Illustration by MGC

The crab trap was neon orange. He whipped it like a frisbee, far out, and watched it sink below the dark blue of the sea. It was early and he was the only one on the pier, cold in his camping chair. The old chicken bones he used as bait were stuffed in a plastic bag beside him, and he could smell them mixing with the salt of the ocean and the damp morning breeze.

One thing he liked about crabbing was that you didn’t have to wait for a tug. You could just sit there and watch the water, read a book if you wanted to, and wait however long you saw fit. Sometimes his wife would come with him and they would sit there together in the sort of silence that came from years of being next to someone. But it had been a while now since she’d joined him.

Usually, he would talk to the other crabbers. They all had the same traps as him, the ones he made. He was famous around here for that. It was a little business; he even had blue baseball caps with his company name embroidered on them in pearly white. They would talk about the weather and their grandkids and debate what bait was the best to use. It was predictable and gave him enough socializing to get by.

The only time he could really be honest with himself was when he sat out there in the quiet of the morning. Then, he could finally admit that this was never the way he saw his life going. He thought about his father wading in the ocean, the water up to his knees. That was in Malaysia, where the sea was clearer and lighter and warmer, and the sun had beaten down on their bare backs. Where he ate mangoes and coconuts from the tree. There was a photo in an old album of his wife and his father, laughing as they pried open a coconut with a machete. In that preserved moment she looked impossibly young, her smile impossibly wide. His father’s dark hair and broad shoulders captured next to her in fading sepia tones.

He thought about the chicken bones sitting now on the ocean floor like some kind of offering. When he was a child, his father was many things: a fisherman, a gifted healer. He could dive for ages, never coming up for air. Down there, on the ocean floor, his father would leave a freshly slaughtered chicken to appease the gods. He had always felt protected, held by his father’s sacrifices. That was a long time ago, and a long way from here, but sometimes when he sat on this pier, he swore for a second he could see his father emerging from between the waves. Then he would shake his head and see nothing but a buoy or the slick head of a seal.

It was funny to be back by the water when he’d spent his whole life getting away from it. For a while he and his wife had lived in Los Angeles, that desert of cars and hot pavement. He’d been taken in by all of it, the gambling and women and shiny things, until there was nothing left. He was proud of a lot of things in his life, but he wasn’t proud of that. He associated LA with death, not of any one person, but of his own upward trajectory. A plane climbing up and up and then crashing to the ground.

After twenty minutes, he slowly pulled the trap out of the water. It was a ring trap, and as he hauled it up it closed quickly, squishing the crabs inside into a mess of legs and pincers. When he opened it, the crabs sat there disoriented for a moment, then started to scuttle around on the wood.

When his granddaughter was little, he used to bring her here sometimes. When he’d release the crabs she would giggle and scream, running away from them down the pier. He would pick up the crabs and chase her, pincers out.

Now, there was no one here to chase and his granddaughter hadn’t called in months. Still, he smiled as he grabbed the crabs. He lifted them up by their back legs, dropping them in the bucket he’d brought with him.

His wife was on oxygen and could barely leave the apartment, but when he got home with the day’s catch she’d still wheel the tank to the kitchen and stand there at the stove. He’d watch her kill and clean the crabs with remorseless, practiced hands. So small and covered in purple-blue veins. The clear tube winding up her body, nubs in her nose above her unchanging smile.

The doctor had told him not to have any salt. His daughter kept reminding him of that, pleading with him. But everything tasted bland, and it didn’t feel like home. That was all he wanted these days, something that tasted like the water he’d grown up next to, that he’d spent so much of his life in.

It was funny that he’d always wanted to leave home and now he was here and all he could think about was the fact that he’d probably never go back, not before he died. And so this was it, the crabbing and the dock and an ocean separating him from his own memories. Maybe he liked being here in the morning light, alone, because he could imagine that right there, past the mountains, the water turned turquoise, and the evergreen trees turned to palms, and his own father was lying on the ocean floor with an offering clutched in his arms.

The trap flashed orange again as he threw it back out into the water. The sun was coming up stronger over the mountains now. It was still beautiful, though he realized then that it was not the sunrise he longed to see; a revelation that came from the middle of his chest like a tether to another world. He would go home in a few hours with his bucket, and his wife would make chili crab and he would hold her small hands in his, and maybe he could call his daughter to come over and have lunch with them and they would lick the spicy oil off their fingers and laugh and maybe that could be all he wanted.

Illustration by Marne Grahlman

You wake up ready for some self care. You stretch, scrape your tongue. Sit still tracking your breath. You’ve been working hard. You need a dose of freshness. What you need is a haircut, and today’s the day you booked one. How timely. As you sip the froth off your oat milk latte, you imagine yourself feeling cute, flashing your new trim to a passerby. There will be just enough wind to fluff it out. It will tumble gently over your shoulders and back. This is because your hair is long. So long that it’s usually the first thing people notice. It reaches your butt. It conceals your boobs. The colour is nondescript, but the length is remarkable.

It’s grown with you and the truth is, you’d feel exposed without it.

That being said, you’ve been spotting people with good hair and they have one thing in common: They have cuts. You could become irrelevant with your long, flat hair.

A couple weeks ago, your friend recommended someone. When you clicked on their profile, you gasped.

“You let a dude cut your hair?”

“He’s been doing this for decades,” she shrugged. “Plus, he’s cheap.”

You’re somewhat reassured, although, how could you be? Give a man full access to your hair? But you trust your friend. You book an appointment.

*

His salon is at the back of a skate shop that smells like weed. You hate weed, although you notice his hair is the same length as yours. He notices too and says “that’s dope,” which is a phrase you haven’t heard in a long time. Maybe he’s a gamer. You feel ill at ease.

“It’s sort of an identity,” you say, referring to your hair. He assures you he can totally relate and you appreciate this. You breathe easier. You tell him you want shaggy bangs framing your face. You tell him not to compromise the length – apart from dead ends, of course.

“Make me look like Stevie Nicks,” you say. “Just longer.”

He winks at you. It’s a gentle wink. You tell yourself you must be in good hands.

He fastens a drape around you and stashes your glasses. He begins to maneuver the scissors quickly. You wonder how he can be snipping so fast—it has to be a mark of experience.

You get to talking about softball and snowboarding, which are the sports he likes. He tells you about his accident, how he tumbled down a black-diamond slope and landed with the board on his teeth. They had to extract him by helicopter, he says, and after that, he got flashbacks. Vertigo, white specks all around, the thwack, a searing pain in his jaw—it wouldn’t stop. You listen as he shares that, one day, he did LSD and dissolved into nothingness and came to terms with the idea of death and the flashbacks went away. This is when you know you have made him feel safe. It’s one of your strengths.

“We’re done,” he says, undoing the drape.

You fumble for cash as he hands you your glasses—could the haircut be over so soon? Then it hits you that you were too nervous coming in, and you forgot to pay for the parking meter. You rush to your car—no ticket! This day has your name written all over it. Your head feels lighter. You set off to the YMCA. The last stop on your wellness train.

At the gym, you change into leggings and tie up your hair and—and that’s when you realize something’s wrong. Your ponytail. It’s too short. Way too short.

*

You enter a state of shock. You leave the Y. At home, you can’t believe what you’re seeing. Your hair has lost a foot. A full foot. It barely falls past your shoulder blades. You burst into tears. You take down the mirrors. You put on a hoodie and tighten the strings until you can only see a tiny patch of light, until you’re almost gone.

You text your friends. They say they are sorry for you. They say it will grow back. They send you links to hair accessories. But you are not ready for this. Your head is full of his hands lifting your hair away, pulling down your pyjamas, groping inside you. You’d been sleeping. That’s why you hadn’t heard him come in. You didn’t even know his name, actually—he was your roommate’s date. Supposed to be.

“Shh,” he said, something wet and warm spreading over your bare butt.

You are losing ground. You tuck yourself under a blanket and cry. You know you are blowing this out of proportion, but this haircut is too short, it doesn’t cover anything.

Your apartment’s gone cold. You want a drink. You want to be surrounded. You want to be left alone. You want to be rocked and told that you’re beautiful anyways. You yank the blanket over your head and wedge it under your body. You wonder how long it will take.

Photo by Jordan Murray, @lovelyliterary

Jordan Murray’s perfectly manicured hand displays an annotated title page of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. “From the library of Jordan Murray” is stamped in the centre; just below she’s written, “the cost of pride, love & marriage, social status.” And all around are illustrations of tiny flowers, hearts and envelopes along with a drawing of the famous 18th century English novelist. A multitude of coloured tabs peek out from the novel’s pages.

Murray’s @lovelyliterary Instagram page is an ode to the modern aesthetics of online book lovers. Murray, a 23-year-old University of Windsor student, is an avid book annotator and part of the boom of young adults passionate about reading.

According to a survey by BookNet Canada, a non-profit that collects and analyzes data about the Canadian book industry, half of those surveyed in the 18 to 29 age group preferred books in print. The medium is optimal for recording thoughts, reactions, and feelings in annotated form, and the phenomenon has spread. Practitioners share the art and joy of book annotation on book blogs, Pinterest, Instagram and BookTok, a TikTok subcommunity. Novices seek advice and tips on Reddit and Goodreads. Online retailers like Etsy and Amazon advertize purpose-made book annotation supplies.

OK, Boomer: this isn’t your version of annotating with pencil in hand, making surreptitious notes in margins. Millennials and Gen Zers go all out. They underline, circle and highlight pages. They generously apply different coloured tabs and stickers. “I’m swooning” moments, memorable quotes, relatable themes and spicy scenes are marked. Some annotators have colour coding systems—pink tabs to represent cute scenes, green for standout paragraphs. They also create legends or tables of content for easy reference. The more aesthetically inclined will match the colours of their tabs to their book covers. When it comes to supplies, tools of the trade include pens, scissors, tweezers, rulers, stickers, coloured tabs and highlighters.

“On a more surface level, it’s treated like an art form,” says Murray. “Sometimes it’s idealized for the aesthetics.”

But while these book enthusiasts use their online platforms to spread the word about their art and share with others, creating a hybrid medium of sorts, they also say the hobby offers a much-needed reprieve from the digitization of their lives. “It’s a form of self care, to really connect with my books and disconnect from the world,” says 36-year-old Alexandra Kelebay, a Montrealer and book columnist for CBC/Radio Canada who posts on Instagram @thebookishglow. “It is also a very creative process for some, which is another fascinating way to approach it; people quite literally transform their books into art objects this way, which is a wonderful antidote to our highly digital, online existence.”

This is something Danielle Fuller has observed in her research. The University of Alberta professor of English and film studies is interested in how Gen Z are drawn to analogue media even while they might choose to display their material practices, such as annotation, via digital technology. “Since [Gen Z] grew up with technology, they don’t want to be on screens all the time. Some of their motivations for choosing a print book is to get off screens and that networked environment.”

Equally important is the hands-on approach book annotation affords them. “It makes the experience come alive—it’s physical, tactile, and a kind of tangible way of experiencing a book,” says Kelebay. “When people especially connect with characters or themes in a book, it can be transformative, so annotating concretizes an experience that would otherwise remain abstract.”

Annotation also provides an opportunity to internalize away from a wired world focused on constant social interaction and stimulation.

“For me, annotating has always been something very personal, so to share this with someone would feel very open and vulnerable, almost like peeking into my journal,” says Kelebay. “It’s where I highlight meaningful lines, passages, and quotes, as well as scribble thoughts in the margins as I read. For me it’s a solitary, meditative experience.”

There’s another motivating factor. A few generations ago, books, reading, and annotation were the domain of geeks and scholars. Academics meticulously pored over classic literature and recorded their thoughts. This came with the implicit understanding that only centuries-old tomes by long-dead authors were worthy of annotation—a concept the new generation of book lovers rejects.

Murray started annotating for her Grade 9 English class unit on Shakespeare. But she says she now annotates whatever she’s enjoying – from a Sally Rooney novel to a horror-thriller. “Annotating has made the practice of reading more accessible and enjoyable. It isn’t just for Tolstoy or Austen anymore; it could also be for romance books with cute moments or thrillers with shocking reveals.”

These days, the practice is for everyone. “It leans into the idea that geekiness is now kind of cool,” says Fuller. And that geekiness is viral and massively influential among young adults. A 2024 Statista survey revealed 37 percent of TikTok users in Canada are Gen Z, with BookTok amassing 45.7 million posts. Then there’s BookTube, an online literary community where 90 percent of users are aged 18-24. At the same time, viral book clubs are helmed by the young, rich and famous: there’s Belletrist from Emma Roberts, and model Kaia Gerber’s Library Science. With this kind of star power, it’s no wonder book lovers are happy to share their love for the written word. And annotation is just one way to both publicly and privately display that feeling.

It’s a feeling shared by Ryan Jones, though she takes a digital approach. “I’m 26-years-old, but I’m definitely an old soul at heart,” says the writer and marketing specialist in Waterloo, Ontario. “I like to keep the integrity of the physical book as it is.”

Jones annotates her e-book versions of novels and makes notes on her phone about the writing, characters, and plot. “I do like to highlight things that make me feel so deeply.” And deep feelings about books show no signs of waning, thanks to this passionate generation of young readers.

Image by Hendra via Adobe Stock

On October 7, 2023, I was just about three months pregnant. As a genocide unfolded before our eyes in the weeks that followed, I reflected a lot on the parallel lives mothers live on both sides of this dystopian world.

Like many others, my social media feed exposed me to countless images of the Israeli military’s atrocities in Palestine. Images of shrapnel seared into the bodies of innocent Gazans are seared into my brain like scars: a woman silently mourning as she tightly hugs a child-sized body bag. A damaged incubator containing shrivelling babies. A girl hanging limp over the window of her destroyed home. Wide-eyed toddlers shaking uncontrollably as they begin to process the trauma that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Many of these images were censored, black squares politely asking me whether I still wanted to view the photos that they concealed. Apparently their contents were too heinous to set eyes on, and yet not heinous enough to end in reality. There was always the occasional image that slipped by uncensored. In those moments, I wished I had not logged on. I cried often. I was pregnant, but these tears were not hormonal. They were human. I often had to force myself to move away from the screen to limit the horrors I was viscerally absorbing, as if to protect the baby that was living through me.

It was an unusual time to be pregnant, to be growing a new life as I witnessed the lives of others being ended so mercilessly. Over the span of three months of genocide, 20,000 babies were born in Gaza. As I planned for my son’s future, over 16,000 children were killed, futures completely obliterated. Of the nearly 1.1 million children in Gaza, those that survived now faced malnutrition, disease, physical disability, and psychological trauma. As I received excellent care in Toronto through regular prenatal appointments, I read about the horrific and life-threatening conditions that 50,000 expectant mothers in Gaza endured, birthing in unsanitary conditions on rubble-filled floors with limited access to medication. As I felt the pain from the stitches of my C-section for weeks, I remembered the mothers who were forced to have emergency C-sections with no anesthesia. I cannot conceive of their unfathomable pain and the trauma that will forever be bound to the memories of how they welcomed their babies into the world. As one mother from Gaza, Um Raed, told Al Jazeera, “Since the birth, I’ve not known whether I should be focusing on my contractions or on the sound of warplanes overhead. Should I be worrying about my baby, or should I be afraid of whatever attacks are happening at that moment?”

Though my pregnancy felt challenging, my baby boy arrived, healthy and present. When I caressed and gently wrapped his little body in soft swaddles, I kept getting intrusive flashbacks of those babies whose tiny bodies were maimed before their first birthdays, and of those who did not even reach this milestone at all, wrapped in white shrouds. While I had the privilege of enjoying my baby’s first winter through a festive holiday season, I also got chills thinking about the infants in Gaza who have frozen to death.

I often wondered about the purpose of bringing new life into this world full of anger and injustice and pain. But if there is anything I have learned from the Palestinian people, it is their deep-rooted resilience, one that stems from the same faith that I share with them as a Muslim, but has been put to the test in ways I can’t comprehend. They provide us with an important lesson on finding purpose in a world littered with inhumanity: we all have a responsibility to be active agents, building a more just world for all. From the articles and poems we read and write to the dinner table conversations we partake in using the knowledge we choose to seek, from the silent donning of a keffiyeh to the ways in which we raise and speak to our children about the world and its people, we all have, within our own skillsets and capacities, in our respective spheres of life, the ability to partake in this global, growing tide of activism.

Over the course of a year, we contributed what we could. Never has the world been so vocal in its support for a free Palestine. Boycotts have proven successful, careers have been put at stake, and a new media outlet, Zeteo, has emerged, questioning the status quo and bringing challenging conversations to the forefront so that we no longer have to tiptoe carefully around the subject of an ongoing genocide.

Despite the signing of a ceasefire deal 465 days later, we will continue to learn, speak, cry, create, call out, and call it like it is. In doing so, we will watch the tide continue to rise, from the river to the sea, in all ages and stages of life, until injustice is entirely swept away.

Illustration by Olivia Thomson

In 2021, Aaron Beaumont decided it was time to create more queer connections in New Brunswick. While doing their undergrad at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Beaumont’s work in fat studies led them to learn more about fat activism online. After realizing that most groups were based in the U.S., and the few Canadian groups that existed were decidedly not in New Brunswick, Beaumont took matters into their own hands.

They created QT Fatties, a mostly online, and sometimes in person, community for queer and trans fat folks living in New Brunswick. Four years later, it has transformed into a space Beaumont had been dreaming of: one where trans fat folks across the province can connect.

QT Fatties uses Discord to plan both virtual and physical events geared towards other fat, trans queers. They’ve hosted clothing swaps and art markets, and have had online monthly meetups. They’ve also run mutual aid fundraisers for people in need of gender-affirming care.

Sam Walsh, who does administrative work for the group, explains that their Discord channel is where most of the community gets together. “There’ll be messages in the Discord sometimes like, ‘I want to do this. Anyone available to meet up and we can just hang out?’ Which I think is really awesome. It’s changed from being all on Aaron organizing, to being a little bit more community based.”

Beaumont founded the group in the hopes that more queers could find and help each other navigate being fat and queer in a largely rural province. “There was no activism happening in the province, more specifically, [around] accessibility. By that I mean clothing, gender affirming items, access to healthcare. All of the things that are already hard to access in this province—but you add body size and fatness on and that makes it more challenging,” they explain. “So, I wanted to make some of those things free and supportive and more accessible for folks.”

Walsh also says it was important to have a group based in the Maritimes, since a lot of resources are based on the West Coast. “Having something that’s local, where you’re able to connect with people that are in the Maritimes is really nice because some of the experiences that we’re dealing with are a bit different. Particularly when it comes to the medical system or accessing gender-affirming care.”

Some of these needs, Beaumont explains, stem from much of New Brunswick being not only rural, but also conservative, and generally lower income, especially compared to other provinces. Because of that, they make sure QT Fatties events take place in the province’s three major cities as well as virtually to remain accessible to all who need it.

“Fat activism is really grounded in disability justice. When we think about accessibility, online platforms, chats, whatever it may be, is what’s most accessible to a lot of disabled folks. I’m disabled myself and sometimes, in-person events are just not possible for me. [Online meetings] help in terms of rurality, but also disability accessibility,” Beaumont says.

The feedback QT Fatties has received from those it serves has been positive—but not everyone understands why it needs to exist. Beaumont says that simply means there’s more work to be done.

“There has been general questioning around like, ‘Why do we need a group specifically for fat people?’ Also, people being uncomfortable with the word ‘fat.’ I don’t think that has been a barrier to our events, but that has been things that come up online. Even though we’ve been doing this for four years people are still uncomfortable with just the idea of using the word fat.”

Still, members and organizers of QT Fatties feel grateful for its existence, especially in a politically tense time where we need activism and community more than ever.

Photo Courtesy of Somia Sadiq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration by Sabahat Ahmad

As a half-Pakistani person, I often cozied up on the couch for Bollywood movie nights with my family growing up. These nights were more than a tradition—they were a rite of passage. I’m a fair-skinned South Asian, and this was a way for me to connect to my culture when I didn’t necessarily present as such on the outside. I idolized the actresses in these movies, awkwardly shaking my preteen hips and listening to soundtracks of films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Aśoka on my CD player days later.

I first visited Toronto in 2015, when I was 24. I came to heal from a bad breakup in my hometown of New York City. A year later, I met my now-husband and fell for him immediately, permanently moving to Canada. He also has a South Asian background, and it made me feel less homesick to experience the comfort of Bollywood nights with my in-laws. We’d throw in our own sassy commentary, poking fun at the soapy love scenes and dramatic dance routines while being enamoured by them at the same time.

My move to Canada was not only out of love for my husband, but love for the city. Toronto has a massive South Asian population (nearly 385,000 as of 2021). It’s also the place with the highest number of South Asians in Canada. In Scarborough, where I live, our cultures are celebrated like nowhere else I’ve been in North America. Despite growing up in a place as diverse as New York, I’d never experienced such a normalized and integrated Indian and Pakistani culture, with aunties walking around in saris and Desi aromas like masala wafting through the streets. As a result, Bollywood carries some heft as a mainstream art form here, and a more diverse range of Bollywood and South Asian films are more present on Canadian Netflix than they are in the States. It’s heartwarming to see the classics of my childhood not just in their own dedicated section but in Netflix’s most-watched films, validating and serving the viewing preferences of the population.

But in the decades between the beloved films of my childhood and Bollywood movies today, not much has changed. The very same thing that brought me comfort is also holding us back as a culture. Only years later, as we watched these movies with my husband’s nieces, did I fully understand the unrealistic beauty standards they presented. European aesthetics are put on a pedestal, and actresses are cast accordingly, sending the message to young South Asian girls that fair means beautiful. As I watched my nieces regularly straighten their gorgeous curls, I reflected on the fact that the wide range of beautiful South Asian women is and was often underrepresented onscreen.

In Canada, these same issues of colourism and racism persist despite the country being globally recognized as a place where all cultures can thrive and coexist harmoniously. This shows us just how pervasive British colonialism remains in India and beyond. In searches for Canadian Bollywood actresses online, starlets like Sunny Leone, Nora Fatehi and Lisa Ray are the first three to pop up. This is in part because they’re the most popular, but it’s no coincidence that they also have fair skin and European features. It makes me feel as though darker-skinned South Asian women are set up for failure. I worry that young Canadian girls like my nieces will inherit these Eurocentric beauty standards, negatively impacting their self-esteem and making them want to fit into an unrealistic mould rather than appreciating what makes them so unique.

In January 2024, I read that Ed Westwick (everyone’s favorite toxic drama king from Gossip Girl) was marrying a Bollywood actress named Amy Jackson. She looked suspiciously Western to me, and with the name Amy Jackson, I knew I had to dive deeper. Was this the case of a name change or something more? She could have been racially ambiguous; as someone who is overtly conscious about being perceived as fully white when I’m not, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. I saw the dark hair, olive skin, and light eyes not unlike my own and assumed she must also be of mixed-race heritage. But after a not-so-deep dive online, I discovered that she was, in fact, an English-speaking, British white woman who was somehow ludicrously popular in Bollywood films. I had the same moment of disconnect when watching one of my favorite shows a few years back, Made in Heaven, and discovering that one of the actresses, Kalki Koechlin, was also a Caucasian woman, despite being raised in India and speaking Hindi, which has helped her fit in when she takes on these roles.

In the past, South Asian actresses who passed as white were showcased and picked first. Today, it’s enough to be white and speak the language. I don’t even think I would mind if these actresses openly acknowledged their skin tone. But the fact that it remains hidden and requires some digging begs the question: is this Brownface Lite? Is it cultural appropriation? Or is it okay if these women were raised in Indian culture and consider India their home? It’s tricky to know where to draw the line.

I’m not trying to downplay the acting skills of talented, lighter-skinned South Asian women. It’s their right to take up space in their industry of choice. But I do find it troubling that these light-skinned and white women skyrocket to fame with such ease and are sought out by directors and producers in Bollywood while thousands of talented actresses with South Asian heritage are cast aside.

Bollywood has a history of giving priority to lighter-skinned actresses, and it perpetuates the harmful side effects of the caste system in South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Skin-lightening creams are frequently advertised in India by major stars like Shah Rukh Khan, and it’s always seemed gross to me.

These messages are already too strong in South Asian culture. I attribute much of that to the brainwashing of the British Raj, which dates back to the 1850s, nailing in the mentality that if you have Eurocentric features and traits, you’re bound to succeed. These sentiments are still fully normalized and accepted.

Anyone who watched Indian Matchmaker has probably heard the bevy of problematic things the show’s star, Sima Aunty, has said, often lauding lighter-skinned people as a great catch just because they’re “fair.” She would prioritize women that fit that colourist Bollywood aesthetic for many of the show’s eligible bachelors. My own fair-skinned grandmother would use the slur “kala,” a derogatory term referring to dark-skinned people. In contrast, as someone who is often perceived as fully white, I’ve been called “gori” which refers to a light-skinned or white girl. I’ve always hated this dichotomy. I’ve heard people within my community freely comment on the skin tone of children. This widely accepted language creates a hierarchy and promotes problematic beauty standards—whether it’s meant as a compliment or a passive-aggressive criticism—and it affects children, subconsciously or not.

It feels grotesque for billion-dollar industries like Bollywood to profit off the commodification of white faces in distinctly brown roles. It screams, “brown women, this is what we want of you. This is how you can be seen as a woman.” As if darker-skinned women with distinctly South Asian features are not equally worthy of earning a “vixen” role or being picked out in a crowded audition room.

If Bollywood showed women who represent the full spectrum of South Asian beauty, it would have a global impact, expanding beauty standards in South Asia and beyond. It would improve the self-confidence of women and girls while challenging the outdated norms of colourism and even make the worlds of beauty and fashion more inclusive, making way for a more empowered female population, which we need more than ever on a global scale.

While it might seem like not much has changed, we’re moving in a more positive direction. In Canada, I see hope in talented Canadian stars like Rekha Sharma, Kamal Sidhu, Uppekha Jain, and Parveen Kaur. It’s no surprise that Canada is leading the charge in showing the many forms that brown beauty can take beyond a skinny nose and pale skin, which will hopefully create a ripple effect in other countries.

Brown women will always remain at the heart of Bollywood, and if, as audiences, we can start to acknowledge how women internalize what they see onscreen, we can start to consciously change both the everyday lexicon we use to discuss beauty and the narratives we craft.

Photo by HAPPYRICHSTUDIO via Adobe Stock

When I learned I had precancerous lesions on my cervix and that my doctor was recommending I remove them surgically, my reaction went as follows: One, muted panic. Two, I’m definitely going to die. Three, Wait, what does that even mean?

So I did what anyone in possession of an Internet connection in 2021 would do: I went online to do my own research. The Internet confirmed what my physician had told me: the procedure, called a loop electrosurgical excision procedure, or LEEP, is a common one, in which a heated wire is inserted into the vagina to remove the offending cells.

I also found a host of women complaining of unexpected side effects. One article, in Cosmopolitan, was particularly concerning, full of stories of post-LEEP sexual dysfunction from women who had fully healed, yet who were unable to orgasm, feel pleasure during penetration, or have pain-free sex.

I mentally rehearsed the discussion I’d had with my gynecologist. He hadn’t warned me about any of this, which worried but did not surprise me. He had seemed more concerned with protecting my ability to get pregnant, even though I had repeatedly told him I was uninterested in bearing children. With scant scientific literature available—studies on post-LEEP outcomes were mostly focused on the procedure’s efficacy in preventing cancer, as well as pregnancy outcomes—it felt impossible to assess whether these risks were real. Was I about to subject myself to a procedure that might save my life, but at the cost of one of the things that brought real joy to it?

*

The disconnect between our experiences with medical professionals and what women and people assigned female at birth (AFAB) hear from our peers has been a central concern for feminist health activists for decades. When it comes to understanding what’s going on with our bodies, who can we trust?

For much of the twentieth century, the health-care system overtly treated AFAB people as unable to make decisions about their own bodies. Contraception was not decriminalized in Canada until 1969, and limitations on abortion were struck down even later, in 1988. Birthing people often had to endure labour alone, without partners present, and without the freedom to decide on pain relief options. Many women were ignorant of even the basic anatomical realities of their bodies.

In the 1960s and ’70s, activists dissatisfied with the limitations imposed by a misogynist health-care system, regressive laws regulating their bodies, and chauvinist doctors began to organize. They formed self-help groups, opened community clinics, and ran underground abortion networks. They performed vaginal self-examinations using a speculum, a flashlight, and a mirror.

What became known as the women’s health movement was grounded in a belief in empowering women with access to information about their own bodies and their sexual and reproductive health that was being denied to them by licensed health-care providers. In the U.S., the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective published revolutionary health-education text Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1970. Inspired in part by that text, a Canadian group called Women Healthsharing launched a quarterly magazine, which ran from 1979 to 1993 with a mandate to “take health out of the hands of the experts and return it to our own collective and individual hands.”

“The media landscape for women’s health information and feminist health perspectives in particular was dismal” at the time, says Connie Clement, founding managing editor of Healthsharing and longtime public health activist.

Healthsharing featured a mix of experts and lay writers reporting from across the country. “We always tried to write for lay women and women who had training in health. And I think it was a huge success for us that we had nurses and doctors contributing and reading, and we had women who had no special knowledge,” Clement says.

The subjects of Healthsharing ’s coverage were wide-ranging. In the inaugural issue, collective members Madeline Boscoe and Kathleen McDonnell penned a piece exploring birthing options in and out of the hospital, in response to feelings of “powerlessness, ignorance, and alienation from our bodies and our surroundings” in childbirth. Multiple issues reported on the use of Depo-Provera, a controversial contraceptive with potentially serious side effects. One column crowdsourced health information from readers (“We are trying to find out more about cervical caps in Canada,” read one callout). Other stories, like a piece on the labour conditions of garment workers, looked at the wider social and economic status of women in Canada.

This kind of education was key to both the women’s health movement and to second-wave feminism more broadly, grounded in the belief that knowledge was a precondition for enacting social change. “The whole feminist health movement was trying to change the social context of women’s health, [and] the structural conditions that influence health,” says Clement.

While it may seem like we are lightyears away from people not knowing what their own vulvas look like, as I peruse archival copies of the magazine over 30 years later, I am struck by how many articles overlap with current hot-button topics. The desire to balance “expert” medical opinion with the layperson’s experiences, the critical questioning of controversial pharmaceutical solutions, the attention to broader social, economic, and political conditions: it’s all in those pages, and it can be bittersweet to see how many issues are still relevant today, a testament to how slow progress can be in these contexts, and how easy it can be to roll it back, especially when we forget what has come before us.

*

I came of age in the 2000s, long after the era of the Women Healthsharings and vagina colouring books of women’s lib. I instinctively shied away from the diet-centric, fatphobic content in teen girl magazines. Thankfully for me, there was an entire ecosystem of feminist writing I could turn to online which shared both individual women’s experiences and fact-based reporting on our health. From blogging platforms Tumblr and LiveJournal to linchpin publications Bitch and Jezebel to private and semi-private groups of people with the same issues, for a while it seemed like the Internet could deliver on the promise of creating networks of knowledge in ways that mattered, filling the gaps where traditional media failed.

But by the time I was doing a deep dive on LEEPs, the online landscape had transformed entirely—in no small part because of social media, especially TikTok. The short-video sharing platform has become a major source for health information, especially for young women. In 2024, a survey study in the journal JMIR Infodemiology found a majority of U.S. women between 18 and 29 used TikTok for health information. Users post about vaginismus, birth control, orgasms, squirting, perimenopause, endometriosis, fibroids: I could go on. Some of these videos are created by health professionals, but many AFAB people post in the spirit of helping others through sharing their own experiences.

When I type in “birth control” on TikTok, the results are as follows: a “wellness”-focused woman encouraging natural planning, i.e. tracking your menstrual cycle to understand when you might be ovulating; a self-described nutrition coach listing ways the pill supposedly “robs us of our health;” and a sex educator responding to a question about birth control that doesn’t involve hormones.

In some ways, this knowledge ecosystem seems like an outcrop of the activist efforts of yore, grounded in information-sharing between peers and often using the language of increased bodily autonomy. Topics like hormonal birth control’s effects on the body are sometimes grounded in
legitimate concerns. Although these contraceptives are both considered safe overall and highly effective at preventing pregnancy, rare life-threatening complications can occur. There is research investigating the link between birth control and chronic inflammation that can lead to cardiovascular problems, blood clots, and mood disorders. Meanwhile, for methods like intrauterine devices (IUDs), for example, some report extreme pain during insertion, feeding into concerns that women and AFAB people’s pain is being dismissed by health-care providers.

More problematically, however, discussion online about birth control can quickly veer into right-wing misinformation territory, inflaming fears in an effort to get people to abandon contraceptive use altogether.

And in countries like a post-Roe U.S., where some states are increasingly implementing restrictive abortion laws, the stakes of an unwanted pregnancy can be high, says Dr. Jenny Wu. Wu is a medical resident in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke’s School of Medicine; she studies women’s reproductive health information shared on TikTok.

“It’s a complex conversation to navigate with my patients, when they tell me they don’t want hormonal birth control and they want to do natural family planning in a state where we have limited abortion access,” shares Wu from her home in North Carolina, which in 2023 banned abortions after 12 weeks with limited exceptions. (Both surgical and medication abortion is legal in Canada and free to those with access to territorial or provincial health care.)

Wu says the level of misinformation propagated online about reproductive health is contributing to increased levels of distrust from her patients overall. This climate makes it more difficult for Wu and other doctors to have these conversations about proper gynecological care, but it also can mean people don’t go see her at all, don’t receive proper care, don’t get the contraceptives they need or access to screening tests to detect potentially life-threatening diseases. But mistrust of the health-care system, especially for at-risk populations, is nothing new.

*

Underlying the relatively recent phenomenon of online misinformation is the much longer, checkered history of gynecological medicine. In Canada, abusive medical practices like the forced sterilization of Indigenous women are ongoing. Meanwhile, many AFAB people and racialized people feel their symptoms are routinely downplayed or dismissed by health-care providers. It’s not hard to understand why some people would want to avoid the medical system altogether.

Tracey Lindeman is a longtime Canadian journalist and author of BLEED: Destroying Myths and Misogyny in Endometriosis Care. Endometriosis, in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows elsewhere in the body, is notoriously under-researched, misunderstood, and underdiagnosed, which can lead to years of pain and suffering for those living with the condition.

“Endo is a super lonely disease, because you just feel like no one can really understand you and how much pain you’re in,” Lindeman, who lives with endometriosis, shares. For endo patients, frustrating repeated encounters with the medical system can feel more like gaslighting than care. In BLEED, Lindeman writes about asking her boyfriend to write a letter confirming that they didn’t want children in order for her request for a hysterectomy to be taken seriously. Another woman she speaks to experiences a pelvic exam so rough she files a sexual assault complaint; others still are denied referrals to a specialist or have their requests for pain relief dismissed.

Online groups can be a boon to these patients. There are thriving communities, like Nancy’s Nook Endometriosis Education on Facebook, with roughly 213,000 members, that offer a network of information and crucial support—and, just as importantly, the knowledge that those going through this are not alone.

But health influencers hawking cures of dubious provenance and efficaciousness feed off the need of those who turn to the Internet to self-manage their health. Much of the content paints itself as “natural,” implying it is better than “chemical” remedies. Looking up videos about LEEPs, I immediately stumble upon an account that is selling a course on how to “naturally” clear human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer. Another “plant-based health” account shares a video about how “chemicals” cause endometriosis and that you can heal it without hormonal or surgical intervention. These accounts are selling supplements, creams, and cycle trackers, all ways to supposedly take control of your own health or body.

Many of these solutions are obviously farfetched; others have a “science-y” veneer of plausibility about them. But for those people who have been ignored, traumatized, or abandoned altogether by formalized health care, these options may feel like the only solution.

“[The wellness industrial complex] is capitalizing on desperation,” says Lindeman. “People are desperate for help, they’re desperate for answers, and they’re not getting that help, and they’re not getting those answers the conventional way, and so they become really vulnerable to online influencers and online [gynecologists] who are proposing information that lets them maybe try to manage it themselves.”

Enduring racism and sexism in the health-care sector; traumatic personal experiences when seeking treatment; the explosion of influencers promising to help reclaim power over your own body: these all feed into one another so that AFAB people delay the treatment they need, suffer needlessly, and even die younger. We need ways to circulate accessible, evidence-based information, both from other women and AFAB people and medical professionals, which build momentum to tackle these much larger problems together, instead of isolating us even further.

*

A year after my diagnosis, I sat in a Montreal-area hospital, clad in a medical gown and socks, clutching a small piece of yellow paper. I didn’t feel like I had all the information I needed to make a decision about whether to have the LEEP, so I had scribbled down a list of questions for my doctor.

But I was called into the OR with no chance to speak to the doctor beforehand. Instead, I was ushered onto the operating table. As he applied local anesthetic to my cervix and inserted the wire into my vaginal canal, I asked him: “So… should I be worried about any sexual side effects?”

“No, no, I have never heard of this,” he replied.

With the loop still inside me, he rattled off what to expect post-surgery. In a daze, I heard the words “heavy bleeding.” “So a lot of bleeding afterwards is normal?” I asked. “No! Go to the ER if you start bleeding,” he repeated.

The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes. I stumbled off, the yellow paper crumpled and unused.

For a long time after the procedure, I felt confused and irritated at myself for not being a better self-advocate. I could have refused to undergo the procedure if I wasn’t satisfied with the level of information I had been provided. Why hadn’t I been able to say what was on my mind?

Sharing my story helped, because I started to realize just how common LEEPs were. It helped assuage my fears that I was necessarily on the road to cervical cancer. Reading accounts like those from Lindeman, who experiences doctor anxiety after a lifetime of poor medical encounters, helped reassure me that I wasn’t alone.

Is sharing stories online enough to take control of our health? In some ways, yes. The Internet has become a lifeline for many Americans seeking medication abortions. Lindeman says journalists pay attention to what is being said online and amplify concerns to a wider audience.

Meanwhile, after finding that the majority of videos about IUDs on TikTok mentioned pain, Wu shifted the way she practices: “I [now] offer patients something for pain before any IUD placement and really before any gynecological procedure.” In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States’ public health agency, even updated its recommendations for IUD insertions to include discussions of pain management.

And in 2023, a year after my own LEEP, a study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine was published exploring healthcare providers’ limited knowledge of post-LEEP sexual dysfunction and the resources patients used to cope—potentially the first ever study to look at the difference in patient and health-care provider perspectives when it comes to LEEP treatment. It found that there was “misalignment” between the two and recommended not only further research into sexual dysfunction symptoms, but also better education and training for providers, and better support for patients who do have negative outcomes.

These are heartening indications that when you share your health experiences, people are listening. The question remains: how do we translate these types of discussions into improving health outcomes for all AFAB people—especially when research into health problems that affect us is still underfunded?

It starts with finding ways to pair networked knowledge with collective action, because the power of social media is ultimately limited. “It’s the personalization of systemic problems,” points out Lindeman. “[You’re] continuing to focus on what you can do as an individual, instead of attacking the systems that are responsible for such a deficit in care.”

Social media may give us the reassuring impression of solidarity. In reality, it is atomizing, incentivizing a competitive attention economy; a billion voices speaking over, but not always to, one another. The collectives of the women’s health movement knew that to build power, you must do it together, through communities of care.

Perhaps we have to start by relearning that lesson–even if it means tearing ourselves away from our phones.

Photo by sakarin14 via Adobe Stock

Arctic Canada is filling with puddles.

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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