Nonetheless, Peterson fights hard for their attention. During his lectures, he paces around the room, his voice fluctuating in tone and dynamic as he waxes theoretical on a string of elaborate hypotheses. He likes to sporadically lock eyes with individual students in the first few rows, approaching them swiftly and raising his voice to get his point across. In one moment he’s dissecting the philosophy of Carl Jung, and in the next he’s reciting the contents of a dream he had the previous night (an incoherent recollection about posing as a Vitruvian man when suddenly the room fills with snakes). “Your mind is a very strange space,” he once told his audience, mid-ramble. “The minute you give it an aim, a genuine aim, it’ll reconfigure the world within keeping that aim—that’s how you see to begin with.” Most of his students let the statement pass, immersed in their social media pursuits.

It isn’t until class wraps up that Peterson becomes the centre of attention. The 54-year-old packs up his belongings and navigates past the foot traffic toward a clear space in the outside corridor. Instantly, eight students line up to speak with him. A short, bearded man, no more than 21 years old—perhaps one of Peterson’s students, perhaps not—shakes his hand vigorously. “I just want you to know how much it means to me, what you’re doing,” the man says. Peterson nods, and wishes him well. A similar exchange transpires with the next three students in line, keeping Peterson in the hallway for the next 10 minutes. These are the Peterson followers, the devoted fans that have emerged on campus to support his ideas.

Earlier in the school year, he turned heads after publicly declaring he would never use gender-neutral pronouns. He rejected the notion of a non-binary gender spectrum, and openly criticized Bill C-16, a federal bill tabled in May 2016 that would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code to include discrimination on the basis of gender identity. He equated the requests of transgender and non-binary people to use pronouns other than “he” or “she” with the suppression of free speech, asserting that his refusal to use such pronouns could land him in hot water with human rights commissions. While many condemned Peterson’s controversial claims, he was simultaneously rewarded with a swath of devoted fans both in Canada and abroad—some of whom even show up in his weekly classes.

Mari Jang, a neuroscience and bioinformatics major at U of T, is one of them. She had only heard Peterson’s name in passing before he made headlines, but now she attends his Thursday lectures regularly. Jang finds Peterson to be a very compelling speaker. “You feel like you’re talking to a human being, and not some foreign entity standing up at the front of the classroom spitting out lecture material at you.”

Many of his fans would agree. Online, praise for Peterson’s speaking abilities seems endless. His YouTube videos receive tens of thousands of hits; more than 200,000 people were subscribed to his channel at the time of publication. Images of Peterson looking thoughtfully into the distance, accompanied by a quote of his in cursive text as though he’s Mahatma Gandhi, circulate regularly within right-wing online forums. An entire subsection of Reddit, a massive online forum, is dedicated solely to Peterson jokes.

Historically, university campuses have served as a space where authority is challenged and met with protest, often from a liberal vantage point. But Peterson has become something of a folk-hero for students opposing what they see as a status quo of liberal discourse on Canadian campuses. As “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and perceived identity politics play an increasing role in student politics—what an article on American university discourse in The Atlantic once referred to as the “coddling of the American mind”—room for discussion on sensitive subject matter is seen to have come under threat. Many students have sparked a movement that’s centred itself on the value of free speech—a fundamental right that Peterson and his fans alike say has been suppressed. In turn, campuses have become battlegrounds, pitting left-leaning students against their far-right counterparts and resulting in ugly spats that teeter on the edge of hatefulness.

***

In the mid-afternoon of October 11, 2016, a large group of students gather on the steps of Sidney Smith Hall, packing in front of the building against one another’s knapsacks. It’s just one week after the release of Peterson’s initial YouTube series, and a rally has broken out to defend Peterson’s controversial claims.

The gathering attracts both sides of the disagreement—the leftie students furious with the havoc Peterson supporters had unleashed, and the supporters themselves. Lauren Southern, a former commentator for right-wing news organization The Rebel Media, known for a stunt in which she received a doctor’s note stating she was male by pretending to identify as transgender, showed up. So did the Black Liberation Collective (BLC), fundamental dissenters of Peterson’s claims. Eventually even Peterson himself ventures outside Sid Smith, greeted by a mixture of jeers and applause. When he tries to speak to the crowd, he is drowned out by a white-noise machine that a counter-protester has hooked up to a speaker.

It’s not long before ad-hominen attacks and bursts of violence break out across the rally. A man wearing a Hells Angels jacket is isolated by police. Another man shouts, “We need more Michael Browns,” referring to a Black man shot and killed by police in Missouri in 2014, at the group of counter-protesters—suggesting more members of the Black community should be slain. A member of the trans and non-binary community smacks Southern’s microphone from her hands. By the end, a man claims to have been briefly strangled by another protester before campus police came to break it up.

In the aftermath of the heated protest, Jang decided to make a Facebook group to promote free speech on campus. She worried that many who opposed Peterson’s beliefs wanted to censor him entirely. For years, Jang worked as an interpreter for North Korean refugees, where she heard harrowing stories of the consequences the country’s laypeople would face should they say the wrong thing. Obviously, she said, Canada is nowhere near the dystopian reality of North Korea, but “one of my biggest fears is living in a world where freedom of speech is questioned.” Her experiences informed her need to defend free speech, and seeing Peterson’s willingness to defend his own motivated her to do the same.

A screenshot from the SFSS Facebook group.

Jang opened Students in Support of Free Speech (SSFS) to anyone who believed in Peterson’s right to speak his mind, whether they agreed with him or not. Almost instantly, the group gained hundreds of members. They consisted primarily of U of T students who gathered online to laud Peterson’s bravery, vigorously reminding each other of free speech’s intrinsic value in a democratic society. They praised Peterson for his brilliance and showed disdain for his dissenters—“radical leftists,” “social justice warriors,” and “the regressive left,” as they called them. (Peterson did not respond to requests for comment from This.)

The Peterson story embodied the clichéd narrative of the valiant professor fighting solo against an amorphous horde of radical, irrational college students with nose rings—and it quickly drew in students at other universities. At the University of British Columbia, the UBC Free Speech Club emerged, declaring their commitment “to cultivating an open dialogue on campus, where arguments are made with wit and reason rather than rhetoric and personal attack.” One day after Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president, about a dozen members of the club held a “coming-out party,” setting up a table outside the student commons and donning red “Make America Great Again” hats. Three hours south of UBC, the University of Victoria’s Students for Free Speech and Accountability came to fruition; within 24 hours of its inception, founders had to deny allegations that they were affiliated with neo-Nazi organizations. The groups remain niche—neither tops more than 600 students at universities with undergraduate populations well over 10,000, and their gatherings primarily remain online.

The bulk of their discourse appears to situate them in opposition to “social justice warriors”—a derogatory term to describe those who lean left and are outspoken about issues of race, gender, and sexuality. They oppose what they see as identity politics, and—as testament to their widespread adoration for Peterson—they champion the need for public debate rather than polarized silence. For dissenters, that debate is often reviled as hateful.

And hateful it became. In the months following SSFS’ inception, dialogue among its members turned from the usual Peterson praising to a mixture of sexism, anti-Semitism, transphobia, and particularly rampant xenophobia. The group attracted not only U of T students but also Facebook users in rural America sporting Make America Great Again hats, in support of President Donald Trump, in their profile pictures and images of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon that has been appropriated as a mascot for racist and sexist ideologies, as their cover photos. “Women are offended to know their place, which is to take care of children develop raise and hold families together,” wrote one member. “I present you with something whose threat to science is even more cancerous than creationism: postmodern feminism,” wrote another.

Nonetheless, the administrators held fast to their convictions—the members would not be banned, nor would their posts be removed. “There are many nasty things from both sides in the group, but that’s just a reflection of where our society has progressed,” SSFS vice-president Geoffrey Liew tells me over the phone. “This is a space where we can actually confront those different views instead of segregating them off into different spheres where people don’t come into contact with them.”

The group’s public relations officer, Chad Hallman, tells me he much prefers arguing with someone’s outlandish opinion rather than silencing it. “There are some pretty despicable views toward certain groups,” he says. “But when there is backlash [to those views], and people see how overwhelming [the backlash] is toward that individual spreading hate, that’s more reassuring than just deleting a post.”

The standards Hallman and his group uphold are not completely far-fetched in a larger educational context. The university has long been a site for the free exchange of ideas, and debate is encouraged among students, viewed as an opportunity to learn and grow intellectually. But as human rights commentator Steven Zhou notes, the university is also positioned as a microcosm of society at large—and when certain beliefs infiltrate campus, it’s a signal of changes to come outside of school boundaries. “The campus propaganda is a sign that this wave has reached an outer fringe of the right wing that’s looking to regain a certain kind of footing among the youth,” Zhou writes for CBC, referencing the widespread appearance of white nationalist posters on campuses across the country.

A screenshot from the SFSS Facebook group.

In early December, just two months after its inception, administrators abandoned the Facebook group, sensing that a U of T-only group would be more effective in defining the boundaries of discourse. The group quickly went the route of Holocaust denial. “Yall [sic] realize the six million number is bullshit? ” one member asked. “More Jewish propaganda trying to draw Goy sympathy.” Meanwhile, at the University of Calgary, the right-wing Wildrose Club on campus came under fire after circulating an email to its members reminding them that “feminism is cancer.” In the UBC Free Speech club Facebook group, one member asked that everyone please “keep the ad-hominen attacks to a minimum.”

***

In mid-November 2016, when it seems as though the Peterson controversy has hit its inevitable tipping point, the University of Toronto hosts a public debate on Bill C-16 between Peterson, U of T law professor and director of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Brenda Cossman, and Mary Bryson, a professor of education at UBC. It is intended to bring the controversy’s opposing dialogues into contention. But by its end, everyone’s pre-established notions are only reaffirmed. Peterson calls human rights tribunals “kangaroo courts” that should be abolished as fast as possible. Cossman rebuts that all human rights are about is respect and dignity; if you can throw a bit of kindness on top, even better. Bryson says Peterson’s videos provide a fabulous case study in the cultural production of ignorance in an age of reactionary populism. Peterson adds that the “political-correctness police” have brainwashed everyone. There is little consensus.

But following the debate, Bryson, who identifies as non-binary and uses the pronoun they, received extensive online threats targeting their gender identity. “The best part about you being a dyke bitch, this shit dies with you, you fucking nasty subhuman piece of trash,” said one message, delivered through Facebook. In the comment section of an article by Christie Blatchford in the National Post, one person wrote: “Things like Bryson remind me of the repulsive, repugnant creatures Clint Eastwood had to deal with and eradicate in his Dirty Harry series.” (Bryson declined to speak to This for matters of safety.)

A Facebook message to Bryson following the debate.

Such instances of bigotry on campus are not confined to the Peterson controversy, but have rather expanded to form an uptick in discriminatory sentiment among many university students. “White Students Union” posters were discovered on York, Ryerson, and U of T campuses last fall, depicting two white men posing stoically in front of the CN Tower. The group responsible for the posters lists “organiz[ing] for and advanc[ing] the interests of Western peoples” as a mission statement online. Other posters reading “Fuck Your Turban” were found on the University of Alberta campus. Anti-Muslim and anti-gay graphics accompanied posters on McGill campus with “Make Canada Great Again” emblazoned as the headline.

When outgoing vice-president, university affairs of the U of T Students’ Union Cassandra Williams expressed anger over the swath of threats made toward Bryson, she was met with a distressing response. “If a trans person puts themselves out publicly, then they can’t expect to not experience violent harassment,” someone told her.

“I think that’s kind of what the culture is right now,” Williams says. “There’s an expectation that it is fair, or justified, or it’s ‘just the way things are,’ that a trans person, should they choose to speak out in defence of themselves in their community, should they choose to just be visible or have a high profile, is bringing that sort of harassment or violence upon themselves.”

If human rights commentator Zhou’s theory that the campus signals change for society at large is true, the treatment of Peterson dissenters like Williams is a troubling sign: It suggests a level of comfort to express such hateful ideology. “That some of the more extreme and explicit forms of this rhetoric are being found on campuses is alarming,” Zhou writes. “It’s a sign that whoever’s responsible is looking to young people for a response and to campuses as a possible setting for mobilization.”

Countering the values of Peterson and the SSFS administrators, Williams participated in #NotUpForDebate, a protest of the forum between Peterson, Bryson, and Cossman, on November 19. “Debating whether or not different classes of people are deserving of equal rights… has always been happening with marginalized groups,” Williams, who identifies as trans, explains. “By saying that these things are not up for debate, we’re saying, ‘Look, we’re here, and we’ve always been here,’ and just [by] virtue of being humans and by virtue of us being members of society, we have, automatically, the expectation of equal rights and the expectation of freedom from discrimination.”

SSFS public relations officer Hallman fervently disagrees with #NotUpForDebate: “If there was one thing that we could do to really de-escalate the general situation, it would be to bring it more toward the space of dialogue and discussion.”

***

In recent months, Peterson shifted the arena of his discourse from U of T to a number of other universities—receiving predictably mixed reception in turn. In mid-March, he stood outside a lecture hall at McMaster University, surrounded in equal part by admirers and protesters. It was a relatively warm day for the season, and the afternoon oxygen appeared to have effectively energized both sides of the campus debacle.

“Shut down Peterson,” chanted the protesters in unison, clanging on pots and pans as they worked to drown him out.

Peterson, red in the face and unwilling to back down from a fight, vociferously reprimanded them. “You, like it or not, only have the interests of your group,” he shouted back. “And the world is nothing but a battleground between groups of different interests!”

Video clips of Peterson’s rather unflattering altercation with the angry protestors would later circulate the Free Speech clubs’ Facebook groups.

“These leftists are some of the worst activists I’ve ever seen,” wrote one. “I really wish I was back in school to fight back against these degenerates,” wrote another.

The noise peaked. Peterson lost his train of thought. A woman in front of him appeared to ask a question, but his response was drowned out by the surrounding chaos.

Eventually, both sides went home.

Anyone with a basic understanding of North America’s history knows this is not what happened. The rivers flowed and the grass continued to grow, but the ship brazenly built its success on the oppression of the canoe. Government mandated genocide, both cultural and literal, attempted to rob generations of Indigenous families from their autonomy. Canada’s residential schools (the last of which only closed in the 1990s) were devoted to the dismantling of Indigenous youth’s languages, spirituality, and culture—and were only a small part of the government’s assimilationist agenda. But the word assimilation doesn’t begin to embody the pain inherent to colonialism. It also does nothing to capture the strength of Indigenous peoples who are now reclaiming their spaces, languages, and knowledge.

Today, Canada’s collective dialogue is finally shifting to include reconciliation with Indigenous people. This year, after six years of gathering statements from witnesses and survivors of Canada’s residential school system, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released 94 calls to action. The calls outline improvements that span across many areas of Canadian society, like child welfare, health, language and culture, media, the legal system, and education. Each of these sectors holds barriers rooted in colonization. And, in many ways, the TRC’s report acts as a guide for the Canadian government to address the chasms left by the residential school system.

In a country with a history of using the education system to oppress Indigenous people, academia has an intrinsic role to play in truth-telling. Given all this, says journalist and award-winning director Candace Maracle, the need for an improved, context-conscious curriculum is evident: “Not just as a Haudenosaunee woman, not just as a journalist, but as a person.”

That’s why the TRC report also addresses modern education, targeting every level of schooling from kindergarten to post-secondary. It’s something that many Indigenous and education activists are currently focusing on, and also grappling with. As these discussions gain traction, post-secondary institutions are newly focused on introducing more Indigenous content into the university curriculum—what’s being called “Indigenization.” But when it comes to translating this term to tangible, systemic action, it’s not so easy to parse out. Indigenization can refer to many things, from to the creation of more Indigenous spaces on campus, to mandatory courses added to universities, to adding more Indigenous context and perspectives into already existing curricula. Regardless of what form it takes, this emergent buzzword carries a connotation of pervasiveness, effortlessly suggesting systemic transformation. At its core, Indigenization is more complicated: these are institutions that, in many ways, are built on a rejection of Indigenous knowledge.

“These institutions and classrooms were never meant to be Indigenized. These spaces were created to not allow my people in,” says Andrea Landry, a 27-year-old University of Saskatchewan professor. Landry is Anishinaabe and comes from Pays Plat First Nation in Ontario. Now, she calls Treaty 6 territory home in Poundmaker Cree Nation, Saskatchewan. She teaches Indigenous studies and political science through on-reserve classes. “I grew up in high schools where being brown was a burden,” says Landry. She went to Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, B.C. During her undergrad, Landry was involved with international politics. She did work with the United Nations. Idle No More had started. She was travelled to different countries every month. But every time she came back to the classroom, she was confronted with frustrating questions like Teach us about the ’60s scoop? Teach us about residential schools? Why do I always see Indians drunk downtown? “I was always questioning my professors,” says Landry, “and saying, ‘Where is the representation of my people?’”

All of which raises the question: How do you even begin to re-imagine institutions that were never meant to welcome Indigenous people in the first place?

* * *

There are 650,000 Indigenous youth under the age of 25 in Canada. This is the fastest growing segment of the country’s population. Yet, fewer than 10 percent of Indigenous people aged 25–64 have a university degree, according to Universities Canada, an organization which labels itself “the voice of Canadian universities.” Comparatively, 65 percent of non-Indigenous people of the same age category have a university degree—more than triple the amount. The reasons behind this are nuanced, not easily attributed to any single set of causes. Economic barriers, like a lower average income, make it more difficult to attend post-secondary institutions. There is also a sense of disheartening alienation that can come with travelling long distances from communities to universities.

“If we’re saying everyone needs a higher education in this country to be employable, how do we create the space so that everyone can attend? That’s the biggest piece,” says Darren Thomas, a 46-year-old working on his Ph.D. in community psychology at Laurier University. A member of the Seneca Nation, Thomas lives in the Grand River Territory of the Haudenosaunee. He also holds the unexpected title of professional entertainer, as an on-stage comedy hypnotist. Thomas is an easy-going conversationalist, with a relaxed smile that reaches his eyes. “I help people who have experienced trauma laugh,” says Thomas. He’s one of 13 designated role models for the Council of Ontario Universities’ (COU) “Let’s Take Our Futures Further” campaign, which launched in February 2016 and aims to showcase the successes of Aboriginal students in Ontario.

In a time where mainstream media and textbooks all too often cast Indigenous people as victims in their own narratives—or don’t cast them at all—showcasing the successes of Indigenous Canadians is long overdue. This is why initiatives like Future Further are important. “Many Canadians don’t know who we are, don’t understand what our resiliency is,” says Wanda Wuttunee, a professor of Native Studies at University of Manitoba. “You can hear many sad, hard stories. But what do they do with them? Are they resilient and keep going? Or do they sit?” There’s a need to make space, so that the triumphs of Indigenous scholars, thinkers, and creators across Canada can be shared. Narratives of struggle should not be dismissed, but they also shouldn’t stifle ones of success.

When Thomas first attended university in the late 1980s, he says there was a sense of trepidation from his home community surrounding Western education. “Fundamentally, there’s still that fear,” says Thomas, “that Western education is a mind changer.” The phrase “mind changer” comes from a very specific part of Haudenosaunee history, Thomas tells me. In the late 18th century, there was a Seneca prophet by the name of Handsome Lake. He had visions that told him how his people should live. One of the visions warned him of the mind changer, alcohol. Another told him that his people would become lost if they followed the white man. At the time, Thomas brushed off his grandmother’s warnings. “It’s the modern world,” he thought. “They’re not going to treat us this way.”

Now, he laughs gently at his youthful optimism, “Little did I know she was right.”

* * *

A few years ago, Maracle sat in a small living room, in her friend’s downtown Toronto apartment. She was hanging out with some colleagues from her Ryerson graduate program, casually drinking beers. One of her male colleagues turned to her, “I knew some Indians once…” There are enough people around that Maracle was embarrassed. “I knew some Indians once…” That agonizing anecdotal pretext. The man told Maracle they beat-up and robbed a friend of his. Five years later, recounting the story, Maracle laughs the sort of laugh that is fuelled by absurdity more than actual amusement. She’s able to laugh now, but at the time it stung, she says. Back then, part of Maracle rushed to offer an explanation on behalf of the Indigenous strangers. The other educated part, says Maracle, followed up her explanation with clarifications. “There was a part of me that sort of stepped back and said, ‘We’re not all like that and I probably don’t know them,’” she pauses, gently scoffing. “We might be a small population but that doesn’t mean I know every Indian there is and I certainly don’t hang out with robbers.” Maracle lets loose into a spurt of wry laughter. But she knows it’s not funny. These are the attitudes that often permeate classrooms—spaces that can be laden with ignorance and outright hostility.

Landry can speak, lengthily and with eloquence, to institutional hostility. She was the first Indigenous student to take the Master of Community and Social Justice program at University of Windsor. During that process, one experience stands out from the rest. The class was talking about Indigenous people, “because, of course, I brought the topic up,” says Landry, the only Indigenous student in the room. When the conversation shifted to genocide, one of Landry’s older male colleagues made eye-contact with her and said, “It wasn’t genocide, because it only killed thousands of your people.” He laughed. Landry locked eyes with him and just stared. “I remember my whole body got really, really hot. Even my insides and my stomach. Everything was hot.”

She felt instantaneous rage. Toward him, but also toward Canada’s institutions, for allowing him to believe such revisionist history. Her pause was brief and her decision to engage her antagonizer, in what she describes as a history lesson, was a quick one. She knew the numbers—that it was more than thousands. So, she talked about the statistics. She asked him if he knew the basics of Canada’s history of colonization.

Landry says she asks people “like that” questions, to lure their thinking outside of its usual scope. Questions like, What are your understandings of treaties? Or, Where did you learn about the history of the land? Her peer didn’t have any answers. He remained quiet, a contrast to his usual demeanour in class. Landry felt he undermined her because she’s an Indigenous woman. But she also felt he had been trained from a young age, by Canada’s institutions, to think that way.

That night she walked home, her anger propelling her tall frame quickly forward. It was the sort of anger that simmers for weeks. She called her mother and told her she wanted to quit, that she was done with the program. She dreamed of leaving academia and its promises of hostility, to be with her mother. To fish and live off the land. But, despite her disillusionment, she was determined to finish her degree (“Mama didn’t raise no quitter,” she later quips). Time and time again, she was expected to act as a spokesperson for all Indigenous people. Teach us about residential schools. Teach us about the ’60s scoop. Why do I always see Indians drunk downtown? “These kind of questions pick away at your identity,” she says, adding, “It took me six years to get my undergrad.”

* * *

University faculty are the only appendage of the great university body that has the ability to reach out directly and personally to students. They are, as Thomas puts it, “this body of people that drive institutional thinking from the classroom.” For many students, the classroom is the first (or only) place they will learn about Indigenous peoples’ histories—histories that, in elementary school, were given little to no space in textbooks, wedged between terms like “first contact” and “fur-trade.” Unfortunately, when students transition from the public school system to post-secondary institutions, university curriculums, shaped by the perspectives of professors, often manage to maintain the same established, outdated “truths.” Rather than drive institutional thinking out, many professors uphold the institutional status-quo.

After a year of doing his undergraduate at Laurentian, Thomas transferred to Western University. He felt fairly successful at Laurentian—a fact which he attributes mostly to being in an Aboriginal-specific program, surrounding by Aboriginal academics—but he couldn’t stand the cold. Western was closer to his community, but also much harder to navigate as one of the only non-white students on campus. He recalled one professor who handed him back a paper and said: “I don’t know anything about your people, how could I mark this?” The professor continued: “Stop thinking like an Indian.” Thomas quit on the spot. Thomas felt, “really, deeply, spiritually,” like he didn’t belong at Western—that it was not a safe space for him. Years later, he went to Laurier and took night classes to finish his undergraduate. Only then did he feel comfortable again.

University institutions do not change rapidly. Even when Thomas later did his master’s degree at Laurier, which he calls “a rich place to play,” he was asked questions like: Why are you here, then, if you’re always bashing the university? Why are you getting your master’s? “Well, no one asked me if they could come and create this country called Canada,” says Thomas, a rare edge to his voice. He adds that part of his university experience is him playing the game. “I’m getting these advanced credentials, because suddenly, in the eyes of the state, I know more.” Now, he sits with people involved in politics, with institutional power, and discusses issues that are important to him. “I’m just some radical Indian that’s trying to change the world,” he says, “but because I’m doing this, following and playing the game, it’s giving me access.”

There is hope for change. The practice of cluster hiring has taken off in North American post-secondary institutions. This involves hiring new faculty, across various disciplines, for the purpose of a common research objective. As a result of these cluster hires, more Indigenous professors are being hired across Canadian campuses. This is the most direct way to subvert the academic status quo and also the easiest way to avoid the co-opting of Indigenous knowledge in the classroom. In March 2016, the University of Guelph announced it will hire, over the course of the next 18 months, five tenured Indigenous faculty members. To encourage more Indigenous scholars, Guelph also announced the creation of five new graduate awards, worth $30,000 a year, for Ph.D. students and a $15,000 annual award for master’s degree students, as well as a new $45,000 postdoctoral award for an Indigenous researcher.

Another way to shift academic perspective is to create more informed educators. This year, Trent University launched a new five-year Indigenous Bachelor of Education program. It offers entry straight out of high school, or through transfer agreements set up with local community colleges and First Nations run schools. The first three years of the program revolve around Trent courses, then the fourth and fifth are spent in the Indigenous Bachelor of Education program. “The key to education is good teachers. That’s what we are trying to prepare here,” says David Newhouse, a professor of Indigenous studies at Trent University, who has also been chair of the Department of Indigenous studies for 23 years. “We’re guided very much by elders who keep telling us over and over again about the importance of education.”

Whatever guides a university’s hiring practices, the lived experience of whomever is doing the educating should be a significant factor in the decision. Lived-experience carries inherent truth, a truth which resonates and captivates. “You can’t teach something you haven’t experienced in your life,” says Landry, “You can try your best, but the emotional content is gone. And the emotional content is what gets to the core of people when you’re teaching in a classroom.” The wisdom and knowledge of Indigenous elders and scholars, for instance, is the core of Cape Breton University’s new MIKM 2701 course. Each week a different Mi’kmaq elder, knowledge keeper, or scholar co-teaches a lecture in their area of expertise. Unlike the rest of the newly incorporated courses offering Indigenous perspectives, this course is entirely free, accessible via live stream and, later, archived footage online.

“We wanted to create something that was free and was Indigenous-focused and Indigenous-led and could be a way for Cape Breton University to give back,” says Ashlee Cunsolo Willox, an assistant professor at Cape Breton University and one of the creators of the course. “To really take our responsibilities around the truth and reconciliation commission seriously.” This combination of honouring Indigenous systems of thought, while straying outside of academia’s capitalist nature created a result that Willox could not have imagined. Over 12,000 people, across 26 different countries, watched the lectures. Suddenly, people who would otherwise not have had the opportunity to enter a university lecture hall could learn about Mi’kmaq culture. Also, Willox tells me, generations of Mi’kmaq families were watching the lectures together. “A lot of people were indicating, as Indigenous elders, that to see their grandchildren, their children, their great-grandchildren watching it together with pride was healing.”

Landry’s classes also use a basis of traditional knowledge to deliver the content. This past semester, Landry asked her students to interview someone who knew about the land, or the old ways. Many of Landry’s students did interviews with people they had never thought to talk with, or had never made time to talk with, she says. A lot of her students broke down in tears when they were presenting. “I always want students to learn more about where they’re living and where they come from,” she says. “We have to stay true to who we are and where we come from, even through the learning process.” Her lessons touch on colonization, but outside the trauma-laden landscape. Instead, she prefers to encourage discussions of family, healing and the land they are learning on. What does your relationship to the land look like, now? What did your Mushum or Kokum teach you about the land? What was it like for them to grow up in colonial Canada?

Today, says Thomas, is an exciting time for emerging academics, because academia is at a tipping point. But for the system as a whole, the biggest challenge is still figuring out how Indigenous knowledge can fit into education. “How do we take Indigeneity,” he asks, “something that is so rich and lived and beautiful, and put it inside a Western institution?” It is important to understand, he adds, that Indigenous systems of thought and Western, Eurocentric systems of thought work from very different principles and have different ways of interacting with the world. The Western approach, cemented in Canada’s institutions and collective-mentality, is about evolving away from the past, whereas the nature of Indigeneity, says Thomas, is: How did our ancestors understand things?

Yet, if Western and Indigenous knowledge are going to cohabit academia, there has to be some sort of intellectual shift. What needs to happen is not a joining of two halves, but an understanding that Indigenous knowledge is inherently whole. For Landry, the answer is clear: First Nations run schools. Spaces rooted in Indigenous knowledge. Landry’s dream is to open her own school, out on the land, free of colonial academia. She doesn’t want Indigenous knowledge to be seen as an alternative to Western institutions of education. She wants her students to know that their academic and career goals and prioritizing their Indigenous knowledge are not mutually exclusive.

Some of these schools already exist (though in dismally small numbers). Blair Stonechild has been at the First Nations University in Saskatchewan since 1976, back when it wasn’t even called First Nations University. He’s been the department head, dean of academics, and was even the executive director of planning and development. Stonechild describes First Nations University’s approach as holistic, with an emphasis on physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being of the students. For Stonechild, First Nation run schools offer Indigenous students an ideal environment. Whether or not people understand or respect Indigenous systems of thought, he adds, they need to make room for protocols and perspectives: “At least create space for Indigenous culture to have some integrity.”

In a country where a ship is a ship and a canoe is a canoe, it’s important to know where you come from. Indigenous students have to recognize that when they leave the reserve and go to university, they’re just visiting the ship, says Thomas. “At the core of their being they have to know they’re born of that canoe,” he adds. “That the strength and resistance of their Indigeneity will help them flourish.”

Gray, Kirchmeier, and another woman referred to as “Jane Doe”, who has been through a similar experience, are raising money for when they go to court. The Silence is Violence Legal Defense Fund is meant to even the playing field when it comes to court fees. As the group’s Indiegogo campaign page reads, “Our universities are multi-million dollar corporations. UBC recently announced raising more than 1.6 BILLION dollars.  Our universities have a team of lawyers employed to challenge our claims.” In the case of Jane Doe, the alleged abuser is a university professor, which means he is entitled to legal representation from a faculty association.

Since all women are students with precarious employment they cannot afford the same legal protection as their accused or their schools. In addition to the financial strain they continue to be re-victimized in the court system. All this knowing the odds are not in their favour. In the episode Gray’s lawyer says that out of an estimated 1,000 sexual assaults, only three are convicted. A lot of this has to do with victim blaming and the collective denial society has when it comes to the placating binary that bad things only happen to “bad”people.

On a positive note, since last week’s post, Dmitry Mordvinov was expelled, after several reports of sexual harassment and assault.

Donations to the Silence is Violence Legal Defense Fund can be made here.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange. 

Illustration by Miki Sato

The months leading up to my graduation this spring were a mix of excitement and desperation. Excitement, because after four years of journalism school at Ryerson University my love for academia had turned sour—I was aching to be done. Desperation, because I knew once I was done, my unemployment would be more apparent and stark than ever. I pored through job listings for hours on end, constantly tweaking my resumé, hitting the “apply” button so many times I started to forget which jobs I had actually applied for.

No emails back. No phone calls. Not a single interview. And all of this was made worse by headlines reminding me just how completely screwed I was. “Indisputable Evidence That Millennials Have It Worse Than Any
Generation in 50 Years,” read the Atlantic in February 2014. “Ontario youth unemployment among the worst in Canada,” from CTV in September 2013. “Why are so many of Canada’s young people out of work?” CBC in June 2013. “Recent university grads increasingly jobless, study shows,” Globe and Mail, September 2014.

The statistics were muddled. While one mid-2013 article on the CBC claimed that youth unemployment was at 14.5 percent, another, in Maclean’s, asserted serious youth unemployment was simply a myth, citing a Statistics Canada study that put unemployment in Canada for 25-29-year-olds at 7.4 percent in 2012. “[The] stagnation in the quality of jobs may explain some of the frustration,” the Maclean’s article allows. “Some university graduates are likely settling for lower-rung jobs that they would have avoided in the past.” (Perhaps true—but perhaps also this means that we’re so desperate to avoid unemployment, we’ll take anything.)

But beyond the headlines, there are the actual people of this highly discussed and debated generation—and, speaking as one of them, the employment drought sure feels real. Every time I read one of these articles, mostly written by someone who isn’t a part of my generation, it’s like we’re mice in a lab. We are the Boomers’ and Generation X’s greatest sociological experiment: scurrying through preset conditions, our achievements and pitfalls analyzed by people who are utterly detached.

“I think a lot of older generations are out of touch with the way that education and professional fields have changed,” says 23-year-old Kelsey Leung, “especially those who are comfortably collecting paycheques for jobs that they have had for quite some time.” Leung has a bachelor of arts with honours in history from Queen’s University, and a bachelor of education from University of Toronto. Currently, she’s a barista—a job that doesn’t require two expensive degrees.

Like myself, Leung has been told millennials are simply entitled and lazy. Apparently, our desire for meaningful work after grueling, expensive, and mental-illness inducing degrees means that we are spoiled, ungrateful children. These criticisms, more often than not, come from middle-aged suburbanites who seem to have scored jobs straight out of school in the 1980s and never had to contemplate the possibility of being in their 30s and making minimum wage.

“I think that if being entitled means that I feel upset that I put in thousands of dollars of my own money and in scholarships towards my education,” says Leung, “and have been told that it will be at least four to six years before I get a full-time contract position—minimum—then I am absolutely entitled.” If anything, my generation is not entitled enough: We willingly scrape through terrible jobs, and work for free after years of education. Most of us feel like we can’t afford a sense of entitlement. Pride is expensive. And though we deserve to have some, we know that pride means no exposure, no paycheque, no chance.

I certainly didn’t feel entitled when, after graduation, I was eager to take on a part-time babysitting gig. I never even asked how much it paid. All I saw was a job. Despite receiving my pricey degree, I was in the exact position as I was before I earned it. I was still writing for free, and, eventually, months after graduation, only making a little money for articles. And I was still spending way too much time on job search websites like Indeed and Monster, cursing at the computer screen every time I came across the dreaded “five years experience necessary.” Amidst pages of job postings that, according to the requirements, I was not qualified for, I felt like Major Tom lost in space.

I started to think the only people landing decent jobs were people who were privileged enough to have the right connections. Some of my fellow graduates had connections within their family, others came from wealthy enough backgrounds to not have to worry about unpaid work. My parents immigrated here with my sister and me in 1996 and, because of that, despite their successes, they haven’t been established here long enough to be able to provide those connections for me.

In the end, my babysitting job fell through. Without full access to a car, it was another job that couldn’t work out. And so by July, I fantasized about just packing up and leaving. There had to be a job for me somewhere in this world; and not just any job, one that would actually make me happy.

That’s exactly what 29-year-oldDavid Matijasevich was thinking in June 2013 while he was working on his Ph.D. in political science at Carleton University. In his fourth year, Matijasevich was, financially, on his own. Not wanting to take on more debt, and knowing that the teaching assistant position provided by the school wouldn’t be sufficient enough to pay rent, he made the move to Singapore. He worked on his Ph.D. from there, where he was able to find work as an associate lecturer in social sciences, and an instructor and academic manager at an adult education centre. Matijasevich just finished his Ph.D. in September.

Matijasevich says that it disappoints him to hear Generation Y labeled as entitled. “Entitlement means expecting something without working for it,” says Matijasevich. “Yet young people, particularly during their school days, seem to be working harder than ever.” Matijasevich recalls his days as a teaching assistant at Carleton University, in which all 15 of the students in his class were working part-time jobs during their studies. Some of them were working more than 20 hours a week, on top of schoolwork.

There are more young people pursuing higher education than ever before. In 1980, there were 550,000 fulltime university students and 218,000 part-time university students. Now, there are 979,000 full-time university students, and 312,000 part time students. This is a huge feat, considering tuition fees have tripled over the last 20 years, and are expected to continue rising, especially in Ontario. In 1975, the average tuition in Canada was $551. In 2013 it was $5,772. In 2017, it is expected to be, on average, around $9,483 in Ontario.

Matijasevich’s solution, however, is not for everyone. Despite my fantasizing, I know I’m not ready for a move like that. Going to an entirely different country, let alone a different continent, is an extreme solution to paying the bills. It means leaving behind the comfort of home, loved ones, and security—just to not become trapped in the exploitative monotony of minimum wage service industry jobs. Getting a job isn’t necessarily the tricky part, it’s getting a job that doesn’t make you hate yourself for ending up in the place that you swore you wouldn’t. The hard part is getting a job that makes you feel proud, that allows you to comfortably move out of your parents’ house, that makes it possible to pay off your Visa bill without your chequing account looking like a wasteland.

I’ve been told I ought to go back to my old jobs—I worked as a cashier at Indigo for two years, and then worked four semesters and one summer as a part-time shelver at the Ryerson University library. (My last job ended when the library no longer had enough work for part-timers.) I wonder if I should. After all, is working for free any better than my days of asking people whether they wanted their receipt in the bag? Yet, it pains me to think I might have to stand behind the same cash register I stood behind when I was 17. “But I have a degree now!” I think to myself.

I sometimes feel like my resumé is one giant “but I have a degree now!”

At family functions, I seek out any distraction and avoid all relatives so I won’t be asked that dreaded question, “What are your plans now?” If caught, I mumble the usual “Looking for better work; freelancing; doing my best.” This answer has never impressed any of my relatives.

But is it even polite to ask that question anymore? It’s hard to chew my food when I’m thinking about how much money is in my bank account, and whether there was a typo in the last resumé I sent out. There should be a new rule that you should never ask a young adult in a terrible economy what their plans are. It’s just bad etiquette. I see the generation gap present in the apathetic nods of my relatives when I explain my mish-mash of ways to make some money, practically pocket change compared to their salaries. They seem painfully out of touch when they declare I ought to go to New York; I’ll get a job right away. If only it were that easy.

I don’t regret going to university. And I don’t feel like it’s useless. Education is important and it does make a difference—my career in journalism would not be even close to where it is now without my degree—but it would be disingenuous to say the strenuous journey to find good work hasn’t made me question whether it was all worth it. I can’t be the only one. Now that university degrees are the norm, I bet many have trouble seeing the value in a bachelor’s degree. There are so many of us with degrees, after all—currently, 1.7 million students are enrolled in degree programs across Canada. Degrees are something you have to acquire to get ahead, yet getting one doesn’t guarantee that you will.

For now, Matijasevich, Leung, and I are all doing the same thing. There’s one common thread between going to Singapore, working as a barista, and picking up odd freelancing jobs: we’re all doing what we feel we have to do to make it to the place where we are financially stable and happy. Say what you will about the flaws of my generation, but there is no doubting that we are a perseverant one. Maybe I’m entitled, stubborn, or just another foolish kid part of an underemployment statistic. Maybe I am the quintessential millennial being analyzed in some think piece written by a Generation Xer with a good salary. Maybe. But mostly I like to think of myself as just another person who works hard and wants the best for themselves. I’m one of the mice in the social experiment that older generations have subjected me too, hoping to escape the maze.

www.theglobeandmail.com

For guys (unless they’re in engineering school), life is a paradise of sexual opportunity. For women, it’s a wasteland. The old-fashioned custom known as “dating” (as in: guy calls up girl and asks her out next Friday, takes her to a movie and a meal, picks up the cheque, takes her home, kisses her goodnight and, if he’s lucky, gets to third base) is something their grandparents did. Today, people just hook up.

Okay I get that the “guys in engineering school are too nerdy to get laid” thing is a joke, but it’s not funny, it’s outdated. And while it’s true that there are more females than males in university today, saying that it makes school a “paradise of sexual opportunity” for men and a “wasteland” for women is bogus, for a few reasons. First, Wente makes it seem like men are just dogs who think with their penises and will literally sleep with any female who blinks twice at them. That isn’t true; guys have types and “deal-breakers,” too. Second, does Wente think university girls look around campus and pout, “But I wanted to have seeexxxxx tonighttt and there are noooo boyyyyssss“? (We don’t.) Finally, that last line: “Today, people just hook up.” Are you serious? Yeah, sure, young people do that. But to say that “hooking up” is all “young people” do is a major generalization. I have a lot of friends, both male and female, in serious, long-term relationships. Some of them even live together. Some of them even talk about marriage. And we still go on dates! Seriously!

What explains the campus hookup culture? One widely overlooked factor is the scarcity of men. As buyers in a buyers’ market, they’re on the right side of supply and demand. The price they have to pay for sex – in terms of commitment, time and money – is at a record low. Plus, women are more inclined than ever to say yes.

So basically what Wente is saying is that these horny dog-men finally get the sweet deal they’ve always dreamed of: no being nice to girls, just sex! Sure, there are guys out there who only want sex from girls. But there are also guys who like relationships, who only want to hook up with that girl they’ve had a crush on since the first day of class—and they want to date her, too. Even if it’s easier than ever for a guy to get laid without putting any work in, it doesn’t necessarily he’s going to go that route. Also, why are women “more inclined than ever to say yes”? Because we’re just so happy that one of the few guys on campus is talking to us, so we’d better snatch him up before the bitty in the next booth does? Blah.

In economic terms, our unequal desire for sex means that, in the sexual marketplace, men are the buyers and women are the sellers. Until recently, the price was steep, up to and including a wedding ring and a promise of lifetime commitment. In my parents’ generation, the only way for a 22-year-old guy to have a lot of sex was to get married. Today, plenty of 22-year-olds can get all the sex they want for the cost of a pack of condoms.

Okay not all women want marriage oh and also so what?

Dr. Baumeister argues that, throughout history, it was to women’s advantage to keep the supply of sex restricted. “Sex was the main thing they had to offer men in order to get a piece of society’s wealth, and so they restricted sexual access as much as they could, to maintain a high price,” he says in his essay Sexual Economics, Culture, Men and Modern Sexual Trends (with Kathleen Vohs). But as women began to gain power and opportunity, that began to change. Women can now get a piece of society’s wealth on their own. And life for everyone is a lot more fun, because it turns out that, wherever women have more autonomy, people have more sex.

So sex was only ever our way of feeling successful. It was never an act of passion or love or fun. Nope, it was just our way of feeling like we were worth something. Great message.

The changes in gender politics since the 1960s have been good for both sexes. Women got something they really wanted (access to careers and money) and men got something they really wanted (more sex). But this bargain is having some unexpected consequences. Young men are in no hurry to get married. Why should they be? As my dear old dad used to say when I waltzed out the door in my miniskirt, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” I hated it when he said that. But he’d grasped the central principle of sexual economics.

NO. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. NO.

A lot of women are in no hurry to get married, either. But it might not work out so well for them. They’ve watched too much Sex in the City. They think they’ll still have the same choices at 35 and 40 that they had at 25. They have no idea that men’s choices will get better with age (especially if they’re successful), but theirs will get worse. Believe me, this sucks. But it’s the truth.

WHAT? Saying that we watched too much Sex and the City and therefore have this distorted view of what it is to grow old and have sex and be a woman is actually making me feel queasy. (If Sex and the City misleads anything, it’s how easy it is to make it as a professional writer. There’s no way Carrie could afford all those Manolo Blahniks off a single column.) Also we’re just supposed to accept that while we get super gross and boring once we hit age 30, men get sexy so they’ll be fine—and therefore we need to get him to put a ring on it pronto for fear of living alone? What year are we in?

University is hard. True. Work is hard. True. Being an adult is hard. True. So why is Wente pointing the finger at those of us who are still trying to wade our way through the muck? And if what young men want most of all is sex, then why work hard if they don’t have to? Young men like sex, for sure, but news flash: so do women! If young females are having more sex, it’s probably because they like it. Also is sex really what guys want most of all? If a 22-year-old guy was offered one night of sex or a university degree, do you think he’s going to pick the former? Are men really that shallow? Are my guy friends really just hugging me when I’m sad because they want to get in my pants? Is the barista who told me to have a nice day as I stirred sugar into my Americano really telling me that he’d like to take me into the staff room and have sex with me? If he was, like, should I go back and talk to him?

David Skok. Illustration by Dave Donald

David Skok, the managing editor of GlobalNews.ca, checked into Harvard University in September to begin a one-year Nieman Fellowship. The 33-year-old is the first Canadian digital journalist to receive the prestigious award. He’ll be studying “how to sustain Canadian journalism’s distinct presence in a world of stateless news organizations.” He spoke with This two weeks before heading to Boston.

THIS: I’ve seen you referred to as an online journalist and a digital journalist. Which do you prefer?

SKOK: Digital journalist. Online is a little too specific to the web. What we do is beyond that. It’s mobile. It’s iPads and everything else.

THIS: Do you like being called a digital journalist?

SKOK: It’s fine for now but I look forward to the day when there’s no label that separates digital versus broadcast versus a print journalist.

THIS: Do you think the established media consider digital to be less important than traditional media?

SKOK: It depends on what we’re talking about. There are two ways to look at digital media. For me there’s the newsgathering … and then there’s digital media for publishing and distribution. I think digital media [for the latter] is becoming more accepted, if not by choice but by necessity. From a newsgathering point of view, I think there’s a long way to go.

THIS: For example?

SKOK: Look at the Arab Spring and how Andy Carvin of NPR used Twitter to verify information and facts. And he did the same thing with Syria. He was in Washington, DC. He’s being more effective at getting the accurate, fair, correct news out than the mainstream or legacy news organizations. That’s something I don’t think many news organizations have actually caught on to yet. And if they have it’s in a very tokenistic way, not as a real way of telling stories.

THIS: There’s a concern that if someone Tweets something, how do you know it’s true?

SKOK: Exactly. When I speak within my own newsrooms, I often make the point: how is a Tweet any different than a press release, or a report you’re hearing on a police scanner or anything else? Every piece of information we get needs to be verified and Twitter is no different.

THIS: Can you sum up your overriding goal for your fellowship?

SKOK: It’s probably too far-reaching but there are three parts I really want to look at. The first is the new tools of journalism, such as Twitter, open data, data journalism and even things like WikiLeaks. Second is how should Canadian newsrooms evolve in light of all these changes. This one hits me very close to home because I run a digital media organization within a legacy news organization. We created that from scratch and eventually, ultimately we have to integrate our product and our journalists into the main news organization as a whole. The third part is how can we, as Canadian news organizations, think of our role in the global sphere.

THIS: What do you mean by stateless news organizations?

SKOK: Ones that are based in a country but whose target audience is not that country. Al Jazeera, for example. Its target audience is not Qatar, where it’s based or Dubai or even the Arab world. I watched Al Jazeera and BBC World and CNN International on my iPad during the Arab Spring demonstrations. I didn’t need to be watching a Canadian news organization. Do we even need a national news organization anymore?

THIS: What else will you be studying?

SKOK: I’m noticing, as someone running the digital side of things, that we’re increasingly reliant on private enterprise to host the content. For example Facebook, Twitter, even the servers we use, Amazon, let’s say, they’re all private companies that host content in California. What interest do they have in sustaining Canadian journalism? What obligations does the CRTC place on them? There’s something about that we should be questioning. I’ll also be taking some courses at business school to understand more of the business side of things. As journalists we’ve always had this church and state mentality and I don’t know if we can still afford to do that anymore because we’re not making money anymore.

THIS: Are you excited about spending a year at Harvard?

SKOK: Absolutely. The resources at Harvard are immense. There are so many bright people. But not just that, there are programs that are thinking about all these issues we’re talking about, whether the law school, the Kennedy School, MIT. And they’re tackling these issues every day. To be immersed in that environment and be able to tackle them without the day-to-day operational running of a newsroom is incredibly exciting.

The 2009 inaugural class of Dechinta Bush University. Photo courtesy Dechinta.

Back in the 1960s, a group of high-minded northern and southern Canadians had a collective revelation: if the North ever wanted to succeed, it desperately needed a university. Toronto-based lawyer and retired Air Force general Richard Rohmer spearheaded the idea, first lobbying locals and politicians, and later penning a draft for a bricks-and-mortar institution. While the resulting plan led to the creation of colleges in all three territories, 50 years later all that is left of the University of Northern Canada is a couple of failed proposals, a worsening brain drain to the south, and an acute need for higher education and trained professionals in a booming region.

Dechinta Bush University Centre for Research and Learning is looking to change all that. Its goal: to provide a post-secondary liberal arts education to northerners at home. Founded in 2009, the aboriginal-run centre offers five courses in a 12-week semester, combining academic standards with indigenous knowledge to offer a comprehensive look at northern politics and land preservation.

“Living off the land and the land-based approaches are really integral to all the courses we deliver,” says Kyla Kakfwi Scott, program manager for Dechinta. In learning and using land-based practices, she adds, students come to understand the material being taught through the academic portions of the course.

Subjects covered include the history of self-determination of the Dene First Nations, decolonization practices, writing and communications, environmental sustainability, and community health, with undergraduate credit granted through the University of Alberta. Each course is taught by academics from the north and south and cultural experts, such as resident elders and guest lecturers.

Each term, up to 25 students, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, northerners and southerners, recent high school graduates to retirees, kick off courses by spending five weeks at home working through assigned readings. After that, they travel by plane to Blachford Lake Lodge, located about 220 kilometres east of Yellowknife, NWT, where classes are held outdoors. While not a degree-granting institution, the bush university is expanding to host one master’s and one PhD student per year who want to do research based out of the Dechinta program, with the goal of having their own masters programming down the road.

“The North has a lot of really interesting insight and expertise to offer, not just to its own residents but to people from around the world,” says Kakfwi Scott. “But for northern people the idea of being able to stay close to home and learn about the things that you’re dealing with every day and have that be recognized as being valuable and teachable at home would be phenomenal.”

Protests outside the British parliament in London. Creative Commons photo by Selena Sheridan.

Almost five months to the day and I’m just now realizing that I didn’t learn my lesson from the G20.

Sure, I found out first had the power and importance of community organization and activism; and I was forced to come to terms with the tragic ease with which our government could abuse our fundamental democratic rights when it suits them.

But neither of those lessons, important though they are, concerned me last Wednesday evening.  As I stood huddled with several thousand other angry, frustrated but mostly just cold students in between two immovable walls of police officers, I wondered how I hadn’t learnt my lesson about kettling the first time.

After being held for hours in the rain at Spadina and Richmond by riot police this summer, I promised I’d never let that happen again. I never wanted to feel so violated and so helpless—as you stand there and stare into the faceless wall of riot police you can’t help but feel impotent, vulnerable and exposed.  And yet, here I was again, hopping from foot to foot to maintain feeling in my toes standing in front of a feeble fire of placards and protest posters trying to fend off the cold London night.

How did it come to this: thousands of students–a large minority of whom were under the age of 16–held for eight hours without food, water or access to washrooms outside the houses of British government on Whitehall?

I suppose it starts with the cuts: devastating austerity measures that will affect every aspect of British life, but will prove particularly ruinous for higher education in the U.K. Under the scheme, government funding for universities will be cut by 40 percent (around £4.3 billion) and will raise the current cap on tuition. For a country that in recent memory offered free university education (universal free higher education was only ended in 1997) the prospect of tripling the fees from roughly £3,000 to more than £9,000 per year has many concerned that the halls of higher education will soon become the domain of the rich exclusively.

But the anger stems from something more emotional then merely the cuts.  Many of the estimated 50,000 students and protesters who walked out of classes and took to the streets across the country recently voted for Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democratic party in the last election; he promised, in light of the Tories’ proposed fiscal austerity, to oppose any increases to education fees.  And yet, here we are, not six months later, with the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government poised to pass legislation that will gut much of the social service sector and force universities to hike their tuition fees.

It’s understandable, then, why “Nick Clegg, shame on you, shame on you for turning blue,” is such a popular chant here, and why central Londoners awoke to find an effigy of Clegg burning Tuesday morning. Students expected this from David Cameron and his Conservatives; from Clegg and the Lib Dems, it feels more like personal betrayal.

This passion, so evident in the November 10th protest that saw “lawless riots”—to quote one sensationalist, though representative, retelling—has traditionally been hard to maintain in British protest movements in recent years.  “Brits just don’t demonstrate,” one protester told me during the march; the only conclusion, he went on, is that “this is something special.”

In a moment of depressing deja vu, I watched as students vented their frustration and anger on a police van left abandoned in the midst of the protest march and recalled how police had similarly left patrol cars on Queen Street this past summer, allegedly for protesters to vandalize.  The three destroyed police cars were used as justification for the authoritarian crackdown the following day in the streets of Toronto; likewise, the vandalized police van became the spurious excuse used for the mass kettling near Parliament Square that I was caught in, along with thousands others.

So there we stood—for hours.

There was something ominous about the entire experience: thousands of people surrounded, towered over by the imposing facades of the buildings of British government and hemmed in by lines of riot-armoured police, yet with plenty of space to move around—the atmosphere ranged from block-party and frenetic to frustrated and lethargic.  As the hours wore on and the cold set in, a few protesters with guitars milled about feebly singing “Give Peace a Chance” but were easily drowned out by the whirl of the helicopters circling overhead, the police sirens’ near constant wailing and, fittingly for London, the reverberating deep bass of the dubstep blaring from the sound system brought for the Carnival of Resistance.  The entire scene was illuminated by sporadic and dying fires of placards, posters and the remnants of a bus-stop lit more for their warmth then their menace (despite what the papers said) and the roving police spotlights.

Eight hours of standing still is a long time—and when your fingers are too cold to play on your smartphone and your mind too numb to do your school readings, you get to talking. The topic du jour was, of course, the cuts and the protests.  Several hours in, the dominant sentiment was frustration bordering on complete exasperation. If the intent of the police kettling had been to intimidate the protesters into silence, it failed; we were given free rein on the street and the non-stop music led to an impromptu dance party. But if they wanted to prove a point about how futile protest can feel in the face of heavy-handed police measures, well, they certainly made an impression.

The question that kept on creeping into the conversation: where was the space for autonomous dissent?

When we were finally let out at 9 pm, eight hours after the kettling began, most were too cold and angry to be anything but amenable.  When the Clash’s “I fought the Law” came on over the speakers, everyone joined in for the chorus, “…and the law won.”  Whether it was intended to be ironic or not, it was fitting.

It was, in short, a low-point.

Many who had been passionate and energetic at the start of the day felt their spirit sapped by the process, and, even more discouraging, many felt despondent about the prospect of an effective protest movement in Britain, myself included.

No matter how special this mass movement is—and you can’t help but marvel at  the sheer size of the country-wide protests—we have to acknowledge the limitations of peaceful protest when the police reaction to the first sign of trouble (graffiti, for instance) is mass kettling. But violent protest doesn’t strike me as being the answer either. For one, it merely galvanizes people away from the cause and serves to justify more repressive police tactics (many see the election of Rob Ford as Toronto mayor, complete with his promise for 100 new police officers, as a knee-jerk reaction to the “mayhem” during the G20).

But if you’ll excuse my use of a tired adage: the night is darkest right before the dawn.

The following day, still numbed and disheartened from the kettling, I joined the student occupation already in progress on my campus at the School of Oriental and African Studies. I admit, I initially opposed the occupation and voted against it in the emergency general meeting on the cuts; I felt like it would channel student anger at the wrong target: our school administration as opposed to the government. But sitting with students and staff members in the reclaimed space–open to anyone who wanted to join and used as a lecture space, music venue, forum for discussion, or simply a place to hang out—showed the dynamism of the student movement and wiped away the ennui I’d felt the day before.

The students’ demands are straightforward: financial transparency in the school’s decision-making; a commitment not to raise tuition fees; and a statement opposing the proposed cuts. If these demands seem overambitious (the school is, after all, at the mercy of the government if they do decide to go through with the cuts) their protest techniques are equally enterprising.  They propose more creative responses: instead of one protest of 5,000 people, which will inevitably be kettled, violent or not, they organize 500 people in 10 separate marches—”flash mob” protests that garner positive media attention. And they’eve built international solidarity networks with students facing similar cuts in other countries such as France, Spain and Italy.

Most of all, British students talk of retaking the means of their own presentation outside of the parameters of the police/media stranglehold on their image.

The school administration served the occupying students with an injunction last Thursday, making their presence in the building illegal as of 7 pm.  I was there as the clock ticked down and more students, staff and supporters kept pouring into the room in solidarity.  As the clock neared 7 and the threat of arrest became ever more real, we voted on defying the High Court Injunction and maintaining the occupation.

Every protest movement has its song: the anti-war movement of the 1960s had countless anthems from Bob Dylan, Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman” became an anthem for the women’s liberation movement and the G20 in Toronto this past summer had “O Canada.”  In a poetic turn of events, as the clock struck 7 and the occupation became illegal, students in occupation echoed those kettled the day before and began singing The Clash’s song once more, with fittingly altered lyrics: “I fought the law AND I WON” resounded through the hall.

It may seem merely symbolic; but the student movement is alive and well in London.

Collectively, the camps in Dadaab are the largest refugee settlement in the world. Built to house 90,000 displaced people, they now hold upwards of 250,000, mainly from neighbouring Somalia. Camps which were supposed to provide temporary shelter for refugees before they could be resettled have instead become distressingly permanent, with many people living in limbo for years.

Goodwin builds a relationship with each student, meeting the families and friends they will have to leave behind as they move, alone, to various universities across Canada. There are wonderfully light moments, and the strength and dignity with which the students face their various challenges is incredibly inspiring. But this is not a happy story. The feelings of dislocation that come when trying to adapt to an alien culture are accompanied by the constant pressure to do well enough, quickly enough, to pull their families out of the camps.

Expectations are high partly because of the perception in the camps that everyone in Canada is “rolling in money” and that once they break through and make it here, they — and their families — are set. Only after arriving in Canada do they learn that this is not the case. It is here that the book offers a look at Canada through the eyes of some very intelligent newcomers. Some wonder why their new Canadian friends don’t seem to care very much about Canadian politics. Others wonder why, in a country so much richer than the ones they were born in, homelessness and poverty are allowed to persist.

The students also struggle with questions of identity, with each having to decide how strongly to hold to lifelong religious and cultural beliefs. Often there is an eagerness to try new things, accompanied by a deep reluctance to leave behind customs which remind them of home. Their views on the interaction between women and men in Canadian society are varied, as are their recollections of gender relations in the camps. More than one of the male students has had the word “feminist” used against him as a severe accusation, and more than one of the female students believes the hijab is a central part of her wardrobe.

As a journalist, Goodwin gains the trust of the students and reports their experiences and observations in their own words. As a mother with a daughter the same age as the students she is writing about, she becomes part of the story herself. For most of them, she is the only outsider who has seen them both as they used to be, young leaders in Dadaab, and as they are now, young leaders in Canada.

The January-February 2010 issue of This is now in subscribers’ mailboxes and on newsstands coast to coast (for the first time ever, we’re also being sold this issue in 30 Canadian airports — let us know if you find us on the racks in your travels!). You’ll be able to read all the articles from this issue here on the website in the weeks ahead, but buying an issue from your friendly local independent bookstore is a great way to read the magazine. We also suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other intertubes-related hijinks.

On the cover of the January-February 2010 issue is our special Olympics-related package of articles, bundled with love by Cate Simpson, Kim Hart Macneill, and Jasmine Rezaee, your complete rundown of 9.2 billion reasons to be flaming mad about the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. We’ve got an in-depth interview with Christopher Shaw, head of 2010 Watch, citizen watchdogs of the Games’ excesses, cost overruns, and civil liberties infringements; plus our look at the issues the Olympic fiasco is exacerbating, including aboriginal land claims, creative budgeting, sponsorships, medals, police tactics, and more.

Also featured in this issue is Lisan Jutras’ meditation on racism, as she examines her own biases and struggles to find a cure for her own prejudices, and finds that 12 steps may be just the beginning. And Amanda Cosco reports on Denis Rancourt, the University of Ottawa professor who tried to give all his students A+ in order to fight what he saw as an unhealthy obsession with marks and grades. Amid the controversy, there’s a serious discussion underway about radically rethinking how students learn.

There’s lots more, including Jason Anderson on Awards Season; Raina Delisle on B.C.’s pro-Olympic curriculum, and the parents and teachers who are fighting it; Bruce M. Hicks has a modest proposal for squaring the circle of Aboriginal government, by turning all Aboriginal lands across the country into an 11th province; Nick Taylor-Vaisey on the Canadian Forces Artist Program that embeds painters, choreographers, and writers with Canadian troops in conflict zones; Jasmine Rezaee on Canada’s deadly trade in Asbestos sales to the developing world; Mariellen Ward on Slumdog Millionaire and the boom in “slum tourism” worldwide; Paul McLaughlin interviews Inuk sealskin clothing designer, lawyer, and activist Aaju Peter; and Denis Calnan reports on the opening of a new school that is transforming Sheshatshiu, the 1990s byword for troubled Innu communities.

PLUS: Brad Badelt on Biochar, Kim Hart Macneill on Canada’s most shameful world records and a new graphic novel from an innovative Nova Scotia publisher; Nick Taylor-Vaisey on the problem with road salt; Chris Benjamin on midwifery; Daniel Tencer on Roman Polanski; Christopher Olson on the death of the obituary; Navneet Alang on how the mobile web is transforming urban life; Siena Anstis on a new generation of African computer hackers; Graham F. Scott on the opportunity cost of the Olympics; and your letters on our Legalize Everything package

With new poems by Jonathan Ball and Verne Good; and a new short story by Michelle Winters.