Top: Lynn Gros Louis (Huron-Wendat). Bottom: Anita Lalo (Innu). Images courtesy Nadine St-Louis and Ashukan Cultural Space, Montreal

Think of the dreamcatcher and it evokes a familiar image. A hoop, a woven web, adorned with beads and feathers. The iconic talisman, said to have originated from the North American Ojibwe, is a common sight in most Canadian souvenir shops. But don’t believe its “Made in Canada” label. More likely, it’s been mass produced overseas and imported into Canada for pennies on the dollar. What may cost you $5 at the shop is costing Indigenous artists their livelihood.

Reclaim Indigenous Arts is an education campaign designed to inform the average consumer of just that. Many Indigenous people rely on arts to make a living, says Jay Soule, artist and co-founder of the initiative. The import and sale of mass-produced knock-offs of Indigenous art pieces is a problem for creators who have spent their lives learning the methods and cultural significance behind the goods. “It’s creating an atmosphere where consumers don’t understand the difference of real, handmade Indigenous arts and crafts,” says Soule.

Why would the average consumer spend $50 on a genuine dreamcatcher that uses real red willow and actual sinew for the web when they can buy an imported facsimile made of faux-feathers and plastic beads for just $10? That’s why the campaign is urging consumers to take action and spread the word as far as they can.

The initiative features a letter-writing campaign to local councillors, souvenir shops, and even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a template for which you can download from the website, sign, and send. The goal is to actually enforce a UN act that Canada has technically adopted, which gives Indigenous people the rights to protect their traditions, customs, and art, with the hope to eventually ban the import of cheaply made, inauthentic Indigenous art. Down the line, the initiative hopes to repatriate sacred objects and art that are either on display in museums and galleries or lay forgotten in archives—and were taken without permission from Indigenous communities in Canada. According to Soule, these ancient injustices set the stage for what’s happening today.

“This is why Canadians and businesses feel that it’s okay to do this,” says Soule, “because Canada itself has been the leader of cultural appropriation for the last 150 years. It sets a precedent for the devaluation of Indigenous arts and crafts.”

Today’s charged political climate and various high-profile incidents of cultural appropriation were the catalysts for Soule and Montreal-based entrepreneur and founder of the Ashukan Cultural Space, Nadine St-Louis, to launch the initiative.

The response has been positive, says Soule. In fact, the campaign has even garnered the attention of Hamilton city council, which is considering taking a closer look at ways to combat cultural appropriation.

In the meantime, he suggests being careful when purchasing so-called “Made in Canada” Indigenous crafts. Ask the shopkeeper who the artist is or which community the piece is from. “Most likely if they don’t know the answers to those questions, they’re not handmade,” says Soule.

After being taken away from their culture, many Indigenous people are connecting to their traditions through art—and are trying to make a living. It’s a task difficult enough without cheap rip-offs made in an overseas factory flooding the market. Soule brings to mind a powerful comparison, citing the recent police raids in Markham, Ont.’s Pacific Mall for selling counterfeit designer fashion brands.

“Why would the police raid a store on behalf of Louis Vuitton and Coach…but not give us the same respect and protect our arts?”

“Music criticism is dead,” proclaimed Dan Kopf emphatically on culture website Quartzy this past spring. In the present streaming era, when you can easily discover music on your own, the “music explainer,” in the form of podcasts, is where it’s at, he argued. Why consider secondhand opinions when you can hear directly from creators about their own writing processes? Hosted by Los Angeles-based Hrishikesh Hirway out of his garage, Song Exploder, a podcast that is perhaps the best known of Kopf’s explainer examples, has already featured an impressive array of guests since it debuted in 2014.

While an explainer like Hirway might not replace the music critic, they could well be reinventing the role. That could be a good thing, even if there are some questions.

It’s possible that explainers could become merely industry insiders, more social entrepreneurs than musician-broadcasters. We’ve seen it happen with music criticism: Since recorded music became freely accessible, the critic-as-journalist has been joined by a new kind of entrepreneurial critic—the opinionated fan. Film critic A.O. Scott has suggested that critics have always been viewed as either specialists or amateurs. In the age of social media, an entrepreneurial music critic is a discerning fan for whom contextualized opinions on music are more important than knowledge of how (or, sometimes, where) it is made. For a select few, fandom can pay, and on YouTube a small crop of verified vlogger-reviewers are now considered modest cultural authorities, with view counts numbering in the millions. However, there are few non-white and even fewer female or non-binary reviewers among them.

The state of criticism at more established online publications is more complicated. Some international music sites like Pitchfork have attempted to diversify their staff and coverage. But the Guardian recently reported that music magazine NME has gone in the other direction. During the early 2000s, two Canadian music sites—Exclaim! and the late Chart Attack—boasted diverse mastheads, but media visibility for non-white, non-male critics seems to be an ongoing problem. Erin Lowers, Exclaim!’s current hip-hop editor, has told Now magazine that “the credit isn’t there” for female-identifying hip-hop writers and publicists.

A key problem plaguing pop music criticism is that, unlike literary and film criticism, it isn’t particularly well-defined. In academia, it exists primarily in musicology or cultural studies departments. In journalism, it has historically involved being present where music subcultures “happen,” an approach seen in Lizzy Goodman’s tome of celeb interviews documenting the 2000s post-punk revival in New York City. During the past two decades, it has also increasingly overlapped with media criticism, such as in recent works by Ryan Alexander Diduck and Grafton Tanner, where music technologies are the focus. Then there are memoirs. Rashod Ollison, a Virginia-based pop critic, documents the challenges he faced growing up as a gay Black teenager in rural Arkansas, marking focal points of his story with song lyrics. He recalls how he admired soul music because he “preferred a more ingratiating place… nurtured by sounds born out of the visceral emotionality of sanctified church singing” to the male anger he felt drove much of west coast hip-hop and alternative rock in the early 1990s, which he couldn’t hear as progressive or sustaining life.

Explainers have the potential to improve criticism and bring these disparate strands closer together. They might also integrate public conversations about pop music with more traditional genres of music like culture-specific folk and classical music, as well as certain forms of jazz. Public broadcasters like NPR, CBC, and BBC already achieve this to an extent, but music criticism sites largely do not. So if there is a Song Exploder equivalent out there capable of getting Mbongwana Star, Shirley Collins and the Latvian Radio Choir in the same room, maybe with Steve Martin dropping in briefly via Skype, I’m on board.

CORRECTION: A version of this story that ran in print in September/October 2018 incorrectly named writer Lizzy Goodman as Elizabeth Goodman. This regrets the error.

A child playing in a snowbank. A woman cutting a cake. A man digging a car out of a snowdrift.

At first glance, these are common Canadian moments. But look closer and they become celebrations in the daily life of any Canadian family. Whether they are new to the country, first- or fifth-generation Canadians, these are things we all share.

Elizabeth Mudenyo is the special projects manager at the Regent Park Film Festival, which leads free, community-driven programming in Toronto. Reflecting on the representation of people of colour she says: “Whenever we see archival material, it’s usually centred around whiteness, especially in Canada.”

Mudenyo is working to change that. In partnership with Charles Street Video and York University Libraries, she is coordinating Home Made Visible, a project to digitize home movies created by members of visible minority and Indigenous communities.

The scenes from a snowy day and a family party are just a few examples of footage that has been transferred from video and film formats to digital files so far. Although the Regent Park Film Festival is rooted in Canada’s oldest and largest social housing community, Mudenyo sees the national archival project as a natural fit because “we are an organization run by people of colour who create content and platforms for people of colour to share their own stories.”

Home Made Visible responds to both technological and social change. By digitizing home movies, it restores access to personal stories that risk being lost as formats like VHS and 16mm become harder to enjoy at home. By allowing participants to choose which portions of their footage they would like to contribute to the archives at the York University Libraries, it ensures that members of Indigenous and visible minority communities remain in control of how they are represented and remembered.

This process tackles the underrepresentation of people of colour in Canadian archives. For Mudenyo, “being a part of our public archives can actually shape how we view the past, how we view communities and people, and how we shape our future.”

Home Made Visible also opens dialogue about analogue artefacts in a digital world. A second component of the project commissions seven artists across the country to create work that critiques the notion of archives. Nadine Arpin is a Two-Spirited Métis artist based in Sioux Lookout, Ont. As one of the commissioned artists with Home Made Visible, she is working on a documentary-style film that tells the story of a local Zamboni driver who emigrated from Colombia. “Archival and found footage is actually a staple of my work,” explains Arpin. For her, the commission is an opportunity to tackle stereotypes about small-town life: “When you see the same faces every day, inclusiveness is imperative.”

It’s a reality Arpin rarely sees reflected in depictions of northern communities. Finding little archival content at the local public library, she put out an open call to residents of Sioux Lookout and is constructing the commission from shoeboxes full of Super 8 footage provided by a community member.

From shovelling snow in the suburbs to shining the ice in Sioux Lookout, this project aims to shed a light on underrepresented communities and how they both contribute to and challenge national narratives.

Father, took Joseph in English,
is Sioe An (like Sue Ann),
is bapak to me,

& we spelled
her name wrong repeatedly.

Uncle, took Joseph in English too,
is Sioe Siet (like sue seat), is paman to me,

& he didn’t correct us all along
until now & Hoei,
in English, Josephine.

As far as I know ‘ibu’, ‘saudara’, ‘isteri’,

are as unknown to me as ‘Hoei’,
are mother, sister, wife,

& Hoei was oui was we
was

Eleanor Sinclair at her daughter Windy’s vigil. Photo courtesy of Ryan Thorpe

It was freezing in Winnipeg, cold enough that frostbite threatened to set in minutes; the kind of cold that sets deep in the bones, down to the marrow. Unforgiving wind ripped through flat, icy streets, and snowdrifts piled along sidewalks. A frigid, stainless steel sky descended on the prairie capital.

By the time Windy Sinclair, a young Indigenous mother, went missing Christmas night in 2017, an unrelenting cold snap was stretching into its second week. In the days after she disappeared, her family phoned police, hospitals, remand centres, and downtown hotels and bars, asking whoever picked up if she was there. They monitored her social media accounts for signs of life. They loaded into an old van, maneuvering through the city’s sleet-covered streets, in search of her. Her children wondered when she was coming home. Her mother prayed.

Then, four days after the disappearance, came the knock at the door. Windy’s crumpled body had been found in a dirty, inner-city back alley, so frozen it took police two days and two space heaters to unthaw it enough to move.

Six weeks later, Eleanor Sinclair stood and stared at the spot her daughter was found frozen and dead. Her shoulders slumped forward and shook as she sobbed. Her head hung low as if in prayer. As tears crested her cheekbones, she whispered something to herself—or maybe to her daughter’s spirit. On that day, Windy would have turned 30. In her memory, Eleanor organized a vigil. Nine people showed up. One of them, a small child held in her mother’s arms, wanted to leave as soon as they’d arrived; it was still incredibly cold out. The group huddled in the back lane, bracing themselves against the elements.

It wasn’t as cold that day for the mourners as it had been when Windy arrived. The last week of her life was one long severe weather warning. It remains unclear how Windy ended up at the spot she was found. What is known, however, is that the chain of events leading to the discovery of her body was remarkably tragic, yet entirely commonplace.

Windy’s death marked one more soul snatched away from the streets of Winnipeg, a city with a long history of Indigenous murders and deaths that sits like an open scar on the community’s heart. Had Windy’s body not been found, it’s likely her death would have passed like those of so many Indigenous women: unreported and ignored.

***

On December 25, 2017, as the Sinclair family prepared to sit down to a traditional Christmas supper of turkey, mashed potatoes, biscuits, and gravy, paramedics were dispatched to their North End home. The area has long been Winnipeg’s most socially disadvantaged and deprived, pocked by high levels of addiction, crime, and gang membership, and low levels of employment and median income. Bordered on the south by a rail yard, the North End is cleaved off from the rest of the city. Community activists say the yard serves as both a physical and psychological barrier between the haves and have-nots; one local playwright described it as Winnipeg’s Berlin Wall.

That night, Windy was intoxicated, hallucinating, and paranoid, convinced a man was coming to kidnap her and her daughter. Eleanor had been concerned with her behaviour all afternoon after she’d caught her mumbling to inanimate objects in their home. “I knew right away she wasn’t herself,” she remembers.

At 11:15 p.m., a nurse went to check on Windy and tell her she was expecting a child. But she was nowhere to be found

The erratic behaviour kept escalating. Eventually, Windy picked up the phone and dialled 911, telling the operator someone was coming to steal her children. Eleanor grabbed the phone and explained what was really going on: Her daughter was high and confused, and while she worried for her well-being, she thought the safest place for her was at home. After hanging up, Eleanor tried to calm her daughter down. It didn’t work. Windy dialled 911 again. Once more Eleanor took the phone from her. In doing so, she accidentally hung up. Two calls in one night with a disconnection meant the operator had no choice; someone had to be dispatched.

Minutes later, an ambulance pulled up to the home. Paramedics checked Windy’s vitals and asked her some questions. In an incident report, one wrote that during the conversation Windy stood up abruptly, walked to the kitchen sink, and turned on the tap. Then she walked back and sat down, leaving the water running. The paramedics asked what drugs she did and Windy told them she injected methamphetamine, explaining sometimes she mixed it with opioids like fentanyl or morphine. Under the portion of the incident report labeled “Primary Impression,” a paramedic wrote: Poisoning/OD.

The paramedics told Eleanor that Windy needed to be transferred to Seven Oaks General Hospital for observation and testing. That forced Eleanor to make a decision. Two of Windy’s children—Travis, then 11, and Samarrah, then five, both of whom Eleanor has custody of—were at her home. The children had been in Eleanor’s care throughout the entirety of Windy’s battle with addiction, which began after her father died in 2015. (Windy also had two other children—Aaron, eight, and Harvey, five—who were not at the home that night. Aaron lives with his father, while Harvey is in foster care.) Eleanor knew she couldn’t leave the children at home. She also didn’t want to take them to the emergency room on Christmas. She decided she and the children would stay home and check on Windy the next day. She explained to the paramedics that should anything come up, hospital staff would have to call her at their family home, not the out-of-date number listed on Windy’s medical file. The paramedics wrote down the correct emergency contact number and promised to pass it along to staff when they arrived at Seven Oaks. As her daughter was led out the door, Eleanor pushed a winter coat into her arms. The temperature outside was nearing -30 C; she hoped it would keep her warm.

Hospital records show Windy was signed into the care of Seven Oaks emergency room staff at 8:06 p.m. Ten minutes later she was seen by a triage nurse, who noted in Windy’s file she was an intravenous meth user behaving erratically. Staff then led Windy to a nearby room, located close to a nursing station where she could be observed, to wait for a doctor. Once again it was noted in her file that she was behaving strange: Her speech was slurred and she told staff she wanted to leave. For still-unknown reasons, the decision was made to move her to a different room, tucked away at the back of the hospital wing, far from the watchful eyes of the nursing station.

At 8:48 p.m. Windy was seen by a doctor, who ordered an IV sedative and a pregnancy test, the latter standard procedure for women of child-bearing age when they come to an emergency room. The results would later show Windy was two months pregnant; there’s no evidence to suggest she knew. At 11:15 p.m. a nurse went to check on her and tell her she was expecting a child. But Windy was nowhere to be seen. Windy had pulled out her IV, gathered her belongings, wandered down the hall, and walked out the hospital’s east exit. Security footage shows her stumbling out the door, her jacket undone as she ventured outside.

When hospital staff realized she was missing, they pulled up Windy’s medical file and called the out-of-date emergency contact number listed. No one picked up. Either the paramedics did not pass along the correct phone number, or staff didn’t bother to call it. Windy’s family was not told she was missing, and no further efforts were made to contact them.

Three days later, on the morning of December 28, a woman looked out her apartment window in the city’s West Broadway neighbourhood, roughly 10 kilometres south of Seven Oaks. She saw something in her back lane, but convinced herself it was a pile of clothes. Minutes later, second guessing her eyes, she walked out back to check. It was Windy’s body, tucked away out of sight in a back alley by a heating vent.

***

There are many holes in the story of Windy’s disappearance. It’s unclear why she was moved from a room where she could be closely observed to one at the back of the hospital wing. It’s unclear why no one checked on her for so long after she was given a sedative. It’s unclear why she was left alone while exhibiting signs consistent with drug-induced psychosis and expressing a desire to leave. It’s unclear why she wasn’t held under the Mental Health Act, which allows people to be detained for their own safety. It remains unclear whether or not a “Code Yellow”—a hospital procedure used, among other reasons, to search for patients who leave against medical advice—was called after staff realized she was missing. It’s unclear why Windy’s family wasn’t notified she had disappeared. It’s unclear why Eleanor was told, when calling the next morning to ask about her daughter, that she’d completed treatment and was discharged. So much about what happened, and did not happen, remains unclear. And that, Eleanor says, is because her daughter was Indigenous in a hospital in Winnipeg.

Winnipeg: The city once dubbed Canada’s most racist by Maclean’s magazine. The city of J.J. Harper, Brian Sinclair, Claudette Osborne, Matthew Dumas, Errol Greene, Tina Fontaine, and countless others whose deaths and disappearances went unreported and whose names no one will ever know. Eleanor recognizes her daughter made poor choices that helped lead her to the alley where her body was found. She also believes her daughter was failed by Seven Oaks. That she still had time to turn her life around. That her death was preventable. Eleanor says the fact her daughter’s skin was brown altered what did and did not happen the night she went missing.

The details of Windy’s death kicked off a minor media stir, with the city’s major news outlets all chasing the story, and Canadian Press copy picked up by national publications. (The writer of this piece was among reporters covering the story.) But news cycles are quick and collective memory short. Six weeks after her body was found, only one publication sent a reporter to Windy’s vigil. The city’s meth epidemic had already offered up new casualties. In August 2017, a police spokesman told reporters Winnipeg was in the grips of a serious meth problem. Months later, the chief of police said at a press conference that the situation was so bad it was starting to keep him up at night. By all accounts meth is easily available and readily consumed on the streets of Winnipeg, which has corresponded with an uptick in violent and property crimes carried out by those desperate to fund their next hit. A local harm-reduction program estimated it gave out 1.5 million clean syringes over the past year. During a six month period that year, the Bear Clan Patrol, an Indigenous-led crime prevention group based out of the North End, said it picked up 3,000 used needles off the street.

At the vigil, Eleanor lit a candle and whispered a prayer for her daughter. Meanwhile, a few kilometres away, hundreds came together in the city’s downtown at The Forks, the historic meeting place of the region’s Indigenous peoples. They gathered in opposition to the verdict in the Gerald Stanley second-degree murder trial. Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man, was shot in the back of the head at point blank range in August 2016. After deliberation, an all-white jury acquitted Stanley, the Saskatchewan farmer who pulled the trigger, sparking nationwide protests and outrage.

With so much death and pain it can be hard to keep track of all the vigils. In front of flashing cameras and reporters scribbling in notebooks, demonstrators expressed frustration and anger at what many call the systemic racism of the Canadian justice system. Addressing the crowd, then-Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Grand Chief Sheila North declared that 150 years of Canadian history weighed on Stanley’s finger as he pulled the trigger. “It wasn’t just an accident. There were years of history that went behind that gunshot that took that life,” North said.

As the words fell from North’s lips, Eleanor wept, standing over the spot her daughter’s body had been found, lamenting what she believes is the institutional racism of the Canadian health care system. The sense Windy’s death had already been forgotten was palpable. It was exactly what Eleanor feared most: Her daughter had become a statistic. “She’s just one more dead Native woman,” Eleanor says.

Twelve days later, the jury in another high-profile murder trial ended deliberations. Raymond Cormier stood accused of murdering 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, whose body was pulled from Winnipeg’s Red River in 2014, wrapped in a duvet and weighed down with rocks. Her death was a catalyst for the creation of Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The hope of “Justice for Tina,” the rallying cry shouted at protests in her honour, was in many ways the stand-in for the overdue justice that had eluded too many for too long. The verdict: not guilty.

***

After her daughter’s death, Eleanor had a series of meetings with staff and administration from Seven Oaks General Hospital and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, the city’s governing body for health care regulation. She was looking for answers, but says she came out with more questions. (The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority declined comment for this story, saying it couldn’t speak publicly about the case due to patient privacy concerns.) When interviewed in June, Eleanor said she still had not learned whether or not hospital staff called a “Code Yellow” when Windy disappeared, which could have protected her that night. She also says a doctor who attended one of the meetings told her Windy had been “lucid” enough to leave on her own the night she went missing.

“She was hallucinating. She was clearly under the influence. They had given her a [sedative]. But she’s lucid enough to leave?” Eleanor says. “They didn’t even look for her. Her life didn’t matter to them. I even told them, ‘If it was that cold outside, you would bring in your pet. You’d have that compassion for your pet. Why didn’t you show my daughter that compassion?’”

Shortly after a local news outlet reported the discovery of Windy’s body, the Winnipeg Police Service, in one of its only public statements on the case, said it did not consider her death suspicious and would have no further updates for media. How and when she got to that back alley is still a mystery. Manitoba’s chief medical examiner has not yet provided an official cause of death.

A 2015 report says anti-Indigenous racism is so common in the nation’s health care system that “people strategize around anticipated racism before visiting the emergency department or, in some cases, avoid care altogether”

Eleanor will likely never get the answers she’s after. On one point, however, she has no doubt: Had the hospital done what it was supposed to, Windy wouldn’t have ended up in that alley. In her view, the hospital failed in its duty of care. And that, she says, is symptomatic of the systemic racism simmering below the surface in Winnipeg hospitals.

A few months after her daughter’s death, while the meetings with hospital representatives were still ongoing, Eleanor sat at her kitchen table reminiscing about her late husband, and Windy’s father, Brian. He had been chronically ill prior to his death, so the two of them often went to Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre, the closest hospital to their home. “The first thing the nurse would say to him when we walked in was, ‘Okay Brian, what kind of drugs do you want now?’” she says. “It’s not, ‘Hey Brian, why did you come to the hospital? What symptoms do you have?’ That’s the attitude. That’s the kind of treatment he would get.” The racism her husband experienced at Winnipeg hospitals made him increasingly unlikely to seek out medical treatment late in life to avoid the humiliation he felt being stereotyped as the drug-seeking “drunk Indian.”

Research on anti-Indigenous bias in Canadian health care shows Eleanor’s husband wasn’t alone in feeling this way. Citing a string of academic studies, a 2015 report published by the Wellesley Institute, a Toronto-based non-profit think tank, says anti-Indigenous racism is so common in the nation’s health care system that “people strategize around anticipated racism before visiting the emergency department or, in some cases, avoid care altogether.”

A 2011 study cited in the report took a closer look at the experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people accessing care at an inner-city emergency department. The researchers found Indigenous participants believed being identified as “Aboriginal and poor” may negatively affect their credibility in the eyes of health care professionals and hinder their ability to get help.

Refusing to go to the hospital, Eleanor’s husband died of pneumonia at home in December 2015. His death served as the spark for his daughter’s struggle with addiction, which would later lead her into the emergency room of Seven Oaks. Two years to the day of Brian’s death, police arrived at Eleanor’s home, telling her Windy was dead.

Dr. Shannon McDonald, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for British Columbia’s First Nations Health Authority, who called Winnipeg home most of her life, says it’s nearly impossible to say for certain whether anti-Indigenous racism was at play in how Windy was treated at Seven Oaks. “I suppose we can say it’s possible [racism was a factor]. Knowing some of the previous circumstances in Winnipeg that have been well reported, it may even be probable,” McDonald says. These previous incidents include, among others, the death of Brian Sinclair (who shares the same name as Eleanor’s deceased husband, but is not related). Sinclair, a 45-year-old double amputee confined to a wheelchair, came to Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre seeking help for a blocked catheter in September 2008. A subsequent inquest into his death determined he was ignored for 34 hours while waiting in the emergency room, with staff later admitting they assumed he was drunk, homeless, or both. He died of a treatable bladder infection in Manitoba’s largest hospital. By the time anyone noticed he was dead, rigor mortis had set in and an official time of death couldn’t be determined.

The Brian Sinclair Working Group, a collection of doctors and academics who conducted an investigation into Sinclair’s death, released a report with a series of recommendations in September 2017. That month, in response to the report, the interim president of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority said it was time to “come to terms” with the way “systemic racism” can affect health care services. Three months later Windy walked into the emergency room at Seven Oaks.

“This young woman coming in, intoxicated, incoherent, she would have been considered troublesome,” McDonald says. “This young woman would have confirmed for some people their image of a drug-using Indigenous person, who may not have been considered as valuable as other patients. I’ve worked in situations where that’s the case, where people that I’ve worked with professionally sometimes see some patients as more worthy of their efforts than others.”

***

Eleanor has still been fighting to learn more about what happened that night. She’s also trying to get Seven Oaks to acknowledge the ways she says hospital staff let her daughter down. Both of those battles, Eleanor says, have so far been in vain. “Her life should matter to them. Her life did matter,” Eleanor says. “But I am going to make sure that changes are made. And if I have to go protest outside the Seven Oaks then I will do that. I can’t let them get away with this one. She mattered. She mattered to a lot of people.”

At the same time, Eleanor has been raising two of Windy’s children, Travis and Samarrah. She dreads the day Samarrah starts asking hard questions about what happened to her mother. She doesn’t yet understand it, and can’t wrap her head around the fact her mom is really gone. “She’s going to ask me what I did about it,” Eleanor says. “So I need to be able to say I made them accountable. That I did anything that I could to try and make her life meaningful. To make sure that nobody else goes through this.”

Sitting in her home, the last place she saw her daughter alive, Eleanor broke down and cried, recounting the time, not long after Windy died, when she took her granddaughter on a trip outside the city.

“I had to drop my Mom and Dad off out of town. I took her with me. On the way back she said, ‘I can see the stars.’ Because she hasn’t been out of the city in the longest time. I said, ‘Yeah baby, there’s a lot of stars out there.’ So we stopped and got out and looked, and she said, ‘I miss my Mommy.’ And I said, ‘Yeah baby, I miss her, too.’”

Eleanor’s voice began to quiver and shake. She tried to compose herself, holding it all in to finish the story. But the dam had cracked behind the weight of the pain. Then, it burst open. She lost control, the words barely audible through her sobs.

“I said, ‘Look for the biggest star baby, that’s probably your Mom.’ So she’s walking around the van trying to find the biggest star. Then she finally finds it and she goes, ‘That’s my Mommy. That’s my Mommy shining brightly.’ And I said, ‘Yeah baby, that’s her.’”

That night, Eleanor made up imaginary errands the two of them needed to run. Her granddaughter didn’t want to lose sight of the star, and Eleanor didn’t have the heart to spoil it for her. They just kept driving, staying out until the clock on the van’s dashboard read 3 a.m. Eventually, she pulled back into the city, winding through the residential streets of the North End, before parking outside their home. Then she carried her granddaughter inside and tucked her into bed, as her mother had once, long ago, in better times.

“Now once in a while she goes out into the backyard and tries to find that star,” Eleanor says, with tears in her eyes. “But here in the city, you can barely see the stars.”

Photo courtesy of Meghan Parker

It’s been said that the medium is the message, but how much say do we have over which mediums shape our experiences—and how might they shape our education? Meghan Parker, an art teacher at a public high school in North Vancouver, considers this question in her recent thesis, “Art teacher in process: An illustrated exploration of art, education and what matters”—a 268-page comic book created for her master’s in arts education at Simon Fraser University.

Challenging conceptions that scholarship should be textual—“12-point font, Times New Roman,” as Parker puts it—her work demonstrates how scholarship can be artful and that art can be scholarly. The thesis is structured into chapters titled after the seven elements of art—line, colour, form, texture, shape, space, and value—which act as real-life metaphors for Parker’s inquiries. Together, the elements converge to form a site of praxis, where the theories and thinkers Parker engages with are in direct conversation with reflections and questions toward her own methods as an art teacher.

Parker anchors this praxis by illustrating herself as narrator, taking us on a journey à la Magic School Bus across scenes from her daily classroom experiences, while also integrating quotes from theorizers she is influenced by, self-reflexive musings, and scenes from her home life. The combination of visuals and text in comic-book form allowed her to depict how scholarship, teaching, learning, life, and art are all interwoven practices. Creating an autobiographical comic also enabled Parker to insert her own body within her scholarship, illustrating how knowledge is deeply embodied—something our educational system often tends to forget.

Through exploration and the support of her supervisors, she was ultimately able to find her chosen medium, carving out a space for herself in academia to represent knowledge in a way best suited to her research. For Parker, scholarship boils down to the following: communication, advancing ideas, and reflection. One of her biggest takeaways from doing this work was that form really matters when communicating one’s ideas—that the how is just as important as the what. Going forward as an educator, she aims to continue making learning accessible and diversified in her classroom, “to inspire others to find their form, to be the artist in them, whatever that form may be.”

I almost threw up all over you the first time we met. I was 18. My then-boyfriend took me to a Just for Laughs showcase in Montreal. Mascara ran down my face as I watched one of the performers, Jeremy Hotz. You and I were still getting to know each other then. I was sweating and hyperventilating and I got dizzy and my jaw was sore and my stomach felt ready to implode—and it was the most distilled joy I’d ever experienced. I wasn’t anticipating, as I normally did, that the joy would soon be over, replaced by grey feelings I carried everywhere; I thought I could laugh that hard forever. I only knew of one way to fall in love: hard and fast. And so you and I began.

Falling in love hard and fast means that when you lose it, you fall hard. And fast. That boyfriend and I broke up. He left the country. I tried to take my own life. You were there every night the following summer after I was in the hospital. My little brother and I stayed up watching you on Conan until my brain settled enough so I could sleep. Thanks to you, we created a secret language—a world of inside jokes where I felt safe from my own mind.

That world expanded the first time I hung out with the person I’d later marry. “Do you know the D?” I asked. “Yeah, I know the D,” he answered, referring to Tenacious D. Our shared appreciation of this silly rock-comedy band sealed our friendship. Our close friendship soon grew into a loving relationship. You were around for that, too. At the beginning, he and I watched old Dana Carvey Show sketches. Years later, we watched a Paul F. Tompkins special where he pretends to be an employee for the South Carolina Electric Company who invites a colleague to a private work function: “Take care to wear your rubber-soled tuxedo, I hear tell they have a punch bowl filled with lightning!” We had to pause the show because we were falling off the couch in hysterics. We spent a decade retelling jokes, inventing new ones. We threw in puns, personification, and celebrity impressions. We were a silly army of two until we separated. Then nothing was funny.

Maybe you’d know exactly how I felt. So many people use you to talk about pain, after all. But me it took me writing to you to find the words. A separation means being lost in a cold place. It’s not getting warmer. You have no map. No compass. No phone. No one knows you’re there. They don’t realize you’re missing.

Crying was my only outlet. I clogged up the work bathroom with snot-filled tissues. I screamed into pillows. I didn’t bother wearing makeup to therapy anymore.

Still, you were there.

You were there every time my colleagues pity-laughed as I stumbled through a DeAnne Smith or Aparna Nancherla bit. It was better than nothing. You were there when my friend, Erin, introduced me to Baron Vaughn and Ron Funches one afternoon when I was sure I’d never experience joy again; I did that day. You were there when I stared down the weepy woman reflected in my computer screen reacting to a Hannah Gadsby line: “Your resilience is your humanity.” I realized I might love that woman. Maybe the heart is like the liver, I thought later. Maybe it regenerates, no matter how raw.

And so my raw heart connected with other people’s raw hearts—those of comedians and the audience. And I started to wonder: Maybe the best thing we can ever hope for is to look at each other’s raw hearts and laugh with understanding. Laugh at how the world is falling apart but we keep showing up every day. Laugh at how absurdly devastating it is for two people who care about each other so much to separate out of love. Laugh at the fact that one small thing could’ve been different and the comedian, audience, and I wouldn’t be sharing that moment.

In those spaces, the cold place got a little warmer. I told people where I was. They came looking me for me. They realized I was missing, and you were the compass out.

Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash

William Chemno’s educational journey in Toronto began in Parkdale, a small but bustling neighbourhood in the city’s west end. Originally from Kenya, the 32-year-old had his sights set on a post-secondary education. Chemno knew that in order to be successful in a post-secondary program, he needed to improve his reading, writing, and math skills. So, he joined Parkdale Project Read’s Academic Upgrading Program, a community-based adult literacy program. Immediately, he got to work: He learned how to write a proper essay, improved his grammar and punctuation in writing, and built confidence in his reading abilities.

The program “is where I got my foundation,” he says. “They prepared me to go to college.”

Chemno is one of many Canadians working to improve his literacy in part to achieve greater academic and personal goals. Still, there is little awareness of just how important adult literacy is. As an adult literacy practitioner who works with learners in community-based programs in Toronto, I know that it is an often-overlooked issue that’s rarely discussed in larger policy discourse. Decision-makers and elected officials at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels still haven’t fully grasped the importance of ensuring that all Canadians are giving the support and resources to increase their literacy and numeracy skills.

If adult learners do not have basic literacy and numeracy skills, everyday tasks become difficult: It becomes harder to apply for jobs, read to their children and grandchildren, complete government forms, vote, and access social supports. The implications of adults with low literacy skills have significant social and economic effects.

Learning to read, write, and do math in the dominant language of the society that you live in is practising how to communicate. It involves building skills, perspectives, and knowledge face-to-face and electronically that is relevant and meaningful. For the many adults working to improve their literacy and numeracy skills, the issue can no longer be invisible.

***

Adult literacy in Canada has a long and rich history. Beginning in the 1800s, the Mechanics’ Institutes in Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia provided information and learning opportunities to labourers exclusively. In 1893, the National Council of Women, an advocacy organization based in Ottawa whose mission was to improve the conditions of women and families, was founded. Home and school associations expanded, public lectures were given in many communities, and educational programs were organized by religious and other groups. By 1899, Frontier College was established and began providing literacy support to individuals in remote communities, who worked in industries such as mining and logging, and eventually extended its educational services to people in prisons, factories, migrant farms, rural populations, domestic workers, and immigrants, as well as those experiencing homelessness.

On the international stage, Canadians made contributions to organizations such as the International Congress of University Adult Education and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). During the UNESCO conference in Tokyo in 1972, and under the leadership of a Canadian adult educator, James Robbins Kidd, in 1973, the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE) was established.

Today, there remains a lack of understanding and awareness of adult literacy and its role in being active and engaged in a democratic society. UNESCO defines literacy as a right and takes a humanistic approach to education, with a central concern for inclusiveness that does not marginalize. Through this lens, consider Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire’s take on learning: He believed that education and politics are connected, suggesting that the acts of teaching and learning are political acts in and of themselves. Therefore, when we examine adult literacy and its importance in Canada on a systemic level, it is a political act.

Under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, adult literacy education became increasingly political across the country after a drastic policy shift. Many adult literacy programs experienced funding cuts, and adult literacy was no longer defined as a means of life-long learning and inclusiveness but as “essential skills.” In 2007, the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills (OLES) was established to support adult Canadians in improving their essential skills to enter and succeed in the job market. Federal policies made the assumption that adult learners who were working on improving their literacy skills did so solely for employment purposes. As a result of this federal shift, provinces began to follow suit. Funded by the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities in Ontario under the Employment Ontario model, the Ontario Adult Literacy Curriculum Framework, for instance, became heavily focused on employment. As a result, those seeking literacy skills for anything other than employment-specific reasons became furthered marginalized.

To better understand the issue, I reached out to other literacy workers, like me, across the country who are working to improve access to literacy education and increase its visibility. The many practitioners that I spoke to have been working in the field for decades and continue to be deeply committed and passionate about their work. The consensus: There’s still plenty of work to be done.

“I thought we were moving toward better research, a more evidence-based approach to adult literacy. But that was all eliminated with the [Harper] cuts and it sent a very strong message about the national effort to address literacy,” says Deanna Allen Champagne, former executive director of Laubach Literacy in New Brunswick. “It wasn’t important enough to maintain that kind of federal commitment.” Terri Peters, a professional development specialist with Calgary Learns, agrees: “The changes in government policy had a profound effect on adult literacy policy, which further marginalized and isolated the field.” These policy changes, Allen Champagne adds, ignore the larger issue of adult literacy outside of a workplace environment, minimizing its overall visibility in the country.

Jenny Horsman, a community-based researcher and educator based in Toronto with a focus on violence, trauma, and learning, echoes this sentiment. “We have shifted away from literacy [and its] relationship to text, and moved toward this bizarre focus on essential skills,” she says. “Excluding the skills the government doesn’t name as essential for work, such as the impact of violence on learning, removes funding for vital learning and teaching.” Important skills, such as public speaking or a better understanding of digital technology, are also excluded.

In the end, practitioners say, the issue of adult literacy has become tangled in a larger fight—one of decentralization of social programs in the government, of a focus not on education but of employability—that can only stand to hurt those yearning to learn.

***

For those working to make adult literacy a more visible issue, the fight starts with a better understanding of literacy in general. “‘Being literate’ is not well understood by most people,” Allen Champagne says. “We live in a society where we depend on literacy skills [so] there is an assumption that because we have access to public education people can easily acquire literacy skills.”

Peters agrees, noting that most of her friends and family outside of the industry fail to grasp what exactly issues of literacy—like the change in definition and skills training by the Harper’s government—in Canada are, and how these issues apply to everyday scenarios. Many practitioners say this is in part due to the fact that we ignore how learners themselves define literacy. “Think of the marketing and promotion of literacy programs, done by the funders… and this may or may not engage potential learners,” Allen Champagne says. “But if the definition came from learners, it would be different.”

Jayne Hunter, executive director of Literacy Nova Scotia adds: “We try to not see low literacy as a negative even though it is talked about as a deficit, but we talk about it as a tool for empowerment.”

Based on her 20 years in the literacy field, Margerit Roger, a consultant with Eupraxia Training in Winnipeg, says adult literacy should be viewed as a social justice issue. “A lack of access to literacy signals a loss of power and serves to marginalize—whether it’s an inability to read a medicine bottle, fill out a form to receive employment insurance, or the way someone struggling with literacy might be treated for their written communication.”

For Indigenous communities, this marginalization is especially potent, says Michelle Davis, executive director of the Ontario Native Literacy Coalition in Ohsweken near the Six Nations of the Grand River. Last year, when Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS) practitioners met in Toronto, most agreed there is still stigma to the word literacy.

“Because our students are the ones that the education system has failed, that stigma attached that comes with our programs comes into play and we’ve got to get away from that,” she says. Media coverage usually doesn’t help matters. Often, journalism about low literacy consists of human-interest stories that don’t take a critical look at the policies and people in power who have changed the discourse on the issue. “Adult literacy does not have public credence,” Peters says.

“When I try to talk about reading, writing, and numeracy, it seems harder to engage others in what it means to have literacy knowledge and skills gaps,” adds Berniece Gowan, a project manager with the Adult Literacy and Essential Skills Research Institute at Calgary’s Bow Valley College.

But some practitioners object to it being an invisible issue. “If we say adult literacy is invisible then it becomes invisible,” says Suzanne Symthe, associate professor in the Faculty of Education at Burnaby, B.C.’s Simon Fraser University. “Adult literacy work is everywhere. It is so entangled and embedded in everyday life.” To ignore this, she says, is to lose progress.

***

William Chemno’s journey from the Academic Upgrading Program to being a student at Centennial College is a testament of how programs similar to the one in Parkdale, in addition to community-based adult literacy programs that are supporting learners with various goals, are critical in supporting adult learners who seek a second chance at learning. And for Chemno, it is thanks to his persistence and dedication as well as the support and encouragement from staff, that he has been given that second chance.

Currently, Chemno is in his third semester at Centennial College, completing his diploma to become a registered practical nurse. Now, Chemno is giving back, providing support to those in the Project Read program who are looking to improve the literacy just like he was.

Regardless of shifts in policy or governmental changes, Allen Champagne says one thing remains true about adult literacy: “It creates access—to resources and supports, opportunities, a network and support system,” she says. “It presents a new perspective on the world around you and your place in it.”

In Mildred Grace German’s piece Stigma Kills, the artist aims to depict how mental illness and addiction can affect anyone, regardless of their background or location. The artwork was inspired by the ongoing battle for social justice in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where German lives. The piece was on display at the University of British Columbia as part of a student art show exploring the impact of the opioid crisis from a youth perspective.

It was the second day of the Calgary Stampede, a 10-day bonanza of cowboy-themed festivities in the Canadian province most stereotyped by its beef, oil, and country music. Nearly every local business had shut down for the week. “It’s our biggest holiday. You just don’t mess with the Stampede,” Calgary-born Mandy Alston tells me nearly a year later.

The 27-year-old has worked in the hospitality industry for the better part of her adult life, and most of her friendships were established in restaurants, bars, and while hosting corporate events.

That day last July, Alston had just been given a case of Prosecco by one of her distributors and was getting ready for an engagement party. Then she got a call. Her boyfriend suggested she not come; it was a friends-of-the-family–only event. When Alston later found out her partner was there with another woman, things unravelled. The affair had been going on for months. She had been betrayed not only by her partner, but by her friends who lied on his behalf to cover up the liaison. “These were people I had known for seven years… I was devastated.”

Alston’s coping mechanism was to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs. She started to spiral, losing weight. “I would essentially wake up and start drinking. I couldn’t even tell you how much cocaine I would do in one day,” she remembers. “I was a mess.”

In Alston’s industry, there is little talk about research-based solutions to addiction or behavioural interventions for mental health. Friends would respond to everything by suggesting a drink or a line. “It’s a supported addiction,” she says.

Alston was teaching spin classes while running restaurants and working for clients, so she felt she had to hide her vulnerabilities. Cocaine, she says, helped her remain positive around others. She could still be the happy, peppy person that everyone knew. “No one had to know that I was going through pain,” she says.

The first time Alston used cocaine was with her ex on vacation in Mexico on New Year’s Eve. She started to work in nightclubs more often, planning and hosting events. “Cocaine was readily available. At first I didn’t like that because I couldn’t sleep,” she says. She stopped doing it for a while, but she then figured out what she calls “the balance.” “It was a quick line here and there and with that came a drink. I would do a line and think, ‘Now I need a drink,’” she says. “The habit formed so fast that I thought, ‘Wow, I’m in this,’” she remembers.

We know that while trauma resides at the roots of addiction, another aspect that holds incredible power is when learning mechanisms go wrong. This is often understood through the field of neuroplasticity. “Cells that fire together wire together,” wrote Donald Hebb, a Canadian neuropsychologist working on associative learning at Harvard University, in 1949. Marc Lewis, a neuroscientist who considers addiction a brain malfunction rather than a disease, has written similar findings extensively. “The more you repeat a behaviour, the more likely your brain is to produce a reward in response to that behaviour. With each repetition, activated synapses become reinforced or strengthened… and alternative [less-used] synapses become weakened or pruned,” he wrote. “Repeated patterns of neural activation are self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing: they form circuits or pathways with an increasing probability of ‘lighting up’ whenever certain cues or stimuli [or thoughts or memories] are encountered.”

In healthy brain functioning, highly pleasurable “rewards” are experienced in the limbic system—the brain’s more primal, impulse-driven centre—and rational thoughts about responsibilities and consequences happen in the prefrontal cortex. In addiction, the former overrides the latter: the decisions made in the rational system of the mind are vetoed by the reward-driven system of the mind.

The good news is that many in the field of addiction and mental health are beginning to understand this and are working toward solutions that help take back the prefrontal cortex’s control. Medication-assisted treatment (MAT) programs are on the rise, and could be a solution for many. MAT combines psycho-social interventions like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) with medications that are offered on a 30- to 60-day plan to reduce the endorphin reward. This lessens the reward-seeking drive so the brain can go back to commanding our actions rationally.

What’s thwarting the success of these programs, however, is an after-effect of the opioid overdose crisis. Echoing failed policies of the drug war, calls for banning all pharmaceuticals are counter-productive and even dangerous. But the hysteria surrounding pharmaceutical intervention is understandable and expected, says Elliot Stone, CEO of Alavida, a MAT program based in Vancouver. “People are upset about [others] dying and opioid addiction is a very serious thing, so it’s a natural [response],” he explains. “With alcohol, someone tells you that you have a problem, then you have a chance to get better.” But with opioids, he says, “you die, immediately in many cases. It’s human nature that people are focusing on this.”

I asked Stone, whose program focuses on alcohol addiction, if he felt alcohol had been lost in the dialogue on addiction given the current news cycle centred on opioids. “I don’t think alcohol is getting the attention it should,” he says. “But I think it’ll come around. Mental health is starting to be appreciated, and there’s a general movement in the right direction. It’s just going to take time.”

Stone’s program combines evidence-based practices in two worlds that he believes are closely related, but that don’t often intersect: the world of psychotherapy and the world of medicine. On the medical side, Alavida uses the opioid antagonist Naltrexone, which partially blocks opioid receptors so that they can’t fully deliver the pleasure they normally do. “[These medications are used] as a tool to essentially retrain the brain and to make the process of paring down your drinking easier from a biological sense,” he explains.

When you don’t get the neurochemical reward, then you aren’t as inclined to seek the substance that delivers it. “If [we’re] able to block that reward for a period of time in specific circumstances, it can pull someone out of that compulsive cycle and give them a bit of space to make decisions,” Stone explains. And that space is where his program really doubles down on the psychotherapy aspects like CBT, motivational interviewing, and traditional therapy.

Because her case was less severe than many addicted to alcohol, on her own, Alston was able to figure out how to achieve some of the components that successful treatment plans like Stone’s and other MAT programs incorporate. She moved from Calgary to Vancouver to get away from her triggers that set her reward-seeking behaviour in the driver’s seat, and sought out relationships that didn’t expect her to be happy and peppy all the time, or those who suddenly became too busy when things got tough. People who, when she’s going through a rough patch, don’t just resort to buying her a shot. “I’m cooking dinners, I’m being honest, and I’m enjoying my life,” she tells me happily.

“I’m out of my ‘darkness place.’”