hare

IN 2001, EVELYN ENCALADA TRAVELLED to Leamington, Ont. for the first time. Driving through the province’s tomato industry capital, flanked by farm fields on each side, made her feel like she was entering a different world, rife with exploitation and poverty. Encalada, an advocate for the rights of migrant workers, was there with a group of activists to investigate a tip that several migrant workers had been abruptly deported to Mexico.

Once there, she discovered the tomato farm workers in question had organized a strike to protest unsafe working conditions at their jobs. In response, the company and Mexican consulate officials repatriated the workers—both as punishment and as a warning to deter others. Encalada and her group of activists wanted to know how employers and the Mexican consulate officials (combined with Canadian labour and immigration policies) could possess such power. How could they dispose of people so quickly and with such ease?

While there, Encalada came face-to-face with the cruel and largely unseen realities of Leamington’s tomato industry: Small shack-like boarding houses filled with 15–20 grown men for eight months at a time; exposure to harsh chemicals and limited access to safety equipment; treatment of workers as disposable people who are easily replaced. “I had no idea where Leamington was,” she says, speaking of her knowledge before the trip. “But after that weekend I realized I couldn’t stop going,”

Encalada knew she had to do something. She launched her activist network, Justicia, an advocate group for the rights of migrant workers, soon after. It is Encalada’s way of trying to fill the void where justice should be in Canada’s temporary foreign worker program: organizing communities of migrant workers and strategizing solutions to issues they face, from unsafe working conditions to sexual assault.

Justicia has since intervened on several Ontario Human Rights Tribunal cases, including one in May 2015. The case exposed the former owner of a fish processing plant in Wheatley, Ont. who coerced female migrant workers to perform sex acts under threats of deportation. Justicia served as advocates and interpreters for the workers who were harassed and, in the end, the tribunal awarded one woman $150,000 and another, her sister, $50,000 as compensation for injury to their dignity, feelings, and self-respect.

Meanwhile, the country’s Temporary Foreign Worker programs, like the Seasonal Agricultural Program (SAWP) and also the Agricultural Stream, violate human rights on Canadian soil, says Encalada. In Ontario alone, the SAWP acts as an annual revolving door of 15,000 desperate migrant workers, largely from Mexico and Guatemala, who want to provide for their families. Encalada helps keep Canada accountable through community-building and intervention strategies.

Racialized immigrants and migrant workers are mistreated similarly, she says. They aren’t often seen as people and when they are, they can be perceived as disenfranchising Canadians of job opportunities. An acute feeling of displacement perpetuated by instances of discrimination she’s experienced has enabled Encalada to sympathize with the plight of migrant workers. As an immigrant, she left Chile in 1981 during a period of political unrest following a bloody dictatorship. Her father immigrated to Canada as a refugee from Chile in 1979 and, two years later, sponsored Encalada, who was then five years old, and her mother. But Encalada wasn’t able to shake the feeling that she wasn’t given a choice. This, in part, made her feel displaced: “I never felt like I belonged in Canada because I was always taught I was different.”

Instead of allowing discrimination to immobilize her, she armed herself with knowledge, and is now on her way to completing a Ph.D. in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. She has since educated others as a teacher at York University, focusing on diversity issues and social justice in Canadian workplaces.

Lately, she is busy working to alleviate the damaging effects of Canada’s new four-in-four-out rule for temporary foreign workers, which took effect in April 2015. The legislation applies to the many Guatemalan, Thai, Filipino, Honduran, and Indonesian migrant workers who come to Canada under the Agricultural Stream program. It stipulates that workers stay in Canada for a maximum of four years, after which they must return home for another four years before they can apply to work in Canada again. It has forced droves of men and women back to their countries of origin struggling to rebuild their lives and to support their families once again, says Encalada. In response to this mass exodus from Canada, Justicia tries to keep the community of migrant workers united across race, language, and ethnicity. The group trains migrant workers on their rights, but Encalada admits that isn’t always enough:“Often asserting their rights gets workers deported.”

Encalada recently returned from a trip to Mexico and Guatemala. In both places, she encountered young people with dreams of migration. Some asked her what it’s like to travel by plane. Others asked why some people can travel freely while they are stranded with little or no opportunities. She instructed workers in Guatemala to keep their paperwork from the Agricultural Stream and to remain optimistic; perhaps one day they will return to Canada. Encalada says much of what Justicia does is radical— in the sense that it requires envisioning a world beyond capitalism and a dependency on the suffering of others. “If that’s radical,” she says, “then that’s what I am.”

Illustration by Dushan Milic

IN 1958, 11-YEAR-OLD JIM DERKSEN was hospitalized for polio for the second time, alongside many other children who’d been caught by the epidemic. The virus caused him to lose the use of his legs when he was just six years old. It was during this hospital trip, however, that he encountered a nurse who verbally abused the young patients and also sometimes hit them. The young Derksen decided he had two choices: speak out or suffer in silence. Derksen chose to speak out; the abuse stopped. It was the moment that changed everything, he says, and when his activism began to take shape.

“I had a growing awareness for the very oppressed social role that I was being put in,” says Derksen. In a dorm room at the University of Winnipeg in the late 1960s, he once again encountered the do-something- or-stay silent choice. His roommate, who was visually impaired, was having difficulty studying. In response, Derksen decided to create a service that transcribed textbooks onto audiotape. He later expanded this idea to include students with learning disabilities, such as dyslexia. His work to better the lives of people with disabilities did not stop there.

In fact, Derksen has been an unignorable presence in the movement for self-representation of people with disabilities since the 1970s. The Manitoba League of Persons with Disabilities, the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, Disabled Peoples International, and the Canadian Disability Rights Council all have one thing in common: Jim Derksen. He is a founding member of both the Council of Canadians with Disabilities and the Canadian Disability Rights Council.

He has also worked as a key member of The Manitoba League of Persons with Disabilities. He has helped to change government policy. The Special Parliamentary Committee on the Disabled and the Handicapped used Derksen’s knowledge to draft the 1980 “Obstacles” report, which offered new perspectives on the experiences of people with disabilities and was meant to change the Canadian government’s understanding of people with disabilities. As a part of the United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons in 1982, the UN employed him to lead and organize representatives from 40 countries across the globe to develop policy to include people with disabilities. While he chaired the Winnipeg Taxicab Board in the 1980s, he brought in metered wheelchair-accessible taxis to ensure those who use wheelchairs pay the same fare as those who don’t, making day-to-day life easier for Canadian people with disabilities. He even once followed Jean Chrétien into a washroom, back when he was Canada’s Minister of Justice, to lobby for the inclusion of physical and mental disabilities in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Today, you can find both in Section 15 of the Charter.

Vocal on all aspects of disability rights, Derksen is perhaps loudest on the issue of euthanasia. “Many people with disabilities have been killed in the name of mercy,” he says. Tracy Latimer, who had a severe form of cerebral palsy, was 12 years old when her father, Robert, killed her in 1993. The Latimer case is one Derksen will never forget. Robert put his daughter into his truck and pumped exhaust into the cabin until she was dead. Initially charged with first-degree murder, Robert was convicted (twice) of second-degree murder and ultimately sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 10 years. The judge presiding over Latimer’s case called Tracy’s killing a “compassionate homicide,” and—overruling the minimum sentence—sentenced Robert to less than two years in jail, a decision the Supreme Court of Canada ultimately overturned. Tracy’s death opened up a conversation on what constitutes assisted suicide and how people with disabilities are often not afforded self-determination because of their undervalued place in society.

“There was an unwillingness to prosecute him because he was seen as a victim of his own daughter,” says Derksen, “in the sense that she was so cruel to be so disabled to have caused him to kill her.” Today, many people in the disabilities rights community reject assisted suicide, thanks to the Latimer case, which introduced the fear it would leave people vulnerable. “Many people don’t think our lives have any value,” says Derksen. He argues that assisted suicide in Canada is a product of the participation of people and institutions in the mainstream. He believes they are participating in injustice and adds that it leaves those with disabilities defenseless to those who do not value their lives. Still, he is hopeful for the future of people with disabilities.

Derksen sees an increasing public awareness when it comes to the unfair treatment of those with disabilities. This includes expanding the range of disabilities to address a wide spectrum, such as “invisible disabilities,” like mental health conditions. The self-representation of the autistic community is particularly optimistic, he adds. “They don’t see their autism as a disability but as a difference,” he says. Successful activism is built on a common cause, he says. “Many things become possible when you have a group of people who are impassioned about a cause.”

Illustration by Antony Hare

ON MARCH 20, 2008 New College students at the University of Toronto occupied Simcoe Hall to protest a hike in fees during a tuition freeze. The students, who were all people of colour, sat chanting and singing songs hoping to get a meeting with the school’s then president David Naylor. One of the students sitting in Simcoe Hall that day was second-year student Rio Rodriguez—who became one of multiple students arrested for the peaceful sit-in. Things escalated quickly after police arrived and Rodriguez (who identifies as multi-racial gender non-conforming Latin@ person and who uses the pronoun “they”) was injured in the confrontation.

Before this, Rodriguez envisioned U of T as a place to thrive—one that was inclusive and welcoming. Suddenly, they had to re-imagine it as potentially violent for people of colour. Soon, Rodriguez and the other 13 students arrested that day were referred to as the “Fight Fees 14.” The student activists were pressed with criminal charges and, per the conditions of their bail, also escorted to and from classes and restricted from communicating with one another. Naylor later issued a statement that framed the student activists as “thugs” and “violent”, refusing to acknowledge they were just students concerned about their tuition fees.

This incident sparked Rodriguez’s start as a radical historical researcher and, subsequently, the launch of their radical walking tours, which retold the story of U of T as a space that not all students experienced the same way. Highlights of the tour included Robarts Library, Hart House, and Simcoe Hall, all forgotten places of student protests—ranging from solidarity with South African resisters during Apartheid to demands of divestment. Living in Toronto’s famous gay neighbourhood, the Village, at Church and Wellesley while attending school, Rodriguez was once excited to attend the university, which they assumed—like many have—was a utopia for progressive folks. Now they realize even spaces that are presumed to be inclusive and Rodriguez continued the walking tours until they graduated in 2011, with a degree in sexual diversity studies.

Shortly thereafter, they headed to New York and became a researcher with a walking tours group in the lower Eastside and were impressed by the group’s comprehensive programming, especially its ability to take up complicated issues like gentrification and educate people in an accessible way. Rodriguez began to wonder why the Village, sold as a supposed bastion of progressiveness, seemed so over-policed. They often saw police target and harass young Indigenous people and people of colour— sometimes on a nightly basis. Their image of a safe haven was shattered.

In 2012, Rodriguez decided to return to Toronto and to start a new radical history walking tour, this time of the Village. Their first step was intensive research at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, where they found the histories so often glossed over when the Village is championed as a utopia for everyone. Or, as Rodriguez puts it: “the shiny benefits for some oppress many others.” Through research, they re-centered and uncovered hidden marginal histories, including, but not limited to, “people of colour histories, radical sex working histories, racist removal of public space, and policing.” From there, Rodriguez re-mapped the Village as what it looks like for the “other,” tackling the false narrative that many tourists and Torontonians see each year during the Pride celebrations. One stop on the walk, for example, is an intersection where transgender sex workers have been violently forced off the street. “People only want to map the Village when happy stories, gay legacies, and success are focal points,” says Rodriguez. “No one ever complicates it.”

But there is value in complexity. Today, Rodriguez largely focuses the walk on its youth audience, who, they believe, will benefit from being confronted with ideas that counter mainstream belief about the Village, and also from thinking through their own political analysis and how they form it. Several people now lead the walks, adds Rodriguez, emphasizing they don’t own the tour and that all collaborators bring value to the projec —including those who go on the walks. In 2012, for instance, York University professor Jin Haritaworn took the walk, inspiring Rodriguez to enrol in the university’s master of environmental studies program. They’re now working together and in 2014 won an Early Researchers Award to create Marvellous Grounds, a project that will look at the history of queer of colour organizing and spaces. The goal is to create a book, blog, and digital mapping project, as well as to initiate a series of focus groups.

Rodriguez hopes Marvellous Grounds will sustain itself as an ongoing platform to map and document queer of colour histories. They plan to create an audio version of the tour for their master’s project so that more people can access it globally. When asked why they focused their activism on neighborhoods and mapping, Rodriguez said it was important to look beyond accepted neighbourhoods of places and communities. “It’s not like rainbows organically appeared,” they say. “[We need to] look at how the spaces manifested, but also how they’re built on erasure.”

Illustration by Hannah Wilson

WHILE MOST PEOPLE’S FACEBOOK messages brim with congratulatory notes on the day of their graduation, Samra Zafar’s inbox was overflowing with two words: “Thank you.”

On Monday June 10, 2013, Zafar, then 30 years old, had kept her phone off for the duration of her University of Toronto graduation, where she was awarded top student in economics. That same morning, an article came out about her personal decade-long battle with and triumph over marital abuse on the Express Tribune blogs page, a major daily English-language newspaper in Pakistan. Unbeknown to Zafar, by the time she walked off the stage, a Bachelor’s degree in hand, women across Pakistan and beyond had read her reluctant in-depth interview and messaged the woman who had somehow broken the shackles of marital abuse.

One message stood out. A young woman in Waterloo asked to talk to her on Skype. She wanted to take her daughter and leave her abusive husband, but she was scared. “This was me five years ago,” says Zafar.

Back then, Zafar was on the brink of deciding whether or not to get a divorce from her husband, who was 12 years her senior. They had married in Abu Dhabi when she was 16 years old. Zafar’s workingclass parents had accepted his Canadian-based family’s marriage proposal so that their eldest daughter had the opportunity to pursue her dreams of higher education at a good university—something assured and supported by his family.

Instead, Zafar’s ticket to a successful education trapped her in decade-long nightmare with a husband who severely controlled and limited her life. She was not permitted to leave the house, had no cell phone, and only minimal contact with her parents—visiting them only when her father personally sent her and her daughter plane tickets. “I feel like I was in a prison for 10 years,” she says.

She had initially excelled at distance-learning education and when she turned 18 was accepted into the University of Toronto. By this time, she was also a mother. Her husband refused to pay her fees, and his financial status made her ineligible for government loans. She didn’t go.

Five years later, she was pregnant with her second daughter when her father died. After his funeral, she reluctantly returned to Canada. Her husband had begged and assured her that it would be different this time. The thought of leaving a relationship that was all she knew was “like jumping off a cliff and hoping there is a surface to land on,” says Zafar. Still, her father’s parting words to “take the fear out” became her driving force. “He always dreamed of seeing me at the top of a world-ranking university,” says Zafar.

In 2008, she applied to university again, and this time used money from her at-home babysitting job to help pay for tuition. “Going to school opened my eyes,” says Zafar, speaking of her time there. “I was being respected at school and that made me re-think my situation and question the way I was being treated at home.” Campus posters at the health and counselling centre prompted her to seek help. She would sometimes skip class just to hear counselling services tell her “it’s not your fault.” Yet, leaving her marriage was neither an easy path, nor a linear one. Her husband’s abuse increased proportional to her steps towards self-sufficiency—so much so that she stalled and dropped out of school, her self-confidence broken. “I used to ask him, ‘Why do you do this?’” says Zafar, “each time he said ‘because you deserve it’ and I used to believe him.”

But she kept focusing on taking the fear out and that, coupled with her older daughters’ insistence that “we will only be happy if you’re happy,” cemented her decision to leave. In 2011, Zafar separated from her husband and gave the police a detailed record of the abuse she faced. From there, without his income, she successfully reapplied to the University of Toronto and this time was granted financial assistance. Her husband was arrested on four counts of assault while Zafar excelled as a mature student, earning over a dozen awards for academic excellence, and getting admission into the Ph.D. program in Economics at U of T with a full scholarship. This was all accomplished while doing four part-time jobs. “The awards that I won reinforced my belief in myself,” she says, “and made me respect myself as a person and as a woman.”

Fast-forward to 2013, during Zafar’s meeting with the woman who contacted her from Waterloo. “I could complete her sentences,” says Zafar. For the first time in her life, Zafar felt hope and a complete sense of empowerment. “I felt like everything I had been through had a purpose, a meaning—to help other women realize their self-worth, break the cycle of abuse and pursue their dreams and potential,” she says. She helped the young woman to examine her options, to walk away from her marriage and to re-establish herself. She told her, “I’ll hold your hand anywhere you want to go.”

This instant connection formed the foundation of Brave Beginnings, Zafar’s non-for-profit mentorship program, to be launched this year. “What helps the most is talking to another woman who understands and can really help,” says Zafar, “I didn’t have that.” Brave Beginnings aims to bridge the gap between resources and the woman, to complement already established counselling services, and to take women out of what Zafar calls “their mental prison.” Once women reach out, they’re matched with a mentor in their area who will provide guidance, human support, and friendship. “We’re regular women who are passionate about empowering other women,” says Zafar. The question she wants us to ask is: How can we help her help herself?

“There’s not a one-size fits all approach,” says Zafar about the need for something like Brave Beginnings. “My dream is that every woman has the freedom to be who she wants be without any fear, without any judgement, and without any ridicule.”

Illustration by Jacqueline Li

ERICA VIOLET LEE IS A SELF-DESCRIBED “Nēhiyaw Philosopher Queen and Indigenous Feminist,” but the terms activist and writer also aptly describe the 25-year-old University of Saskatchewan student. “The first activism event I did was when I was about five years old,” says Lee, the hint of a smile detectable in her voice, even over Skype. “My mom took me to the legislature in Regina and I said, ‘Help stop the cycle of poverty.’” Lee pauses, scoffing in a gently self-deprecating way, “That was the beginning of my career of being a loud-mouth.”

Lee says she has struggled to own the term activist. “Growing up being poor, Indigenous and in the inner city,” she says, “while having a single mom who raised me and I saw activism as an obligation to living on this planet.” To her, it’s not being silent when you see something’s wrong. Every person, she believes, has a duty to the people and creatures on the planet. Lee’s interests lie with anti-poverty advocacy and Indigenous rights and sovereignty.

Three years ago, she spoke at the first Idle No More movement in Saskatoon: “It was the perfect storm of people feeling tired of taking abuse.” The basis of the movement, she says, is that action and change start in the community. This can offer inspiration on a large-scale level, but each community has to have unique action, tailored to that specific context, to maximize change. For example, she is part of the “One House Many Nations” Idle No More project to raise funds to build safe, sustainable housing for people on reserves without homes.

Lee is particularly interested in colonialism and how this history has shaped Canadian institutions. She started her undergraduate degree taking political science, but says she quickly realized that philosophy offers more opportunity to explore why these institutions exist in Canada. “Going into a university as this young student you are optimistic and excited to learn and hone your skills as an intellectual,” says Lee. “But then coming up against a big barrier when I talk about race, gender, or lived experience is frustrating.” She adds that while some philosophy professors have been supportive, others often struggle to understand her. They can’t, she says, understand why her identity as an Indigenous woman is so important, and ask why she can’t leave it at the door when she goes into a classroom. Lee refuses to separate her identity as an Indigenous woman from her academic experience. She recently tweeted: “It’s 2015 and still, Canadian university classrooms are frequently hostile spaces for Indigenous students,” citing the pervasive racism, colonialism, and patriarchy in lectures, readings, and assignments.

“People still oversimplify Indigenous thought and see it as some sort of new-agey thing,” says Lee. She and her peers have been keeping an eye on one philosophy class in particular. They have informed the university of the ethical responsibility of teaching Indigenous philosophy, but ultimately feel their concerns were unheard. In response, they are holding an event at the same time as an upcoming talk affiliated with the class in question. Their own event will showcase Indigenous scholars and students, highlighting Indigenous academics who confront the stereotypes of what Indigenous systems of thought look like. “I want to make it safer,” says Lee, “for other students in the future to challenge these ways.”

When I ask Lee what role writing plays in her activism, she tells me that she’s been writing since she was a child. It has always made her feel like she’s creating a permanence in the work she’s doing. She also uses it to reach people, a tool she can use to help her community. The name of Lee’s website, Moontime Warrior, is itself a testament to her bold, subversive brand of activism, “The title is a bit tongue-in-cheek,” reads her “about me” section. “[It’s] a term for menstruation in certain communities, and ‘warrior’ is an evocative, often essentialist, usually gendered, Indigenous political identity.”

Lee says she draws inspiration from women such as Rinnelle Harper, an Indigenous Winnipeg teen who survived a vicious attack and who is now bravely speaking out on missing and murdered Indigenous women. “There’s a lot of desire to save or protect Indigenous women,” she says, “in a way that sees us as having no agency or no idea of what we’re doing with ourselves.” Lee says we should constantly be challenging this dangerously paternalistic view of Indigenous women.

She also sees a collective dismissal of agency reflected in society’s approach to sex workers. As a feminist, Lee believes that the way sex workers are viewed in our society needs to be challenged, especially in terms of understanding the colonial context that accompanies Indigenous women in sex work. Conversations about sex work should rest on an acknowledgment of the colonial history of the places these discussions are happening in, says Lee, calling for a more nuanced dialogue.

Later, she lets loose into a peel of surprised, lilting laughter when I break away from more serious questions and ask about her favourite vintage films. After a short, contemplative pause, she says: “I’ve always had a thing for Marilyn Monroe, because I think that she was a great actress. I like to defend her. People hate on Marilyn Monroe, but she owned her sexuality.”

Illustration by Dushan Milic

IT’S MARCH 2015 and the Toronto crowd is rallying to protest Bill C-51. There’s excitement in the air. With every new body comes a greater sense of solidarity. Speakers file on and off stage. The crowd is committed, but human: there comes a point when attention wanes and distraction takes over. The energy starts to lower. Mohammad Ali Aumeer, better known in activist circles as the “Socialist Vocalist,” is backstage. He knows the crowd needs its energy back. And he’s just the person to do it.

Aumeer has been filling notebooks with lyrics for nearly two decades. He was inspired after reading the words of Noam Chomsky and Che Guevara, among others. In fact, it was after reading Guevara’s Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War that Aumeer chose to move to Havana, Cuba, at the age of 25, where he lived on and off from 2004–2005. “We were living in post-reform Cuba,” he says. “People would be rapping in Spanish, and at the end I would come in and rap in English.” The crowd’s excitement and cheers inspired Aumeer to continue performing in Canada. He decided: “I’m going to make political music.”

Back in Toronto in 2006, while browsing the (now closed) World’s Biggest Bookstore, he spotted someone holding a copy of Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, a book that examines how the elite classes disregard human rights. The two started talking and, by the end of the conversation, Aumeer was invited to a War Resisters Support Campaign event. The War Resisters organization formed to help U.S. military personnel who refused to participate in the Iraq war and came to Canada seeking asylum. When Aumeer connected with the group, he saw a well-run organization with a solid PR campaign, and, more importantly, an opportunity to stir up youth engagement.

Aumeer started touring university campuses with the War Resisters, performing social justice-themed raps and talking to audience members. The team-up was engaging, he says, to the point where even the hecklers in the audience would be on-side in the end. Next, he expanded to play the wider activist circuit. Between 2007–2010 he toured Canada, from St. John’s to Vancouver, rapping about human rights and social justice issues. He gained a reputation for hyping up crowds at rallies. One day after performing at a CUPE convention in 2013, he told himself: “If I’m going to be an artist it can’t be on the sidelines, it needs to be a full-time thing.” As an activist, he helped organize the rallies, now he wanted to be the fire behind their energy.

Fellow hip hop artist Red Menace introduced Aumeer to Roshin of Notes to Self. The two were natural friends, both obsessed with rap battles, politically aware, and into Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game. The two have big plans. Their album, pending release, isn’t just about changing minds, but, as Aumeer describes it, also giving activists something to which they can relax—even if it’s more likely to awaken something revolutionary inside of his listeners. As his music evolves, it’s now less about persuading the conservative right, and more about connecting progressive voices and people.

The same outgoing personality that pushed Aumeer to approach a stranger in a book store has helped him find other opportunities, including a spot on CBCs The National with Peter Mansbridge. “Opportunities are less frequent for progressive artists. But when they come they are big,” he says. He urges independent political artists to drop everything to make these opportunities happen. Aumeer and Roshin are now building a strong international network of indie political artists. Aumeer wants to set a new standard: polished videos, like the ones he has on his YouTube channel, including “Precarious Work,” a song about organizing, student’s rights, and worker’s rights. The project also includes using the work of talented local artists. This plan involves having Son of Nun, of Firebrand Records (Ryan Harvey and Tom Morello’s label) perform, as well as setting up an Ontario tour with artists from Hamilton, Toronto, and Ottawa performing together in the three cities.

In the last two years, Aumeer has also taken on a new role as a father. He says his daughter, Ameerah, who is nearly two-years-old, forces him to take breaks from work. Before we part ways he shares some of his work. They’re words we should all hear: “This for Ameerah, my first born/This for my ancestors, I talk to ’em/This for Prashad his words of wisdom/This that karma of brown folk living … Rock Trayvon’s hoodie/Rock Malala’s hijab.”

Illustration by Hannah Wilson

“WHY DO YOU HAVE TO WEAR THAT THING HERE?” “Why don’t you just go back to where you came from?” That these kinds of remarks are ever voiced might seem far-fetched, almost cartoonishly so, but they are actually common enough that many Muslim women in Canada who wear the hijab hear them at some point in their lives—some even routinely.

In this case, it was at a long-term care facility in Ottawa in the mid-2000s. A older man and his ailing sister followed Amira Elghawaby down the hallway, hurling xenophobic comments at her for wearing a headscarf. Elghawaby was visiting her mother, who had multiple sclerosis, something she had done for years without incident. “My mother lived at that hospital. That was like my home … I had so many happy memories in that space,” she says. “I can’t emphasize enough how hurtful it is when it is addressed to you. It really does hurt—a lot.”

A decade later, Elghawaby works at the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM). It’s a non-profit dedicated to addressing human rights issues that affect Canadian Muslims, including discrimination. A small shop of two full-time employees in Ottawa and three part-timers there and elsewhere, it is the premier national agency combatting anti-Muslim sentiment in Canada. Elghawaby is NCCM’s director of communications—an extension of her earlier journalism work and interest in social justice issues. One of her main roles is to ensure that Canadian Muslims are heard from directly—especially as the spotlight increasingly focuses on this diverse community.

Much of Elghawaby’s job is about holding the press accountable—she wants the media to discuss Muslims in a way that doesn’t cast a pall of suspicion over the entire community. But with terms such as Islamic terrorism, jihadism, and Islamofascism used liberally, both politicians and the press often contribute to the growing suspicion of Muslims. As a 2012 Royal Canadian Mounted Police report “Words Make Worlds” notes, these incorrect terms “succeed only in conflating terrorism with mainstream Islam, thereby casting all Muslims as terrorists or potential terrorists.” It’s partly why hate crimes against Canada’s one million Muslims have risen even as they fall for all other religious groups. NCCM launched a hate crimes tracker in June 2015 to empower Canadian Muslims and to “name it and shame it.” Representatives from the LGBTQ, Black, Jewish, and Sikh communities turned up in solidarity at the press announcement.

That’s just the routine stuff. Then there are these incidents: “Islam is a criminal enterprise seeking to enslave the world. A Muslim who is not a terrorist is a bad Muslim,” reads one letter to the editor in the Barrie Examiner published late October 2015. NCCM responded by pointing out that “had someone said the same about Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism or any other faith, there would have been an outcry.” Elghawaby plans to follow-up further by requesting an editorial board meeting with the Examiner. Freedom of speech is important, she says, but it’s hard to imagine someone could write a letter criminalizing any other community and see it get published: “So there has to be that sensitivity.”

Beyond media outreach, part of Elghawaby’s work is building bridges between Muslims and other Canadians. A 2013 Angus Reid poll showed that 54 percent of Canadians held a negative view of Muslims, up from 46 percent in 2009. But this changes, she notes, as people actually get to know Muslims. “So it’s about increasing that contact,” she says.

It’s been a busy few years for the NCCM. Concerns about terrorism have given a license for many to express xenophobic views, keeping the group on the defensive. To offset this issue, the NCCM recently launched a Stronger Together campaign and will wrap up its 2015- 2016 Empowerment Tour in May. The respective goals, Elghawaby says, are to create civic engagement teams in every major city that can advocate key issues like amending or repealing Bill C-51, and to offer training to community activists on tackling anti-Muslim sentiment. (NCCM already provides guides and kits for educators, employers, and journalists. More are in the pipeline.)

To be sure, the official tone toward Muslims has changed for the better since the Harper Conservatives were voted out on October 19. “What a difference a day makes,” wrote Elghawaby, for the Globe and Mail. Yet assaults on Canadian Muslims have since risen—one mosque in Peterborough, Ont. was set aflame the day after the Paris attacks on November 13. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said he was “deeply disturbed” by the arson and has urged Canadians not to turn to “acts of hatred and racism.”

For her part, Elghawaby says now is not the time to take a “breather.” She plans to continue holding the media (and public officials) to account, and to step up NCCM’s efforts to build a grassroots network of activists and civic leaders. In the end, her goal is a basic one: to ensure that anti-Muslim sentiment, she says, “is seen to be on the same level as all other hatreds.”

Illustration by Jacqueline Li

WHEN ILANA LABOW was getting her hands dirty planting baby greens and carrots in a friend’s backyard in 2009, she never envisioned that it would lead her to start a non-profit organization. “It was accidental. I’m not going to lie,” says Labow, the 32-year-old co-founder and director of Fresh Roots. “It was a lot of twists and turns and serendipity.” Based in Vancouver, Fresh Roots works with locals and schools on community gardens and educational programs to encourage healthy eating, ecological stewardship, and community building. Its mandate, “good food for all,” is telling of the work Labow does to fight for food accessibility and education.

Labow was raised in a suburb just outside Chicago in a “strong, Zionist Jewish household.” At 19, she travelled to Israel to gain further understanding of Judaism. One day while hitchhiking there, someone told her about Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, an Israeli multinational peace institute that focuses on environmental leadership and research in the Middle East. A year later, in 2002, she enrolled and learned how to use sustainable agriculture methods as a way of building both peace projects and community. It inspired her to think in new ways. “My mom was an immigrant and my parents were building a business,” she says. “We had access to food and it wasn’t a priority.”

Later, during her studies at University of British Columbia’s global resource systems program, Labow interned with Growing Power in the U.S., where she “learned to work with people who used farming as a tool around justice and community building, creating access to healthy, safe, and affordable food.” For Labow, good food is more than just for eating; it’s key to education. She believes it can create community and work opportunities, provide access to healthy food, and help a new generation grow up with food literacy skills.

That’s all why, when her friend and Fresh Roots co-founder Gray Oron wanted to create a backyard full of vegetables to sell in East Vancouver, he called Labow. What started with one backyard soon grew to eight in 2010. With business picking up and with the backing of UBC, Labow and Oron soon hired their first interns.

“Then things started happening all at once,” says Labow. One of their garden backyards shared a fence with a local elementary school, and one day the curious principal approached Labow and asked if she wanted to move the garden to the school’s abandoned, bigger one. An experimental project, it allowed Labow’s team to collaborate with other environmental and food non-profits in the area, as well as to train teachers to teach outside in the garden. With this training, teachers then started taking their students outside; science class became a firsthand lesson in how composting workst. In social studies class, teachers could use the garden to discuss society’s green revolution, or what it means to grow food on Coast Salish territories.

Soon, the school’s success inspired a biology teacher who invited Labow to farm with her high school. Labow was intrigued, but wondered if it could be done well. How would expansion work? How much would it cost? Back then, in 2010, there were no examples of similar projects in Canada. The growing popularity pushed Labow and her colleagues to officially become a non-profit organization and to sign a licensing agreement with the Vancouver School Board, allowing it to legally farm at the school. By 2013, Fresh Roots had struck up partnerships with two secondary schools, David Thompson and Vancouver Technical. “As a team, what we really believed in the most was good, healthy food for all,” says Labow. “We came to that place where we realized education was more important than the farming and that the farming would be the pathway for educational opportunities and social justice work for the good food movement in the West Coast.”

Dubbed the Schoolyard Market Gardens, the Fresh Roots gardens provide grounds for commercially productive educative farms that both teachers and the community can use. Labow is a strong believer of the “train the trainer” model and she spearheads workshops for teachers in collaboration with other local organizations. In turn, teachers learn how to physically plant crops and connect their curriculum to the garden so they can teach outside in fresh air. There are programs for community members, too. Fresh Roots assists youth workers, social workers, and neighbourhood house programmers with integrating garden spaces and growing food into their programs. Community members who want to hone their urban farming skills can attend workshops like Making Kimchi Together, Backyard and Schoolyard Garden Irrigation, Garden Planning and Design, among others.

Over the past five years, Labow says more than 400 teachers from Vancouver have attended Fresh Roots’s professional development days, where they learn how to connect material they’re teaching from the curriculum to the gardens. At David Thompson S.S, students in the culinary arts program prepare food from the garden to serve in the cafeteria—all part of an initiative to connect students to where their food comes from.
The gardens bring the community together. In addition to student volunteers, Labow says many neighbourhood locals and elderly folk also come out to the gardens. In the past year alone, 1,300 volunteer hours were logged. Those in the community who don’t physically lend a hand subscribe to the organization’s Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) salad boxes. “It’s another way people in the city have an opportunity to communicate with their neighbours,” she says, “and take part in something that is bigger than themselves.”

When Labow isn’t out in the garden—or winning a Vancouver Award of Excellence with Fresh Roots—she’s giving talks in schools surrounding the good food movement, and the importance of food literacy and security. “As urbanites, every consumer choice we make has a local and global impact,” says Labow. “What I’m learning is that the Schoolyard Market Gardens have become a place that reminds people of all their daily consumptive choices, and not just around food.”