Image by brotiN biswaS via Pexels

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.”

Image by Paul Loh via Pexels

In the heart of the city, while more than 385,000 South Asians go about their lives, the University of Toronto (U of T) has quietly set a precedent. Amid the clamour for social justice and equality, U of T’s teaching assistants have negotiated with their union to include caste as a discriminatory practice—a move that has slipped under the radar of mainstream Canadian discourse.

Along with U of T, the Canadian Union of Public Employees – 3902 Unit 1 also became the first union in North America to add caste as a protected category, according to organizers. Caste is a traditional social hierarchy and restrictive practice based on birth or traditional occupation, ingrained in some societies, particularly in South Asia, that dictates a person’s social status and opportunities. With 2.6 million people comprising 7.1 percent of the population, South Asians represent the largest visible minority in Canada, according to Statistics Canada.

U of T’s decision sets a precedent for other institutions to follow suit, marking a significant moment in Canadian anti-caste activists’ ongoing struggle for inclusivity. “Your proposed amendment to Article 4 of your Collective Agreement includes caste as a category to be protected from workplace discrimination, harassment, coercion, interference, restriction, or any other practices prohibited by law,” said a bulletin from CUPE during the negotiation phase. “This demonstrates your ongoing commitment to fighting against oppression and recognizes that many students and education workers within the University of Toronto are impacted by caste politics and caste-based discrimination in their workplaces, classrooms, and communities.”

“This creates an inclusive and equitable environment and campus for all; that is our larger goal,” said Shibi Laxman Kumaraperumal, a fourth-year PhD scholar at U of T’s History department,teacher’s assistant, and union-side bargaining committee member who pushed for the amendment. “By doing this, we are actually beginning anti-caste conversations in the university environments in Canada. We encourage other trade unions to take it up as well.”

While many in the community are pleased with this step to curtail discrimination, that doesn’t hold true for everyone. Efforts to incorporate anti-caste measures in various North American jurisdictions have faced opposition from some Hindu organizations, which argue that such measures could lead to Hinduphobia. The term “Hinduphobia,” as outlined in petition E-4507, tabled at the House of Commons in December 2023 and meant to specifically address and define the discrimination faced by Hindus in Canada, refers to prejudice, discrimination, or hostility toward Hindu people, culture, or religion, including the association of casteism with Hinduism.

The U.S. has seen initiatives to combat caste discrimination, notably in Seattle, Washington, which became the first U.S. city to prohibit caste discrimination in 2023. Some members of the diaspora resisted, though, and they also resisted the introduction of an anti-caste discrimination bill in California, expressing concerns about the implications for the Hindu community.

Similarly, in Canada, some Hindu groups have called for a Hinduphobia bill, arguing that caste discrimination is not prevalent and that legislation against caste discrimination could unfairly target the Hindu community. Still, across the country, jurisdictions are taking steps to combat caste-based discrimination. The Ontario Human Rights Commission recognizes it now. Similarly, the city of Burnaby, B.C. voted unanimously to include caste as a protected category in its code of conduct, and Brampton, Ontario’s city council voted unanimously to take steps to add caste-based discrimination to its anti-discrimination policy.

It’s a more complex issue than it seems, and initiatives to combat anti-caste discrimination in Canada and the U.S. are in the early stages. But the efforts being made at U of T point to the need to unpack it, and to implement change at an institutional level.

Collage by Valerie Thai

Isabella Calahoo-Zeller was attending eighth grade in Alberta when she received sex education for the first time. It consisted of a YouTube video about consent, and not much else. “We didn’t really get much on what a penis looks like, or what a vulva looks like,” Calahoo-Zeller says. “We never got the birth video that you hear so much about. So for me, I was like, what is this?”

Calahoo-Zeller is one of many young people in Alberta, and across Canada, who have been left wanting more from the sex ed experience offered in schools. Research by the Sex Information & Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN) has shown that 82.5 percent of young people across Canada see sex ed as a basic right for all.

These results come at a time when political and popular support for sex education seems to be shifting. Across the country, some parents, who claim to be advocating for parental rights, have been extremely vocal in their distaste for comprehensive sex ed, especially content focused on 2SLGBTQIA+ identities. According to Statistics Canada, about four percent of the population identifies as 2SLGBTQIA+. This means that if queer and trans-related content is left out of sex ed, many young Canadians won’t be receiving essential information about their health.

In Alberta, Saskatchewan, and New Brunswick, trans and nonbinary young people’s rights in the education space are on a backslide. New policies by the United Conservative Party, the Saskatchewan Party, and the Progressive Conservative Party respectively around the use of changed names and pronouns, as well as sex-ed access, are increasing the number of hoops through which young people have to jump to be recognized as their authentic selves and access resources made to support them.

“You’re already struggling in surviving to be yourself. How can you ask for help when the help doesn’t want to help you, right? I think it’s really a struggle right now being a trans person,” says Calahoo-Zeller, who is Two Spirit.

The benefits of receiving comprehensive sexuality education have been proven by science, and they’re not just about healthy and safe sex. From a violence prevention perspective, sex ed is key because it builds knowledge and understanding of bodily autonomy. It can be the first place children who are being abused learn that what’s happening to them is not okay. The health and safety aspect of sexuality education is essential, but that’s no less true of learning about gender identity, self-expression, and the full spectrum of human relationships.

“Historically, sexual health education focused on issues related to problem prevention. It has been focused on the needs of heterosexual, cisgender, white youth primarily, and focused on preventing unwanted pregnancies and preventing sexually transmitted infections,” says Jessica Wood, research and project development lead at SIECCAN. “It’s really important to understand that sexual education is not just learning about safer sex and reproduction, but should be a comprehensive approach to learning about sexuality and bodies and relationships, personal and interpersonal well-being, gender and sexual diversity, and values and rights.”

Because education falls under provincial jurisdiction, sex ed experiences are known to vary widely across Canada. Approaches can differ even between classrooms in the same school, as educators have different levels of comfort and training in delivering this knowledge. This means some students get all of the details, while others are left in an unfortunate state of ignorance. And it’s not just their own openness to the topic that educators must negotiate with: the volume of anti-trans rights rhetoric can also affect the classroom.

But, according to Janani Suthan, the comprehensive sexuality education program coordinator at the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the perception that support for comprehensive sex ed is decreasing isn’t always rooted in reality. “The majority of parents, in the grand scheme of things in Canada, are supportive of their children learning about their sexual health in schools, and learning it holistically and comprehensively,” they say. “But the people that are against this are very loud and very proud about it, and are mobilizing.”

Wood also says it’s a small minority of people who are actually against students learning this critical information. Advocacy against comprehensive sex ed, led by groups like 1 Million March 4 Children and Parents for Choice in Education, are often well organized and well funded. Religious and political interest groups have a strong hand in the work of such organizations.

The spread of misinformation and disinformation about sex ed on social media has contributed to the movement. “And so when we hear about this often, it may seem as if more people are not supportive of comprehensive sex ed,” Wood explains. “We find that a lot of people actually are, but we just don’t hear that coverage as much.”

This disproportionate coverage of dissenting voices leads to the spread of myths about sexual health, sex education, and queer and trans experiences. “They don’t want youth to know about gender, [or] sex,” says Suthan. “They are fearful of youth having knowledge, of youth having skills to understand themselves better.”

If queer and trans experiences aren’t taught as part of sex ed curriculum, that leaves young people vulnerable. Since sex ed is a health and safety issue, it is reasonable to expect that all students should have equal access to it. “It’s suicide prevention, it’s mental health care. It’s everything, because a lot of issues end up linking to sexuality and relationships,” Suthan says. “It’s very much necessary for everybody.”

For those who are supportive of sex ed in the classroom, it has never been more important to speak up for young people’s right to access information. “If you can advocate, advocate. If you can’t, that’s okay,” says Suthan. “Show up for your kid.”

Sharing knowledge with young people can help to build acceptance and understanding, some of the most important parts of living a fulfilled life. “Community is where I found more information on being Two Spirit,” says Calahoo-Zeller. “You get to understand yourself and also other people… we don’t have secrets. There’s nothing to hide.”

Art by Valerie Thai

Ronnie Riley learned through social media that their first novel was facing censorship. Riley was scrolling late one evening when they saw what appeared to be a leaked school memo. Their middle-grade book about a non-binary pre-teen named Jude was one of four 2SLGBTQIA+ books that Ontario’s Waterloo Catholic District School Board was trying to get out of students’ hands.

The book wasn’t explicitly banned, but there were enough hurdles for kids to access the novel that Danny Ramadan, the chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, called the decision a “shadow ban” in an interview with the Toronto Star. (Ramadan’s book Salma Writes a Book, part of his children’s series about a young immigrant, was also challenged by the school board.)

Riley, whose work so far is most prominent in the Canadian children’s literary scene, says that while they anticipated having some issues in the U.S., it’s difficult to acknowledge that Canada is not immune to book bans. “In the States…they’re more vocal,” Riley says. “But I do believe that it’s happening in Canada, just very quietly.”

Advocacy groups in the U.S.—Parents’ Rights in Education, Citizens Defending Freedom and Moms for Liberty are three of the most vocal organizations—represent a growing trend of censorship there. By re-framing language as advocating for parental rights rather than literary censorship, groups like these have been able to successfully ban books. This harms children by suppressing their ability to access information, though advocacy groups often claim that they’re trying to protect children from explicit and inappropriate materials. And, though in its characteristically slower, slightly quieter way, the same has been happening in Canada, with an increase in book ban requests here in recent years.

It’s not just these authors’ books that are at risk. Without them, children have fewer opportunities to learn about other people and customs, and about themselves. Children’s education and exposure to different ways of life are under threat, and public libraries may be, too.

*

In the U.S., recent data from the American Library Association (ALA) found that “[books] targeted for censorship at public libraries grew by 92 percent from 2022 to 2023,” and “47 percent of challenged materials represent the voices and experiences of those in the LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC community.” In Texas, 578 books were banned in the 2021-22 school year, 424 in Pennsylvania, and 401 in Florida.

Moms For Liberty, a so-called parental rights group that reports having over 130,000 members, has often made the news due to its continuous calls to ban children’s books in libraries and schools across the country. In July 2023, they were successful in getting five books banned across Leon County schools in Tallahassee, Florida. The books had characters dealing with HIV, sexual assault, leukemia, and life after death.

While parental calls to ban books aren’t always successful, the ones that are can set off a political ripple effect for other parts of the country. “What we know to be true in several states is that they’ve been following each other in a race to the bottom about how many books you can ban in how many different ways,” says John Chrastka, executive director and founder of EveryLibrary, a non-profit political action organization focused on fighting book bans in the U.S.

Chrastka references data from the Unpacking 2023 Legislation of Concern for Libraries report, created by EveryLibrary to examine the status of bills in the U.S. aiming to censor access to books in both school and public libraries. Chrastka says that EveryLibrary was able to track that some bills, despite being in different states, were using the same language as one another to ban books. “That cut and paste job—that copycat—is sometimes very explicit,” he says. “And sometimes it’s based on the intent of the law: how can we make it easier to call a book criminal, call a book obscene, call a book harmful?”

There’s a clear “feedback loop,” Chrastka says, between groups like Moms For Liberty and politicians when it comes to banning books, meaning that citizen organizations and political leaders are influencing each other. “It is a witch’s brew of interest groups that are utilizing a fairly soft target—public libraries—which are intended to be, under law, under Supreme Court precedent, public forums, and the materials are available for all—as long as they’re legal,” he says. “If you can say that those books about those human beings are obscene or criminal or harmful, you can make an attack on those populations by proxy, whether it’s LGBTQ or Black and Brown communities.”

When libraries refuse to remove books from their shelves, parents sometimes push to remove their funding altogether in retaliation. Chrastka says that while not every library will lose funding from continuing to stock challenged books, there have been and continue to be states where this is the case. In Alabama, a legislative code change, enacted this past May, made $6.6 million in state funding for public libraries contingent on their compliance with the Alabama Public Library Service Board’s guidelines about restricting access to books deemed inappropriate for certain ages.

This isn’t just happening in southern states. In Michigan, the Patmos Library nearly lost 84 percent of its funding after the town’s residents voted twice that taxpayer money shouldn’t support the library as long as it continued to supply 2SLGBTQIA+ books. But library staff would not remove the books, and after a third vote, the library will remain open.

When asked whether parental requests for libraries to censor 2SLGBTQIA+ materials could lead to budget concerns, the ALA told This Magazine in a written statement that while they don’t have national data to validate this correlation, they felt this outcome was unlikely: “Although it is challenging to quantify, these incidents emphasize the ongoing importance of defending libraries as vital community resources,” the statement reads.

As Chrastka says, though, “This is not a casual social interaction. This is a political movement.” It’s a movement that’s travelling north of the border, and in an unprecedented way.

*

Fully banning a book in Canada is a tough task, and it’s not always clear how it can be done. Public libraries, though funded by municipalities, are run by independent boards which have jurisdiction over the contents of their shelves. Libraries usually respond to disputes by following their challenge policies or request for reconsideration policies. In Canadian schools, the process for vetting books often involves the board developing selection methods through training with librarians, and then trusting librarians to implement those methods. Curricula are set by provinces, and teachers decide how best to meet the curricula. It’s not the role of school boards to police individual books, though parents sometimes appeal to them in attempts to bypass any formal selection and reconsideration processes that boards entrust librarians to follow. When these policies do not exist—and they often don’t—it’s often board members and administrators who end up handling the issue and responding to parental pressures.

Shadowbanning, though, is easier to accomplish. It can include what happened to Riley, where their book was moved to a shelf inaccessible by students and “a teacher must provide the Catholic context” before students are allowed to borrow the book. Basically, citizens and school districts are finding other ways to get books out of people’s hands rather than outright banning them. In the words of Fin Leary, the program manager at We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit organization focused on making the publishing industry more diverse, the goal is to “not have them seen as often.” He says it’s much harder to fight this kind of censorship.

Regardless of whether or not a book is challenged in a public library or a school, book bans affect both readers and authors. A November 2023 statement from the Ontario Library Association said that a diverse representation of books helps students “learn how to navigate differences and develop critical awareness of their environments.” The largest worry, according to Canadian School Libraries, is that groups calling for censorship in the U.S. will continue to inspire Canadians to use similar organization tactics.

According to data from the Canadian Library Challenges Database (CLCD), Canadian libraries facing the most calls for censorship are the Edmonton Public Library (143 requests), the Ottawa Public Library (127 requests) and the Toronto Public Library (101 requests). While the database has information from as early as 1998, some libraries have only reported censorship requests from recent years.

Michael Nyby, the chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations, said in an article published on Freedom To Read’s website that library challenges from September 2002 to August 2023 represent the highest number ever recorded in Canada in a twelve-month period. According to data from the CLCD, books and events with 2SLGBTQIA+ content made up 38 percent of all challenges in 2022. (Between 2015 to 2021, less than 10 percent of all challenges were connected to 2SLGBTQIA+ matters.) Books surrounding sexual content (19 percent) and racism (16 percent) made up the next highest percentages. The influence of library censorship in the U.S. also extends to books on drug use, abuse, violence, grief, and death.

Though Riley’s novel’s shadow ban was overturned after public outcry, concerns about a rise in book censorship in Canada, and calls to defund in the event that it doesn’t happen, aren’t without reason. At the Prairie Rose School Division (PRSD), a Manitoba-based school board, 11 requests for books to be banned were made in just 2023. Among them were 2SLGBTQIA+ books like Juno Dawson’s This Book is Gay. Dawson, who spent seven years working as a sex-ed teacher, described the nonfiction book as “essentially a textbook.” Each chapter of the book focuses on a different aspect of queer life, including definitions of 2SLGBTQIA+ identities, the history of HIV/AIDS, and sex. The book also addresses the importance of queer dating apps and using sexual protection. According to the PRSD, parents proposed banning this book (among multiple others) for reasons of pornography— though the book teaches children about bodies, and is not pornography. The school board said there was “some connection with the Concerned Citizens Canada Twitter account,” but not whether the parents proposing the ban were part of the group, which self-describes as “addressing sexually explicit materials being made available to children in our public libraries.” Still, the group’s account falsely tweeted that This Book is Gay was encouraging minors to solicit sex from adults on Grindr. The school board did not end up removing Dawson’s book (or the others proposed in the ban), but Concerned Citizens Canada is just one of many social and political groups that continue to advocate for book censorship.

In the summer of 2022, Manitoba’s South Central Regional Library was also pressured to remove three books about puberty and consent from shelves. Residents protested a library board meeting, flooded city council meetings, and said public library funding should be removed if the books weren’t, calling them “child pornography.” However, both Cathy Ching, the library services director, and local city councillor Marvin Plett both denied these claims. “Calling books pornographic does not make it so,” Plett said at a Winkler council meeting in July 2023. “Censuring books based on content that some find objectionable can have far-reaching and unintended implications.”

Around the same time, in Chilliwack, B.C., the RCMP were called to investigate after books there were reported for alleged child pornography in schools, too. Also in 2023, library picture books about gender in Red Deer, Alberta were vandalized. A page about using a singular “they” pronoun for nonbinary people was ripped out, according to a news report from the Red Deer Advocate.

Though the case in Chilliwack was dismissed and the books in Red Deer were replaced, parents’ calls to defund the Manitoba library if certain books aren’t removed echoes bills proposed by American lawmakers stressing that libraries should lose funding if bans aren’t enacted. And while books aren’t being overtly removed from shelves in Canada very often, there are other, sometimes more insidious impacts this attitude is having on queer and racialized youth.

*

The Toronto Public Library (TPL) is Canada’s largest public library system. When asked about whether groups like those in the U.S. seeking to defund libraries for not removing 2SLGBTQIA+ material could affect what happens in Toronto, the media team at TPL said in an emailed statement that its budget is not affected by these groups. “We are governed by a library board and while our budget is ultimately approved by City Council, our materials selection is governed by our Board policies,” the email reads.

TPL’s Intellectual Freedom Challenges – 2023 Annual Report states that none of the requests to remove books from its shelves were successful that year. However, the same report also acknowledges that there are other issues at play. “TPL has experienced objections to 2SLGBTQ+ content outside of the formal request for reconsideration process, with opposition to Drag Queen Story Time programs at five branches and protests at three of them; damage to Progress Pride decals at eight branches; vandalized Pride Celebration displays at two branches; and vandalized 2SLGBTQ+ books at one branch.”

Historical book banning represents violence and censorship. Current book bans, though they may be disguised as parental rights, are more of the same. Vandalism of Pride displays at TPL is another form of violence, and while it may not be physical in nature, it has lasting effects that can harm queer youth for years beyond the act itself.

Banning queer and trans people’s books sends the message that these folks shouldn’t exist, at least not publicly. Ideas like these contribute to the state of widespread violence against them. Recent data from Statistics Canada found that around two thirds of 2SLGBTQIA+ Canadians had experienced physical or sexual violence. However, this number could be much higher: data from the same report found that around 80 percent of physical assaults against this group within the year prior to the survey didn’t “[come] to the attention of the police.”

Many 2SLGBTQIA+ people also struggle with feelings of suicidality. In the U.S., data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that 29 percent of trans youth have attempted suicide. In Canada, researchers at the University of Montreal and Egale Canada reported that 36 percent of trans people in Ontario experience feelings of suicidal ideation. Systemic discrimination, erasure, and invalidation contributes to this, and book banning is part of this wider package of behaviours that harms the community.

Canadian author Robin Stevenson was interviewed for PEN Canada about her children’s rhyming picture books, Pride Colors and Pride Puppy!, being targeted by the recent wave of book censorship in the U.S. and Canada. “Book banners say that they want to protect children, but they are doing real harm to the very children they claim to protect,” Stevenson said, explaining that “learning to hate yourself was far more dangerous than any book could ever be.”

Leary says that removing these types of books from libraries can send a message to publishers: if they notice that titles aren’t making it to school libraries or are banned, it could discourage them from publishing and promoting them. “As much as the book bans are horrifying, they also are so much scarier when you consider the larger context of why they’re happening—because it’s to legislate folks out of existence, or to legislate folks out of having an education about these topics.”

*

Representation matters because it helps reduce stereotypes. Books with diverse representation are vital. They can help teach empathy and understanding, while also showing readers that they aren’t alone in their experiences. Diverse books also teach a fuller picture of history, sharing stories previously overlooked. They are a key aspect of a well-rounded education.

While it is a terrifying moment for queer and racialized writers, authors are not silencing themselves as a result of the pushback. Protecting their work from the possibility of being banned, though, will take a concerted effort on the part of anyone hoping to support them.

Riley believes that the shadow ban of their novel at the Waterloo Catholic District School Board was only overturned because of statements from not only their publisher, but other authors as well. They say they had a sound support system, and that helped.

That kind of unified support is crucial to fostering an environment that permits the continuation of freedom in publishing. Leary says that from an advocacy standpoint, parents opposing book censorship have the most power when they stick together. “Our voices are stronger when we are collectively organizing, and it also kind of allows parents to have each other to lean on,” he says. One way to do this is by communicating with school board members and going to community meetings that include opportunities to speak to these issues.

Riley keeps their final advice to anyone passionate about this issue simple and blunt. “Keep speaking out,” they say. “Keep making sure that books get into the hands of kids—especially queer books.”

Art by Valerie Thai

Robin had been ready to start school for a year. On the first day, she was prepared, wearing a blue dress with pink hearts and carrying a giant backpack that tugged at her mother’s heart.

Robin’s parents both came to drop her off. As they left, they waved goodbye to their oldest child and called out: “Ona!” Goodbye in Mohawk. Robin wasn’t starting at just any elementary school. She was starting at a Mohawk language immersion school, or more specifically, the Language Nest program, Totáhne, run by Tsi Tyónnheht Onkwawén:na (TTO), the Language and Cultural Centre in Tyendinaga.

“It was a really good feeling,” Robin’s mom, Alyssa Bardy, says, smiling when she remembers that morning. “To drop her off, and say hello and greet the teachers in Mohawk.”

TTO was established in 2000, by a group of community members concerned with the revitalization of the Mohawk language in Tyendinaga. The name means keeping the words alive. Their services include a Mohawk immersion elementary school and an adult learning program. For the youngest community members, there’s the nursery program, or Language Nest, which includes language learning, culture-based learning, and lots of outdoor play.

Bardy is Upper Cayuga of Six Nations and mixed settler. She belongs to Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte (she’s also my cousin—we’re related through our Dutch-Canadian mothers). She and her husband, Markus, decided to send Robin to the TTO because “it’s kind of a way that we can take back the parts of our culture that were taken away from us,” Bardy says. “On my dad’s side, we have family members who did attend residential school. Specifically we have stories in our family in which, at the residential schools, children were punished physically for speaking the language.”

That’s the fire that motivates her, Bardy says, in terms of putting her daughter into Mohawk language immersion school today. “It’s kind of a way to show honour to those people before us, who had a language, which is a key element to culture, taken away… It’s like an act of reclamation.” It’s particularly special because Robin is the first generation in Bardy’s family that’s been able to immerse herself in it. “To me, there’s nothing more important than being able to take [the language] back,” Bardy says.

Bardy’s watched her daughter thrive in the new school, absorbing words and bringing them home for the rest of the family to learn. Alyssa and Markus are planning to keep her in Mohawk language immersion. But currently, the TTO only offers up to Grade 4. After that, Robin will have to switch to a different school. There’s currently no school near the family that offers Mohawk language immersion from kindergarten to Grade 12. For Robin’s family, and for other Indigenous families reclaiming what’s theirs, this causes a very real concern: if their children have to leave immersion school, will they retain the language they’ve learned up to that point—or lose it?

*

Over the past couple of decades, many Indigenous groups have been pushing hard for language preservation. Grassroots movements have tried to match the demand from parents and communities for schools that offer language programming. There have been tremendous successes, such as the creation of community led, non-profit organizations across Ontario, like TTO. In Six Nations, Kawenní:io/Gawení:yo Private School (KGPS) recently received their high school accreditation—it’s the only school in Canada that offers Cayuga and Mohawk languages from kindergarten to Grade 12. Some communities have found strength in collaboration, like the First Nations with Schools Collective, a group of eight First Nations in Ontario who work together with the aim of achieving “full control of our lifelong-learning education systems, including schools on reserve.”

Data from Statistics Canada shows that for the 2021-2022 school year (the most recent year for which data is available), there were 59,355 students in Indigenous language programs in public elementary and secondary schools in Canada. An additional 8,238 students were in Indigenous language immersion programs. These numbers do not include private schools. However, whether public or private, nearly all of these schools face challenges, including a lack of first-language speakers, space and funding, and curriculum resources.

“If you want to run an immersion school, you have to be ready to take on a number of things,” says Neil Debassige, an education expert from M’Chigeeng First Nation. He joins the Zoom call smiling, with a long beard, baseball cap, and glasses, sitting in a wood-panelled room. He’s spent his career in First Nations education systems, including as a kindergarten student in one of the earliest immersion programs, and later as a teacher and principal at that same school, Lakeview Elementary School. He ran an immersion program there which he describes as “relatively successful.”

When looking at how education systems are developed, and what they need to be successful, Debassige says they really need to answer four key questions:

1.) Are we clear in what our learners need to know and demonstrate in order to meet our sovereign definition of success?

2.) Are we clear in how students are going to demonstrate their learning?

3.) Are we clear in their response when they don’t learn it?

4.) Are we clear in how the community privileges education?

But even when these questions can be answered, Debassige says, immersion schools are a contentious issue in many communities. “It’s not because people don’t think it’s important,” he says, but because “this colonized process of this system that we’re in, it operates on a divide-and-conquer approach. So if communities can be divided in terms of what they think is important in their education system, it’s easier to defeat them.”

Debassige talks about deprivation theory, how people have been conditioned through dependency and the idea that there’s not enough to go around. When grassroots language programs emerge, they might be seen as competition to mainstream schools on reserves. He says those schools, which follow the Ontario curriculum and receive government funding, are severely underfunded, “but at least it’s some first-level funding.”

Starting an immersion school, Debassige says, means taking on the challenge of being underresourced, and fighting for financial support. While schools on reserve (which may offer Indigenous language programming) can receive government funding, immersion schools, similar to private schools, may not be eligible for the same amount. Their funding can come from a variety of sources, including government grants, community fundraising, or other organizations. The TTO, for example, has received funding through the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians (AIAI), the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte band council (MBQ), and through the province’s Ontario Trillium Commission.

Yet numerous studies show that students who are exposed to a language in an immersive way will exhibit higher levels of fluency. “If you want to get good at something fast, you need to be immersed,” Debassige says. “That makes perfect sense.” But he says it can be a hard choice for parents to decide to put a child in a grassroots language school, especially a newly founded one. If it’s an immersion school, Debassige says, and parents know that they’re underfunded, they have to consider whether they’re willing to risk the chances of their child not having access to equal sports opportunities, special education, and more.

Debassige says he’d rather describe the schools as bilingual or trilingual. The connotations of bilingual programs and students are more positive. Even so, there’s a level of uncertainty with these programs. “We’re not sure if they’re going to work,” Debassige says.

Today, Debassige runs a couple of tourism businesses, including captaining a chartered boat to take people fishing, renting cottages, and co-hosting a TV show that’s produced on the reserve and airs nationally. These are his passions, but he’s still involved in education work through his own consulting business. They do school evaluations, appraisals of principals, and capacity development. It’s obvious that he cares deeply about language schools, but it’s also obvious that the work comes with a great deal of challenge. I ask what keeps him in it, and he softens a little.

“I have a stake in it,” he says. “I’m a parent. I have two daughters.” One goes to McMaster University, and the other is in Grade 12. “We wanted them to be the kids that were the top Ojibwe language students and the valedictorian of their class, and they were that every year,” he says. Proudly, he tells me that when she graduated, his daughter was the first ever Indigenous valedictorian at her provincial high school. “They were proof that it could be done.”

Debassige says the same is possible for every First Nation kid, if they’re dealt a better hand. “You know, if the system supports that, then I think we can get to fluency and I think—we can do literacy in our language, and be literate in English as well at the end of Grade 8. I honestly think that.”

*

Cyndie Wemigwans is a fluent Nishnaabemwin speaker from Dooganing (South Bay) Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory. She’s had a varied career: she worked as a chef and as a mechanic before accepting a job as an interpreter at Rainbow District School Board. Recognizing a need for first-language teachers, the board encouraged her to become a certified teacher, and she went through Nipissing University to get her Teacher of Indigenous Language as A Second Language certificate. Now, she’s a teacher at the Wiikwemkoong Board of Education.

Wemigwans teaches her students with Nishnaabemwin immersion, speaking to them about 40 percent in Nishnaabemwin and 60 percent in English at the start of the school year, and shifting toward 80 percent Nishnaabemwin and 20 percent English by the end. She notices a difference between the way she teaches compared to second-language teachers in the school. “I find a lot of teachers are afraid— they’re teaching the curriculum, but they want to infuse the Nishnaabemwin in with the curriculum, but they’re kind of lost on how to go about it.”

Conversely, it can also be tricky for first-language speakers who don’t have teaching experience to teach the language. “For them it’s a little bit difficult, like how to teach the kids, the language itself…It’s hard to find people that have both experience in a school setting and the language.”

In her first year teaching, just before Christmas break, Wemigwans remembers putting her students to the test, asking them to build sentences out of everything they’d learned up to that point. They aced it. Watching them converse in Nishnaabemwin, Wemigwans says, “I had tears coming down. I’ve given them that sentence structure, how to figure out what’s animate, inanimate, the endings… and they understood it. They didn’t have to really think so hard because they understood it.”

Wemigwans says that for her, passing her language on to generations to come is important because “that’s who we are.” She has three kids, including a seven-year-old daughter who is fluent in Nishnaabemwin. “How I explain that to my little one is, when I move on from this world to the next world, if you’re speaking English… I’m not going to understand you,” Wemigwans says. “It’s important that my children speak the language, so that I can still communicate with them.”

Bardy says that the schools play such an important role not only for children, but also for their families. Last January, the Bardys went to a Midwinter Ceremony, a social celebration hosted by Robin’s school to celebrate the beginning of midwinter, an important time of year in the Haudenosaunee calendar. When they got there, Robin and one of her school friends saw each other from across the longhouse. Her friend greeted Robin with her Mohawk name, and the two ran to each other and embraced. The interaction happened completely in Mohawk.

“It was so cool,” Bardy says, “to see that was the first way she was acknowledged, by her Mohawk name, and how Robin responded to that. So inspiring.” Bardy says it’s hard to say at this age how the language might be benefitting her daughter, but “there’s definitely a confidence there.”

“She’s not a shy girl, she’s not afraid to correct us if we say something wrong, or if we say something in English and she feels like it should be said in Mohawk,” Bardy says. “I think it’s instilling a sense of pride in who she is, as maybe a potential language speaker.”

Bardy says the schools play a vital role in reconnecting families to their language and parts of their culture. She worries about Robin losing what she’s learned after immersion school. “We’re going to have to dig deep as a family and do the work to sustain it, and surround ourselves with people who know the languages, and make sure we have everything in place, all the resources that we can possibly have.”

“My biggest fear about that is that we don’t make it a habit of our daily life,” Bardy says, “And it slips away from us.” Though some schools, like Robin’s, currently only offer immersion for younger grades, this could change in the future as First Nations communities, families, parents, and schools continue working to expand. Expansion could include everything from offering more grade levels to expanding their resources and programming. Some parents are just trying to get an immersion school near them.

“We need immersion schools in our communities,” says Tracy Cleland. Cleland is from Wiikwemkoong, Ontario. She’s passionate about the Ojibwe language and was involved in a language nest nearby, Nawewin Gamik, that was started by local elders. Nawewin Gamik ran for about four years, Cleland says, and during that time they had well over 300 attendees, in addition to seven kids and their parents who were there every day. It was forced to close last year due to a lack of funding. Though there are schools that offer a lot of language classes, “it’s not a hundred percent immersion,” Cleland says. “If there was [an Ojibwe school] built in Toronto or something, I literally would move there just to get it. That’s how important I feel it is,” Cleland says. “I’m so close to moving to Wisconsin cause they do have one.” She stresses the importance of dedicated funding for creating immersion schools. “And not just short-term funding—you can’t get things done in a year or six months.”

Part of Debassige’s consulting work with the First Nations with Schools Collective has included developing a new funding formula. They’re trying to negotiate with the federal government to advocate for better access to quality programming. By lobbying for more provincial and federal money, Indigenous language immersion schools could continue doing their work and expand to serve more children. Some schools have also had success at community fundraising, but this can be hard to sustain long term. In the meantime, communities and families are left to find ways to teach their language to the next generations.

*

Testimony from Indigenous communities and a growing body of research speaks to the benefits of learning ancestral languages. Language experts say that maintaining Indigenous languages in early childhood helps to preserve culture and identity. Losing the language impacts an entire community’s well-being.

For Bardy, having her daughter learn Mohawk is about something much bigger. “Aside from knowing the language itself, I want [Robin] to know how the language ties into who she is as a Onkwehón:we,” Bardy says. Onkwehón:we translates to original people. Languages can also be a way to share knowledge systems and to shape people’s worldview and relationships with the land. “One word in Mohawk can be like a sentence in English,” Bardy says. “So I want her to have an appreciation of how descriptive and flowery and beautiful the language is, and how it ties into our place in the natural world and here on earth and as Onkwehón:we and as caretakers of the land.”

Robin is now in her second year in the Totáhne. Last autumn, her younger brother also started at the Language Nest, learning more of the Mohawk language along with his sister. He already had a handful of words when he started, thanks to Robin bringing them home.

Their experience with the immersion school so far has been incredible, Bardy says, and she’s really grateful to have that resource in their community. “Watching your child thrive and flourish in the language, it gives me so much pride,” she says. “When you go outside or you’re looking at a book, and your daughter tells you the name of something in Mohawk, it’s a really special moment.”

“Those bits of culture that were taken away—to me, that reclamation is one of the number one priorities in raising my kids. The schools are an extension of how families and Onkwehón:we can take back what was taken away so many years ago.”

Editor’s note: Robin’s name has been changed to protect her privacy 

LEARNING MORE

Want more information about Indigenous language education? Here are some places you can start:

First Nations with Schools Collective

Kingston Indigenous Languages Nest

Six Nations Language Commission

Woodland Cultural Centre

When Derek Brougham was a member of the University of Ottawa’s varsity track and field team, they regularly searched for scholarships for queer athletes. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t find a single one.

Brougham, who uses both he and they pronouns, is no longer on the team. “I never felt like I quite fit in. No one was ever rude to me, but there was a certain sense that I was being tolerated rather than accepted and celebrated.”

Retirement is one of the most difficult things an athlete can experience. Unlike an office job, an athletic career can become someone’s social life, form of exercise, job and escape. So what happens when athletes no longer compete? “[Track] was really such a huge part of my identity for so long that when I retired I wasn’t fully ready to give it up,” Brougham says.

Post-retirement, athletes must bridge the divide between who they were while playing sports and who they are without sports. For Brougham, this period of seeking led to his eventual foray into drag. “Representation is one of the most important and impactful ways to make change,” he says. “To me, drag is just the queerest part of queer culture, so I thought it made sense to do that and bring it to sport.”

Brougham brought drag “to sport” by merging their love of track with their interest in drag. They named their alter ego Deca Thlon, an ode to their chosen track event. Thlon made her debut as a drag performer in June 2022, during Pride Month.

After years of being out and encouraging various organizations to support and engage with Pride, Brougham decided it was time to do something about the utter lack of athletes. So in her first month of work, Thlon collected all of her booking fees and tips to put toward a queer athletic scholarship. “I decided that I really wanted to make that change and offer that to someone,” Brougham says.

It was their first month doing drag, and they didn’t know how much they’d make. Their goal was to raise $500. They ended up exceeding their own expectations and making enough for two scholarships of $1,250 and $500 respectively. Those were awarded to Johnathan Frampton, a Nordic skier at Queen’s University, and Sienna MacDonald, a combined-events athlete in track at the University of Calgary.

Brougham plans to award scholarships again during this year’s Pride Month. June 2023 will be Thlon’s one-year anniversary as a performer, so she wants to throw a big celebration with the proceeds going toward her scholarship fund.

To Brougham, this marriage of interests represents taking up space and serving as a beacon for other queer athletes. Growing up, they remember seeing very few openly 2SLGBTQ+ athletes to look up to. “I can’t think of a single queer, gay or lesbian athlete that I could point out,” he recalls.

“I always found myself relating to women athletes more because it’s more about talent than just the brute strength in men’s athletics, which is not something I always associated with.”

Deca Thlon’s drag balances strength and femininity. She loves performing to Taylor Swift songs and even hosted a four-and-a-half-hour T. Swift-inspired show in the lead-up to the artist’s latest album release. Thlon also makes costumes for herself and other queens in the city, incorporating her love of sewing into her newfound art.

But the culmination of Deca Thlon’s mix of athleticism and drag, aside from her scholarship, is the monthly show she hosts at a local rock climbing gym, where Thlon scales climbing walls while performing songs like Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb.”

“[The] rock climbing drag is just the coolest thing in my mind—it just feels perfect because of what my drag is and what I’m trying to do,” Brougham says.

Moving forward, he hopes to encourage others to find themselves in similar ways by offering bigger scholarships to queer student athletes and increasing the number of scholarships available.

We practiced saying no in class. If a boy wants to have sex with you before you are married, you must be ready to steer the ship away from troubled waters.

If you loved me, you’d have sex with me. If you loved me, you’d know I was waiting. Why? We’re just having fun. I really like you. I like you too, enough to have respect for myself and my boundaries. This feels too good to stop. Well, we must.

Leave room for Jesus. I practiced in the mirror until my room went dark.

I grew up attending private evangelical Christian school, in Calgary, from Grades 1 through 12, on the basis that my education there would be more well-rounded. When your kid has ADHD and profound anxiety at an early age, sending them to the Christians just makes sense. My parents came from that early aughts holistic spirituality point of view—the Oprah way—and their faith was utterly distinct to themselves and certainly not in alignment with the militaristic and authoritative evangelical teachings of my youth. As the years passed, they struggled with me being in the school they’d once deemed the best fit, but once I had drunk the Kool-Aid, I couldn’t bring myself to leave, even though I was struggling too.

At evangelical Christian school, questions are not tolerated. Why would God allow suffering? Because. Why can’t science and faith coexist? Because. Why would God create gay people if it’s a sin? Because. Stop asking. By the time I graduated in 2014, I felt like my faith was radically different from that of the people around me, and I could not call myself a Christian anymore. But I couldn’t say I was agnostic or an atheist either. So what was I?

All that felt certain was the shame that had been drilled into me throughout my school years, right into my marrow. You are not worthy. You are disgusting. You are unholy. You are sinful. You are disruptive. You are disappointing. You are not your own.

They taught us that sex is for marriage, to have children. No exceptions. I didn’t even know what a condom looked like until I was well into adulthood. Pregnancy loomed its swelled shadow on my psyche from the time I learned what a period was: the body purging the unused eggs, each cell a soul. Tick, tick. Another egg wasted. Another soul wasted. Time is running out. Have a baby to experience what God designed you to do. This is your purpose on this earth.

They taught us women are cursed with pain because of Eve’s trespass. A shiny red apple, a ripe, plump, juicy pomegranate. All the blessings of God and man and she threw it away to know? For some fruit? Thus, pain in childbirth. Thus, pain from lack of child to birth. Thus, pain. She deserved it. You deserve it.

From the time I first felt that pain that defies all language in my abdomen, pain was with me wherever I went. Each month, I would keel over, stopping whatever I was doing to grit my teeth and wait until the stabbing—or radiating, or sharp, or throbbing—pain was over. I learned to accommodate this pain, let it dictate how much or how little I did. This was a practice well established at school, at church—the rare times I would go—to become one with your pain. The burden, the cross, to bear as a woman. Eve’s sin, your fall.

When I was older, I realized that outside my evangelical bubble, people didn’t respond to pain like it was a tool to sharpen belief. They didn’t use their pain as a badge of honour, or as a form of sacrament as I was taught to do. Pain was just a puzzle to solve—something that could be fixed, cured with a couple pills or a visit to a doctor. University exposed me to the reality of my pain, a chronic illness wrapped in the cloak of women’s penance, and gave me absolution. I take little white pills now, and my pain is manageable. It was the first time I realized that I had a body I could control. It was the first time I realized I had a body at all; not just a collection of parts that made me ashamed, lesser, worse. It was mine, and I should never have been taught that it wasn’t.

There is a concept in Christianity, born in the early 1990s—although some would argue that it gets its structure from the Bible itself—which has shaped contemporary evangelical Christian doctrine since. “Purity culture” refers to an ideology that “attempts to promote a biblical view of purity [following the example in] (1 Thess. 4:3-8) by discouraging dating and promoting virginity before marriage,” states Joe Carter, an associate pastor who writes about modern faith. According to Linda Kay Klein, an author and self-proclaimed “purity culture recovery coach,” central to this ideology is a belief in rigid gender roles, heteronormativity, nationalism and white supremacy, and the inherent sinfulness of women.

In 1992, the slogan “True Love Waits” was coined by Richard Ross, a youth minister consultant at LifeWay Christian Resources, a publishing conglomerate that prints Christian educational content. “True Love Waits” refers to the concept that waiting until marriage for sexual activity of any kind is the best choice for both parties, male and female, and is God’s design for sex.

“Waiting” can take on a variety of meanings, including abstinence from sex, but also kissing, hugging, and dating. The extremity of purity culture is exemplified in the television show 19 Kids and Counting in which the Quiverfull Duggar family didn’t allow their children to date without being accompanied by a parental chaperone. As a result, most of the kids married their first crush very young and all had their first kiss on their wedding day.

A few notes on the Duggars and how their commitment to purity culture played out: one, Quiverfull refers to the theological position of viewing large families as blessings from God and therefore actively denying and abstaining from all forms of birth control and instead encouraging procreation. Your family stops growing when God decides it stops growing. Two, while the Duggars are known for their religiosity, they became more famous still when it got out that their pedophile son, Josh Duggar, not only molested his younger siblings but also has been found guilty on charges of possession of child pornography. Furthermore, he was involved in the Ashley Madison infidelity dating website scandal of 2015, the same year the show went off the air after these allegations surfaced.

By 1997, the seminal text on purity culture was released, Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Harris proposed that dating should not be pursued by Christian teenagers. Instead, Harris proposes “courting,” which in his view, means utilizing group settings for getting to know someone. There is no room for experimentation or dating a variety of people or seeing what you like. You develop feelings for someone, and you get to know them in group settings until you decide to get married. You are not alone until your wedding night.

The success of I Kissed Dating Goodbye allowed purity culture to enter the mainstream. Now, thousands of teens were taking pledges to remain pure and going to purity balls and buying purity rings. They signed documents, conducted rituals, cried as they made a promise to God—and crucially, their earthly fathers—to remain “pure” until marriage. When Disney became privy to the growing purity industry, the network’s teen stars started wearing purity rings too. Stories about how cool the Jonas Brothers were for wearing their rings, or how Selena Gomez was also totally down to be celibate, permeated the culture. If Selena could do it, why couldn’t I? Why wouldn’t I?

Of course, pledging purity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The message’s central conceit, that it will lead to less sexual activity in teenagers and lower the rate of STIs in young people, turned out to be a fallacy.

In a national study conducted between 1995 and 2002—twenty years ago—in the U.S., 20,000 young people were asked to share details regarding their sexual health. The study found that 20 percent of those surveyed had taken a virginity pledge; some of those were consistent in their pledge, and others were labelled inconsistent due to their changing answers over the years. Crucially, 61 percent of consistent pledgers reported having sex before marriage or before their final interview in 2002. For the inconsistent pledgers, that number was 79 percent. When it came to STIs, almost 7 percent who didn’t make a pledge got diagnosed with one. For the inconsistent pledgers, the figure was 6.4 percent. For the consistent plegers, it was 4.6 percent. The authors of the study found the difference in those numbers to be statistically insignificant, and so do I.

The religious fervour in which an entire generation of young people vowed to remain celibate had virtually no real world benefits. In the U.S., this fervour was well-documented, with countless TV specials, balls, televangelist support, and mainstream media coverage. Here in Canada, however, it was more interior, private. We don’t have nearly the same pull the evangelicals have on mainstream American life, with their bombastic television personalities and church celebrities. Instead, Canadian evangelicals are more guarded, exclusive. Vague.

The trend in reframing purity culture as “pro-women” is almost unique to Canada. Take the Harper government’s handling of sex work, following the so-called “Nordic model,” which targets buyers over sellers under the guise of “protecting women”—even though the law still stigmatizes the sex worker. Or, how some Canadian evangelicals are reframing the abortion debate as one of sex-selective discrimination against girls. This frames anti-choice rhetoric as guarding women’s rights while reinforcing evangelical purity culture, through the lens of political engagement.

This engagement is in reality no more than political dog-whistles designed to strip away rights from women and queer Canadians, by presenting the former as vulnerable and in need of male protection and the latter as sinners making poor “lifestyle choices.” With the recent overturning of a supposed mainstay of American politics, Roe v. Wade, Canadians should do well to be reminded how tenuous our own rights are. As these evangelicals continue to spread their message under the guise of support for women, while peddling the very ideology that devalues women over men, the threat of puritanical politics becomes more accepted and expected in Canadian politics.

Purity culture relies on the understanding that to engage in sexual activity makes you less than. Sex takes something away from you, every time, that you cannot get back. I’ll explain it to you like it was explained to me: a glass of clean water has spoonfuls of dirt added to it; who wants to drink muddy water over a cold glass of pure, undiluted water? A piece of blue paper is glued to a piece of red paper. The papers are then ripped apart, leaving the residue of red on blue, blue on the red. Who the hell will want you when you are leaving traces of yourself on another person? A rose is passed around, crinkled, crunched, crumpled. When it makes its way back to the front of the classroom the teacher holds it out, proud to be making a point so clearly. Who wants this rose now?

This rose is worthless.

Purity culture creates a sense of specialness that isn’t there. A girl needs to be harnessed, possessed, dominated. She is dangerous. Should she know what she wants or come into her sexual power, she would be fearsome indeed. So, instead, make it clear to her: you have no value outside of what you can offer to a man. You are not your own. You do not belong to yourself. You belong to three men, and three men only. God, your father, and your husband, in that order.

The onus is placed on the girls to put the brakes on any and all potential sexual activity. And that’s the key right there—potential. Sexual activity doesn’t even need to be happening, just a chance that it might and therefore you need to be ready. When I was in the sixth grade, I had to sign a covenant with God and my school. Firstly, I committed to being covered up at all times; modesty is important. No leggings, no tank tops, no spaghetti straps, no low cut t-shirts, no skirts shorter than one inch above the knee, no bare legs, no dyed hair, no visible underwear lines, no visible bra lines, no jewellery, no tattoos, no heeled shoes. Although not strictly enforced, there was an understanding about cosmetics too: no lipstick, no eyeshadow, no foundation, no glitter, no eyeliner, no, no, no, no. Secondly, never be alone with a boy. Never sit next to a boy on a bus, never be alone in a room talking, never walk alone, never eat alone, never, never, never.

The result is a total and complete fetishization of yourself, your friendships, your relationships. The result is a total and complete disregard for same-sex attraction, for those who live outside the gender binary, for those who are attracted to all genders. The result, ironically, is creating an idol out of sex and sexual activity.

The hashtag #exvangelical started to gain traction in 2016, after the Trump election. All of a sudden, the floodgates were open and people started to tell their truths about growing up in this environment, and what it does to you.

As Chrissy Stroop, an #exvangelical activist stated to Bradley Onishi, a fellow exvangelical writer, “those who associate with #exvangelical on Twitter are going to be in the vast majority of cases liberal to left. People who were harmed by patriarchal politics because we were queer, women, people of colour.” Indeed, by 2016 it became clear the Church wasn’t protecting their flock of all nations; they were pruning and protecting those who fit the image they wanted to project, one born of whiteness. The anti LGBTQ2S+, racist and sexist belief systems touted by Trump were quietly (and sometimes not-so-quietly) endorsed by evangelical Canadians too. Indeed, after Trump was actually elected, chosen by the very people who preach love and acceptance, there became a stark Before and After
in my life and the life of my friends.

I saw people I used to know in school, and once respected, pledging their support for conversion therapy, anti-immigration policies, and white supremacy. My former principal sent out an email appealing for parents to contact their representatives in order to block the proposed conversion therapy ban in Calgary. In the U.S., white evangelicals prayed for Trump to be re-elected, and held fundraisers and pray-a-thons all for him. I no longer wanted anything to do with any of it. I stopped calling myself a Christian. I dropped the phrase “spiritual, but not religious” from my vocabulary. What used to be vaguely annoying now felt sinister to me.

In the eight years since I graduated, I’ve run into old classmates and realized they have been prompted into leaving as well. “I just couldn’t stand by anymore,” is the constant refrain. Friends I open up to refer me to therapists that specialize in religious trauma syndrome. Friends have stays in mental hospitals. Friends divorce their spouses when they discover they’ve actually been repressing their sexuality, their gender, or their politics. The more evangelical Christians become synonymous with republicanism, conservatism, fascism, the less we can stomach it. As Stroop tells Bradley Onishi in their interview, “being an ex-evangelical is inherently a political position.” It becomes one for me.

Last year, a friend and former schoolmate said something to me, as the leaves were just starting to turn ochre, that I have been turning over in my mind ever since.

“When you silence a girl’s agency, sexually, when you say that you have to say no—” she pauses here. Blinks. “Not even that you have to say no. I would frame it as you cannot say yes. That’s saying you cannot consent. Because your decision is made for you. And when that decision is made for you, that you cannot say yes? It makes it that much harder to say no.”

This is what purity culture took from me. I have trouble saying yes, making decisions on my own. I need input, to think for a while, to measure out every angle to make a decision. I rarely know how I feel. When people try to get to know me, I find it easy to throw up barriers, to stomp out any potential connection. I have trouble saying no. If someone is persistent, eager, controlling, and perseverant in their quest to make me do something, I will stop saying no around the third time. I will take the hurt. And every time I talk to the others, the other women just like me, the more I see the recognition in their eyes, and the pain in their voices, and I realize I am not alone.

Faith may be the prison of belief, but it can also be a way forward. Having faith in each other’s stories and experiences, having faith that we can and will heal from this, has saved me a thousand times over.
I am born again.

Published by BIPOC students and alumni, the letter documents specific instances of racism they had experienced at the school and outlines 30 calls to action. Chief among these calls was one to diversify faculty. In the first call to action, students and alumni said the school must hire more BIPOC faculty, specifically Black and Indigenous faculty, as well as collect and release demographic data, with a distinction between tenured and contract staff. Students and alumni said they created the calls to action, because, while consulted in the past through the school’s Equity and Inclusion committee, created in 2019, “serious steps toward reform have not been shared with us or made public.”

“Hiring practices have also not reflected changes that the school has expressed interest in making,” they added. In one section of the letter, BIPOC students and alumni also anonymously shared anecdotal experiences within the program. It reflected the significance of having racialized faculty in the program, especially in permanent positions: for most racialized students and alumni, it was a matter of better education through greater representation.

“Before joining Carleton’s journalism school, I asked a recently graduated white student about the racial makeup of the program’s faculty,” one of them recalled in the letter. “They asked me why on earth that mattered. This is why it matters.” Students and alumni also shared the harm some of them experienced at the hands of existing faculty in the program, much of which was white until the calls to action were released. “A professor shouted a religious slur at me in an attempt to make a joke,” one of them wrote in the letter. “Once, in a fourth-year Indigenous reporting class, the professor told me racism is simply not real and an excuse,” another shared. “If you thought you saw something as racism or a source said something was due to racism, you’re just not doing a good job as a journalist.”

In the two years since the calls to action were released, the program has brought in almost a dozen sessional instructors of colour and three tenure-track faculty, including high-profile Black journalists Nana aba Duncan and Adrian Harewood. Tobin Ng, a Carleton journalism student entering their third year at the time, says the calls to action were created “out of that frustration.” They elaborated that there “was this desire to just create a really comprehensive document that would basically outline all the things that students had been calling for again and again. There’s the emotional labour of having to repeat [ourselves], and just demand the same things without seeing concrete results,” they said.

Two years since they helped write the calls to action, Ng says the school’s response to the letter, especially through the steps it has taken to diversify faculty in the program, has finally made them hopeful. “I think that the hiring of new faculty is a step towards allowing for things that will last long beyond my time or the time of the students who are involved in this work right now.” Yet, much work remains. While the school has hired professors and instructors of colour, more change is needed to ensure that diverse faculty continue to join the program moving forward, and feel supported enough to stay and grow within it. Some steps the school is taking, in particular, involve rethinking the job of a journalism professor, creating opportunities for research and growth, and recognizing the contributions of both the students and alumni, as well as the new faculty of colour, through allyship and support.

RETHINKING THE JOB
Nana aba Duncan was sharing the job posting for a new chair at Carleton’s journalism school when a colleague suggested she apply for it. Duncan, who had spent much of her career at the CBC and had been actively involved in various diversity efforts at the public broadcaster, was completing the William Southam Journalism Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Massey College at the time. Her research at Massey involved looking at the experiences of leaders of colour. She was interested in this topic in part because she’d never had the opportunity to work under a Black or racialized leader, and because she was looking to take on a leadership role herself.

“I was in this place of thinking about race and leadership and a move in my own career,” Duncan recalls. “I was [also] in this place of making a change and thinking about journalism in a way that could just be better for those of us who come from underrepresented communities or misrepresented communities.” After that nudge to apply for the Carty Chair in Diversity and Inclusion Studies, Duncan took a moment to pause. Then, she superimposed her personal mission “to help change the industry so that racialized journalists can feel like their perspectives and expertise are just as worthy and legitimate as the expertise and experiences of white journalists” onto the job posting from Carleton. “I realized [it all] aligns … so I applied.” The Carty Chair is the first of its kind at Carleton and across Canada. No other journalism program has a chair permanently committed to diversity and inclusion studies.

Until the summer of 2020, Carleton’s journalism school didn’t either. Allan Thompson, a professor and now the program head, insists the school had made the decision to convert its permanent chair in business and financial journalism into one that focuses on diversity and inclusion even before the calls to action were released. The decision was part of other strategic steps the school was taking since 2019, when Atong Ater, a former student in the program, shared her experiences as a journalism student at Carleton in a personal essay published by the CBC that May. A job posting for the position from September 2019, however, continued to advertise the Carty Chair as one specifically geared toward business and financial journalism, as it had been in previous years. While unclear about when the decision to change the focus of the job was actually made, Thompson says the new direction for the Carty Chair as one geared toward equity and inclusion gave the school a unique opportunity to maneuver around challenges that come with the hiring process, such as budget constraints from the university and the ability to hire new permanent faculty only when existing full-time professors retire from their positions.

It also meant the school would have a permanent member committed to spearheading equity, diversity, and inclusion, and that no budget cuts or hiring changes would affect this work. “[Endowed chairs] exist in perpetuity … and the Carty Chair had been empty for a couple of years because the occupant retired and the position hadn’t been filled,” Thompson says of the decision. “Strategically and ethically, I think it was a really wise choice to use that opportunity to create the first chair of its kind in a Canadian journalism school, where that person would have a priority to look at a whole range of equity, diversity, and inclusion issues in journalism,” he adds. “To conduct research, to create new courses, to be available to students and faculty as a resource and to be a champion, but also just to be another faculty member.”

Outside of budget constraints though, Thompson says he recognizes other challenges exist when it comes to hiring diverse faculty too. Perhaps rethinking the job also means rethinking the job requirements, especially the fact you need to have a master’s degree in order to apply for a faculty position. “Are we missing out on some really good journalists out there who have solid careers behind them, who might be interested in teaching, but don’t have a master’s degree?” he says. The conversation, however, goes beyond the school’s decision-making capacity. It continues with the university, which is ultimately responsible for changing job requirements, Thompson adds.

CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR GROWTH
Duncan completed her first year as the Carty Chair this July, having designed a course on journalism and belonging and begun working on a podcasting course for the upcoming year. She says the big difference between her job now and those in the past is that at Carleton, Duncan is “simultaneously a professor and the person who cares about diversity.” At the CBC, where she was the founding co-chair for Diversify CBC, a resource group for employees of colour, Duncan remembers the work being unpaid and something she did after hours, often on top of everything else. “I was doing [diversity work] at the side of my desk while also being the host of the weekend morning show, while also having a three- and five-year-old at home,” she says. “The difference between my work here at Carleton and my work at CBC is that I had two sides to myself at CBC,” Duncan adds, “and as strange as it sounds, in this position [of the Carty Chair], I feel freer to express how much I care about inclusion and diversity.”

The work has in no way been easy, especially with working during a pandemic—often remotely or online—working from home while being a mother, and especially working to implement change that can often be emotionally draining too. It has, however, also been immensely fulfilling. “What has been rewarding is how students have responded to my course,” Duncan says, recalling the last day of class for her course on journalism and belonging. Students in the course shared with her a Kudoboard they had made. In it, they wrote their experiences in the class, thanking her for giving them the space to talk about complex issues so openly. Knowing it was her course that made these students feel that sense of gratitude filled Duncan with gratitude herself. “I just want us to continue to be fearless and curious and to do the work with respect.”

CBC journalist Adrian Harewood also joined Carleton’s journalism program following the calls to action released by students and alumni in 2020. An associate professor at Carleton, Harewood says the position has given him the opportunity and space to conduct research and create courses that illuminate Canada’s Black history. An example of this is a course that focuses specifically on the history of Black journalism in Canada. “I’m really enjoying the process of creating the course and of creating curriculum and of identifying figures and media outlets that might be unfamiliar to people,” Harewood says. “I’m also working on a longer-term project looking at the history of a very prominent Black newspaper in Canada called Contrast that was active in the late 1960s and 1970s and really was part and parcel or a product of the civil rights movement.” Harewood’s parents wrote for Contrast, and he says the research process has been interesting, given that one of the most important interviews for the project was with his 85-year-old father. These opportunities—to research and to build a more inclusive curriculum—are giving Harewood the chance to help reduce the disconnect “between the academy and the community.” He sees his work as a way to “get busy outside of our comfortable spaces.”

“Carleton is not this rarefied place, which only exists for members of the social, economic, and political elite. It is an institution that we own, too,” Harewood says. “I see that as being part of my own job and practice of trying to make space for more people but also to harness the resources of the university and share those resources with the community that we’re a part of.” His goals are varied, but being part of the faculty at Carleton
and having opportunities for research, has magnified them. “I want Carleton to be a leader when it comes to all aspects of journalism education,” Harewood says of his plans. “I want us to be a space where we are comfortable taking risks […] where we embrace discomfort.” Ultimately, Harewood says he wants the program “always to be ahead of the curve. Looking back always, and appreciating history, but also looking forward in a very kind of bold way.”

A FAR-FROM-PERFECT PROCESS
Many of the students and alumni who worked on releasing the calls to action in 2020 have also been working with the school to implement them. The process is far from perfect. Much like Duncan’s experience doing diversity and inclusion work at the CBC, students and alumni involved in addressing the calls to action are not paid for this labour, and many of them do it outside of their full-time jobs.

“We’re all working reporters with many other responsibilities on top of this,” Olivia Rania Bowden, a reporter with the Toronto Star and an alumnus from the program, says. “When we decided to [publish] these calls to action, we were like, where do we have a voice? And what can we push?” For Duncan, the work of diversifying the oldest journalism program in Canada has been a rigorous process on the faculty level too. Whether through diversifying the curriculum and the courses, the guest speakers who engage with students, or the research projects she takes on, Duncan says the work of pushing for equity and inclusion both within the classroom and outside of it is “emotionally draining and sometimes, there are the surprise moments of harm.”

An example of this, Duncan says, is when in some situations, she has heard a person say something racist or offensive or ignorant “and you either don’t know what to say, or you have to do the calculus.” For Duncan, the calculus involves deciding “whether or not I’m going to say something. And then if I decided I am going to say something, what am I going to say? And that calculus also includes: how is this person going to take it? How is my relationship going to change with this person?” According to Duncan, institutions like Carleton need to recognize “there is a burden that they don’t understand and it’s a burden they don’t know. Just as in the same way if my position was held by an Indigenous journalist or a person who went through a lot of trauma as a young person or a trans professor—there’s going to be a burden that they have that I wouldn’t know.”

The nature of the work, according to both the students and alumni involved, as well as the faculty, requires recognition from the school that goes beyond engaging with them. “What really bothers me is when [the school has] made changes, they don’t credit us publicly,” says Bowden. “I know they’ve said they were thinking about this or working on [certain changes] prior to our calls, but the thing is we did it really quickly and really well around our extremely demanding jobs because we don’t have a choice but to make it happen. As people of colour, we don’t have a choice.” It also means recognizing the push for equity, diversity, and inclusion may have begun with students and alumni of colour, but that white students and faculty within the program are equally responsible for solutions and change moving forward.

“Feeling bad or guilty is useful only as much as it is a natural feeling, and if it propels you to action, then that’s good,” says Duncan. “But I think allyship also means not performing your sadness or your guilt about the fact that systemic racism exists. And knowing that the performance of those feelings—it comes across as looking for absolution from BIPOC students or faculty. As we always say, it’s really about doing the work,” she adds. “Do the work with your colleagues, maybe with your other fellow white students, do the work within yourself.”

THE CHALLENGES THAT REMAIN
While Carleton’s journalism program has taken steps to address the calls to action released in 2020, especially when it comes to diversifying faculty and sessional instructors within the program, leaders at the university continue to remain white. The Racialized Leaders Leading Canadian Universities research published in Educational Management Administration & Leadership Journal last year found that “universities in Canada are overwhelmingly top-down institutions.”

“Even with an executive-level diversity advocate, there can be issues with diversity at the organizational level,” the research says. “Scholars have warned that these positions have the potential for tokenism, ‘whereby Chief Diversity Officers [and similar positions] may be seen as the face of diversity, but lack the formidable authority and support to create real and lasting change.’” Data from 2020 used in the research shows that 80 percent of Carleton University’s leadership is white, with 60 percent of leadership positions being held by white men, and another 20 percent held by white women. There are no Black or Indigenous men or women in leadership roles at the university.

Mohamed Elmi, the acting executive director at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Diversity Institute and a co-author of the paper, says barriers at three levels—societal, organizational, and individual—determine how many people of colour seek leadership positions in academia. One of the biggest barriers, however, is that longer career trajectories within post-secondary institutions mean those leadership positions are much slower to change.

“Even though from the outside, they [post-secondary institutions] are viewed as progressive, they are relatively bureaucratic and very slow,” Elmi says. At the same time, Elmi says the responsibility for better diversity and inclusion within the university must not fall on leaders alone. Instead, organizations and individuals that support a university, whether through funding or strategic partnerships, must also call on institutions to address diversity. “You don’t want to put the onus on the individuals, especially in a system that is not responsive,” he says.

A BLUEPRINT FOR THE FUTURE
More than two years since the calls to action were first published by students and alumni, Carleton’s journalism school has taken significant steps to address the first: hiring diverse faculty. At the same time, conversations about other calls to action listed in the document are still taking place between the journalism school at Carleton and the university at large. Among these is the call to collect race-based student data and abolish unpaid internships. It is unclear how the diversity of Carleton as a university—or lack thereof—is affecting these conversations. Thompson does say they are ongoing. For students and alumni involved, the unmet calls to action remain front and centre. For Bowden, it’s important the school now goes from addressing the calls to action to defining its mission over the next couple years. It’s a way of ensuring accountability, especially since she feels “a lot of these issues in the industry, I think can be tackled by j-schools.”

“I’m happy to see [changes] but I don’t want blog posts on our website being like, ‘Oh, we randomly did this and we randomly did this,’” Bowden says. “I want to see that in six months, [the school has] committed to [particular changes], and are they going to happen? And if it doesn’t, somebody is going to face consequences for that.”

“That’s how any planning is done,” she says, adding, “When I do see it, that’s when I’m going to feel more confident about this process.” For Ng, who graduated just this summer, the changes that Carleton’s journalism program has made so far, as well as the ones they hope the school commits to making in the future, could ensure that equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives implemented in the classroom have a positive impact on newsrooms across the country as well. “I think that conversations about accountability and transparency, and bringing that respect and care to our reporting, is something that can start at journalism schools and should continue to flow into the industry,” they say. “[It all] links back to journalism school because I think this is the place where a lot of journalists are shaped and where we first begin to understand journalistic values and the history of our role as reporters.”

“The conversation on the picket line was frankly, ‘what the fuck?’” recalls Jason Laurendeau, a sociology professor who was among the strikers. It seemed surreal that relations between faculty and the university had deteriorated to this point, but Lethbridge isn’t an anomaly. Over the past year, Canada has seen a wave of post-secondary faculty strikes amid rising tensions.

From Acadia University to Ontario Tech, to the University of Manitoba and the University of Lethbridge, and even smaller universities like Concordia University of Edmonton and Université Sainte-Anne, strikes broke out. The wave began on November 2 with the University of Manitoba strike and dwindled by April 25 with the end of the strike at Université Sainte-Anne.

In Canada, tenured university faculty have a reputation for rarely striking. But harsh austerity measures and the COVID-19 pandemic have been exacerbating the existing workplace injustices they faced. “We haven’t seen any type of strike activity at this kind of intensity in the past—it’s just never happened,” says Peter McInnis, president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, an association of faculty unions. McInnis notes that the significance of this wave goes beyond the number of strikes; it is also that they are nationwide.

Before the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan, which made the right to strike a Charter right, the ability for faculty to strike varied from province to province—and sometimes even university to university. In Alberta, there had been no faculty strikes, legal or otherwise, until faculty at Concordia University of Edmonton went on strike for 11 days in January for better working conditions, pay, and job security.

SLASHED BUDGETS
Since the 1990s, the funding provincial and federal governments have invested into post-secondary education has dwindled. Ontario Progressive Conservative Mike Harris’s government slashed operating grants and deregulated tuition fees as part of his “Common Sense Revolution.” Today, Alberta’s United Conservatives are following in a similar neoliberal mould. With these cuts, post-secondary institutions are under pressure to do more with less. Instead of hiring tenure-track faculty, many are relying on precariously employed contract faculty and graduate students to teach. This scenario comes with a lack of job security, reduced academic freedom, and lower wages.

A study conducted by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that in the 2016/2017 year, 53.6 percent of all faculty positions in the country were contract instructors, versus tenure-track positions.
Before the 1990s, contract appointments were comparatively rare, though it’s hard to quantify exactly how big this shift is, due to the lack of data and comprehensive study. Nevertheless, the current moment of precarity and austerity has implications for any sort of labour action.

“The trend that we’re concerned with is that because they are precarious workers, they are hard to mobilize and organize,” says Orvie Dingwall, president of the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA), which went on strike in late 2021. For example, many contract instructors commute from university to university, teaching classes here and there to eke out a living. As more academic positions shift from well-paid tenure-track to poorly compensated instructors, the landscape of faculty associations changes and the needs of staff are fragmented.

“There’s a clear hierarchy within [the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association] … that can manifest as this sort of deep-seated solidarity … But it also can result in this kind of tension,” says Tanner Layton, a sociology instructor at the University of Lethbridge. He recalls a professor telling him that they were not striking for their own job, but rather his, because he and other contract workers are “exploited and exploitable.”

COVID AND CONTRACTS
In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into collective bargaining. The very nature of higher education changed, as classes went online. Faculty and students had to figure out how to teach and learn in a completely new setting. In many cases, the pandemic exacerbated existing issues. While the specific issues being negotiated varied from university to university, there are clear throughlines in terms of pay, job security, equity measures for marginalized workers, and working conditions.

Going into a strike or lockout during the grievous early stages of the pandemic was not an attractive prospect to the UMFA. Instead, in October 2020, UMFA negotiated a onetime payment from the university for overwork brought on by COVID-19, and renewed the existing contract from the past round of bargaining until March 2021. Dingwall believes reluctance to strike during the early months of the pandemic ultimately created the strike wave, with multiple unions moving into protest mode, when the pandemic seemed less chaotic. “I think us going on strike when we did demonstrated to others that ‘Yes, you can go on strike in a pandemic. If you need to, then you can.’”

BARGAINING INTERFERENCE
In Canada, workers have a constitutional right to free and fair collective bargaining with their employer. This means it is illegal for governments to interfere in the process of collective bargaining in ways that significantly override the relationship between employer and employee.

With universities, what constitutes interference can be complicated. Universities are largely publicly funded, so governments have a stake in their finances and operations. But legally speaking, universities are separate entities from the government, to ensure academic freedom and independence—cornerstone principles of academia. So what happens when provincial governments attempt to interfere in the collective bargaining process to keep wages down? And what happens when university administrations go along with it?

In the case of the University of Manitoba, a $19.3 million settlement happened. After a protracted legal battle, in 2022 the court found the Manitoba government had interfered illegally in the 2016 round of collective bargaining between the university and the UMFA. It had set hard limits on what could be offered and compromised upon, including a one-year wage freeze, rather than letting the university bargain independently. The provincial government is in the process of appealing this judgement. Some faculty members at the University of Lethbridge, like Laurendeau, fear something similar happened there. “We knew that there was this secret directive,” said Laurendeau. “We didn’t know what it was, but when you look at the opening offers of institutions throughout the province, it was pretty clear what it was because there’s an extraordinary degree of consistency.”

The United Conservative Party government elected in 2019 took an austerity approach to higher education. They lifted the tuition freeze instated by the NDP government and cut operating grants, and they intend to impose a performance-based-funding framework. This would tie government funding to certain metrics, such as how quickly a student was employed after graduation, what their salary was, and how many work-integrated learning opportunities were offered.

Critics argue that tying funding to these metrics will force universities to direct more funding towards programs offering immediate returns in the workforce, like business and engineering, and perhaps take away funding from programs in fields such as the humanities or social sciences. Laurendeau believes the provincial government mandated what universities could offer on monetary issues, but that does not explain the university’s reticence to bargain on other issues.

TAKING TO THE PICKET LINES
Strikes are often referred to as the muscle of the labour movement. Like muscles, strikes are more effective the longer you use and develop them. They can mobilize workers in ways that might have been impossible before, and rally workers behind the union flag.

“There was an excitement—not an excitement to go on strike, I want to be clear about that, but an excitement that we were finally doing something,” says Laurendeau. The University of Lethbridge Faculty Association (ULFA) had been without a contract for 629 days by the end of the 40-day strike in March 2021. For ULFA, this was a big moment. It was not just the first strike that ULFA had ever undertaken, but also the second faculty strike in Alberta. In a previous round of bargaining in 2013, ULFA took a one-percent pay cut to help with the university’s budget deficit, which makes this push for better pay, among other things, even
more significant.

The fact these strikes happened in close proximity to one another gave faculty associations some advantages.
Dingwall noted how faculty associations were able to share information, everything from strategic advice to
simple logistical things—like making sure to have a COVID-19 plan and washrooms near the picket lines.

STUDENTS CHOOSING SIDES
The point of a strike is to be disruptive. That’s what makes strikes effective. This disruption of students’ routine was met with conflicting information from the university and the union, leaving some students at the University of Lethbridge in the lurch. For example, the university’s FAQ for students stated that ending the strike was at the sole discretion of ULFA, neglecting to mention that the university had locked out faculty simultaneously. “It almost felt as if we were with divorced parents and we were being forced to pick a side,” says Lauryn Evans, an Addictions Counselling student at the University of Lethbridge.

In some cases, neither union nor university communication made its way effectively to students. Evans found out about the impending strike from the ULethwildin Instagram account, which posts mainly memes and videos of student parties. Angie Nikoleychuk, a fourth-year psychology and computer science student at U of L, is a member of the Student Solidarity and Action Council, which worked to help students sort out conflicting communication through posting on social media. Professors like Jason Laurendeau set up Discord channels of their own for students to ask questions about the strike.

The council worked with another student group, the Student Action Assembly, to stand in solidarity with faculty, organizing a sit-in protest by administration offices. For Nikoleychuk, working to make sure students were informed and walking the picket line with her professors was a balm. To her, walking the line was “a way to see each other [students and faculty] as human.”

Similar student activist groups emerged at other universities, like Students Supporting UMFA at the University of Manitoba and Students Supporting the CUE Faculty Association at Concordia University of Edmonton. Students Supporting UMFA took action by blocking doors to the administration building, in an attempt to pressure the Board of Governors into settling. Strikes can be moments of politicization; they can forge new connections for social movements. “As academics we can be kind of isolated, and as students we can be isolated. And this [strike] was a moment of inspiration, to put it kind of cheesily,” says Layton.

WHAT NOW?
While the strike wave has subsided, many of the issues that precipitated it remain, from COVID-19 to the shift to precarious academic labour. While faculty unions across the country have won victories large and small, much remains to be done for justice in the academic workplace. However, the key problem of structural precarity remains not fully addressed. Student groups like the Student Solidarity and Action Council and Students Supporting UMFA (renamed Student Solidarity Collective) still remain post-strike, only they are refocused to different causes. McInnis points out these strikes are another “warning that governments have a role to play and that you can’t sustain the system with private donors or really high tuition rates.”

If ongoing labour strife is to be avoided, governments and universities must address the underlying injustices. This begins with provincial governments letting universities bargain freely with unions, and investing in well-paid and secure jobs in the academy. Then, unions and universities can exercise their rights to bargain in good faith and get back to the essential work of teaching and research. Until then, the signs indicate that unions will keep returning to the front lines in a long battle for justice in the workplace.

It’s not the first time Stewart has interacted with paramedics this year and it won’t be the last. But she can’t stop replaying the image of the student being dragged limp across the floor. She lies awake in bed, thinking about her resident in the hospital. Worrying. She gets up the next day at 5 a.m. to walk them home.

Now, five years later, as Alanna Stewart talks about her experience as a resident assistant (RA) at Mount Allison University (Mt. A), she keeps coming back to that night, even though it was just one tough night in a year of tough nights. She also remembers things like sleeping on a resident’s floor to monitor them after recurring medical episodes and breaking up physical fights. Dealing regularly with drunk, disorderly, or angry students, and with toxic roommate drama, eventually took its toll.

RAs at post-secondary institutions are expected to take on the roles of caregiver, rule-enforcer, and counsellor for other students. They are overworked, underpaid, and always on the clock. Although they are the first line of defence against the mental-health crisis affecting students, their stories of shouldering the trauma of their peers are rarely told.

RAs are live-in “paraprofessionals.” They are usually in their second year of university or beyond and, in most cases, in their late teens or early 20s. While small differences exist in their role from school to school, their job typically involves doing rounds on weekends, keeping residents safe, enforcing rules, and making new students comfortable in their transition away from home.

“I WANT TO BE YOU NEXT YEAR”
Mt. A is a university in Sackville, New Brunswick, with a student population of approximately 2,300 and eight on campus residences. When Stewart and I attended, the smaller residences had four RAs each, and five other student leaders, all of whom were tasked with helping first-year students adapt to their new homes.

“On my very first day as a first year at Mount Allison, I remember saying to [the head RA], ‘I want to be you next year,’” Stewart says. She started Mt. A at 21 years old, a little older than most first-year students coming fresh out of high school. “I felt like if I had to live with younger people, I wanted to have a purpose.”

Stewart was my first-year roommate. From the get-go she was deeply attuned to people’s feelings. A natural helper and fierce advocate for mental health, she spoke openly about her own experiences with bipolar disorder. Stewart was the model candidate for a Mt. A Resident Assistant, which the school website describes as someone who is “caring, has a desire to help others and an interest in building strong residence communities.”

In her first year, Stewart successfully intervened in a fellow student’s crisis, making her the top choice for assistant don (senior RA) in her second year. But she and the RA team that ended up being hired could’ve had no idea just how challenging and exhausting the year ahead would be. For many people with serious mental-health conditions, between the ages of 18 and 21 is when symptoms first appear. It’s a phase when the brain is developing rapidly. Combined with the massive transition of moving away from home, exposure to alcohol for the first time (for some), culture clashes, and even just learning to live with a roommate, it’s generally a chaotic time.

In recent years, directors of university counselling services have seen higher numbers of students seeking help with more severe concerns. A 2019 survey of over 55,000 students at 58 campuses across Canada found nearly a quarter of students surveyed were diagnosed with anxiety and nearly one-fifth with depression that year. Approximately 11 percent of students reported intentional self-harm and 16.4 percent considered suicide, while 2.8 percent attempted it at some point that year.

Meanwhile, studies of RAs found those with residents who disclose self-harm experience higher levels of burnout and compassion fatigue. The mental-health crisis is escalating at post-secondary institutions, with added stressors and isolation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic being linked to poorer mental-health outcomes for students, including higher levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness among students, with potential long-term effects. This means more high-stakes responsibility is being laid at the feet of young-adult RAs, who may be just as vulnerable to stress-related mental-health disorders as the peers in their charge.

ALWAYS ON
Back in 2017, burnout on the RA team at our residence was already prevalent. By the end of the first semester, one RA had stepped back because of the pressure. Another, who remained on the team, needed regular breaks from the role to keep up with school work and protect their mental health. The remaining team members became overextended, and many seemed close to breaking point.

Morgan Kelter was hired to fill in for the second semester. She went into the role with enthusiasm, “I got a fanny pack and painted it with sparkles … and I remember I got a T-shirt.” It meant a lot to her to be making a difference for younger students as part of the residence team.

During her first week on the job, there were three campus parties, which meant three consecutive late nights and dozens of intoxicated residents. “I had done all three because everyone else was burnt out,” Kelter explains. By the end of that week, she, too, already felt worn down. It was obvious her colleagues were struggling. “People that I had known for two years that I had never seen cry, I saw cry for the first time. [There were] trips to the hospital for mental health reasons. Therapy,” says Kelter.

Kelter recalls one instance clearly. “There was drama going on in residence that we were dealing with that we probably shouldn’t have been dealing with. It probably should have been in someone else’s hands instead of some 19-year-old,” she says. Her colleague became overwhelmed and didn’t shower for days. There wasn’t time to shower, they argued, teary-eyed. The former RA says it wasn’t the volume of hours, but the hypervigilance, that made the role exhausting. “When you’re needed, you’re needed. And you have to make yourself available all the time.”

The school administration would tell them they were students first, RAs second, but if someone was hurting themselves, in danger, or suicidal, it wasn’t something you could ignore just because you had an assignment due the next day. And students develop a special relationship of trust with their RA, which adds to the weight of the responsibilities of the role. “We do find that for some of the most traumatic or difficult issues our students are dealing with, it is peers that they are most likely to go to,” explains Chad Johnstone, director of Residence and Student Life at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

Kelter’s mental, academic, and emotional life were ultimately affected by the job. “I was just like ‘I need to stay in my bed, where I’m not accessible to anyone.’” Kelter says she had to go into counselling after her first week on the job. She started missing classes for the first time. She stocked her room with granola bars to avoid sitting with friends at the meal hall, just to get a break from other people’s problems.

One weekend, when Stewart’s stress levels approached crisis point, she booked a hotel in town just to get away. “You’re so immersed in it…. It’s definitely a mind-blowing experience. You can never escape … you never really truly get a full break.”

COMPENSATION GAPS
The number of hours on paper does not adequately reflect the time and emotional investment required of RAs. It makes fair compensation hard to calculate. On top of that, there’s a lack of standardization in RA pay, even in geographically close schools of comparable size.

At Acadia, RAs get a deluxe single room covered, as well as $1,500 toward their meal plan, compensation in kind of an approximate $10,000 value. At St. Francis Xavier (St. FX), community assistants (their title for RAs) receive a salary of approximately $8,800. Mt. A does not publish RA compensation rates, but administration shared that compensation has increased 36 percent in the last five years, though they also reduced the number of RAs, which consequently increased the workload. Based on Stewart’s stipend in 2016 to 2017, compensation for senior RAs today is likely around $4,800, with non-senior RAs making less. RAs’ room fees at Mt. A and St. FX are not covered, despite the fact students in these roles need a more expensive single room to carry out their duties.

Such significant disparities across schools for the same work reflect the different value institutions place on the contributions of their student leaders. It was the student union at Mt. A that was instrumental in bringing attention to the pay disparities between RAs at Atlantic universities, pushing administration to increase pay. Being transparent about RA compensation across schools gives students the power to recognize when they’re being underpaid, so they can organize to have their invaluable contributions better compensated.

IN MISERY TOGETHER
Stewart says that while she had some supportive conversations with supervisors and school administrators about the overwhelming pressures she was experiencing, the RA team was her biggest support. “We went through so many intense moments together, and we collaborated and pulled together when we were all burnt out,” she says. “We were in misery together. I don’t know if we helped each other, but we always had each other,” Kelter adds.

While RAs had priority access to counselling at the school wellness centre, which many members of the team used, both Kelter and Stewart felt largely unsupported in the role. Having more RAs to share the workload, and opportunities to debrief more regularly with a professional facilitator, would have been helpful, Stewart says. Instead, the RAs had informal offloading sessions, “hanging out in my room all laying in bed, talking and venting.” Kelter suggested RAs could live in different residences from where they work, while still being accessible if needed, though she recognizes the drawbacks of that approach.

Mt. A has made changes since Kelter and Stewart were RAs. Residence Life has added a coordinator position, dealing specifically with student health and wellness. They say they’ve also expanded counselling services, adding mental-health, harm-reduction education, and social worker positions at the school for all students. RA training continues to evolve, too, and now includes crisis intervention and self-care programming. But, in the smaller residences there are now fewer RAs, and the ratio of RAs to students has gone from one RA for every 14 to 20 residents, to one for every 24, meaning RAs are taking on a higher workload in exchange.

Acadia now has a team of residence life coordinators on call to support RAs in crisis 24/7. They also run debriefs to help prevent overwhelm. There are more counselling services available now than there were five years ago, and there are programs specific to RAs from marginalized backgrounds to address additional stressors that they may be experiencing, says Johnstone.

But in light of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, which has amplified stress in students’ lives, it’s still not enough to ensure a new generation of RAs can fare better than their predecessors, the likes of Alanna Stewart and her fellow RAs. Jennifer Hamilton, executive director of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services says, “When it comes to health and mental health, this is not a university and college issue. The increase in mental-health issues is a societal concern.” She acknowledges that while schools are stepping up their efforts to support students, without a coordinated approach addressing the gaps in mental health care outside of the post-secondary environment, not much will change.

Ultimately, addressing poor mental health at universities means addressing it in all areas of life, through government policy that prioritizes mental health. The unmanageable load for RAs won’t stop until we tackle the mental-health crisis among young Canadians on all fronts.