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Journalism students across Canada are learning to share stories that are rooted in reciprocity with Indigenous communities in new ways.

Created by Indigenous faculty and designed in partnership with local communities, students in journalism programs at Carleton University, the University of King’s College and others are taking experiential learning courses that involve spending time with Indigenous people and reporting stories that are important to them.

At Carleton, the Reporting in Indigenous Communities course, created by Anishinaabe journalist and professor Duncan McCue, was offered for the first time in winter 2024. While new to Carleton, McCue is building on his work at the University of British Columbia, where he launched his course in 2011 in collaboration with the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, the Tsawwassen First Nation, the Squamish First Nation, and others. The goal was to teach students about the unique cultures that are thriving in each First Nation today, and how to respect and prioritize them in their reporting.

In McCue’s course at Carleton, students worked with the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation, the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne, and the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, learning about the stories that matter most to these communities. The theme for stories this year was Adaawe: Stories of Indigenous Economy, with students learning about the spirit of Indigenous entrepreneurship and business innovation.

McCue says the course was also an opportunity for students to learn more about the diversity within and between First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities. “Indigenous people are not homogenous…A Dene is not a Cree is not a Mi’kmaw, and they certainly have very different lived experiences if they grew up in the city versus growing up on the reserve versus growing up in a hamlet. It’s really important for students to understand that.”

At King’s, the Reporting in Mi’kma’ki course, co-created and taught by Miʹkmaw professor Trina Roache, introduces journalism students to the depth and diversity within local Miʹkmaq communities. Miʹkma’ki is the ancestral and unceded land of the Mi’kmaq, colonially known as most of Atlantic Canada and parts of Quebec.

Launched in 2021, the course aims to encourage students to go from reporting stories about the trauma experienced by Mi’kmaq communities to sharing stories that reflect their resilience instead. “Stories are a way of building that relationship and focusing on things that the community wants to celebrate and wants to put out there about how they see themselves,” Roache says of this approach. “It doesn’t mean you don’t do other stories. But you have to do all the stories—you can’t just do the negative ones.”

McCue says these courses are especially important for non-Indigenous students, who continue to be a majority within both programs. “I think it’s important that non-Indigenous journalism students learn and have a baseline of cultural competency when it comes to reporting in Indigenous communities [because] if you are a journalist in Canada, you are going to, at some point in your career, be reporting on Indigenous issues,” McCue says. “I think it is important that non-Indigenous students are exposed to this in a safe setting of a classroom where they can get feedback, and not under the pressure of a deadline in a massive newsroom.”

However, McCue and Roache also acknowledged other barriers, such as funding support, that make their reporting courses—and, in a larger sense, journalism programs—inaccessible to young Indigenous people. “The challenge is that Miʹkmaq, and I think other Indigenous young people, don’t see themselves in journalism [and] that’s something we’re working hard to change,” Roache says. “It’s going to take time and we have to play the long game.”

For both McCue and Roache, an important next step is ensuring the journalism programs they are part of actively recruit and train the next generation of Indigenous journalists. At Carleton, McCue says the work looks like hosting a video and audio course for Indigenous storytellers over the summer in partnership with local First Nations colleges and institutes. At King’s, Roache says the journalism program has created three fully funded scholarships for Miʹkmaq students, the first cohort of which will begin their studies this fall. It was created in partnership with Ann Sylliboy of the Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey, the educational authority for 12 of Nova Scotia’s 13 Mi’kmaq First Nations. The university also pledged a $600,000 investment to support Indigenous students.

According to Roache, the increased funding and scholarships are but one step in King’s University’s approach to holding space at the urging of journalism students, who have been demanding diversity in faculty, staff and curriculum in the journalism program since 2015.

For Catriona Koenig, a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation who grew up in Ottawa and a former Carleton student who took McCue’s course, it’s important to make courses on responsibly reporting about Indigenous communities mandatory for journalism students. Taking experiential learning courses created and taught by Indigenous faculty, she says, is an opportunity to learn how to be a “storyteller and not a story-taker.”

“For so long, journalists would go into Indigenous communities and tell their story, and then just leave and burn bridges and not continue relationships and not strengthen partnerships,” she says. “[It’s important] to make sure to continue these partnerships with communities, keep in touch, and maintain the relationship.”

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.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

Photos courtesy Jennifer David & Waubgeshig Rice

When Jennifer David decided to start Storykeepers, a podcast that spotlights Indigenous literature, she knew Waubgeshig Rice was her only choice for a co-host. He was an experienced journalist with CBC, a published author—most recently of the bestseller Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press, 2018)—and they were both passionate about uplifting Indigenous voices.

However, the first time David approached Rice about co-hosting in 2018, he had to decline. Although he was excited about the idea, he couldn’t take on a new project. He was working full-time at CBC and he had a new baby.

“I shelved it because I never pictured any other co-host. I did not want to go ahead unless I was going to go ahead with Waub,” David says.

David sees herself as a communicator. She has a background in journalism, she’s an experienced facilitator, and she’s the author of two books, including the podcast’s namesake, Story Keepers: Conversations with Aboriginal Writers (Ningwakwe Learning Press, 2004). She’s spent her career promoting Indigenous voices on television, radio, and in literature.

Early in 2021, David heard Rice was leaving CBC so he could write full-time. She approached him again and asked if this was a better time for him to co-host the podcast. He said yes. Right away, they got to work. They successfully applied for funding with the Ontario Arts Council, hammered out the details of what they’d like the podcast to be, and started planning the first season. The first episode aired in March 2021.

Rather than the typical radio show where authors are interviewed about their books, David wanted to do something different. Storykeepers is more like a book club, with a book being discussed in depth without the author present. They record one episode per month. The entire focus of Storykeepers is Indigenous voices: they discuss Indigenous writing across genres—fiction, memoir, plays, and poetry—with an Indigenous guest host.

“It’s a bit of a challenge to transpose that book club kind of vibe,” Rice says. “How we approach each episode is very informal and casual.”

Although they read the books, take notes, and discuss topics ahead of time, David and Rice keep the actual episodes unscripted. For Rice, the podcast was an exciting challenge after working at CBC for so long, where almost everything was scripted.

When planning the season, David and Rice started with a list of books they wanted to discuss, and then they made a list of potential guest hosts. Afterwards, they tried to match them up.

“What we try to do is identify somebody who has some sort of personal or professional connection to that book or to that author or to the Indigenous nation that it’s about just to open our eyes to perspectives we may not have considered either,” Rice says. They bring in voices from Anishinaabe, Cree, Inuit, Métis, and Two-Spirit backgrounds, among others.

They recorded 10 episodes for the first season, including a discussion with Cherie Dimaline about Eden Robinson’s Return of the Trickster, Duncan McCue about Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk, Rosanna Deerchild about Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, and more. To encourage listeners to engage with the podcast and interact with them online as if it is a book club, Storykeepers offers book giveaways. At the end of the season, David and Rice were thrilled when they realized the podcast had over 47,000 downloads.

Season two kicked off in January 2022 with a discussion of Katherena Vermette’s The Strangers with guest host Jamie Morse. Rice has taken a slight step back for season two, as he will be a judge for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize and he’s editing his forthcoming novel. Instead of participating in every episode, he’ll be co-hosting every second episode.

“I didn’t want to spread myself too thin. I want to do the books we feature in the podcast properly,” Rice says.

He expects to return to co-hosting every episode in fall 2022.

Listeners can look forward to hearing about an exciting lineup this season, including Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians, and the podcast’s first episode featuring a graphic novel, This Place: 150 Years Retold.

David hopes the new season reaches even more listeners. She would like people to come to them and tell them what they’re reading. She’d be thrilled to hear from Indigenous writers and artists interested in being a guest host on the show.

“We can do this for 10, 20 years and still not get through all the books by Indigenous authors,” David says. “I feel like I kind of owe it to Indigenous authors to keep this going so that they can see themselves and their books in here. We’ve just touched the surface.”

EXPLORE THE FEATURE:

Editor’s note by Gwen Benaway ● Prose by Kai Minosh Pyle ● Interview with Lindsay Nixon ● Visual art by Fallon Simard ● Interview with Ziibiwan Rivers ● Prose by Jaye Simpson ● Poetry by Arielle Twist

A note from the editor:

When I was asked to guest edit an Indigenous-specific supplement for This, my first instinct was to look toward the Trans, Two-Spirit, and Queer Indigenous voices that were emerging around me. Indigenous transness is a complex way of being in the world. As Billy-Ray Belcourt notes in his essay, The Poltergeist Manifesto, Queer Indigenous being is a double impossibility. Indigenous being is often viewed as an impossible selfness, a remnant of a past conquered people or an unimagined future. Queer Indigenous being is similarly located in either the sexual and gender diversity inheritance of our Two-Spirit ancestors or invisible in mainstream White Queerness. If Indigenous being broadly and Queer Indigenous being specifically are seen as impossible ways of being within settler society, Indigenous transness is absent from colonial imaginations.

The voices in this supplement resist the assumed impossibility of our lives to show the vibrancy of our living. When Jaye Simpson writes “how do I explain my queerness to the gatekeeper of my blood line?” they are speaking back to the impossibility of Indigenous Queer and transness, answering it with a clear invocation of radiant being. Arielle Twist writes, “I am reworking my reality” and “How does a tranny/ coexist with lust.” Her writing is not about a distant Indigenous transness rooted in the past, but a celebration of an Indigenous trans body here in the present. Indigenous transness in Twist’s poetry is a sexually active and fully present hereness that not only exists, but desires and moves through a world that refuses to allow our realities to exist.

In Kai Minosh Pyle’s work, they inhabit a rich complexity of Anishinaabe and Métis being. They write, “duality is binary with an ndn heart,” complicating notions of traditions, gender, and pushing softly back on notions of Two-Spirit being which exclude or erase transness. The line, “i’ve stopped using the word ‘traditional’ because i no longer know what it means and maybe never did. you should, too,” hits like a thunderstorm over a lake. There is beautiful “survivance” in Pyle’s work, interweaving anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) language while questioning the ways we are taught to see Indigenous transness.

Nothing celebrates the beauty of Indigenous trans bodies more than Fallon Simard’s art. In the series of images within this submission, they show their chest after top surgery. Intercut with purple, pink, and other digital images, the artwork is a ceremony of trans ndn embodiment. Their artworks and online activism is grounded in a fierce and loving defence of Indigenous trans women and resists transphobia. Within these images, Indigenous being is present as a vital and complex living that cannot be regulated into absence or ghostly haunting. Lindsay Nixon’s interview is another window into the kinship-based notions of Indigenous Queerness and Transness. Their work as an activist, community organizer, academic, and writer is creating space and expanding profound conversations on Indigenous being across many disciplines and discourses. Within their words, Indigenous Transness is not merely an inheritance, but a vital gift to our communities.

Finally, my interview with Ziibiwan Rivers explores the legacy of toxic masculinity and the important of working within kinship and spaces that uplift us. Their music is exceptional, merging genres and modalities to envision beautiful new soundscapes. Taking kawaii into profound NDN realities, Ziibiwan’s work is everything I’ve ever wanted in the world. In all the vibrancy present in this issue, Indigenous being is a burning light, unrelenting in its intensity but gentle in its illumination.

I am immensely honoured—as an artist, as a trans girl, as an Anishinaabe and Métis woman—for the opportunity to uplift these incredible voices and celebrate the wonder of their work. We are not impossible. We have always been here, we are still here now, and we will be here in the future. Share with us in our living.

— GWEN BENAWAY

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Photo by The Canadian Press/Michelle Siu

After decades of self-advocacy by Indigenous people, parts of Canada’s painful colonial legacy, such as residential schools, have finally been publicly acknowledged by the government. But the same government has yet to apologize for the Sixties Scoop, an era where thousands of Indigenous children were “scooped” from their communities to be fostered and adopted by white families. Since 2009, Ontario Scoop survivors have been battling the federal government to acknowledge the hardships they endured, and the government resisted. In February, survivors in the province were finally promised financial compensation. But other provinces across Canada continue to demand justice. Here’s a look at Ontario Scoop survivors’ arduous path toward reparation.

1965–1984

About 20,000 children, mostly from Ontario, are taken from their homes and placed with white families. They are given new names and stripped of their languages and cultural practices—a psychologically traumatic event for many survivors.

February 2009

Ontario survivors launch a class-action lawsuit against Ottawa, resting on whether it was the Canadian government’s inherent responsibility to ensure these children were not deprived of their culture.

January 25, 2012

The federal government wins an appeal against conditional certification for the class-action lawsuit in divisional court. The ruling forces lead plaintiffs Marcia Brown Martel and Robert Commanda to pay $25,000 in costs.

July 16, 2013

Despite that setback, the case is approved as a class-action lawsuit.

December 3, 2014

The Court dismisses Ottawa’s appeal to scrap the lawsuit without a hearing.

August 23, 2016

Survivors are finally heard in front of a Superior Court judge.

November 2016

Ottawa maintains that “while things might be done differently now, the government argues, no legal reason exists to apply modern standards to an approach taken decades ago.”

December 1, 2016

A lawyer for the government says the feds had no legal duty to prevent children from reserves from losing connection to their Indigenous cultures at the time. Another lawyer adds that even if the government was obligated to ensure the children remained connected to their cultures, Indigenous identity is too abstract to mandate this.

February 1, 2017

The federal government says it wants to settle the case out of court. The request is denied.

February 14, 2017

Superior Court Justice Edward Belobaba rules in favour of the Ontario survivors. He rules that the Canadian government “had a common law duty of care” to ensure children taken from the reserve maintained their Indigenous identities.

March 2017

A new class action lawsuit begins for survivors afflicted by the Sixties Scoop in other regions across Canada.

“Traditional, holistic treatment is much more successful in its outcome,” says Boshart, pointing out that physical symptoms often stem from underlying emotional challenges.

“Usually the root [of illness] is in the emotional or spiritual realm. You have to disentangle all these things to help rebuild people in a very broad and supportive way; it’s about healing not just about treating symptoms.”

Recently, Boshart travelled to North Dakota to join the Dakota Access Pipeline protest and offer her healing services. “I sat in a space called the emotional wellness teepee,” says Boshart. “We were there to support people in whichever way they needed.”

Joining a community of Western physicians, herbalists, chiropractors, and energy workers, Boshart discovered “the capacity of humans to come together in generosity, respect, and reciprocal relationships” and create a functioning multi-dimensional health care system.

It’s this type of blended model that she hopes to one day establish in her own community. “Ultimately, I want to see Indigenous people given back the power to take care of each other,” says Boshart.

“Every Canadian needs to educate themselves about the history of Indigenous issues, and be an ally in bringing us to a place where we can be well again,” she adds. “[The Indigenous community] has so much knowledge about how to work with the land and make our earth a better place, and if people aren’t well, they can’t share their gifts.”

Photo courtesy of SmartIce

The Inuit of Pond Inlet, Nunavut, have been navigating the sea ice for centuries, relying on their experience and wisdom from their elders to inform when and when not to travel across the frozen mass. But as global warming intensifies, the ice is becoming increasingly unpredictable and unsafe. Now, a project out of Memorial University in Newfoundland is working to change that.

“My colleagues and I wanted to help our community and try to address their concerns about the Arctic sea ice conditions,” says Andrew Arreak, a Pond Inlet resident and research coordinator for the project. SmartIce, a collaborative initiative between the Inuit community, the Nunatsiavut government in Newfoundland and Labrador, and Memorial University, uses high-tech sensors to monitor and track changes in sea ice, making it much safer for locals to tread upon.

During the uncharacteristically warm winter of 2009–10 a community survey conducted by the government found that one in 12 locals fell through thinning ice in Nunatsiavut, and more than half of the residents could not travel across the ice to collect wood to heat their homes.

Sea ice has been a leading protagonist in shaping the lives and culture of the Inuit, and understanding it has been a skill passed down from generation to generation. “Initially, my community was very concerned about the SmartIce project,” says Arreak, noting that they were apprehensive to replace their traditional wisdom with technology. “So I started listening to them and asked how they would like me to work on the project.”

The feedback helped inform the current iteration of the project, which uses sensors stored in floatable plastic tubes that monitor danger zones identified through community feedback. Data is then collected via electromagnetic waves in the ice, producing an accurate reading of its thickness. The beauty lies in the simplicity of the gadget, which visualizes data through user-friendly maps where orange means “caution” and red means “stop.”

Besides Pond Inlet, SmartIce is being piloted in Nain, Labrador. For their work so far, Arreak and his team were recognized with an Arctic Inspiration Award, the “Nobel of the North,” which came with a $400,000 prize.

“It’s good to see the community embrace SmartIce,” says Arreak, who emphasizes the importance of community ownership over the development and implementation of the technology. “We can go back to predicting ice conditions better, and making life safer.”

Illustration by Matt Daley.

Amanda Thompson remembers meeting the other participant in her months-long game of tap-tap. She would tap on her partner’s belly, and someone would tap back from inside. After an eventful day, the result of careful deliberations and a planned C-section, Thompson met her daughter, feeling instantly familiar. As soon as she was born, “it was this lovely recognition of, ‘Oh, you’re this person we already know,’” she says.

Her birth followed purposeful conversations about identity. Thompson’s family is registered to the Flying Post First Nation. No one lives there, what was once a traditional hunting and trapping community. It’s a swamp in the north, she says. Members of her Ojibwe band live dotted around northern districts in Ontario, between Timmins, Nipigon, and Chapleau, her extended family in southwestern Ontario. Thompson grew up urban. “We don’t have the same sense of community in the same way that people who are registered to other First Nations would have a strong sense of place do,” she says. When she moved to Toronto at 21, those ties were built. “I made my community here,” Thompson says. “That means the community that I came from was already a mishmash of people from different nations and different cultures and different understandings of their culture, and they’ve all sort of migrated here in different ways.”

She’s one of three generations of women in her family denied status—starting with her grandmother, who lost recognition to her band under the Indian Act when she married a British man. Over the decades, Thompson and her mother regained their status under bills C-31 and C-3, contested attempts at restraining the paternalism of the Indian Act. When Thompson and her partner decided to start a family, questions of identity quickly entered their considerations.

But they were one of many. Before they had their daughter, meditation on Indigeneity, place, and identity needed to be weighed against morasses of potential legal twists. When couples visit fertility clinics in Toronto—30 percent of which are estimated to be from queer communities—about 20 of the 200 anonymous donors available to them are Canadian. None of those 20 is Indigenous.

Thompson knew she and her partner wanted to choose an Indigenous donor, and that he would be anonymous. The laws governing guardianship made it so they couldn’t be certain a known donor wouldn’t have the ability to retain custody down the line. And when they consulted legal experts, no one could tell them that he couldn’t definitively, not enough that they felt comfortable with the risks. Never mind how or if their child could gain status in such an arrangement.

The circuitous culture of service provision and legislation can descend on prospective families—especially those with members from queer Indigenous communities—in many ways, each on their own bringing a range of potential obstacles. The law in Ontario has only recently changed to better accommodate family planning routes for queer couples who may not always conceive children or come to be families the same way that many with two biological parents do. These choices amount to a process that can help honour and define familial identity for many couples. In ways large and small these systems aren’t set up to give many couples equal access to the choices and clinical experiences white, heterosexual, and cisgender couples can have.

***

Twice a week for about two years in the early 1990s, Harlan Pruden donated sperm to a fertility clinic, so conveniently situated on the University of Alberta campus where he was studying philosophy and political science that his visits could be scheduled in between classes. He earned $50 each time: half every week, and the balance at the end of a six-month cycle when, if he received a clean bill of sexual health, “the lot” would be closed out. The multi-page questionnaire he filled out the first day at the clinic asked about family history, disease, his IQ.

He doesn’t remember much about the donor agreement he signed at the time, in his early 20s. “It’s kind of like the Apple agreement,” he says. But he does recall clinic staff telling him that he was the only Native (they called him at the time) donor on their books. That was incentive enough for him. Pruden, registered to the Whitefish Lake First Nation in Alberta, calculated that while the cash was a nice perk, it was important for his semen to find its way to prospective families who wanted children, in the heart of Cree territory, as they were. Pruden figures he’s an anomaly: a gay-identified Two-Spirit sperm donor. He may be right. If not then, he would be now.

The history of assisted human reproduction (AHR) such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) is that of heteronormative familial and clinical constructions that haven’t prepared the system to consistently and readily welcome families with specifications past blood type and eye colour. The earliest couples to start their families this way did so under a veil of secrecy— conception through a third party clashed with religious mores that neither patients nor doctors would defy. Frequently, sperm donors were medical students, plucked on the basis of little more than loose physical resemblance and proximity. At the time, fertility services largely dealt with offering solutions for male infertility in traditional monied families.

By the 1990s there were more than 100 fertility clinics in Canada operating in the sperm business. The rules governing donorship and tissue sales didn’t constrict until 2000, after a woman was inseminated with sperm carrying a strain of chlamydia. The updated Semen Regulations, active today, outline the criteria with which donors must comply and how clinics operate. These regulations are followed by the few remaining sperm banks in Canada—the largest of which is in Etobicoke, Ont.—to accept local donations.

With IVF costing anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000, the added cost of travel to an urban hub can make an already prohibitive means of starting a family insurmountable

In some ways a bid to create bulwarks against commercializing the trade of genetic material, Parliament passed the Assisted Human Reproduction Act (AHRA) in 2004. This bill featured several provisions to regulate the proliferation of reproductive technologies. One of the provisions that survived the 2010 Supreme Court challenge was the regulation that prohibits compensation for material donation. Subsequently, the number of donors located in Canada plummeted. With little incentive for Canadian men to donate altruistically, the vast majority of sperm donors available to prospective families in Canadian sperm banks are from the U.S., with some from Europe.

Some stakeholders are not convinced by the ban on compensation. It’s one of the areas of the AHRA being taken up by the AHRA/LGBT Working Group, a team of academic, legal, and medical experts consulting with the Ministry of Health to bring a queer lens to policy issues. “The fertility world is so heterocentric,” says Andy Inkster, the health promoter at the LGBTQ Parenting Network leading the charge on the project. “And it’s not just the industry, it’s not just the practitioners. It’s deeply embedded into the structure of what they’re doing. Fertility is where eggs and sperm come together, and it’s embedded with heterosexist and heterocentric assumptions, but the reality is that a huge number of the people using assisted human reproduction are LGBTQ people.”

Where health care is concerned, let alone reproductive technology, the intended focus and professional training tend to be centred on the needs of straight patients. Through policy and practice, health outcomes for queer communities are disproportionately worse than the general population. Fertility services are also riddled with active and coded messaging—the model, centred on heteronormative paradigms as it is, assumes infertility when a couple first arrives. Queer patients don’t inherently need a battery of tests to determine their ability to have children, like a straight couple having tried and failed to conceive for a time, but often the clinic is their first step. Understanding the overall landscape of queer health, the Working Group petitioned the Ministry to amend the law to both correct some of its previously stated incongruities and make room for the queer families that represent a high percentage of fertility clinic patients.

***

For parents like Thompson, there is still little information on laws affecting Indigenous and queer families seeking AHR. Some researchers have attempted to unpack these filigreed legal implications and their unique effects on queer families in Canada. Lori Ross, associate professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in Toronto, spearheaded the Creating our Families study, which surveyed 66 LGBTQ couples in Ontario and their experiences accessing AHR services. According to Ross’s research, non-biological parents could face a variety of pressures, including cost barriers, discrimination, and the stress of pending but uncertain guardianship.

One of the simplest ways to circumvent a lack of donor sperm from one’s community is known donorship, an arrangement between a prospective parent and a friend, family member, or acquaintance. In the expert witness affidavit she wrote for the AHRA, Ross notes the catch-22 inherent to the decision-making for some prospective parents. An Indigenous participant in the study, for example, demonstrates the complexity of navigating known versus unknown donorship for families who want to maintain Indigenous lineage, but don’t want to bring a third parent into the arrangement: “If we had found a sperm donor whom we knew, who was status [according to the Indian Act], we’re then opening ourselves right back up to… the legal implications that would be involved. Because we’d have to list that person as their father, essentially.” Few people are equipped to neutralize the concern. While there are experts in fertility law and how it may pertain to queer families, the question of Indigenous parentage is not understood as ubiquitously. They’re “two different specialties that haven’t come together, really,” says Ross.

A spate of Canadian laws that purportedly exist to protect children have had ways of creeping into the family planning options for queer couples in Canada. In November 2016, Ontario’s All Families Are Equal Act passed, finally contravening one of them. Until then, the Children’s Law Reform Act, which designated how adoptive parents were named and recognized, conferred parenthood to mothers and fathers, and to sperm donors before partners in the province. To assure guardianship of their child, couples would need to apply for a second parent adoption, a process in which the donor would need to actively resign their rights and a member of the family would need to appeal the courts for guardianship. This law arose from Cy and Ruby’s Act, a bill named for a family that, after a harrowing childbirth, feared they would lose guardianship of their child because the laws didn’t automatically recognize a same-sex co-parent. Ontario is the fifth Canadian province to implement parental recognition legislation, following Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec, and B.C.

This legal victory for queer families in Canada came when Thompson’s daughter was already more than than a year old. When she was still navigating the waters of known versus anonymous donorship, there was hardly a dilemma. She and her partner were lucky: Situated in a major urban area in Toronto, as they were, they had access to queer parenting resources and a cluster of fertility clinics and counsel. But none of the lawyers she asked could tell her declaratively how a known donorship would affect her family. At that point, a known donor had de facto guardianship. How could they avoid peril to her partner’s parentship application to the courts? And what of the duty to consult? If her band chose to intervene, what recourse did they have? “It was really important to us from the outset that we were able to reflect our family’s cultural identity. So for us, we had to weigh out the desire to have Indigenous sperm from our area or someone who identified as Ojibwe as our sperm donor with the risks with a known donor,” Thompson says. “In the end we decided to not go with a known donor because the system didn’t seem equipped to support our family.”

Handling issues like donor diversity hasn’t proven feasible under existing regulations. Without the offer of compensation, recruiting volunteers to submit to regular health screenings, waves of ejaculatory abstinence, and the time to commute to the receiving clinic in Etobicoke hasn’t panned out. Furthermore, willing donors are turned away. As with blood donation, men who have sex with men are barred from donating sperm anonymously. And the requirement of a three-generation medical history may hinder Indigenous men, who are overrepresented in child welfare systems and might not know their history that far back, from becoming donors.

Organizations from queer community centre The 519 to the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) have decried the AHRA’s disproportionate impact on queer families. The CBA’s Family and Health Law Section and the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Community Forum also acknowledge that the exponential rise of reproductive technology would almost surely outpace the bill’s reason. Stiff penalties apply; paying a sperm donor or surrogate can earn one $500,000 in fines and a 10-year prison sentence.

The lack of proportionality in these measures is being pursued by some in the legal community who are addressing its deficits, from the confounding to the discriminatory. “If you are looking for a white healthy person, that’s an option. But if you are looking for anything beyond that, it becomes incredibly difficult in Canada to access gametes from any other racial or other background,” says Sara Cohen, a Toronto-based fertility lawyer involved with the AHRA/LGBTQ Working Group. “If you or your partner are non-caucasian and would like a specific racial background or heritage reflected in the genetic makeup of your child, you are down to a couple of donors at best—the same couple of donors as are available to everyone else in your community,” she wrote on the Fertility Law Canada blog. “Across the board for any racialized family who is active in LGBTQ communities, they kind of go through their mental Rolodex of who they know and guess that they’ve probably used the same donor,” adds Inkster.

But even if the working group’s consultations yield results for prospective queer parents—training their clinicians and counsellors in culturally competent care for those patients— that’s still only a piece of the question. Of all the clinics they deal with, “There are none that are aligned with Indigenous health principles—with clinicians who are aligned with that modality and trained in culturally safe care for Indigenous folks,” Inkster says. “I’ve never heard a clinician say to me, ‘We’re considering culturally safe care for Indigenous communities.’” He figures it’s likely a matter of place—fertility clinics in Canada are concentrated by density. Kingston, Ont. has none. There is one per Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

It’s a rather uncharted area of reproductive justice. Birth control, abortion, and other areas of health care are scantily accessible in Canada’s more remote regions. With IVF costing anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000, the added cost of travel to an urban hub can make an already prohibitive means of starting a family insurmountable.

“The way that Indigenous people look at families is very different than sort of this Western format of what family looks like,” says Denise Booth McLeod, an Indigenous full-spectrum doula, noting how common adoption and extended kinship ties are in her community. “I have other friends who are talking about when they’re planning on having babies who are already in talks with people within our community: ‘Okay, you’re Indigenous; we’re Indigenous. How do we sort of source your product? How do we do this in a way where it feels right for us as a family?’”

***

For Thompson and families like hers, how can an area like this be problematized? Reproductive justice and health inequity aside, now there’s a child. A living and loved manifestation of laborious decision-making, unexpected relics of the Indian Act, the spillover of second parent adoption laws. Recognition of the complexities of second parent adoptions and its obsolescence after the passage of the All Families Are Equal Act could change course for future families. “That new development I think could be a bit of a game changer,” she says.

In the end, she used an American donor with Indigenous ancestry. Once she and her partner decided that was important to them, it narrowed the selection down to a small pool.

At the time of publication, ReproMed, Canada’s largest sperm bank, had zero Indigenous-identified donors. Not much has changed since Pruden first donated his sperm in the 1990s. He has wondered intermittently over the years about what became of his sperm. A culture of immense racism, internalized, may have meant that some Indigenous families wouldn’t have had the pride in their identities and culture to motivate them to so deliberately expand their lineages in this way, passing down all that came with it, he says.

But today, identity remains a terrain to navigate. “One of the things that happens in the community is there’s a huge focus on who you are and where you’ve come from. And so I think about that for her,” Thompson says. Her Anishnabe family is her daughter’s family. “We’ll talk about that and that’s who she’ll grow up with.”

“We’re happy with the little person we got.”

UPDATE, MAY 25: This story has been updated, removing language surrounding the ancestry of the Thompson family’s sperm donor to protect their privacy.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

In 2017 Canada will celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation. Canada’s origin story will be revisited—the story of the British North America (BNA) Act, the Fathers of Confederation, and the British/French duality that together formed the bedrock of the free, equal, diverse democracy we believe ourselves to be.

But here’s the problem: our origin story is false. In 1996, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples observed, “A country cannot be built on a living lie.” Coming to terms with our true origin story is long overdue. Recognition that Indigenous peoples were founders of the nation must be acknowledged in a formal, legal way. Only then will there be a solid foundation for Canada to reconcile its past and lay the foundation for a new relationship with its first peoples.

The accepted story of Canada’s origin tells us the nation came into being on July 1, 1867. Thirty-six “Fathers of Confederation,” representing the British and the French colonial powers, signed the BNA, setting out the governance structure for the new country. Significantly, it protected the English and French languages, cultures, and civil rights. Indigenous Canadians are invisible—even though they were present on the land for thousands of years prior to Confederation and without their contributions Canada would not be the country it was then or now.

Take, for example, the vast tracts of land acquired through treaty negotiations with the Indigenous peoples—lands that have produced immense riches, making Canada one of the wealthiest nations in the world.

Indigenous people have received neither recognition for their nation-building contributions, nor a fair share of the ensuing wealth. Instead, they were classified as non-citizens and subjected to unequal treatment based on racist philosophical and legal justifications—namely, the discovery doctrine and the formal equality principle.

The discovery doctrine was the self-serving legal principle whereby Europeans claimed rights of sovereignty and ownership of regions they “discovered.” Under this doctrine, Indigenous peoples could not claim ownership of their lands, but only the right to occupy and use the land.

The formal equality principle dates back to Plato and Aristotle, whose definition of equality was that likes were to be treated alike. As such, discrimination against slaves, women, and Indigenous peoples was not considered unequal treatment.

Together, the two principles assured the perpetual dominance of the British and the French founders over the land and the permanent subordination of the Indigenous peoples who occupied it. The Supreme Court of Canada finally rejected the formal equality principle in 1989, saying it could justify Hitler’s Nuremberg laws. The discovery doctrine, too, has been widely discredited as racist and in violation of fundamental human rights. Yet these doctrines have underpinned Canada’s origin story and left Indigenous Canadians marginalized, dispossessed, and unrecognized. The 150th anniversary of Confederation is an opportunity to set the record straight. Parliamentarians, after discussions with Indigenous leaders, provincial governments, and civil society, pass a statute to formally recognize Indigenous peoples as equal founders of Canada. This will allow all Canadians—Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike—to celebrate the possibilities for lasting reconciliation and set the stage for a genuine nation-to-nation relationship of equality and respect.