Ghost Days by Terrance Houle. Video still courtesy Alex Moon.

Terrance Houle, whose Blackfoot name is Iinniiwahkiimah (Buffalo Herder), is searching for bricks from his junior high and parents’ residential schools. He will bring all three bricks back to the IXL brick factory in Medicine Hat, where he will film a performance of him smashing them until they become fine dust. His parents will sing a healing song while this is going on, and after the performance, Houle will sprinkle the dust back on top of a hill in the original settlement place of his people. Houle’s performance, which will tour parts of Canada this summer, is called Ghost Days.

Mainstream arts organizations are making attempts to partner with Indigenous artists to celebrate Canada’s 150th year, but some members of the Indigenous arts community suspect some of these relationships are not genuine.

This isn’t the first time that mainstream arts organizations have shown a sudden interest in collaboration. Ryan Rice, chair of the Ontario College of Art and Design’s Indigenous visual culture program, says that this has happened on every colonial anniversary. Mainstream arts organizations feel a need to represent the Indigenous population during these periods, resulting in community engagements that aren’t meaningful and often temporary. This poses the risk of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation.

Isidra Cruz, Indigenous arts officer at the Toronto Arts Council and Associate Indigenous Arts Officer at the Ontario Arts Council, says that a lot of mainstream arts organizations received Canada 150 funding for Indigenous projects, while Indigenous organizations did not. The latter are already working on projects that accurately represent Indigenous voices, and this work could have been amplified, she says. “It’s really frustrating as an Indigenous artist,” and it shows what the government thinks reconciliation is versus the reality.

Sometimes art pieces are made out to be Indigenous projects, but there may be little to no Indigenous control in the creative process. In order to avoid misrepresentation, it’s important for Indigenous artists to have sovereignty over their own projects, says Clayton Windatt, executive director of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. Rice says this can be done through meaningful collaboration and consultation.

Indigenous artists have been excluded from the mainstream arts community for many years and so have formed their own organizations. During the early 1970s, seven Indigenous artists started meeting to discuss the prejudices they faced as artists in Canada. Incorporated in 1974, the group later became known as the Indigenous Group of Seven. After this, Native Earth Performing Arts was formed in 1982, Native Women in the Arts in 1993 and the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective in 2005.

In recent years, the relationship between Indigenous and mainstream arts communities has improved. People have become more educated about Indigenous issues causing national and provincial funding councils to change and relationships to develop. Three years ago, in response to the request for separate funding for the creation of Indigenous art, the Toronto Arts Council implemented Indigenous Arts Project grants. Cruz says that while this change is positive, it is late to the game.

The Indigenous arts scene blends both artistic and traditional practices with contemporary European arts practices. Prior to colonization—and currently—art and culture were closely intertwined with one another, which is widely misunderstood by the mainstream arts community. Houle likes to incorporate traditional themes of spiritualism into his work, and has used his art as a healing tool.

For Houle, art is about playing to the spirits, which he believes has been largely forgotten in the Canada 150 preparations. “I just want people to know my contemporary Indigenous experience and find some sort of common ground within that.”

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Dwight Ball.

At a St. John’s rally on April 6, the day the provincial government released its 2017 budget, Michelle Keep addressed a crowd of about 40 protesters. “We need ideas outside the box,” she told them. “We need them now, we need them fast.”

Keep, a best-selling romance novelist based in St. John’s, has built her living on creativity and risk—and her experiences could hold one of the keys to the future of work for Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.

In 2016, the government of Dwight Ball made many cuts, including to education spending, libraries, and the civil service, and introduced a tax on books. The economy had been deeply reliant on royalties from offshore drilling, making $2.8 billion in 2011-12. In 2015-16, royalty revenues only reached $551 million.

As the government struggled to deal with a drop in resource extraction revenues and rising unemployment, it turned to austerity. Though revenues in 2017 had been higher than forecasted, activists rallying in St. John’s had expected the year’s budget to impose more cuts. The budget didn’t offer much relief for people struggling, with higher education hit the hardest.

Now, the province is banking on industry for its financial salvation: oil, gas, seafood, hydro, mining, lumber and agri-food. “In order to return to fiscal balance we must think and act in a way that is long term,” Minister of Finance Cathy Bennett said in her budget speech. “We can no longer afford to be bound by short-term reactionary thinking.”

But it’s hard to not see short-term reactionary thinking in Bennett’s budget. They’re short-term fixes in various resource industries designed to tide the province over until commodity prices pick back up. Bennett claims that with infrastructure spending, some jobs will be created. But it’s not nearly enough.

Unifor Atlantic regional director Lana Payne and economist Jim Stanford call the province’s economy a “helicopter economy,” in which natural resource companies generate a lot of profit, but not enough of it makes it to average people. As a resource-dependent province, Newfoundland and Labrador should be able to buoy public finances with revenues from extraction. But Payne says that the proportion of the province’s GDP that went to corporate profits when revenues were at a high of 37 percent. Nationally, the percentage is 15.

The solution to improve the province’s economy isn’t hard to see, but it requires political will and more control over industry by average people. “[The] emerging struggle is the same struggle we have always had here: keeping more of our wealth, using that wealth to diversify and share prosperity, and invest more in our creative industries, green jobs, etc.,” Payne writes in an email. The province, she adds, needs to entice more youth and more immigrants to live there. Choosing to make cuts in higher education suggests that the government is forging a different path.

If the government isn’t interested in creating or protecting new, good jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador, Keep’s vision for her province should inspire people to do the work themselves. “[O]nce you no longer have to guarantee a profit for the owners or investors, a business of any sort can often securely operate for the good of the workers, for the good of the customers, for the good of the whole community without worry,” she told the budget-day protesters. “All it requires… is a change in how we as a society, and the government, view things.”

Perhaps that’s the key: Start with society, and maybe government will follow.

In early 2017, pro-abortion activists across Canada celebrated when abortions became available in P.E.I. for the first time in 35 years. The new Women’s Wellness Program means women no longer have to travel off the island to access reproductive services.

But access to other health care services remains limited across the province. Nearly 7,000 Islanders are listed on the provincial patient registry waiting for a primary-care practitioner. Health PEI has announced a plan to match 3,000 people with a practitioner within the next year, but by that time, nearly 5,000 more will have joined the wait. Accessing care is especially difficult for rural residents. A 2016 report by Islandwide Hospital Access, a grassroots advocacy group, says some rural Islanders have to travel 30 to 90 minutes for emergency services. The report also claims the shortage of services results in further strain on larger hospitals’ emergency departments.

There too is a distinct lack of specialized services across the province as a whole. Patients are frequently forced to travel abroad to get the treatment they need. Last year, P.E.I. spent $47 million on out-of-province health care, the province’s second-largest health cost after Charlottetown’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital. And even when P.E.I. covers the financial burden of out-of-province medical trips, travel takes patients away from their families and support systems—all for care they should be able access closer to home.

New Brunswick has Canada’s oldest population, a near-20 percent concentration of citizens over 65. There’s currently a senior in one of every four hospital beds. They don’t need to be there.

These elders, a quarter of the hospitalized population, are called Alternate Level of Care (ALC) patients, an institutional euphemism for what’s actually one of the most urgent failings of Canada’s health care system. Typically admitted for the sort of routine accidents or minor illnesses hardly ever associated with emergency admission by anyone under 65, these ALC patients are better now—discharged but with nowhere to go. Many are on nursing-home waiting lists, which can drag on up to six months. In the meantime, they’re in what New Brunswick Council on Aging co-chair Suzanne Dupuis-Blanchard calls a state of limbo, living out of hospital beds. More than 300 on any given day, grandmothers and grandfathers.

“The seniors are here, but the family isn’t,” Dupuis-Blanchard says. Many of the province’s younger citizens have left to pursue careers farther west. “The sense we most often get is, ‘I’m really alone here.’”

How New Brunswick came to be the old-age capital of Canada has no simple answer, though two contributing factors are the crossing-over of baby boomers into seniorhood and the increasing rate at which youth are leaving the province (1,250 annually and counting). The question of why more and more young adults are moving away has its own array of complicated answers, including an at-best lukewarm job market and the fact that New Brunswick is, largely, emphatically rural.

Listening to one young person who left the province, the tone with which she describes the multiform churches, strip-malls, and legions of her hometown, a high concentration of seniors seems a factor in the province’s youth’s longing to travel elsewhere—a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy driven by the sense of dead-endedness we tend to associate with old age.

“The local communities are definitely for older people,” said the young person, who moved to Toronto upon graduating high school. “New Brunswick has its charms, but if I’m not counting nostalgic purposes, there’s really no reason to stay.”

These same associations help explain why we’re so reluctant to address the impending crisis of an aging population. In February, Dupuis-Blanchard’s fellow Council on Aging co-chair Ken McGeorge told CBC he’d like to see an action plan by the provincial government within weeks and that, at most, “it shouldn’t take any more than a month.” When I spoke with Dupuis-Blanchard in April, no such plan for implementation was in place.

Toward the end of the 1960s, herself just entering her sixties, French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Coming of Age in an attempt to expose what she called “society’s secret shame”: the othering and discrimination of elders. And, while contemporary Canada isn’t as blatantly ageist as was France in the ’60s, we suffer many similar prejudices.

On an individual level, it’s excruciatingly difficult for us to accept the fact of our own aging—something we fear, according to de Beauvoir, more than death.

But this kind of ingrained distaste for growing old is most harmful when it extends beyond our own personal fears to affect how we view the elderly around us. Or, rather, how we refuse to view them—the crisis of an increasingly elderly population being especially difficult to solve because it involves carefully considering a facet of human life we spend so much time deliberately not thinking about.

Both Dr. Muriel Gillick—author of The Denial of Aging: Perpetual Youth, Eternal Life, and Other Dangerous Fantasies—and the Council on Aging agree elder independence should be top-priority for any old-age action plan. Dupuis-Blanchard talks about “aging in place,” or allowing seniors to receive health care in their own homes for as long as possible.

Gillick stresses the idea of “intermediate care,” a middle ground between maximally aggressive health care (characterized by invasive surgeries and often doing elders more harm than good) and the more defeatist hospice-type care that treats seniors as if on a one-way street of deteriorating health. “Of course they’d like to live longer,” Gillick says, “but not if the price they have to pay for a few more… years of life is losing their ability to do all the things that really matter most to them.”

New Brunswick’s Council on Aging projects that, by 2038, seniors will make up over 30 percent of the province’s population and 24 percent of Canada’s—stressing the national scope of this issue.

In the conclusion of The Coming of Age, de Beauvoir writes that society, by the way it treats its elders, “gives itself away.” For her, this was a jab at post-WWII capitalism’s consideration of citizens as employees first, irrelevant the moment they could no longer work. Now, for Canada, it’s a chance to decide what kind of society we want to be. “This is our chance to really shine,” Dupuis-Blanchard says. “To be role models for the rest of the country and to think outside the box.”

A CN train passes through Africville in 1965. Photo courtesy of Bob Brooks/Nova Scotia Archives.

Fifty years ago, the city of Halifax destroyed the historic Black Nova Scotian community of Africville, demolishing its church and homes and forcibly relocating nearly 400 residents. In 2010, Halifax’s mayor apologized and funded the rebuilding of the Seaview United Baptist Church. The following year, the mayor, in response to activism by former residents, also renamed a commemorative park after Africville. But for many, the reparations do not sufficiently address the devastating effect the loss of Africville has had on Nova Scotia’s Black community. More than 40 descendants have been seeking compensation for communal lands through a class action lawsuit since 1996.

Anti-Black systemic racism remains rampant across the province. In Halifax, Black people are three times more likely to be street-checked than white people. Black Nova Scotians are overrepresented in child welfare and incarceration systems. Black students are suspended at disproportionately high rates. Last fall, when Halifax’s North End elected Lindell Smith, he became the city’s first Black councillor in 16 years.

At the same time, members of the North End’s Black community gathered at a meeting to mourn and discuss the deaths of several young men to gun violence. When the community requested the event be private, some white residents were outraged over being excluded. Meanwhile, in rural areas, Black communities like Lincolnville and Shelburne endure severe environmental racism, with nearby landfills polluting the air and water.

For the most part, white Nova Scotians ignore and dismiss these issues. The willful ignorance serves a purpose. As poet and activist El Jones writes in the Halifax Examiner, “By erasing the historical Black presence in Canada, and the anti-Blackness ingrained in Canadian history, Canada is able to present itself as a peaceful, progressive, and multicultural nation.”

Although the last residential school in Canada closed in 1996, the effects of its policies enacted to erase Indigenous culture remain. “These policies were extremely damaging to the language, which lies at the heart of who Inuit are,” writes Nikki Eegeesiak, executive director of the non-governmental Coalition of Nunavut District Education Authorities (CNDEA). In Nunavut, more than 85 percent of the population is Inuit. About 70 percent of Nunavummiut grow up learning Inuktitut, and one and a half percent grow up learning Inuinnaqtun.

The goal of the Nunavut Education Act is to establish a bilingual education system by 2019, with students from kindergarten to Grade 12 learning Inuktut (a term used by the Nunavut government to refer to Inuit language dialects used in the territory) and either English or French. But a 2013 report by the Auditor General of Canada found the territory was not going to meet its goal, due to a shortage of bilingual teachers and Inuktuk classroom materials.

In response, the Government of Nunavut proposed Bill 37 in March 2017, which would amend the Education Act and the Inuit Language Protection Act, a statute promising parents the right to have their children educated in Inuktut from kindergarten to Grade 3. This amendment would prolong Nunavut’s goal of having a bilingual education system by more than 10 years. With more than half of the Inuit population in Nunavut under the age of 25, many in the territory will not have received a formal bilingual education— disconnecting another generation of Nunavummiut from their culture.

If passed, Bill 37 would aim to create standardized education models that include Inuktuk and focus on increasing the number of bilingual teachers. This sounds hopeful, but vague. The bill has been critiqued for planning to restructure an entire education system when what it really needs is more teachers and classroom resources. “The [government] wants to control language of instruction, yet has taken no responsibly [sic] for the lack of planning for Inuktitut teachers or the shortage of learning materials,” Donna Adams, chairperson of the CNDEA, writes.

“Today, school systems in the Arctic are trying to rebuild the education systems so that Inuit language, culture, and history are at the foundation,” writes Eegeesiak. Without a system that prioritizes Inuktut, Nunavut, and Inuit culture will be lost.

New Eid stamp, unveiled this May. Photo courtesy of Canada Post.

 I hadn’t been this excited about a stamp since I collected them back in Grade 6.

Canada’s first commemorative Eid stamp was unveiled just days before the holy month of Ramadan was set to start this May. I caught one of two launch events in Montreal. I expected to see Quebec’s mainstream media outlets well represented. But there was not a single journalist, beyond ethnic media, in attendance.

It reminded me of last summer, when the organization I work for, the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), along with community representatives, was holding six simultaneous press conferences across the country to launch the Charter for Inclusive Communities, a document that reaffirms Canadians’ commitments to inclusion and to express opposition to all forms of hate and discrimination. The launch was covered extensively in all but one province: Quebec.

Quebec media, it seemed, was only interested in Muslim stories when there was a bad-news angle.

At a 2016 NCCM youth workshop in Montreal exploring Islamophobia in the media, 94 percent of participants said they felt media portrayals of Muslims in Quebec were negative. This was the highest of Ontario, Alberta, and Manitoba, where we held similar workshops. “The media either intentionally or indirectly portray Muslims as outsiders [or] a threat,” noted one Montreal participant. “They still don’t have the literacy and awareness.”

This reality came into sharp focus following the tragic terrorist attack on a Quebec City mosque on January 29. Politicians, media, and community members alike immediately pointed to the province’s media landscape as a key driver of anti-Muslim attitudes. It was clear that the media landscape—specifically the French-language media—had been too often scapegoating, fear mongering, and promoting stereotypes about Muslims.

Universite Laval’s Colette Brin says the province’s shock-jock radio hosts frequently target minority groups, especially Muslims. “There’s this strong discourse [against] people who they see as wanting to change society, who are asking for special rights,” Brin told The Canadian Press following the massacre. “There’s the fear of Islamic terrorism and the generalization that the Muslims’ Islamic faith in general is the problem.” 

This has human rights implications. Galvanized by a far-right anti-Muslim group with a strong presence on Facebook, less than a handful of residents in Saint-Apollinaire voted this past July to reject the establishment of a Muslim cemetery. That was enough to scuttle the proposal.

Part of the problem is a lack of media representation. “[The media] don’t have information about real Muslims. They don’t ask Muslims about the real Islam,” a regular congregant at the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Centre, the site of the attack, told journalists. One host working for radio poubelle (literally “trash talk radio”) admitted that in all the years he’d been talking about Muslims, he’d never even invited a single community member on his program. That admission spurred at least one community activist to reach out and urge radio stations to invite Muslims onto their airwaves. There was only nominal interest, which quickly fizzled out.

Nevertheless, community members do acknowledge a change. “It made us all stop, breathe and do some deep thinking,” writes Montreal activist and interpreter Nermine Barbouch in an email. “Many haters, racists, and Islamophobes have even changed their minds and views. Regardless of their opinion on their fellow Canadian citizens of Muslim faith, they… did not want to be part of this crime and they did not want their words and [Facebook posts] to inspire other haters to insanity.”

Haroun Bouazzi, president of Association des Musulmans et des Arabes pour la Laïcité au Québec, agrees. “There is more sensitivity,” he says.

Individuals with anti-Muslim biases also seem to be getting less air time, says Shaheen Junaid, a Montreal board member with the Canadian Council of Muslim women. “The deaths of our six brothers was not in vain,” she says, seeming hopeful.

Public perceptions seem to be changing, too. Polling by Angus Reid show an upswing in positive attitudes toward Muslims in Quebec; doubling between 2009 and 2017, with the most positive level recorded shortly after the attack.

This doesn’t surprise Sameer Zuberi, a long-time Montreal resident who also works to promote greater understanding among diverse communities. “We were in the papers for a full week, being humanized on every page of the paper,” he says. “The average person who doesn’t have any deep-seated prejudices had their eyes open and it counter balanced to some extent the years of negative media on Quebec Muslims.”

Still, Zuberi says, Canadian media needs to recruit more Muslim journalists—and not just those writing about their own faith. At the Montreal Gazette, for instance, popular blogger Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed began writing a monthly column following the attack in Quebec City. Her most recent columns include reflections on the community spirit that emerged during the devastating floods that swept through parts of Quebec, as well as a profile of Big Brothers, Big Sisters of the West Island.

But it shouldn’t take a tragedy to convince media outlets that more positive coverage is necessary to help foster cohesive communities. Given mainstream media’s struggle to make a profit, reflecting diverse audiences—and therefore attracting more revenue—would be an obvious priority.

As for me, I’ll be out buying my commemorative stamp that too few Quebecers will likely know about or appreciate—unless our own communities shout the good news from the rafters.

Black Lives Matter Toronto’s tent city. Photo courtesy of Desmond Cole via Twitter.

Last year, Black Lives Matter Toronto concluded #BLMTOtentcity, a 15-day occupation of Toronto Police headquarters. What began as a protest against the death of Andrew Loku, a Black man shot and killed by Toronto police in July 2015, became a public retrospect on the reality Canadians love to ignore: We too have a police violence problem. Our systems of law enforcement are predicated on the incessant criminalization, re-enslavement, and macabre disposal of Black bodies.

The tent city was initially planned as a City Hall campout that would last mere hours, but when officers arrived, we moved to Toronto Police Headquarters. On the first night there, the police attacked protesters, kicking, punching, and raiding the area. In a show of defiance, we stayed put and protested for more than two weeks. Through #BLMTOtentcity, Black Torontonians organized in a scale not seen since the 1992 Yonge Street Riot, a response to the growing number of Black men killed by police. Tens of thousands of people participated in demonstrations, direct actions, and arts-based community healing spaces. For the first time in a generation, the struggles of Black Ontarians captured the world’s attention. Our stories were being told to millions—from news stations to Twitter feeds across the globe.

#BLMTOtentcity was about the reclamation of a space that carried our community’s trauma. It was a manifesto of how we envisioned a close-to-utopic Black-centric space: everyday people curating their own liberation, activism from a transfeminist lens, and solidarity with Indigenous communities.

A year after #BLMTOtentcity, 25 years after the Yonge Street Riot, and centuries after the creation of Canada’s first policing institution, our issues remain unchanged. Black communities continue to be police targets. The public remains desensitized to alarming rates of racial profiling, sentencing disparities, and death by trigger-happy cops. It has become norm for our slain bodies to be flashed across screens—Black bodies killed during routine traffic stops, in their homes, in front of their families, and in most cases, with little to no consequence for the officers who kill them.

This crisis is exacerbated by police-violence deniers, coordinated campaigns by police sympathizers, and police associations who insist this is a problem exclusive to Americans. These myths negate evidence that paint a very different picture: In 2017, police continue to terrorize Black communities and act with impunity.

Today, Black people are still being carded in Ontario. Carding, or arbitrary street checks, allows police to criminalize Black people simply for being. Once in the system, a person is seen as known to police, even when there’s been no arrest. Their file expands each time they are carded. Carding victimizes thousands of Black Ontarians, stripping them of their dignity and right to presumed innocence. The police claim carding was necessary to fight crime, a position they have yet to prove with any data.

The province responded to the global condemnation of the act by promising its ban, but instead established regulations, which came into effect this year. In reality, the “ban” on carding is simply a set of bureaucratic policy that amount to a how-to-guide for the practice’s continuation. Under the new regulations, the police must give a reason for stopping civilians and inform them of their right not to give identifying information. This means that as long as an officer presents a plausible reason for stopping civilians, say a theoretical crime in the area, then one can still get carded. Additionally, regulations do little to curb racial bias within police forces. In Ontario, the police continue to target Black communities, as evidenced in the case of 15-year-old Devonte Miller Blake and 10-year-old Kishwayne McCalla, who were stopped on their way home from school by seven (yes, seven) police officers pointing guns at their faces simply because they “fit the description” of a criminal suspect.

Today, the families of Jermaine Carby, Andrew Loku, Marc Ekamba-Boekwa, Abdirahman Abdi, Kwasi Skene-Peters, and Alex Wettlaufer—Black Ontarians who were killed in the last two years by police—are still waiting for justice, waiting on Special Investigations Unit (SIU) reports that will inevitably grant the officers impunity.

Twenty-seven years ago, Black activists pushed for civilian oversight of the police. The SIU was created and lauded as the provincial police watchdog, with a mission to “nurture public confidence in policing by ensuring that police conduct is subject to rigorous and independent investigations.” In reality, the SIU’s record proves otherwise. Under the SIU’s watch, there has been a dearth of police officers charged and barely any convicted. Of 3,400 investigations, 95 have had criminal charges laid (less than three percent), 16 have led to convictions, and only three have served time.

School resource officers facilitate the school-to-prison pipelines. Over-inflated police budgets are the largest line items in municipalities. Anti-violence task forces continue to rip apart Black communities. It is within this context, and in response to the abhorrent conditions that Black people are expected to live in, that Black Lives Matter Toronto organizes, drawing on the brilliance and strategies of past Black liberation movements.

In retrospect, #BLMTOtentcity was a desperate plea from people who have had enough, who were tired of having their issues brushed aside. #BLMTOtentcity was not just a protest, but a vision for a world free from state-sanctioned violence. Perhaps most important, #BLMTOtentcity showed us that we could indeed win, there can be an end to police brutality.

We have more work to do.

In 2012, the Sisters In Spirit Vigil in Ottawa asked volunteers to silently hold pictures of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Photo courtesy of the Native Women’s Association of Canada.

For decades, Indigenous women in Canada have been resisting oppression. Canada’s institutions and systems, steeped in colonialism, racism, and sexism, have deemed Indigenous women as less worthy of raising their children, of having access to proper housing, income, or education.

They’ve also deemed them less worthy of life.

Between 1980 and 2012, there were 1,181 police-reported cases of murder and long-term disappearances involving Indigenous women and girls, the RCMP revealed in a 2014 report. Patty Hajdu, then-minister for the status of women, has cited the research of the Native Women’s Association of Canada suggesting the number could actually be closer to 4,000.

These numbers reflect what the families of missing and murdered Indigenous women have been saying for decades: There are hundreds of Indigenous women and girls whose lives have been dismissed by the government, police, RCMP, and the media.

Manitoba in particular has had a longstanding issue with racism and violence. In 2014, the province had the highest documented number of homicides of Indigenous people and recorded the second-highest rate of hate crimes. A 2015 Maclean’s feature exploring the province’s race problem found only 13 percent of Manitobans had “very favourable” views of Indigenous citizens.

Canadian police and the RCMP also have a history of discrimination in their treatment of missing Indigenous women and girls cases. Poor report-taking, ineffective coordination of and between police, failure to investigate properly, and insensitivity are all common complaints from family members of missing Indigenous women and girls. Families are often made to wait up to 72 hours to even report someone missing—an arbitrary, unofficial period of time, rooted in the stereotype that Indigenous women are transient and unreliable.

When institutions fail to protect a population, it renders them vulnerable to the violence of people who know they won’t face consequences for their behaviour. This culture of immunity is what makes Indigenous women six times more likely to be murdered than non-Indigenous women in Canada.

Last year, the Canadian government launched a national inquiry, with a budget of $53 million, into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The inquiry has been scrutinized for a lack of transparency and communication with Indigenous communities in its planning stages. It does not include the police’s role in the violence Indigenous women and girls face.

Indigenous women have had to fight for their autonomy—and their lives—for far longer than this country has been called Canada. And that’s nothing to celebrate.

CLARIFICATION (JULY 31, 2017): This story has been updated to clarify that the estimated number of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls is cited from NWAC research and not directly from former minister Patty Hajdu.

Meewasin Valley. Photo courtesy of Meewasin on Facebook.

Along a winding trail on both sides of the South Saskatchewan River, the varying rhythms of feet on pavement and sounds of wildlife replace the blaring noises of the city. Within Saskatoon lies a space where citizens and tourists can enjoy thriving greenery and educational nature tours. Meewasin Valley, situated in the South Saskatchewan River Basin, is an urban park maintained by a 38-year-old Saskatoon conservation organization, Meewasin. The urban park is home to museums, interpretive centres, canoe launches, and conservation areas.

But in the last two years, six members of the Association of Saskatchewan Urban Parks and Conservation Agencies, an organization that aids conservation and development agencies throughout Saskatchewan, suffered a loss of funding from the provincial government. Last year, five urban parks lost their funding from the province, a deficit totalling $540,000. Earlier this year, the Government of Saskatchewan contributed $500,000 to Meewasin—$409,000 less than last year’s contribution. As a result, Meewasin has closed three river access sites, cancelled canoe tours, and reduced staff.

The government says it needs to reallocate taxpayer money to other initiatives in Saskatchewan that require more attention, such as improving the emergency response times of social services for children and treatment of water within cities. Now Meewasin is trying to figure out how to manage the holes in its budget, cutting staff, decreasing maintenance services, and soliciting donations from the public.

Saskatchewan can protect its urban parks from financial cuts with guidelines and statutory funding, including a formula for cities to calculate the amount of money they need to provide to keep parks open, according to Meewasin community development manager Doug Porteous. Boards with representatives from stakeholders whose lands are included in urban parks also allow everyone—including the Government of Saskatchewan, City of Saskatoon, and citizens—to have a say in budgeting.

Until then, park activists continue to lobby for help. “Without education and events… leading to stewardship and ownership, natural areas in the province will continue to lose their biodiversity, gradually becoming a wasteland,” writes Porteous. “Saskatchewan is gifted with a rich and rare natural and cultural heritage resource that is at risk of being compromised forever.”