Photo Courtesy of Somia Sadiq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO BY SARAH BODRI

We were teaching ourselves something that we didn’t know,” says Kat Estacio, co-founder of Toronto’s Pantayo, a quintet blending traditional Filipino kulintang music with Western pop and rock styles. That’s partly why it took eight years between the ensemble’s first practice in 2012 and the release of their self-titled debut earlier this year. As with many of the best records, though, Pantayo was worth the wait.

The group is made up of Kat Estacio, her twin Katrina Estacio, Michelle Cruz, Eirene Cloma, and Joanna Delos Reyes, all of whom met over the course of several years at Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Arts and Culture’s former location in Kensington Market. They discovered a shared desire to play Filipino kulintang music, and decided to learn together, via YouTube videos and sheet music. Typical kulintang pieces are played on gongs and metallophones, but before too long the group found themselves innovating on tradition.

“As we were exploring, we were putting in our own influences, ’cause we’ve been exposed to pop music, all five of us,” says Kat. “We played the sheet music in a way that made sense to us, added our flavour to it.”

This flavour comes in many forms on their record, which draws inspiration from R&B, hip-hop, and synth-pop. The album covers a lot of ground both stylistically and thematically. On the soulful “Divine,” Cloma beckons a lover over a cool beat. Other tracks like “Taranta” and “Kaingin” feature driving percussion, chant-like vocals, and lyrics about trauma and resistance, inspired by topics like colonialism and missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The record is tied together by its kulintang base, the gongs sometimes serving as a captivating centrepiece, or otherwise an atonal counterpoint to synths and drums.

For Pantayo, learning to play kulintang music was a process of understanding a part of Filipino culture that had previously felt inaccessible. Even band members who grew up in the Philippines were raised on North American pop culture—the band counts The Tragically Hip and Santigold amongst their influences—and kulintang music felt far away.

“I saw those instruments as something ornamental in a room, not really incorporated in daily life,” Kat explains. “But they’re a community-based instrument; people would play them outside after a long day at work.” Kat grew up in Manila, while kulintang music is played predominantly in the southern Philippines.

Approaching the tradition as outsiders, the group took care to reach out to kulintang teachers both in the Philippines and North America. After spending years learning traditional pieces, they began writing material for Pantayo in 2016, working closely with producer alaska B of experimental rock group Yamantaka // Sonic Titan. During the album-writing process, the band grappled with questions of identity: “Who are we? What are we about?” Cruz says they asked themselves. “How can we stay away from making music just because it’s what everyone’s going to like?”

The answer to the questions came through the music itself, and partly through the process of building Pantayo as a group. The band members’ experiences as queer Filipina-Canadians shape their work implicitly. “I’m not the same person that I was when I was in the Philippines,” Kat says. “I am the result of the migration that happened. That story is what we want to tell, apart from the narrative of the songs themselves.”

With the release of the album, their story has reached a wider audience, landing them on the Polaris Prize shortlist and opening up new opportunities. Though the group was disappointed not to attend a Polaris gala in person, they’re already working on ideas for new material, as well as spreading kulintang music to others through educational workshops in Toronto schools. “The fact that we’re able to talk about the tradition and our experience as a band making these songs,” Katrina says. “It’s nothing like I ever imagined.”

Photo material republished with the express permission of: National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

One Friday in late January, a photo on Facebook had Debra Selkirk in tears. Weeks earlier, she’d received a desperate email from a woman in the U.S. The woman’s 30-year-old sister needed a new liver, but she had to be alcohol-free for six months before she could get a transplant. The question was: Did she have time to wait? Selkirk quickly sent over a list of American transplant centres and a doctor who would waive the waiting period. Now, as Selkirk scrolled through her feed, she spotted a picture of the two sisters together—post-transplant. “I helped with that,” she sighs.

Selkirk’s name made headlines a few years ago when she fought that very six-month policy in Canada. Her husband, Mark Selkirk, died in 2010 just two weeks after he was told he wasn’t eligible for a transplant—he’d only been alcohol-free for six weeks.

While there are U.S. transplant centres who don’t follow the policy, it’s much more consistent in Ontario, where Mark was being treated, and across Canada. Proponents argue that those who haven’t been alcohol-free long enough are likely to relapse after surgery, or that patients are likely to get better over the six-month abstinence period (and possibly avoid the need for a transplant). But Selkirk says it’s discriminatory and misguided. She often cites medical research, such as a University of Pittsburgh study that found that only six percent of liver transplant patients who once misused alcohol relapsed each year, and only two-and-a-half percent returned to heavy drinking. That, and other studies, conclude abstaining from alcohol has only a moderate impact on transplant success. In 2015, Selkirk filed a constitutional challenge to change the rule in Ontario.

Last September, after more than two years in court, the Trillium Gift of Life Network, the agency that runs the province’s transplant network, agreed to launch a three-year pilot that would eventually waive the requirement for all patients. While the policy remains unchanged for now, the agency will watch participants’ progress and determine whether to alter the criteria. Selkirk believes the pilot will succeed, and hopes the outcomes will convince other provinces to change their policies. The program begins in August, but other cases have already popped up in the news. Last fall, Cary Gallant was scheduled to ask a judge for an injunction to force authorities to put him on Ontario’s transplant list. And in December, Indigenous rights activist Delilah Saunders’s story spread after she, too, was denied a transplant.

Selkirk has been watching these stories, and offering support where she can. As her court case wrapped up, she realized she wanted more than a legal battle that would end. Patients still need so much support, she says. “I just started to have a million ideas, like I should do this, and someone should be doing that.” And so, in October, she began narrowing down the mandate for the Selkirk Liver Society.

She wants to encourage a holistic approach to treatment where patients manage their disease with the help of not just a liver specialist, but a nutritionist and other health professionals that they can periodically visit all in one day. She also wants to reshape public perception starting with the media, and she’s asked the Canadian Press to finalize their decision to replace words like “drunk” and “alcoholic” with “person with an alcohol use disorder” in their style guide. And, long term, she wants to support people through the process of transplantation by making things like accommodation easier. Paying to stay in Toronto for six weeks during the surgery and recovery process, for example, can be an extra burden on families—especially when a spouse or partner has to be away from work for so long. She hopes to set up more affordable short-term housing where families can stay.

There’s a lot to be done, but Selkirk says she’s found her calling. “I’ve never loved what I do,” she says. “I just always wanted to go home to Mark.” These days, Selkirk occasionally gets a message from another stranger watching a family member suffer, and she’ll channel her passion into that. Soon, she says, they’re texting like they’re best friends

Shyra Barberstock was 21 years old when she met her Anishinaabe birth mother and finally gained Kebaowek status. Until then, she was unaware of her Kebaowek First Nation roots, having grown up with her nonIndigenous adoptive family.

“As you can see I’m very fair skinned,” says Barberstock. “Had I not met her, I may never have realized that I was Anishinaabe.”

Seventeen years later, Barberstock, along with her husband Rye, a member of the Mohawk nation, has made a career of connecting Indigenous people in disparate communities. It’s all made possible through the couple’s joint venture, the Okwaho Network.

The project began as an Indigenous social network of sorts, a way to remove the geographic and financial barriers remote communities face in their attempts to connect. Soon it grew to attract Indigenous (and now includes non-Indigenous) members around the world looking to connect on a social or professional basis.

The network spurred consulting and speaking opportunities from the government, private sectors, and non-profit organizations interested in learning about Indigenous entrepreneurship.

The flurry of interest snowballed into what, in 2017, became Okwaho Equal Source Inc., a Kingston-based global startup focused on reconciliation through Indigenous-led social innovation projects.

Barberstock says she was destined for this sort of work. At her naming ceremony at age 21, an Elder told her she had a strawberry heart and gave her the name O’demin’kwe (O’demin: strawberry, kwe: woman). In Indigenous teachings, the strawberry is known as the heart berry, full of healing properties and the power to rouse peace and forgiveness, Barberstock explains. “[The Elder] said that I have a big heart and that my purpose in life is to follow my heart,” she recalls, adding that people gifted with a strawberry heart are tasked with guiding reconciliation within their family and community.

Certainly for Barberstock, her Indigenous name rings true in her business and her life. Even her partnership with Rye is a testament to reconciliation in action. “Mohawks are very different from the Anishinaabe,” she remarks. “Historically, they were enemies. We prove that reconciliation can happen.”

That’s not to downplay the complexity of reconciliation processes that are based on lived experiences and trauma, cultural history and dynamics.

In her 2017 master’s thesis, “‘A New Way Forward’: Reconciliation through Indigenous Social Innovation,” Barberstock challenges recommendation 92 of the 94 calls to action released by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015, which calls on corporate powers to adopt a reconciliation framework. She contends the narrative of the recommendation focuses on what non-Indigenous people should be doing, and argues that Indigenous people are actively contributing to reconciliation too. Her research presents a seldom heard Indigenous voice on the topic.

Through Okwaho Equal Source, Barberstock and her Indigenous-led team are making significant contributions to reconciliation. Recently, they were invited by La Asociación Colombiana de Universidades (Association of Colombian Universities) to share Indigenous knowledge and community-building best practices through “talking circles” with local delegates from academia, government, and the private sectors.

“Shyra is disrupting the space of social innovation,” says Luke McIlroy-Ranga, the president of Okwaho Equal Source’s operations in Australasia. “We want our youth to see people who represent themselves in entrepreneurial roles,” McIlroy-Ranga adds. He emphasizes the significance of bolstering Indigenous-run for-profits, especially in a world where most financial backing for Indigenous organizations favours charities.

Indeed, the Barberstocks used their honeymoon money and personal funds to build Okwaho Equal Source and the Okwaho Network—though they wanted to apply for funding agencies, they were often excluded from doing so.

“We understand that there are a lot of funding pockets out there for Indigenous projects, but a lot of the government funding is for not-for-profits,” Barberstock remarks. “We are a for-profit social enterprise with a non-profit heart.”

Moving forward, Barberstock plans to establish an exchange program with Okwaho’s sister hub in Sydney, Australia. She also hopes to build a bricks-and-mortar centre for full-time Indigenous students in Kingston, and hire qualified Indigenous staff to create a collective.

Already, she’s well on her way.

Photo by Erika Donovan.

In her bright turquoise van adorned with purple lightning bolts, Melissa Sariffodeen resembles a digital era Ms. Frizzle—travelling the country, expanding the minds of bright-eyed students in new and exciting ways.

This is the Code Mobile, Canada’s first coding truck led by Sariffodeen, the CEO of Ladies Learning Code.

Sariffodeen was inspired to start the project after a road trip in 2012 from Toronto to Montana. It had been a year since the Ivey Business School alumna left her accounting job to co-found Ladies Learning Code, and her sole focus was promoting digital literacy to more women—and kids. The non-profit organization had expanded to close to 30 chapters across the country, reaching more than 40,000 learners. But Sariffodeen wanted to stretch the organization’s influence further. The idea to go mobile was a game-changer. “The Code Mobile allows us to bring programs where the learners are,” she says. “That’s my big thing: Go where the learners go.”

The Code Mobile (via Instagram).

What started as a summer tour in 2016 is now a year-long effort to build children’s digital literacy. The coding truck visits schools and community centres in southwestern Ontario throughout the year, carting plugged and unplugged activities to give students their first lesson in coding. Kids are offered an hour and a half of guided coding, and play a round or two of “Do the Robot”—a two-learner unplugged game where the programmer gets the robot to do an activity using a sequence of carefully chosen words.

But the Code Mobile goes beyond teaching kids how to code; it’s about teaching them that they can be creators of technology, not just consumers. It’s all part of Ladies Learning Code’s core mission. “It was driven by this desire for us to be more technical, scratching our own itch,” she says of the group. And according to Carolyn Van, director of youth programs at the organization, scratching that itch isn’t just a relief—it’s empowering. “It’s letting people know that we are the ones that make technology do what it does,” says Van. “We can learn how to speak all these programming languages and make it do what we want it to do. That’s powerful.”

But there are still major power imbalances in the tech industry. In 2016, women represented less than 25 percent of information communications technology (ICT) professionals. And a recent study by the Information and Communications Technology Council reported that women, Indigenous communities, and youth living in poverty lacked the training required to enter STEM and ICT fields. If this skills gap was addressed, the demand for more than 180,000 digital jobs in Canada could be met.

Ladies Learning Code and the Code Mobile are working to change that. With digital literacy being, as the organization puts it, “the next educational frontier,” forming a standard coding curriculum for elementary and high-school students will help level the digital playing field. (Canada currently has no unified view on teaching digital literacy in schools.) Sariffodeen hopes that Ladies Learning Code can provide teachers with resources so they can introduce coding to students, and the Code Mobile can reach communities that aren’t requesting visits and are off their radar.

Having travelled more than 25,000 kilometres, visiting over 55 cities, and reaching more than 15,000 kids, the Code Mobile’s plan to spread digital literacy has just begun. “I want a fleet of Code Mobiles,” says Sariffodeen. “Like, The Fast and the Furious-style fleet. I want enough of them so that we can go back to each community week after week and build those relationships.”

Percy Sacobie and wife, Barb. Photo courtesy of Percy Sacobie.

“You have to stay here with me ’cause I don’t want you to be responsible for me,” insists a visitor to Percy Sacobie’s cabin in the woods behind his mother’s house.

“You’re responsible for what you do to yourself,” Sacobie replies. He stops by the cabin every morning and every evening, but beyond that, its visitors are left to their own self-reflection. “From my own experience self-healing is the best healing you can do,” he says.

Sacobie is a former teacher and band councillor on St. Mary’s First Nation in New Brunswick and, just this year, recipient of a Governor General’s Award for building the Take a Break Lodge, a temporary retreat for those who are struggling with mental health, addiction, or simply going through a difficult time.

The 16-by-24 cabin is simple in design, with only the most basic amenities. It isn’t intended for a permanent stay. The rules, according to Sacobie, are pretty simple: No drinking or doing drugs around the Lodge (though it is open to those who are under the influence). Clean up after yourself. Be respectful. He doesn’t ask names, though there is a guestbook for those who feel inclined to sign it. “I don’t want to pry,” Sacobie says. “I’m just there to offer [them] a place to go.” It’s a place for self-reflection where privacy is respected, and all are welcome.

The idea for the Lodge emerged out of personal tragedy—Sacobie lost his brother Glen to suicide in 2015, the fourth of his siblings to pass away—but he remains adamant that the project is about more than his own losses. “I didn’t wanna make it about my struggles,” he says “I didn’t want people to say, ‘Oh, poor Percy, he lost four siblings.’ Let’s make this about the issue, which is mental health.” In a time when the rate of Indigenous suicide has resulted in states of emergency in multiple communities, initiatives to improve mental wellness are more important than ever.

“I mean, it would be nice if we had a one-size-fits-all approach to make everyone better mentally,” Sacobie says, “but this is just another option for people.”

The Lodge is, in part, inspired by the traditional sweat lodge ceremony, but while sweat lodges are a long-term spiritual undertaking, sometimes with rules concerning whether one can participate while intoxicated, Take a Break is intended for what Sacobie refers to as “a quick fix.” It’s there when it’s needed, whatever the reason, for a little while.

The space could not have been provided without support both in St. Mary’s and beyond. The Lodge was built through crowdfunding, and with help from Maliseet Nation Mental Wellness, who furnished the Lodge. Acknowledgements on the Lodge’s Facebook page includes local businesses, families, and community centres.

So far, the Take a Break Lodge has been a success, though Sacobie has no illusions about what the future may hold. “Someone’s gonna bust a window, someone’s gonna mark on the wall,” he says, unperturbed. “[Someone’s] gonna abuse it, but just fix it back up.”

Either way, Sacobie is satisfied. “If the Lodge helps out one person, it’s done its job. I’ve helped that person out, and I’m okay with that.”

Photo by Czeska Dumali.

Nearly every day, Mark Marsolais-Nahwegahbow hears stories from Indigenous men and women that they’ve often never told. The exchange usually begins at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre, within which Indigenous people accused of various crimes are awaiting trial. Their stories are turned into a Gladue report, a document that outlines their personal history and how they were affected by decades of colonial oppression. When put in front of a judge, the hoped-for outcome for many offenders is a shorter sentence with a focus on rehabilitation rather than incarceration.

Marsolais-Nahwegahbow, an Ojibway Band Member from Whitefish River First Nation, has spent the past 25 years working in the criminal justice system, seeking ways to reduce the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in Canadian prisons. In 2015, he founded IndiGenius & Associates, an Ottawa-based justice consulting firm that provides Gladue reports to people facing a loss of liberty, and training Gladue writers in the process. For Marsolais-Nahwegahbow, a Gladue report is more than just a court document. It’s a person’s sacred story—peeling back the layers of family history and lingering intergenerational trauma, revealing a past that a court would have otherwise never known.

“It’s very important,” says Marsolais-Nahwegahbow. “It’s so the courts can understand why that person, to this day, possibly got involved with drugs and alcohol—because that’s all they ever knew in their life.”

Gladue reports came out of a 1999 Supreme Court ruling in R. v. Gladue, which required judges to factor into their rulings Indigenous people’s experiences as a result of colonization, in an attempt to end their over-incarceration in Canadian prisons. But nearly 20 years later, Indigenous people in Canada make up almost 24 percent of all inmates in federal prisons—up 43 percent since 2005—despite representing just four percent of the Canadian population. Those stats skew higher in some prisons, including Manitoba’s Stony Mountain Institution where Indigenous men make up 65 percent of inmates. At the Edmonton Institution for Women, Indigenous women make up 56 percent of the inmate population, while representing 33 percent of all female inmates in federal prisons. The mass incarceration of Indigenous people, along with Canada’s history of residential schools and the ongoing child welfare crisis, means that many will spend a lifetime in some form of government institution.

After years on the frontlines of the justice system, Marsolais-Nahwegahbow knows this crisis all too well. Before transitioning to Gladue writing, he was a justice coordinator at the Odawa Native Friendship Centre and he continues to work as a residential school crisis intervention counsellor for Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.

Through his work, it became clear how lacking Gladue services were in Canada. But convinced Gladue reports could work if implemented properly, Marsolais-Nahwegahbow set out to improve services within the court system, and even wrote his first few reports for free. Before he and his team, there were no Gladue writers in Ottawa, and he says it’s a practice that still remains largely neglected throughout Canada.

“The justice system I think is very closed-minded and that’s not to say that there aren’t people out there that respect the Gladue, but in some areas, they can’t be bothered,” he says.

That’s why, in 2012, the Supreme Court reaffirmed Gladue rights for Indigenous offenders in the case of R. v. Ipeelee. But lack of awareness around Gladue reports remains a systemic barrier for Indigenous people, and many courts have failed to make Gladue reports accessible, even after the 2012 reinforcement of Gladue rights. “I’ve dealt with cases where people have been in jail for eight months and they never even knew of their Gladue rights because nobody ever told them,” says Marsolais-Nahwegahbow.

In April, IndiGenius & Associates announced a partnership with Vancouver Community College to launch a Gladue report writing program, a first for colleges in Canada. “There’s a huge need for well-trained Gladue writers right across Canada— in each district, in each region, it needs to be done,” Marsolais-Nahwegahbow says. There’s also a need, on the part of the courts, to take Gladue reports seriously. When it’s all said and done, and the report is placed in front of some judges, Marsolais-Nahwegahbow says, it’s often ignored and tossed to the side.

Marsolais-Nahwegahbow knew when he started IndiGenius that it would be an uphill battle. Fortunately, he has the endurance to keep fighting. “It’s the need for change,” he says. “I have to be a voice for the people that can’t have a voice.”

Photo by Hilary Gauld Commercial.

When Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt said, at a science conference in 2015, that the trouble with women in labs is they cry and fall in love, the scientific community reacted with a barrage of vituperations from both sides. For doctoral candidate Eden Hennessey, one hashtag became a call to action.

Under the banner #DistractinglySexy, female scientists took to Twitter to clarify what it’s really like for them in the lab or field. “Here I am shoulder-deep in cow rectum,” one woman tweeted. “So seductive!” Hennessey, a social psychology PhD candidate and manager at the Centre for Women in Science at Waterloo’s Wilfrid Laurier University, responded with another, more on-the-nose hashtag: #DistractinglySexist. The hashtag mobilized women across science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields to present their true stories of confronting sexism.

As part of her dissertation, #DistractinglySexist became Hennessey’s first photo-research exhibition, drawing attention to sexism in Canada’s “Silicon Valley”—Ontario’s Waterloo, Kitchener, and Cambridge areas. The project integrated art and social psychology research methods to assess whether women fighting sexism in STEM fields face greater social costs than other women, and if so, how can those costs be buffered.

The #distractinglysexy trend is phenomenal. Here I am shoulder-deep in cow rectum, so seductive! pic.twitter.com/fz0v5fygTK

— justmeness (@VanessaAdams6) June 11, 2015

If you look at a high school math or science class, you’ll notice more than half of the students are girls. In university, the number of women in STEM drops to about 39 percent. By the time they get into the workforce, women hold 22 percent of jobs in STEM fields—up just two percent from 1987.

“For women in STEM,” says Hennessey, “it’s not just the lack of women, it’s the resistant and slow rate of change.”

The sluggish improvements are both a cause and symptom of the old boys’ club culture that continues to disadvantage female scientists. While there’s myriad data describing the gender gap in STEM, Hennessey was compelled to communicate the problem in a different way.

“We all have a right to be presented facts in a way that’s easily understood,” she says during our interview, before she makes her way to a protest march in downtown Waterloo to fight for her rights in STEM labs. “I wanted to de-silo knowledge from the ivory tower and present it such that it can get us the funding we need and effect change for STEM women.” Indeed, her work is part of a small but growing movement toward academic activism. The idea is that by taking hard data and converting it into creative expression, research becomes more inclusive and creates a wider, more powerful impact.

On the heels of #DistractinglySexist, which attracted international praise, Hennessey recently launched #DistractinglyHonest. This second exhibit features female-led research that unpacks whether honesty is the best policy for women facing sexism in STEM fields.

In the series, Imogen Coe, Dean of Sciences at Ryerson University, is photographed looking over rose-hued glasses with the message: “We cannot change what we will not see.” Coe’s piece highlights that male-authored studies are deemed more scientifically valuable than female-authored ones, even when those studies are identical. “There was something intensely personal about Eden’s photo-essay,” Coe says. “She focussed on individual women and their authentic self. We’re supposed to be scientists—hence, unemotional—but the photography aspect of her exhibit made us value ourselves more. It’s about engaging men and not about fixing women.”

The stats suggest girls grow up with just as much interest in science, math, and technology as boys. The shift away from STEM, then, is linked to cultural messaging that says women and girls don’t belong.

“There are systemic barriers every step of the way for women,” says Hennessey, noting that this is particularly apparent for women who want to have children in graduate school. “For them, financial support is minimal. It’s a cultural issue and a big deterrent for women.”

Of the 14 portraits featured in #DistractinglyHonest, perhaps the most poignant is of 10-year-old Alyssa Armstrong. She’s wearing headphones inside a bubble, shielded from negative gender biases. “I want to go to Mars when I grow up,” she says.

When that time comes, Hennessy is hopeful projects like hers won’t have to exist—that Alyssa and other young women can pursue their ambitions, undeterred by flawed cultural mores. “Changes to such systemic pressures need to happen in the next decade,” Hennessey adds, “or we’ll lose another cohort of scientists.”

Photo by Stephanie Willis, Falling Leaves Photography

Thirty minutes due east of Edmonton, where the traffic signals turn from streetlights to stop signs, is the town of Ardrossan. Here, you’ll find the Dreamcatcher Nature-Assisted Therapy Association, perched on 40 acres of lush, tree-lined, and trailed land.

Founded in 2003 by psychologist Eileen Bona, Dreamcatcher has become a haven for individuals struggling with a vast range of obstacles—from mood disorders to behavioural and developmental challenges—as well as abandoned and abused animals. With an emphasis on animalassisted therapy, the centre’s practice is based largely on the biophilia hypothesis, an idea first introduced by biologist and conservationist Edward O. Wilson. “[The theory] states that because humans evolved through nature and used to live as one with animals our brains are genetically attuned to be at one with nature and animals,” says Bona. “They calm us.”

Getting her start in Grand Prairie, Alta., Bona’s early clients included children suffering from severe brain damage, often due to fetal alcohol spectrum disorders and accidents. “At the time, I wasn’t thinking about animals at all,” she says. Instead, she was considering her patients’ motivations and how she could encourage them to communicate differently through their innate interests— a technique influenced by Bona’s own childhood, growing up with a brother who had a severe disability. The shift to animal-assisted therapy seemed to happen serendipitously when Bona’s fiancé, now husband, suggested they move to the countryside. At the time, she was largely unaware of animal-assisted therapy, but Bona had always dreamed of owning a horse and farm, and imagined if a patient was motivated enough to interact with and care for an animal, perhaps the animal could in turn strengthen the individual’s communicative skills. After some thorough research, she decided to launch Dreamcatcher, a program that paired clients with animal companions.

One of Bona’s greatest success stories is a young woman with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, ADHD, and oppositional defiance disorder, who came to Dreamcatcher at the age of 15, after multiple failed attempts in other therapy programs. “She was living in a residential centre and getting into unimaginable trouble,” says Bona. Around that time, Dreamcatcher had been donated a skittish miniature horse that was terrified of people, and the teen offered to help. For the next six months, the girl came and sat in the pasture, in -30 C weather, and waited for the horse with cookies. Once it began to trust her, the teen expressed to Bona that she couldn’t believe he had allowed her to help him.

“I said, ‘I know how you feel,’” says Bona. “‘I wish you would let me help you.’” Following that encounter, the girl agreed to do six months of talk therapy sessions.

Despite the many successes that Bona has witnessed, criticism surrounding the effectiveness of animal-assisted therapy still remains, as do ethical challenges regarding the use of animals.

“I always worry about the animal, and how it’s feeling,” Bona says. “Is it still happy doing this kind of work? And when people are healing, and they’re in the process of working with animals, what expense is that to the animal?” Others have criticized the lack of research available on this field of therapy, and the relative difficulty that comes with proving its long-term effectiveness.

While limited, the literature that does exist is promising. A 2009 study from Loyola University found that adults who received canine therapy while recovering from total joint-replacement surgery required 50 percent less pain medication. Another study, published in the Western Journal of Nursing Research, noted a significant increase in pro-social behaviour when 12 autistic children were introduced to dogs.

Bona remains confident in animal-assisted therapy’s ability to change lives and expand in practice. In fact, she is the designer of Western Canada’s first college-accredited course in animal-assisted therapy, and is currently helping to develop standards and certification for therapists across Canada. For her, the practice’s ability to make significant change is based on simple logic.

“The animal doesn’t judge people, it offers unconditional acceptance,” says Bona. “[And throughout most of these peoples’ lives], no one else has given them that message.”