Illustration by Kat Verhoeven

I was maybe, what, eight years old? There I was, standing in my literal cave of a stinky basement—a carved-out hollow of dark, dank stone under my rickety old house—scrounging through books piled high into mountains of dust. I whipped out one book. The cover stood out: A woman with flowing ebony braids is striking an ultimate power pose atop a flying carpet. At her side sat a man with eyes agog in admiration. Aladdin and Jasmine, I wondered? No, far from it. It was so, so much better. Her name was Princess Cimorene, a protagonist girl with gumption, confidence, bravery; she was everything I wanted to be. And that was my introduction to the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, an epic fantasy series and my all-time favourite set of books.

I remember it as the first time, in my burgeoning mind, that I never wanted a book to end. This book was different. There was magic and enchantment, sure, but the true fairytale aspect was Princess Cimorene herself. A girl with some ’tude, some spunk (oh, and, yeah, she fully, coolly befriends dragons). In the following years, however, I’d come to learn Princess Cimorene was a minority. As much as I fell in deeper and deeper love with the genre, I was not heart-eyed at all over the dearth of characters like me. I soon discovered it wasn’t enough for authors to plop a female character into the story (which was rarity enough)—I wanted complex female characters, vulnerable ones, strong ones, ones that felt real and diverse. It felt paramount to me that I, and other readers like me, could see themselves in these stories.

In his November 2012 Tedx talk, “The Mystery of Storytelling,” literary agent Julian Friedmann argues prehistoric caves were the earliest cinemas. Hunters would go in, look at the paintings, and imagine the fear they’d feel when they went out in the bushes. They rehearsed it. It’s the same reason we use literature, theatre, and cinema. “When we’re looking up at the screen,” he says during his talk, “we’re certainly not looking at you, we’re looking at ourselves, because only we are the storytellers.” They gazed up at the walls and, in place of dragons and wizards under the flickering torchlight, they saw beasts, and in them they saw themselves. But where do girls and women, people of colour, and those on the LGBTQ spectrum go when they want to look at themselves?

These days, more and more, fantasy and sci-fi are our pop culture cave drawings of choice. The genre has played an ever-larger role, gradually increasing in dominance since the Second World War, says Lisa Makman, a Columbia-educated Ph.D. and English lit lecturer at the University of Michigan. Just look at cultural staying power of Harry Potter or Game of Thrones’ cult following. We have superhero movies galore, what seem like an endless amount of post-apocalypse books and movies, and a surplus of monster-human and dystopian love triangles. The new Star Wars grossed nearly $120 million at the U.S. box office on its first day. That’s not to mention the hundreds of spin-offs, imitations, and other popular shows and books—we’re saturated. And, yet, in a series of worlds where there are, quite literally, no boundaries, why have so few authors and creators imagined a world of diversity?

Fantasy and sci-fi have nothing and yet everything to do with reality. The twin genres aren’t about escapism; they’re a search for meaning. In them, we see a mirror of the world reflected back— our own modern struggles dancing in the cave light. In many cases, when we read fantasy we’re hoping for a sort of redemption: from war, from nuclear weapons, from broken hearts, from a depleting ozone. There’s a reason dystopian fantasy is on the rise. One of the most influential fantasy writers, J.R.R. Tolkien, coined the term eucatastrophe: “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears.” He argues that a eucatastrophic state privileges us with a glimpse of truth—one that liberates us from our limitations. That’s why we read fantasy: truth.

Fantasy is all about truth. Alison Gopnik is an American psychologist who, in a 2005 Slate article, argued in favour of the genre. Those enmeshed in the world of fantastical lore, she argued, are more secure in their physical and psychological environments than those with a lessened propensity for the magical. “Children may love fantasy not because they can’t appreciate the truth or because their lives are difficult,” she wrote in the article, “but for precisely the opposite reason.” Such stories are important because, rather than offering readers escape from their woeful environment, they let readers embrace a single-minded determination towards truth. In other words, fantasy lets us work out our shit—but how do you do that when you can’t see yourself in the narrative?

When I got sick in my early 20s, fantasy became excruciatingly important to me. Doctors had no idea what was happening. I felt lethargic and on the verge of falling asleep all the time. I lost my job as a salesperson at Indigo. I couldn’t leave my bed for over two months; even watching TV became too tiring. Even now, way after the fact, doctors still have no idea what happened—the best they can surmise is that I contracted a devastating virus. But what I do know is this strange time in my life let me a lot of time to think. I’d imagine what was happening in my body. I felt like I was living in a corpse, everything was failing, weakening, into nothing. That’s where the image of the snake came in.

In my feverish, weakened state, I kept imagining a glistening snake in my lower abdomen, a venomous serpent. It felt like a mythical battle going on inside my body. Later, I was sure the recurring image was an instinctual urge to fight for my life. I felt on the verge of death and so everything became primal. I would imagine the snake shedding its skin and in it I wished for my own rebirth. When our ancestors looked up at the churning grey sky, they saw anger. In the sun and abundance of crops, they saw benevolence. When we have no answers, we construct tales. Centuries ago, they made gods. For everything prolific and small, we weave stories where answers have yet to present themselves. That’s what I was doing in those months. Without paper or pen, I was writing a fantasy story in my mind, discovering my truth, working it all out.

An interminable hope impelled me toward these stories—I would get better. The mystery illness would abate. Escapism buffers us against reality, even as it continues to be plundered. Fantasy helped make me proactive; I visualized what I could not see. After I recovered, I kept writing stories, but they evolved. I incorporated dragons as main characters in my story, and they would coalesce with female characters. I made these characters wild, defiant, feminine, and strong— exactly the kinds of women I’d always wanted in the books that I read.

In all the various mainstays and tropes in fantasy, women and dragons inhabit close quarters in our psyche—and this relationship has played out time and time again in literary and cultural scenes. Silken-haired Game of Thrones fan favourite Daenerys Targaryen is best known, for example, as the mother of dragons. After her husband dies, she cremates his body and burns herself along with three petrified dragon eggs in his remains. The eggs hatch, and she goes from being a child (who, it must be said, was “given” to said husband as a gift and political pawn), to a boss-ass bitch. It’s the quintessential rise of the phoenix.

Yet even Daenerys, often lauded as a model for awesome women characters, is problematic: she comes with some serious white savior issues, a whole lot of indecision, and much—too much—is made of the men who follow her out of devotion to her beauty and goodness. She’s as much of an example of how far we’ve come as she is of how far we have to go.

I often wonder where, as Game of Thrones continues, she’ll fit into Carl Jung’s theory of the dragon as the arch-enemy of the hero: “[The] mother dragon which threatens to overwhelm the birth of the God, which the Hero must defeat before becoming the Hero.” In Jung’s world, the father figure triumphs over the matriarch—a trend we often see in real life, but also in Sleeping Beauty’s puissant Maleficent. Though she’s recently received an Angelina Jolie remake, this spunky, spiky lady is best known as the evil dragon who battles the heroic prince. And loses.

Dragons are a classic villain, says Jordan Peterson, eminent psychologist and University of Toronto professor. He points to Medusa as a prime example. Even on her best hair days, this lady turned men into stone. She represents what Peterson says is man’s ultimate fear: a woman rejecting them. Taking a Darwinian approach, Peterson theorizes that when a woman rejects a man, he’s also rejected by nature—because, as gatekeepers to reproduction, women symbolize the power of nature, natch. When a (male) knight tames the dragon, he also tames the woman, ensuring survival through his offspring. It’s a fascinating theory, but one that reduces both women and men to their pure biological makeup. I suspect Peterson’s right—it’s a classic case of fantasy, but also one that needs to change.

Too often both women and dragons represent wild natural forces, either within us or outside us, but always ones that must be tamed and conquered. After watching a video clip in which mythologist Joseph Campbell describes the Western dragon as a symbol of the untamed wild, it struck me that in myth women, too, usually symbolize an uncontrolled element of nature. In her seminal book Women Who Run with Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes analyzes the roles of female characters in classic tales. “Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species,” she writes. “Over time, we have seen the feminine instinct nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt.” To Estes, the Wild Woman has been mismanaged just like the wild lands, relegated to poorest land in the psyche. I can’t help but agree.

It’s truly hard, if not seemingly impossible, to break away from archetypal figures. Since the dawn of stories, through goddesses and sorceresses, powerful women have graced our imagination. And there are shining examples of diversity like my treasured Enchanted Forest Chronicles stories. At the same time, we’ve collectively kept women largely in narrow roles—and that’s not to mention both the stereotyping and scarcity of heroes who are people of colour or LGBTQ. Luckily, I’m not the only one who’s desperate for more diversity. While change seems slow, many authors are starting to defy standard narratives, and many of them are Canadian women.

I spoke to Vancouver-based author and teacher Linda DeMeulemeester about the inspiration behind her award-winning children’s fantasy series, Grim Hill, which follows two sisters who move to a new house and battle supernatural forces. DeMeulemeester was drawn to the power women have in Celtic mythology. While other mythologies portray women with power and supernatural abilities, DeMeulemeester stresses, that power often resides in their ability to weaken men. That’s not what she was after. Instead, legendary Celtic figures like Queen Maeb intrigued her—these mythological women who held wealth, power and influence of their own accord, not in relation to their sexiness. “Influence is the key,” says DeMeulemeester, “that they had power to make important decisions and contributions.”

Influence also means it’s not all about muscles. While it’s nice to see women with sheer physical strength, I’d also like to see more stories where women can depend on cleverness, wit, talent. Ontario-based children’s author Alison Baird agrees. As a young woman, Baird was in love with larger-than-life heroines. She recognizes now that these books, often women-authored, were likely written as a way to address the need for strong, brave, proactive female figures in fiction. But eventually, she became disillusioned with the trend. The heroines felt a little too strong, a little too unrealistic. “I could not, as a nonathletic bookworm,” says Baird, “relate to a woman who could wield a broadsword and handily defeat a male opponent on the field of battle.” The female protagonists in her many fantasy books rely less on physical strength and more on strength of character and cleverness.

This concern harkens back to an age-old question: Can women still have it all? My answer is: why the hell not? Fantasy gives us room to be optimistic: we strive towards admirable characters and learn from evil ones. Fantasy gave us one of TV’s greatest feminists, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a character that flips patriarchy the middle finger,shows that feminine doesn’t equate weakness, is never defined by a man, shares her power with other women, and on. (Though she’s also a pint-sized, white blonde.)

Yet, Buffy went off-air in 2003. More recently we have Marvel’s Jessica Jones, a complex superhero who helps us confront rape culture and sexual trauma. There’s also Rey from Star Wars, who, it should be noted, was criticized for being too awesome—some film buffs, views, and pop culture writers called her a Mary Sue, a term used to deride a woman character who’s good at everything. Apparently, to them, she was unrealistic. Let’s just pause a second to ponder this: In a world full of fantastical scenarios, it was the heroic woman that caused them to stir uncomfortably in their seats. And let’s not even get started on the noticeable lack of Rey toys in the Star Wars sets, despite her status as the main character.

Strong women characters who are in charge of their own fates isn’t a new trend, says Liz Johnston, manager of Toronto’s Mabel’s Fable Childrens Book Store. It’s often one book, though, that makes it mainstream and enlightens the populace, like the recent Hunger Games. (Although it’s worth debating whether protagonist Katniss’s ultimate reward of a husband and babies is a positive message or not.) Johnston says that the number of female protagonists in popular dystopian fiction has helped advance diversity. Once something becomes so widespread and popular, she says, it makes it easier for book publishers to pick it up. She’s noticed many publishers are now starting to move away from books targeted toward males, which is a welcome change.

While recently browsing the children’s section at Indigo, I noticed two categories: “LGBTQIA” and “We Need Diverse Books.” Admittedly, I didn’t know whether to feel happy or uneasy. While I want increased awareness, I also hope the day will come when such classifications won’t exist—that diversity will be just as much a part of fantasy and sci-fi books as plot, spaceships, and magic.

I think about Tolkien, whose work I like but also find uncomfortable. Traversing the plains of Middle Earth while reading Lord of the Rings as an adult, physical descriptions of some characters—the evil ones—snapped me out of my eucatastrophic state. I was transported back to my living room couch, shaking my head. As John Yatt wrote in the Guardian: “Perhaps I’d better come right out and say it. The Lord of the Rings is racist.” Tolkien’s evil characters have dark skin, slant-eyes, broad features, and dreadlocks. After I wrenched the spear of truth from my heart, I thought, “Damn, this Easterling—enemy of the free people, sallow and swarthy, dark hair and dark eyes—sounds just like my uncle.” So maybe, for now, I’m just happy to know children browsing the many colourful covers can find themselves.

Almost universally, white is seen as divine and a force of good, where as darkness is evil. When these features are projected on characters, I start to drift out of these worlds. I’m trying to see myself in the forces of good, but the good doesn’t look like me. My hair is thick, dark, and curly. My eyes are an almost black-brown, cupped in dark circles. I’ve never read a description in a book that refers to my features as angelic, and let’s face it, neither have most readers. Because angelic is an assumption; one of beauty, one of light features, one of worthiness.

Even in writing this article, I realized my sources were a pretty homogeneous group: they were all white. While I’m glad to have spoken to women—and those who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum—it was clear that it’s not just characters of colour who are absent, but writers, critics, booksellers. When Léonicka Valcius started Centennial’s book and magazine publishing program in 2011 she realized the same thing: “I walked into my class—of 60 to 70 people—and saw it was primarily white. There were a handful of people of colour, and a handful of men. That was another ‘huh’ moment.” Later, she came to the conclusion that CanLit “felt like very dead white guys writing about the Canadian experience that meant nothing to me.” That’s when Valcius started the #DiverseCanLit movement, a weekly Twitter discussion about all things diversity in Canada’s publishing world. Valcius says books are like time capsules, and when people look back to CanLit, they should have an opportunity to see how everyone—not just a select few—lived.

Certainly, I’m happy that J.M. Frey exists. Frey is a Guelph, Ont.-based science fiction and fantasy author, as well as a pop culture scholar and a self-described fanthropologist (a term used to describe employing anthropological techniques to study fans and fandom.) She is best known for her book Triptych: a sci-fi novel that follows three narrators as they recount major turning points in the life of a character named Gwen Pierson. Frey’s goal is to write intersectional, feminist novels, but she admits it’s hard to train herself out of writing the genre’s tropes.

She knows it’s frustrating for female readers and writers, especially those who identify as LGBTQ and/or as a person colour, to read or watch prolific fantasy tales. Echoing my earlier thoughts, she asks me: How can an author imagine all these incredible things, yet not imagine a diverse world? While she agrees fantasy is evolving, she also concurs that it’s doing so slowly. “For those of us who want better now, now, now,” she says, “it’s difficult to know we could have much more inclusive media, and more protagonists who are different.”

New Brunswick-based fantasy author KV Johansen adds that “the tendency still exists to use the heterosexual male as the default main character.” Lately, in an attempt to redress past favouritism toward male heroes, publishers are pushing for female protagonists—to the exclusion of men and boys. For Johansen, it’s not a perfect solution. Like me, she hopes we’ll soon outgrow this exclusionary categorization for the sake of equality. She’s not holding her breath, though, noting that there seems to be more reluctance in some segments of “fandom” to accept women, non-white, and non-straight heroes than there is to accept other inverted expectations and clichés—like “aged-and-creaky-archetypes and traditionally villainous creatures.” In other words, readers can get behind a good vampire, but not necessarily a complex, Black, gay, woman hero.

Later, though, when I speak to John Sellers, the children’s review editor for Publishers Weekly, he cautions against getting caught up in what’s meant for boys and what’s meant for girls, or certain categories. Sellers says publishers have an increased interest in diversity in children’s books, including a movement to stop “gender publishing” and start giving kids permission to read what they want to read. Books are packaged more neutrally and even so-called romance books are trending toward typographical covers. “Stories about people of colour, sexuality and identity,” he says, “have been more widely explored in recent years.”

While Sellers and others like him acknowledge the push towards diversification, publishers only make up one part of the equation. Opportunities must exist for readers to see themselves in stories, and for writers to create stories. It’s not enough for those books to be published; they have to be widely promoted, taught in schools, and made easily available. We should all be happy we have people like 11-yearold New Jersey girl Marley Dias, who launched the social action project and book drive #1000BlackGirlBooks after she became tired of reading about white boys and their dogs. She aptly called her assigned school books “monochromatic”.

Whenever we read a fantasy or sci-fi book or watch a movie, it’s our own self-discovery that’s the driving force of these many great quests. Vital to the exploits and the encounters is the identity that is revealed—and challenged—throughout. I’m hopeful that Sellers and others are right: that we’re seeing a change in the genre and using our great imaginations to craft a bigger world. Because everybody, not just beefy white dudes, deserve to open the doors to adventure, just like I did that day in my smelly basement.

Spoken word poet Zeinab Aidid // Photo by Setti Kidane

Nasim Asgari is looking at the tofu sitting in her shopping cart, waiting for her mother to join her at the food aisle at the No Frills store in north Toronto. I wonder what it’s going to taste like, she thinks. She adjusts her headscarf. Tomorrow she’ll start her trial 40 days as a vegetarian. It was time for a diet change. Time for a proper cleanse.

Asgari tries to spot her mother in the crowd but can’t recognize her among the other Muslim women shopping there this afternoon. She turns back to examining the tofu, oblivious to the older white man walking down the aisle. “The animals are out again,” he says under his breath but loud enough for her to hear. “Welcome to the First World.”

The moment feels like a dramatic slow motion film scene for the then 16-year-old. The man never looked directly at her but his words took her mind off tofu. Slowly they hit her eardrums and connected to her mind: Oh, that’s for me.

In that moment, Asgari said nothing. Upset, she went home that night, almost a year and a half ago now, and translated her emotions into lines of poetry in her journal. She performed those lines for the fifth or sixth time on March 8, 2015 at “When Women Rule the Night,” an International Women’s Day event held at Beit Zatoun, a cultural centre, gallery and community meeting space located in the west side of Toronto. She named the poem “Breath of a Warrior”—a literal translation of her Iranian name. Nasim means breeze. Asgari means warrior.

She smiles now when she recalls the man’s words, but her eyes give away the confusion she felt. The man had called her an animal simply because of the scarf she chose to wear, a decision she made when she was nine years old. He wasn’t the only one. A couple of days later after the grocery store incident, she was standing at a bus stop, when a man, probably drunk she thinks, ambled up to her. “Oh you Muslims,” he says, “you’re going to kill us all.”

He told me this is Canada,
And people who look and dress like me should have no business here.
He felt the need to remind me of the country I’m in,
As if the white colour on the flag
Represents the colour of the skin
Of the people who ‘should’ belong here.

“The Quran says to greet ignorance with peace,” says Asgari, so she turned to spoken word poetry to calmly create a counter-narrative against hate speech. She has chosen to embrace her “animal” self. She has released her suppressed inner voice and speaks out loud now of her Muslim experience in Toronto. She and other like-minded young Muslim women have formed a pack of poetesses that empower each other, not only through their own encounters with bigotry and cultural clashes, but those of other Muslims around the world, from the unwarranted deaths of Deah Barakat, Yusor Mohammed Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha at Chapel Hill, North Carolina in January 2015 to the foul and false images of Muslim women that ISIS propagates in Syria. Closer to home, the group was part of the movement strongly advocating the welcome of Syrian refugees to Canada.

They do it with pens and voices, not teeth and claws.

In London, Ontario, 23-year-old Rozan Mosa performs her rhyming spoken word poetry, clad in a niqab. “Simply standing on stage is powerful enough to get people thinking about their prejudice,” says Mosa.

Muslim women like Asgari and Mosa are part of an evolving tradition of slam poetry and spoken word in North America that is reactionary in nature and activist in function. It grew more prevalent among Muslim American youth initially in response to the events of 9/11. In his report on “The rise of Islamic rap,” Peter Mandaville, director of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, writes that Islamic hip-hop met a need for youth who were “searching for music that reflects their own experiences with alienation, racism and silenced political consciousness.” For Muslim American women, it was a new channel, making a space for their voices in a male-dominated field. In 2002, Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad’s performed her poem “First Writing Since” on Def Jam Poetry, an HBO spoken word TV series hosted by Mos Def, marking the shift.

In Canada, MuslimFest, an annual three-day festival in Mississauga, Ont., and one of the largest Muslim arts and culture festivals in North America, also emerged as a response to 9/11. Founded in 2004, it was meant to answer the question: How can we move forward as a community and show youth that Islam is more than the stereotypes portrayed in media and elsewhere? “Muslim Canadians come from such different backgrounds, cultures and experiences,” says Maduba Ahmad, a 23-year-old organizing member of the festival. “MuslimFest is a platform that allows them to just take their identity, whatever they associate it with, and vocalize it.” They’re speaking to themselves and also to the 25 percent of the attendees that are not Muslim.

In the 12 years since the festival launched, other platforms have also emerged to create spaces for Muslim poets, specifically Muslim female poets. One of those is the Muslims Writers Collective (MWC), an initiative aimed at cultivating a vibrant Muslim literary tradition that began in 2014. At such events, most of the audience, according to Key Ballah, a 25-year-old published poet who heads the Toronto chapter of the MWC, are women. I see what she means when I go to the inaugural MWC meeting in Toronto in February 2014. Out of the 50 people in the meeting space in the basement of the MaRS Discovery District at the footsteps of University of Toronto, only three are men. In five minutes, these women come up with a couple of verses of poetry on mental health, cultural confusion, identity struggles, and the definitions of home. “Our job now,” Ballah says, “is to continue to provide a space for these women to speak their voices.”

As these spaces flourish, community leaders I spoke to have noticed more women coming forward, especially as news coverage of Muslim-based issues, unwittingly, gives them material for their art. “We try to provide a unique, alternative space that doesn’t always exist,” says Yasmin Hussain, violence prevention coordinator at the Muslim Resource Centre (MRC) in London, Ont., where Mosa first performed. Like the MWC, the overarching goal isn’t to bring more women to the stage but create spaces that are more inclusive and safe for them to be comfortable and empowered to enter. “They are valuable and valid,” she says, these spaces that encourage and support the lesser-known insights and stories shared.

To do so effectively, some platforms choose specific topics that introduce women to the spoken art form. Platforms like Outburst! Young Muslim Women’s Project, an awarding winning project by the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic in Toronto that began September, 2011, are spaces specifically for Muslim girls to speak out about violence in their community. They create sisterhoods, embracing and empowering young women like Asgari.

In 2014, the MRC led a spoken word workshop where 21 Muslim girls wrote a collective piece called “As a Muslim Woman.” The first chorus rings out with relatability: “As a Muslim woman I am tired of representing one billion people.” As a young Muslim female writer, I can’t help but nod in agreement. These women channel, or allow the translation of, interpretations of Islam that emphasize teachings on women’s rights, gender justice, and independent identity. These identities, in terms of religion, race, and gender, are the tools they use to break free of their cages and change the perception of the wild. Asgari calls
it an “inner revolution,” and in many ways it has become one.

Spoken word poet Nasim Asgari // Photo by Tara Farahani

At Beit Zatoun’s “When Women Rule the Night” event, Asgari watches the performance of another Muslim girl, whose youthful energy exudes from her smile, her louder-than-life laugh, and her Persian eyes as she performs to a still and attentive room. “Tell them about me,” the performer says, both her hands point at herself. The crowd replies without missing a beat, “this woman that I am.”

Tonight, Beit Zatoun is a makeshift coliseum, and the tigresses have been released, ready to tear apart anti-Islam, antifeminist, anti-human bigotry and stereotyping. About 100 people, three-quarters female, mill about the wood-panelled town hall type of room with high ceilings and haunted-house style chandeliers. Today is a safe space for the female performers to share their personal truths with the audience. No judgement, no insult, no backlash. We’re all just listeners and observers to the stories and journeys these women let go of on the stage.

The venue’s name is Arabic for “House of Olives,” a fitting name for the cathartic atmosphere the room embodies. In a Quranic parable, the olive tree is referred to as “a blessed tree … neither of the east nor of the west, but whose oil would almost glow forth, though no light touched it.” Every performer seems to be an olive from that tree tonight, not embodying a geographical location, but shining bright in the spotlight.

Asgari is the last performer at the open-mic portion of the evening. She stands against a wall off to the side before she’s called to stage. Her eyes are closed but her lips are moving—she’s rehearsing. She wears a blue and yellow scarf on a black dress with a full-length chiffon coat. She’s introduced as “a 17-year-old high school student who will blow your mind” by this evening’s emcee. As always, before she begins, Asgari calms her nerves by saying a verse of the Quran to herself. She lifts her head, moves one step back from the microphone and raises her arms.

If hatred knocks at your door,
Greet it with a smile,
But tell it it has come too late,
For love is already having tea inside.

Asgari’s hand gestures in this performance make it seem like she has the wings of an albatross. The big sleeves of her coat rise and fall with every arm movement. She seems to soar on her words. The audience snaps their fingers melodically, indicating some kind of collective cerebral connection to her words and her emotions. Some nod their heads, some express their love more audibly—“soul grunts,” they call them. When her voice softens, the audience goes silent. When she raises her voice louder, the audience responds proportionally.

They’re responding to a transformation of a small girl into an impressively powerful woman. In mere minutes she gives the crowd goose bumps, makes them laugh, makes them cry, and lifts their spirits. When she’s done, she walks away to the thunderous applause of the crowd. Quick hug to the emcee, some smiles to her friend, and a couple of high-fives. She once described the process of performance as a release of energy, transferring the heavy thoughts in her head into space. That’s why, after most performances, she leaves for a moment, to escape the thoughts she left floating around in the room, to escape, what she calls, the uncomfortable vulnerability of her open mind and soul.

Afterwards, women come up to thank her for her voice. Some hug her, some hold her hands. The cerebral connection is acknowledged physically. We are the same, suggests the hug. Thank you for understanding, suggests the two-handed hand shake. Some, like me, just nod and smile with tears in their eyes to indicate that for five minutes, our inner struggles were her spoken thoughts.

The loudest voices supporting Asgari at these performances are her friends from Outburst!. Asgari joined the organization in 2014. There, she found a family of young women who accepted each other without judgement and listened to one another’s voices. They called their group a sisterhood and have grown to become just that: supportive, dependable, and present.

One of her “big sisters” in the crowd is Zeinab Aidid, a21-year-old Somali-Canadian with beautiful long black-to-brown braided hair and big, brown eyes. She says she has been obsessed with def poetry jam since she was 13 years old, when she went to a spoken-word event at a Muslim festival in Mississauga. There she became entranced by Amir Sulaiman, who was then one of the only prominent Muslim spoken-word artists. He performed a piece that the CIA once questioned him on because it deemed the words “anti-American.” His wife, Liza Garza, also a singer and a poet, wasn’t allowed to perform because the organizers didn’t want female performers, something that annoyed Aidid at the time. But, Sulaiman brought his wife on stage anyway. Between the life-threatening power of Sulaiman’s poetry and Garza’s performance with her baby strapped to her body, Aidid couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Aidid tossed a couple of braids on her face towards the side as she casually told me how she used to wear the hijab all through high school. She doesn’t anymore. We were sitting in a reading room in the University of Toronto, at the end of one of the building’s signature long, wooden Hogwarts-esque tables.

She pulled out her driving licence: a picture of a younger Aidid wearing a headscarf. “I wasn’t pressured or anything. I just felt that it was a lie,” she says. “I was giving off this vibe that I was a devout Muslim, but I wasn’t.” She’s working on a new piece about her experience with the hijab, trying to convey her guilt over not experiencing what other Muslim girls do.

Even though she was born and raised here, Aidid doesn’t consider Canada to be her home: “I don’t feel any attachment to this land, but then what land do I have an attachment to?” Poetry, for her, is a way to document alternate narratives to find that sense of belonging. “I never read a story in a textbook I could relate to.” Asgari has told me the same thing. An animal can’t call a cage home.

One frigid February evening in 2015, I arrive at Reverb, a Regent Park community centre program where Aidid is a mentor. It’s taking place at Daniels Spectrum, an arts and culture hub, where I see Aidid talking to some of her “sisters.” We’re sitting in another makeshift coliseum, set up in the third floor lounge featuring an open concept kitchen. Fifty emerging spoken-word artists and poets are sitting in a semi-circle, many of us on wooden chairs, plastic chairs or stools. Some lounge on a rug with large floor pillows that’s at the centre of the room. A rustic wooden “Welcome Desk” sign hangs above the performing space, microphone all set up. “This is a safe space,” announces the emcee. “We’ll be hearing some truth tonight. We’ll be hearing some honesty tonight.”

In Grade 7, my English teacher was a tall, bald, tubby British fellow who never wrote on the chalkboard behind him but used his versatile voice box to prove the power of poetry. “You have to read it to know it,” he used to say, “but you have to read it right.” He would demonstrate. First, he read Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer day” in his loud, booming headmaster tone, onerously emphasizing every other word with his right arm powerfully flailing up and down. Then he read it in his soft, melodic tone, the volume of his voice decreasing as he concluded the poem, the last line just a few decibels above a whisper.

I’m reminded of this today as I hear Aidid voice her piece about her cousin who was shot over a stolen phone that happened to belong to a drug dealer in a gang. When Aidid told me the story at U of T, she looked away and spoke vaguely, mentioning that lately her writing had been “consumed” by her cousin. She tells the audience this too when the emcee affectionately calls her to the stage in a booming sports announcer voice as “Z-Money”—a joke from Aidid’s high school days when she wanted to be a rapper. Today, Aidid looks right at the audience and tells her cousin’s story softly, powerfully, emotionally, fiercely.

I replay it in my head
My aunt collapsing into my mother’s arms when
we got there
Her children crying at her feet
My uncle calling in to work
‘It’s March 23, 2012. This is employee #7752, I
will not be coming into work today because I
will be burying my son’

She repeats the last line three times. The first time is soft. She chokes up and holds back tears the second time. She pauses. The crowd listens silently. No snaps, no soul grunts, no verbal applause. Only Aidid’s voice pierces the room the third time. When she finishes, she walks away quickly to roaring applause. Her sisterhood meets her at the back with supportive hugs. The next speaker thanks her for sharing. He’s been reminded of a similar experience he had, a shooting at a pizza joint. He was happy they could collectively mourn, remember, and move on.

A couple of weeks later, I was walking down the street one sunny afternoon, heading to an Outburst! event, when Asgari tells me, “sometimes existing just feels heavy.” Aidid turns to her, “You should write that down.” Asgari replies, “I think I might have somewhere.” They stop at a red light, watching the red hand, waiting for it to turn green.

Young women like Aidid and Asgari trace their ability to tell such poetic stories to their ancestry. In most cultures, the origins of spoken word can be found in the oral tradition in religious, cultural, and familial setting. It is the oldest form of poetry that has evolved over time, but its core principles still remain—consciousness of how words sound out loud, the cerebral thread that connects speaker to audience, and the power of the tone of voice.

Aidid emphasises how words are part of her blood: “Somalia is a nation of poets,” she says. “My dad’s quite creative too. I’ve never seen him write, but he tells stories.” Asgari credits her parents for giving her a poetic name that she channels, which she addresses in “Breath of a Warrior.”

There is a reason this oral culture is handed down. MWC’s Ballah says Islam is poetic in nature, and poetry has historically been an integral part of Muslim culture. A fable recalls how Prophet Muhammad entered a verse of the Quran into a poetry competition without attribution. The entries were put up for display and a poet from afar read the verse and declared it to be the most inimitable piece of poetry he had ever come across. Islamic folklore is also littered with examples of women being unable to tell their stories. Many were slave girls fighting for their voices to be heard. Some were queens and princesses, fighting for a female narrative.

Ballah has her own stories to tell. Her book of poems Preparing My Daughter for Rain was published in 2014, the same year she started wearing the hijab. On Jan. 7, 2015, the day of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, she was spat on by a woman at a subway station. Her assailant missed. A couple of years earlier, while she was at university, a drunk young Muslim man, so ashamed and saddened by his actions, began reciting Quranic verses in an attempt to prove to Ballah, to God, to himself that he was a Muslim.

I swear I am Muslim—he slurs.
I say: I know. No—he says—you’re judging me,
look.
And he holds his hands over his ears and he begins
to recite
[…] and he tries again and again, never getting
past Bismillah
He keeps on saying ‘No you don’t understand.
I am Muslim, I am Muslim, I am Muslim, I am
Muslim.”
I know, I say.
And he holds the bottle to his mouth and he almost
swallows it whole…

In this way, identity and culture continue to be lock and key to the trappings of personal struggles and societal perceptions. Ballah is finishing her new self-published book titled Skin and Sun, documenting her struggle to understand her position in the world as a Black Muslim woman, set for release this year. This summer, she’s set to speak at Duke University as part of a panel that discussed Muslim women who use art as a medium to express themselves.

Asgari is also set to release her first collection of poetry, at the age of 18. Eighty-nine backers raised more than $5,000 on Kickstarter for the book to be published. Called What was Swept Under the Persian Rug, the image on the cover of the book is a powerful gothic photo of Asgari standing on a Persian rug in a desert landscape, her head raised to a grey sunset sky, her arms wide open, her coat made of faded Arabic lettering. It’s the still image encapsulating the moment before lightning strikes and thunder roars, all at the beat of a woman’s command.

Cover illustration by Nick Craine

WHEN MAURINA BEADLE WAS CARRYING HER SECOND CHILD 20 years ago, the doctors told her she should terminate her pregnancy. The fetus was showing signs of hydrocephalus, also known as “water on the brain.” As excess fluid builds up in the brain, it places abnormal amounts of pressure and stress on important regions, and can cause varying degrees of brain damage, including mental retardation, different forms of motor disability, cerebral palsy, and death. It didn’t dissuade Beadle. She gave birth to her son, Jeremy Meawasige, on December 9, 1994.

The doctors were right. Jeremy was eventually diagnosed with hydrocephalus, cerebral palsy, spinal curvature, and severe autism. He has required around-the-clock care since birth. He can’t walk on his own without the support of others, he can’t eat on his own, he is incontinent and needs to wear a diaper, and he isn’t able to speak or write. He has very limited means to communicate with others, and he doesn’t make eye contact with people he doesn’t know. Only those who are close to him, like his mother, can understand what he wants or needs from the sounds and movements he makes.

“When Jeremy slept,” says Beadle, “that’s when I took a sleep. Whenever he was awake, I was awake with him. And if he fell asleep in my arms, then I would fall asleep too.” Sometimes, he’s self-abusive. Once, when he was about 15, he repeatedly smashed his head against the wall so hard that he was in a coma for four days. Beadle says he looked like Sylvester Stallone coming out of a boxing match. The doctors told her they would have to drill a hole into his head to release the fluid build-up resulting from the trauma. Luckily, as they were preparing the operating room, Jeremy woke up from his coma, narrowly dodging the invasive surgery. Beadle also has another son, Jonavon, six years older than Jeremy. But taking care of her second son has been her full-time job since the day he was born.

While Jeremy was growing up, the family didn’t spend much time at home, not even during Christmas holidays. He was often ill and was hospitalized numerous times—too many to count. Beadle can’t remember going longer than one month between hospital trips. Jeremy’s immune system is extremely weak. When he catches something (a bacterium or virus that a healthy child could easily fight off) it could turn serious, requiring a hospital stay or even surgery. His shunt system, put in place to treat his hydrocephalus, is largely to blame. The long tube transfers the excess fluid in his brain to his abdominal cavity where it can be properly absorbed. An infection could travel to the shunt tubing, infecting it too. When this happens, surgeons have to remove the old shunt, clear the infection using antibiotics, and then put in a new shunt.

Every day, Beadle has to help Jeremy dress, shower, change diapers, and spoon feed him his meals. She also has to keep a vigilant eye on him to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself. She spends a lot of time singing with him, which she says is the one thing that always makes him smile and laugh. It has never been easy. Beadle and her two sons live on Pictou Landing First Nation reserve, a two-hour drive from the hospital in Halifax, called the IWK Health Centre. Beadle always took Jonavon with her on the long trips, both of them sleeping in a cot beside Jeremy during the extended hospital stays. In those early days, Beadle tried to get part-time help to take care of him. She would write to the local health centres to ask for support and fill out all the necessary forms, but help never came. Eventually, Beadle gave up hope. She carried on, as a single mother of two, doing the best she could to keep her sons happy and safe.

But everything changed in May 2010. At the age of 50, Beadle suffered a stroke that left half of her brain damaged. The doctors told her she might not be able to walk again, nor regain full movement on her right side. Beadle felt helpless, but was determined. She would walk again. And she did. She walked out of the rehabilitation facility and returned home after a month of hospitalization. But when she returned, she quickly realized she was not able to provide the care Jeremy needed while still recovering from her stroke. It was hard for both of them to accept. “He wanted me to snuggle with him and cuddle with him,” she says, “and I wasn’t able to do that.”

She needed help. But as an Aboriginal family living on a reserve, help was hard to get.

IF BEADLE AND HER FAMILY DIDN’T LIVE ON A RESERVE, GETTING home care and caregiving support would be a much easier process. She could have reached out to her provincial Disability Support Program. From there, the provincial program would do an assessment of their needs, and then provide the necessary financial support. As far as hassles go, it would only be a small one—and more importantly, there would be scant delay between contacting the program and receiving support.

Things are a lot more complicated when a person lives on a reserve. The federal government, rather than the provincial government, funds health and social services on reserves. The federal government provides funding through block contribution agreements to a reserve’s band council, which is the elected government of a particular First Nation—in Beadle’s case, the Pictou Landing First Nation.
The band council then decides how the money is spent. In theory, the band council is supposed to receive enough funding to provide care and services at a level similar to what is available to off-reserve residents in the same province. But problems arise when there simply isn’t enough money in the budget.

The person in charge of delivering health care services on Pictou Landing First Nation reserve is Philippa Pictou, the health director. When she found out about Beadle and Jeremy’s situation, she insisted he receive daily at-home care immediately, even though she knew it would quickly eat up the entire health budget. She hoped there would be a way to obtain extra funding and, in the meantime, asked the province of Nova Scotia to send a nurse to perform an assessment—she wanted to know what level of care the family would receive if they lived off-reserve. The assessment was performed in October 2010, after which Beadle’s 24/7-hour care was reduced to 8:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m during the week, and 24-hour care over the weekend. The care services still cost about $8,200 per month, nearly 80 percent of the band council’s entire monthly budget for personal and home care services. For a small reserve of 600 members, it was unsustainable.

Pictou asked the two federal departments responsible for funding home care, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada and Health Canada, to top up the band’s funding. But both departments denied her request and told her it was up to the band to properly budget for the extra costs. “It became clear,” says Pictou, “that Jeremy was already starting to get treated differently than if he was living off-reserve.” In 2012, Beadle and the Pictou Landing Band Council took the federal government to court, demanding the right to be treated equally and to receive the services band members needed—and deserved.

The decision to fight the federal government was easy for Beadle. She knew it was the right thing to do, not just for herself and her son, but also for all the First Nations children across Canada. And, it wasn’t just about equal treatment of children on- and off-reserve. Jeremy’s case connected to a wider issue that’s deeply gutted First Nations communities across Canada: the forced removal of First Nations children from their homes and communities, often as a direct result of low funding and services on reserve. The battle was going to set a legal precedent one way or another.

If Beadle and the band council won, it would give First Nations families a better chance in the future to access services at a level equal to their off-reserve counterparts. More children would be able to stay at home, instead of given up to foster care or institutions. If the federal government won, it meant current funding agreements with First Nations communities didn’t need to allow for exceptional circumstances that warranted additional funding. Everything would remain the same—if not worse—for First Nations families.

BEADLE SPEAKS WITH A SOFT YET EXCITED VOICE. SHE ISN’T ONE TO dominate a conversation. Her home on the reserve is a small, minimally-furnished bungalow, which she shares with both her sons. When I visited her, it was during the dead of winter in February, just ahead of a massive snowstorm. Everything seemed a little dreary. Houses on the reserve are spaced far apart—not like in wealthier Canadian neighbourhoods, where the space is for meticulously landscaped yards and gardens, but haphazardly, with unplowed snow-covered roads connecting them. Life is generally quiet for Beadle and her family, especially during the winter months. Going outside meant risking infections for Jeremy. The only time Beadle stepped outside the day I was there was to huddle in front of her door to smoke a quick cigarette.

The events post-stroke, she tells me, disrupted her family’s life, but also put a strain on the entire community. While looking for a way to relieve that strain, Beadle and Pictou discovered Jordan’s Principle. A child-first principle adopted by the House of Commons in a unanimous vote in 2007, its intention is to ensure jurisdictional disputes don’t cause First Nations children to experience delays, disruptions or denial of services available to other children. The principle is named after Jordan River Anderson, who was born in October 1999 on Manitoba’s Norway House Cree Nation reserve. Thanks to an extremely rare neuromuscular disorder called Carey-Fineman-Ziter Syndrome, Jordan spent the first two years of his life in a Winnipeg hospital, 800 kilometres away from his home. When he was two years old, the doctors decided he was ready to leave the hospital, provided he had special home-care services.

This led to a long fight between the provincial and federal governments over which was on the hook for the bill. They argued over high-cost items, such as home renovation needed for installing a wheelchair ramp, to very low-cost items, like a showerhead. The dispute lasted for over two years until 2005, when Jordan died in the hospital at five years old, having never spent a single day at home with his family. If Jordan were a child living off-reserve, the province would have immediately covered the costs to provide home-care for him.

The sad reality is, Jordan’s situation—like Jeremy’s—is not unique. In the same year Jordan died, a First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada report found that across 12 First Nations child welfare agencies in Canada, 393 children faced denied or delayed services because of jurisdictional disputes. And, that’s just the tally from a handful of agencies—there are 108 in Canada. They’re all services that would be readily available to an off-reserve child. Jordan’s Principle was designed to stop the disparity. When the private member’s motion to adopt the principle was introduced, there was very little debate. Everyone agreed what happened to Jordan shouldn’t happen again. Before the vote, Conservative MP Steven Blaney, who spoke on behalf of the Conservative government, told the House that the feds were already working hard to “transform the commitment we make here today into a fact of daily life for First Nations parents and their children.”

Yet in 2011, four years after the historic vote, neither Beadle nor Pictou could find a single successful application of the principle in Canada. It seemed clear to them that Jordan’s Principle should apply to—and, therefore, help—Jeremy. Under it, the first governmental department a family approaches should foot the bill for necessary and eligible care and services. If the principle had been properly implemented in Jeremy’s situation, the provincial government should have provided services immediately after its nurse’s assessment of the family. It could negotiate with the federal government over costs and reimbursement later, on its own, in the background.

Devastatingly, after many meetings with provincial and federal officials to discuss Jeremy’s case, the federal official in charge of implementing Jordan’s Principle in Atlantic Canada decided it didn’t apply. Both the province and the federal government agreed the amount of care requested exceeded the provincial normative standard of care, a maximum of $2,200 per month. Thus, since the two governments weren’t technically in dispute, it wasn’t a Jordan’s Principle case—help hinged on the two governments battling over costs. As an alternative, the governments suggested Beadle place Jeremy into a longterm institutional care facility. They promised all the costs of his care would be fully covered by either the federal or provincial government. The estimated daily cost of institutionalized care for Jeremy was $350 per day. The cost to keep Jeremy at home was roughly $270 per day. Beadle was horrified. It felt like the government would rather spend more money to take Jeremy away than to spend less to help her keep him home. There was no way she would give up her son. Court was her last chance to save him—and to broaden Jordan’s Principle so it could finally help children on reserves.

AT THE END OF MARCH 2011, THE NOVA SCOTIA SUPREME COURT ruled on a case similar to Beadle’s. It involved a Nova Scotia off-reserve resident named Brian Boudreau who required 24-hour care. Unfortunately, his in-home care was capped at $2,200 per month—the same cap Jeremy faced. Boudreau was fighting to have the funding cap abolished. In the end, a judge ruled in favour of Boudreau, finding the monthly cap unlawful. The judge ruled the cap contravened the Nova Scotia Social Assistance Act, as well as the province’s Direct Family Support Policy from 2006, which specifically states that funding exceeding $2,200 per month may be granted in “exceptional circumstances.”

When Pictou heard about Boudreau’s win on the radio, she believed she’d found the smoking gun she needed to get Jeremy’s care covered. She shared the Boudreau decision with the federal official in charge of Jeremy’s files, but the government still insisted Jordan’s Principle didn’t apply. Unwilling to give up, Pictou contacted Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society. She thought maybe Blackstock, who has been at the forefront of advocating for Jordan’s Principle since 2005, could suggest options. Certainly, Blackstock was outraged. How could a government deny Jeremy the care and support he needed to stay at home with his mother, but willingly offer a more expensive solution to institutionalize him? “That just doesn’t make sense to me at all,” says Blackstock. “I can’t square that circle.”

She’s spent the last decade working to close the gap between what children get on- versus off-reserve. For Blackstock, the government’s failure to properly implement Jordan’s Principle is a symptom of a much greater problem facing First Nations children across Canada. Prior to her current role, Blackstock was a child protection worker on- and off-reserve in B.C. During that time, she became exceedingly aware of the differences in care and services available to the children on either side of a reserve line. She felt it wasn’t a problem of remoteness, but systemic racism against First Nations. After all, inequality existed even in First Nations reserves near big cities. “Just stepping across that imaginary line was like going thousands and thousands of miles away,” she says, referencing a Squamish First Nation reserve close to North Vancouver. “I could not believe how restrictive the services were.”

This belief has led to her own legal battle. In February 2007, the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations launched a human rights complaint against the federal government. It’s the first time in history a country has been held accountable for its present day actions towards an Indigenous population. The complaint alleged the Canadian government discriminates against First Nations children like Jordan and Jeremy by providing them with less child welfare funding than other children in the country. The government’s own documents estimate the funding gap between on- and off-reserve child welfare services is at anywhere between 22–34 percent. Hearings for the case took place in front of a three-person panel at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal and concluded in October 2014.

At the crux of the tribunal hearings: that the Canadian government provided flawed and unequal services to First Nations children, and that it failed to implement Jordan’s Principle. The ripple effect, argued Blackstock and her allies, meant First Nations families were often forced to surrender their children to foster care or institutions. First Nations children are 12 times more likely to be placed in foster care than non-Indigenous children. They account for 30–40 percent of all Canadian children in child welfare care, even though they make up only five percent of the Canadian child population. What Blackstock wanted was the same thing Beadle wanted: the right and ability to keep First Nations children at home and in their communities.

In the end, Beadle’s case reached its conclusion before Blackstock’s. After spending $300,000 to win its case, the federal government lost. The court ruled in favour of Beadle and the band council in April 2013. The judge agreed with Beadle that the federal government made the wrong judgement on Jeremy’s case, and that Jordan’s Principle did apply. The provincial government, as dictated by the Social Assistance Act, would, in fact, have to cover Jeremy’s care costs if he lived off-reserve. And thus, the federal government should cover those costs to ensure equality for First Nations children living on a reserve. The court ordered the federal government to reimburse the band council for all legal costs, the fees for the services Jeremy had been receiving since Beadle suffered her stroke, and to cover all future costs related to his care.

It was the first time Jordan’s Principle was successfully applied in Canada. And the only time. The Canadian government has made it virtually impossible for families to apply for Jordan’s Principle. First, a narrow definition of qualification exists. A child must have multiple complex health care needs—not just one or two, but many. Second, there’s still the sticking issue of what constitutes a dispute and who it is that must be feuding. That is, if two federal departments, like Health Canada and Indigenous Affairs, couldn’t agree over which should cover the costs of a service, the principle would not apply. And finally, there is just too much red tape to access services using the principle. Even though Beadle won against the government and now has the support she needs to keep Jeremy home, she knows the fight isn’t over. She thinks about how Jordan River Anderson died and knows that he is dead because the principle that’s his namesake didn’t exist when he was alive. She wonders if it would have helped him even if it did.

AFTER SEVEN YEARS AND NUMEROUS EMOTIONAL TESTIMONIES across Canada, the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission published an executive summary of its final report in June 2015. Number one on its list of calls-to-action was to reduce the number of Aboriginal children in care. Number three was to fully implement Jordan’s Principle. The statement was clear: the inequality faced by children and families living on reserves today perpetuates the horrific legacy of Indian Residential Schools.

Seven months following its release, at the end of nine long years and more than $5-million later, the Human Rights Tribunal also released its ruling on Blackstock’s case. On January 26, 2016, it found the Canadian government racially discriminated against 163,000 First Nations children. It ordered the government to reform its First Nations Child and Family Services program so that its child and family welfare agencies are provided with the same level of funding and resources as its provincial counterparts. It also ordered the government to “cease applying its narrow definition of Jordan’s Principle” and “immediately implement the full meaning and scope of Jordan’s Principle.”

Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett spoke to reporters the day the Tribunal released its decision. She said her department will move quickly to start coming up with solutions and, in doing so, will be working closely with First Nations communities and the Assembly of First Nations. She also said there will be a proper needs assessment done in order to determine how much money is required to reform First Nations child-welfare programs. “My job,” she told media, “is to go forward and fix these things.”

This is the news that Blackstock, Beadle, and all the other advocates for First Nations children across the country have been waiting for—a wait that has spanned decades, and involved years of hard work. Yet, although there has been a lot of excitement rippling through First Nations communities across Canada, it has been accompanied by a certain level of skepticism. It will take years to tell whether the ruling will actually change the realities of First Nations children and families. If it does, Canadians should see the number of First Nations children in foster care or institutions fall to a level that is proportionate to their population size.

Recognition of the government’s discriminatory policies against First Nations children alone does not create change. The government can continue to make apology after apology for its treatment of First Nations children, but that also does not lead to positive change. It will take proactive action and continual pressure on governments to make the changes First Nations children need. After spending so many years battling with the government, Blackstock knows this all too well. She knows the road ahead will not be a straightforward one. But she has a clear vision for the future that she will give everything she has to attain: “I want to see a generation of First Nations children that don’t have to recover from their childhoods, and I want to see a generation of non-Aboriginal children who grow up healthy and proud, and never have to say sorry for the treatment of First Nations kids again.”