Toyin Kayo-Ajayi’s favourite meal is pounded yam, with cassava and egusi — protein-rich African melon seeds, roasted in oil with spices and blended into a paste (pumpkin seeds will do if that’s all you can find). You can add turkey, chicken, fish, shrimp, kpomo (cow-skin) — any meat you want, with some broth and African spinach or amaranth — to turn it into a stew. 

Cassava and yam are central foods in his Nigerian culture and other Black cuisines across Africa, South America and India. He’s growing the tropical produce in greenhouses in Miracle Valley just outside Mission, B.C., about a 90-minute drive east from Vancouver. 

Kayo-Ajayi was told again and again that farming in Canada would be out of reach — it would be too expensive, the climate too unforgiving for the tropical crops he dreamed of growing. It wouldn’t last.

But he says enthusiasm for his five-acre farm has only grown since he got started in 2020. For five months of the year, he can grow tropical produce in greenhouses. His soil, which he makes himself, consists of clean silt, sand and goat manure. It’s working so well, he says, he is now selling it online and trying to get it stocked in stores. He’s still experimenting at a small scale, but the food he grows, like cassava and yam, he mostly supplies to the African Foods Food Bank, an organization he launched to provide healthy food to Black families.

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Donating to the food bank helps more people access African produce that may be out of reach in Canada. Imported cultural food, like cassava, can face extreme mark-ups by the time they get to the grocery store. On top of rising grocery prices and systemic income inequality, those mark-ups can put these foods out of reach. “If it’s somebody that is still low-income, now, he’s struggling to afford the cultural food,” Kayo-Ajayi explains.

This summer, he plans to host people on his farm at the Kara-Kata Africa Village, where they can camp, learn about farming, share good food and enjoy music together, he says. In its fifth year, the initiative is part of his wider vision to break down barriers for Black, African and Caribbean people to get into agriculture in Canada. In 2022, he founded the Canadian Black Farmers Association, which now has over 200 members.

The farm produces an average of 4,500 pounds of produce for the food bank and 250 dozen eggs per year. To date, Kayo-Ajayi has provided agricultural mentoring to more than 500 people.

Breaking down barriers for Black farmers across Canada

Primary agriculture — meaning the work done on a farm or in greenhouses — contributes $31.7 billion to Canada’s economy annually. It employs about 223,000 people, but 40 per cent of that workforce could retire by 2033. 

Just under five per cent of those farmers are Black, and Kayo-Ajayi sees huge opportunity to increase that number in order to grow local economies, improve food security for Black homes, make communities more “self-reliant” food-wise and increase access to cultural foods.

Food growers are the roots of the entire agricultural sector, which generates $149.2 billion annually, or seven per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product.

While Kayo-Ajayi’s priority is getting cultural foods into Black homes at reasonable prices, he says supporting food growers stands to benefit all Canadians as the United States imposes tariffs and threatens annexation. 

“It’s something that is beneficial for our community and for Canada,” he says. “Everybody wins.”

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Soil ‘the key to most of my success’

When he was about five years old in Ekiti State, Nigeria, Kayo-Ajayi’s mother would send him to visit his grandparents’ farm. “I didn’t like it,” he says. 

But that was where he learned “the most important thing in life is food.”

“I remember, we walked in the farm, they would smell the soil … They could tell you what could easily grow in that area,” he says.

He discovered planting seeds made him feel grounded. “It’s energy. It’s spiritual. It’s actually good for us,” he says.

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He’s stayed in farming his whole life, and has been farming in Canada for more than 20 years, beginning shortly after he arrived in 2001 at 23 years old. Today he still owns a 500-acre sister farm in Nigeria from which he imports food into Canada as well, including about 7,000 pounds on average each year to the food bank. He’s able to grow more throughout the year, and stocks some produce in the food bank, and sells some to support his operations.

In 2011, he began what would officially become the Kara-Kata Afrobeat Society, which brings music and food to community events in order to build connections and share information about food-growing.

“When there’s music and food, you find more people in our community. And I know how to make good food,” he says.

At his B.C. farm he creates a loam soil, which supports the tropical plants that yield traditional African foods, like cassava and yam. He says it’s made all his produce grow better and easier. It’s a simple mixture — but it’s “the key to most of my success,” he says. 

“The soil is the root of everything I was able to do.”

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He hopes to make it widely available for purchase across Canada, and even beyond.

But he says he’s had trouble getting it into stores. He’s reached out to retailers but it hasn’t gone anywhere.

 It can be difficult for small producers to meet retailers’ requirements and make goods at scale, and often little guidance is available.

Kayo-Ajayi wants to use proceeds from soil sales to support programming for Black farmers. In turn, he hopes those farmers will someday contribute to the food bank and build capacity in the community.

“It’s like a cycle, reinvesting back,” he says.

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Cultural food can ‘create a sustainable economy in our community’

Kayo-Ajayi’s operations are all-organic, and the plants he grows work together to benefit each other. Herbs repel pests. Cassava leaves provide protein for cows. He grows sorghum, a nutritious grain that grows like grass. You can cut it three times a year, but it just grows back, rather than needing to be replanted like other crops, he says.

He’s met a fair amount of nay-sayers who doubt how successful he can be. “People think I’m crazy, but, you know, it’s good to be crazy in a good way,” he says.

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He met aspiring Black farmers who found there was little support in navigating the agriculture system, and wound up giving up on farming. That’s why he created the Canadian Black Farmers Association, which provides advice but also helps members purchase land, create business plans, find funding and secure infrastructure.

Kayo-Ajayi thinks there can also still be lingering stigma around Black farmers. When he first moved to Canada, he was working on a farm close to the road, and someone walked by and asked, “Are you picking some cotton over there?” and laughed.

Those associations can be internalized among Black farmers too, he says. “It’s kind of stuck in the mind, seeing a Black person on the field … That kind of pushed most Black people away,” he says. “ ‘My ancestors were brought here, so I don’t want to bring myself here now, and now give myself up as a slave again.’ ”

Kayo-Ajayi’s vision is to highlight the empowerment that comes from growing healthy and cultural foods for one’s own community. 

“The most important thing in this life is food,” he says again. “We can use that food to create a sustainable economy in our community.”

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Beyond financial and informational barriers, there are still more challenges for new food growers. Farmers rated upfront costs and climate change as their top two concerns, according to a 2024 poll commissioned by Farmers for Climate Solutions. 

Flooding and drought have caused billions in damages to farmland across Canada, and climate change also is leading to a rise in pests. 

Kayo-Ajayi says his vegetables are mostly grown in greenhouses and are drought-tolerant, and he believes they can be very adaptable to a hotter, drier climate. 

Kayo-Ajayi says he invested a lot of money personally before he started getting funding. “You have to prove that you can do something before you can get support,” he says. 

Since then, the Canadian Black Farmers Association has received funding from organizations like Agriculture Canada, the Vancouver Foundation and the Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiative. But he says he needs a lot more funding to get the farm going at a bigger scale and get to the point of selling soil.

“This is my passion,” Kayo-Ajayi says. “To me, somebody has to do it. It costs a lot, but guess what? The reason why you have a little is to be able to use the resources you have to make a difference in somebody’s life. To me, investing in another human being is my best investment, and I’m doing it this way.”

Updated on Feb. 18, at 1:50 p.m PT: A previous version of this story stated the farm produces an average of 250 eggs per year. The story has been corrected to state the farm produces an average of 250 dozen eggs per year.

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When Wade Grant was eight years old, he went to visit his mom at work. She was one of the first woman chiefs of Musqueam Nation and Grant found her in the band office having a meeting. When he opened the door, he saw her speaking with the mayor of Vancouver at the time, Gordon Campbell, who later became premier of British Columbia.

“In my mind I was like, oh my God, it’s the first person I’ve ever seen on television, and my mom was talking to him,” he says over the phone from his home in Musqueam territory in Vancouver near the mouth of the Fraser River. That was the moment he first wanted to enter public service.

To witness his mom “break a glass ceiling” in her role as chief and see her meeting with “the most powerful person in Vancouver — it really got my political blood flowing at a young age,” he says. In April, he was elected member of parliament for Vancouver Quadra — another first for a member of the Musqueam Nation.

When he was older, Grant learned that First Nations people only gained the right to vote in 1960 — only 18 years before he was born. It makes him think of his grandfather, a Musqueam chief, who died in 1964.

“He got to vote in Canada for four years,” Grant said. “That just blows my mind.”

“And here I am now.”

Here he is — representing 115,000 people in parliament in a riding that includes his home Musqueam reserve as well as the University of British Columbia and some of Vancouver’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. It’s a riding that brings together students, affluent residents, families who have lived in the area for generations and the people who have stewarded the mouth of the Fraser River for millenia.

Grant served on Musqueam council for 10 years, getting to know how the power structures between different levels of government work. Now he’s focused on putting that experience to work on his priorities of climate change, housing and health. His years serving on council taught him accountability in a profound way.

“Nothing can be tougher or more scary than being a councillor for a First Nation, because the decisions you make are affecting your grandpa, your aunt, your uncle,” he says. “If they don’t like it, they’re just two doors down, and they can come knock on the door.”

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Why environment is a top concern for Vancouver Quadra residents

Grant did a lot of door knocking during his campaign and says one of the top priorities he heard about was the environment. That contradicts a narrative that argued that while climate change was a serious concern in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, polling suggested it was a lower voter concern this year, with people distracted by cost of living and Canada-U.S. relations.

“Seeing salmon stocks dwindle on the Fraser River is a key component of this riding,” Grant says. “The rising temperatures over the last 25, 30 years is undeniable and is something that is very, very concerning.”

Justin Trudeau will be remembered as the prime minister that bought the Trans Mountain pipeline for a final price tag of $34 billion, leading to one of many intense standoffs over industrial projects. During his time in power, multiple United Nations rapporteurs and committees called on Canada to stop criminalizing Indigenous people peacefully defending their land and water.

But in some ways, Trudeau led the most environmentally conscious federal government in Canada’s history. It brought in carbon pricing and legislation that mandates the federal government to come up with national emissions reduction targets every five years, with the goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

They also committed to protect 30 per cent of lands and oceans by 2030, and have earmarked over $1 billion for Indigenous-led conservation. Newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney says he remains committed to the goal, but the most recent data shows there’s a long way to go. In 2023, 13.7 per cent of land was protected and 14. 7 per cent of marine areas. The protected areas need to double in less than five years to meet their international commitments.

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When asked how the Liberals will reach this goal in a short time frame, Grant points to the new Liberal government’s commitment to create at least 10 new national parks and marine conservation areas, along with 15 new urban parks. He wants the federal government to work with municipal, First Nations and provincial governments to establish new protected areas.

While campaigning, he spoke with many high school and university students who were voting for the first time, and who told them they were concerned about the environment. The number one priority that he heard from his constituents is cleaner energy — meaning a move away from fossil fuels.

“I think there’s a lot more we can do,” he says. “We’ve announced that we want to invest in greener technologies, but we’re in a state of transition. I know that we need to move forward at a pace so that our next generation can inherit something that’s more robust than it is today.”

The minerals required for electric cars and solar panels are now at the centre of heated debates as provinces and the feds have passed legislation to fast-track approval of industrial projects, including mines. The laws are purportedly to bolster Canadian sovereignty as U.S. relations are tense — but First Nations are raising the alarm that these bills could mean bypassing Indigenous rights and leading to costly legal challenges.

Grant hopes to have ‘most educated caucus ever’ when it comes to Indigenous Rights

To Grant, pushing climate action forward means engaging with Indigenous Peoples. He pointed to how Musqueam Nation has worked with federal, provincial and local governments to successfully reintroduce salmon and restore habitat. Musqueam Creek is currently the only wild-salmon bearing creek in the City of Vancouver.  

“First Nations across the province of British Columbia have been traditionally stewards of the land. They know how to protect it,” he says. “They want to ensure that they protect it for future generations, not just for their communities, but for all.”

For six years, Grant served on the First Nations Health Council in B.C., four of them as chair. Continuing to transfer health decision-making from the federal government to First Nations is central to the council’s 10-year strategy and Grant plans to push this forward in his role.

Grant knows that one of his challenges will be countering misinformation around Indigenous Rights: lately, residential school denialism has even been spread by the provincial MLA in his own riding. “It’s unfortunate that we still have people that approach First Nations in … such a negative light,” he says. “People have to understand that Indigenous Peoples in this country — First Nations, Inuit and Métis — have been fighting in the Canadian courts to prove their place in this country. Title has been proven by the Supreme Court of Canada.”

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People can rely on unreliable sources, like opinions online — and “lash out,”he says. And some of the responses he’s gotten after engaging with anti-Indigenous posts on social media have been dark, racist and volatile.

“It’s disheartening that people are applauding such divisive comments that sets reconciliation back generations,” he says.

Grant says he doesn’t want to see people regressing to challenging the existence of Indigenous Rights and long court battles that cost millions.

“Having the opportunity to educate the public, but also my fellow colleagues, will be something I’ll take great pride in, for sure — to ensure that we have the most educated caucus ever when it comes to First Nations, Inuit and Métis Title and Rights.”

He chooses to focus his effort on young people, ensuring they are exposed to Indigenous histories and cultures in their communities. To Grant, it’s promising that “we’re in the first generation where First Nations, Inuit and Métis history is actually being taught in a more robust and accurate way in schools.”

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He wants to include youth in policy conversations — especially when it comes to climate change. Grant is inspired by his two children, 16 and 14 years old, who he says told him “people always say the youth are our future, but actually the youth are the present.”

“Why do we always have to wait until the youth are 25, 30, 35 years old before we actually listen to them?” he says. “We need to have a more robust approach to how we are listening to the next generation before it’s too late.”

Being a ‘bridge-builder’ on divisive issues like climate, housing

Grant’s bringing that collaborative approach to conversations about housing affordability, one of the Mark Carney government’s biggest challenges. 

Grant guesses he’s probably the only one of six or seven people from his high school class that still live in the riding. The others didn’t stay — “not because they didn’t want to, but because they’ve been priced out.”

The re-elected Liberals have committed to doubling the pace of construction to build 500,000 new homes per year. The party campaigned on improving housing affordability when it was elected in 2015 — but by 2021 housing prices had increased 97 per cent. New builds have not kept up with demand, and Trudeau admitted to the CBC the government “should have, could have moved faster” to address housing prices. 

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Like climate change and Indigenous Rights, development is a divisive topic — one that requires balancing the need for housing with the environmental considerations of building, and servicing a growing population. But Grant wants to be one of the people that helps illustrate what people have in common and how they can learn from each other. He wants to be a “bridge-builder” that brings different groups together.

Grant has had to navigate difficult conversations as a Musqueam councillor, and while serving on the First Nations Health Council and the Vancouver Police Board. He draws on something his parents told him when he was a child: that while their ancestors may not always have come to consensus, they would try to agree on most things and find ways to move forward despite the small per cent of things they disagreed on.

“I always try to listen, ensure I’m listening first before I speak,” he says. “I’m usually the last person that will speak.” He tries to bring together varying opinions and point out to people that “We’re not actually that far apart. Let’s work on what’s bringing us together.”

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This story has been co-published with the Free Press.

Most Friday and Saturday evenings in the dark months of winter, the distinctive whir of tire treads can be heard crossing the pavement and ice outside the Centennial Concert Hall, home of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. As the downtown Exchange District buzzes with concertgoers shuffling on icy sidewalks and shielding themselves against the bracing Manitoba cold, Daniel Perry, a double bassist, arrives on his custom-built Osto fat bike. He wears only thin merino-wool base layers, snow pants and a light shell. Ice crystals form on the buff he wears over his face to protect his skin. 

Perry moved to Winnipeg from Indianapolis, Indiana, in 2014. “I had a really shitty Canadian Tire bike I got off Kijiji when I first moved here,” Perry recalls. “I didn’t get very far before I gave up, and I didn’t ride again for a few months.” 

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Cycling in Winnipeg can be challenging. Winnipeg is traditionally a car city — not to mention that it is frequently dubbed the coldest city in Canada and is known for its icy winds. In Winnipeg, about 0.5 percent of the population commutes by bike. This is on par with cities like Toronto and Ottawa but behind Montreal, where 1.2 percent of the population cycles. Winter cyclists face myriad challenges beyond cold toes: unplowed bike lanes make for treacherous riding, road salt corrodes bike chains and snow compacted by car tires makes for an especially slippery commute. Despite these challenges, cyclists in Winnipeg persist, though their numbers dwindle substantially in the winter months. 

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Chris Baker, the active transportation coordinator for the City of Winnipeg, says the city’s bike network is still in its “teenage years.” It’s come a long way since its infancy, but there’s still a lot of work to do. “Winnipeg has only had a bike policy or a plan since 2015,” he adds. That same year, Perry decided to invest in a decent pair of wheels. For him, cycling in the winter was the antidote to seasonal blues and the anxiety of driving, as well as a way to keep in shape — both mentally and physically.

Cycling was a way to expand an insular Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra experience

In 2014, Perry had been excited to land a spot in the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. It was a prestigious gig: there are only 41 bass spots available across the seven orchestras in Canada that pay above $40,000 per year, and openings are rare. But when he arrived alone on Winnipeg’s distant doorstep, so far from family and friends, Perry felt displaced, anxious and adrift. 

I know how Daniel felt. I also moved from the U.S. to join the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. When I arrived 15 years ago, I too struggled to adjust to Winnipeg being my new home. 

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Being part of the city’s professional symphony orchestra, as Perry puts it, felt like being in a “bubble that’s disconnected from the community.” With erratic work schedules and intense daily practice, newcomers to the symphony often settle into an insular, indoor existence, entrenched in the social circle and culture of the orchestra. In Perry’s small friend group, that culture involved many evenings a week of socializing and heavy drinking, not uncommon among symphony musicians.

After a year stuck indoors, suffering from asthma and allergies caused by dust and pet dander in friends’ homes, Perry committed to changing his habits. He vowed to stop drinking for a few months, start getting outdoors and begin exercising. Perry traded in his used Canadian Tire bike for a new road bike, better suited to longer rides and city streets. 

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He began pulling up the Google Maps bike feature and exploring Winnipeg. Suddenly, he found himself seeing things he’d never noticed when driving.

Before long, he was hooked on biking. Within a couple of years, he’d given up his car altogether and relied on his bike as his primary mode of transportation, including riding to work. As a fellow orchestra member, I always felt I could be forgiven for driving to work. My cello — my most precious possession — is, like all stringed instruments, susceptible to extreme cold and heat. It’s also next to impossible to transport by bicycle. 

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Perry faces an even bigger barrier to commuting by cycle in a wintry, windy city. He plays the double bass, one of the largest instruments in the orchestra, alongside the harp and piano. Basses are cumbersome and heavy, nearly two metres tall, and extremely delicate. Like all string instruments, they are expensive and can cost as much as buying a car. Perry’s solution: use his second bass to practise at home and avoid transporting his primary bass to and from the concert hall. 

Winnipeg’s cycling infrastructure has improved, but cyclists say more improvements needed

Perry’s relationship with Winnipeg has evolved in tandem with its biking infrastructure. There are now more than 400 kilometres of bike lanes, greenways and multi-use paths. “[I discovered] how [routes] are connected to the riverside paths, they go through neighbourhoods and next to green spaces, and [I] actually got to see that side of the city,” Perry tells me, speaking both scenically and geographically. “I was like, ‘Oh — this is a beautiful place!’ ” 

These days, Perry is a local fixture on Winnipeg’s bike lanes. 

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He has also become deeply entrenched in Winnipeg’s cycling community. As local cyclist Leslie Parisien puts it, “You can’t throw a rock around here without finding someone that knows Daniel.” He volunteers with organizations like The Wrench, which uses reclaimed parts to refurbish bikes and offers classes, workshops and community programming with the stated aims of “educating youth, empowering volunteers and providing people with affordable, sustainable active transportation options.”

Perry’s infectious enthusiasm for biking has rubbed off on his colleagues at the orchestra. “I do try to celebrate that since I started, we’ll have winter days where there are between five and ten people riding to work in the middle of winter,” Perry says. “For me, that’s where I have power … even if that’s in the smallest of ways, it’s a change, and that’s what I can do.” The municipal government also appears to be taking notice of the growing cycling community: Baker notes the city has committed to increasing its active transportation budget. (The 2025 city capital budget for the pedestrian and cycling program is $2.2 million, and is forecast to rise to $5.4 million in 2026.) Still, some cyclists feel the current efforts aren’t enough. 

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According to Manitoba Public Insurance, every year, an average of four cyclists in Winnipeg are killed in collisions with cars, with an additional 78 injured. Edmonton, by comparison, has an annual budget of $33.3 million for cycling infrastructure and plans to expand its bike network through 2026. On average, there was only one cyclist fatality per year between 2012 and 2022.

Few studies have been done on the impact of infrastructure design on cyclists’ safety. Those have indicated that when dedicated bike-only infrastructure exists, the risk of crashes and injuries is significantly reduced in addition to providing sustainable transportation options and benefits to public health. Perry and others believe well-maintained, dedicated bike lanes are essential to prevent fatalities like one in June this year when long-time cyclist Rob Jenner was killed on an urban street. Patty Wiens is one of those working to ensure city officials make cycling safe. 

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“We have to hold them to task,” Wiens, known as the “Bike Mayor of Winnipeg,” says. (Bike Mayor is a title bestowed on 141 people in dozens of countries by Bicycle Citizen Network, an Amsterdam-based organization providing support to community-led cycling initiatives and Bike Mayors across the globe.) When Weins meets with Mayor Scott Gillingham, — she calls him the “Car Mayor” — she pushes for three changes to make roads safer for cyclists: reduce residential speed limits to 30 kilometres per hour, eliminate right turns for cars at red lights and remove all slip lanes. Weins, who rides an e-bike, finds her sense of community enriched by cycling activism: “We’re too isolated. I think that is why the bike community has become so crucial. We find these people who feel the way we do. We bond together, and then we’re outside together. I’ve added probably 200 new friends to my life that I can honestly say are friends.”

From Winnipeg bike lanes to Iditarod

While Winnipeg’s punishing winters and fragmented bike routes scare off many cyclists, Perry remains undeterred. And his relationship to the orchestra has changed for the better as well. With a deeper connection to the community, he says, “now for me, this is more of a job than an identity.”

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Finding a healthier work-life balance has allowed Perry to explore the world of competitive winter marathon bike races. As he gradually increased his distance, he started to eye the 268-kilometre Toscobia Winter Ultra in Wisconsin. “It sounded kind of ridiculous but also attainable enough that I wanted to go for it.” He thought, “If this is an actual event, and people do this all the time, why can’t I be one of those people?” 

Now, Perry is not only one of those people, but he is incredibly successful. He finished first in the 2023 Tuscobia Ultra, in which he also won a spot to compete in Alaska’s fabled Iditarod Trail Invitational — a behemoth fat bike ultra-marathon which takes place annually each February, covering more than 560 kilometres. Perry, one of only a few rookies on the trail this year, rode to a fourth-place finish. 

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Though Perry and I have sat in close quarters on the orchestra stage for ten years, I visited his home for only the second time about a month after the race. I found him sitting cross-legged on his sleek grey sofa, sipping a cup of black coffee. Bella, a small, elderly rescue he was dog-sitting, was curled up like a croissant at the opposite end of the couch. Sporting a mullet and trimmed beard, he was “still processing” the Iditarod experience and seemed philosophical.

“I’m not just obsessed with bikes,” he tells me. “I use it as a tool or an avenue for other things.” 

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Perry spends a lot of time on his bike in reflection, he says, doing what he calls his “inner work.” And without his bike, Perry knows his connection to his community in Winnipeg wouldn’t be as rich.

Beyond the physical benefits of cycling year-round, biking has also propelled Perry’s personal development and community activism. Cycling is no longer simply a mode of transportation. 

Trading sweaty cycling clothes for formalwear backstage at the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra

There are many sub-zero temperature evenings when Perry arrives at the concert hall, rosy-cheeked and refreshed from his commute. He’s already started mentally and physically preparing for his performance on his ride to work. He says, “I like to take time to think about my breathing and my posture and my muscle engagement while I’m riding … this helps me warm up and think about using my entire body to play bass.”

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He wheels his bike backstage, past colleagues already in their evening dress. Perry and the other bassists he inspired to ride to work leave their bikes in a large instrument storage room. Fat bikes parked between instrument cases and storage lockers spark conversations about recent rides, road conditions and weather. Layers of sweaty clothing are peeled off and hung on handlebars to dry, as orchestra members change into tuxedos, dresses and other formalwear. 

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As the ice melts and drips from his bike tires, Perry sits on stage, just one cog in the wheel of the orchestra, anticipating his ride home after the concert amid the snow falling gently outside. Perry is thankful for the relationship he has cultivated with cycling. “I needed something, that I did on my own terms, that I could have as a passion away from music,” he says. “My world is so much bigger now.”

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One of the seven calls to action from Canadian Journalists of Colour and Canadian Association of Black Journalists calls for mentorship opportunities for aspiring journalists of colour. The Narwhal offers paid fellowships for photographers who are Black, Indigenous or people of colour. Ebunoluwa Akinbo is one of the 2024 fellows.

There’s a saying in Nigerian Pidgin: “na mumu dey go boutique.” It translates roughly to “It is only a fool that goes to the boutique,” Ebunoluwa Akinbo says, laughing as she perches on the arm of a couch in her south Winnipeg apartment. 

The armchair to her right is piled high with an eclectic assortment of fabrics: a polyester pantsuit, a sequined minidress, ripped jeans, a windbreaker, long sheer curtains, a straw hat, a thick patterned scarf, faux snakeskin boots. Each garment still bears a paper price tag from one of Winnipeg’s myriad thrift stores.

The Nigerian-born photographer’s living room has recently doubled as a makeshift portrait studio, where she has been wearing multiple hats (literally and figuratively) as photographer, stylist, artistic director and model.

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Through self-portraits, still life and documentary photography, Akinbo has spent months exploring a familiar yet mystifying phenomenon: the rising popularity of thrifted clothes. 

“There’s a big deal about thrifting here,” she says. “It’s a culture or a way of life. It’s a community on its own.”

Her search to better understand Winnipeg’s love of the second-hand hunt led her from overflowing thrift store racks to the organized chaos of a sorting warehouse and into her own memories of Nigeria’s bustling okrika (Pidgin for second-hand clothing) markets. She spoke to shoppers, second-hand-store owners and staff who make the all-important decisions about what goes on the shelf.

Along the way, Akinbo says she’s come to think a little differently about clothing — what it’s made of, how it travels and what it says about who we are and where we come from.

“Thrifting is all about travelling, it’s about migration,” she says. “It’s interesting to see all of the little identities of the city are present in the thrift store.” 

From ‘bend-down-selects’ in Lagos to Value Village in Winnipeg

When Akinbo arrived in Winnipeg during the frigid winter of 2021 to start an arts degree at the University of Manitoba, her first stop was the thrift store. 

The coat her mother had found for her at a second-hand market in their hometown of Lagos couldn’t handle Manitoba’s winter extremes, so Akinbo’s then-roommate took her to find a replacement.

“Let’s go to Value Village because that’s where you’re going to get good stuff,” Akinbo remembers her roommate saying. 

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The bright maze of neatly arranged shoes, books, housewares and clothing draped on seemingly endless rows of hangers in the south Winnipeg store was revelatory, Akinbo recalls. And she did find a good deal on a jacket, she says proudly. 

“Back home, thrifting is in a night market and the clothes are actually on the floor,” Akinbo says, miming the stooping and sifting of “bend-down-select” — Nigerian slang for thrifting.

Yaba, a Lagos suburb, is something of a second-hand shopping hub. Vendors pack into Tejuosho, the city’s largest outdoor market, with bags of used clothing, organized by quality and spread out across the ground for shoppers to pick through.

In Nigeria as in Canada, a bend-down-select is frequented by students, lower-income and middle-class families looking for affordable necessities or unique items, Akinbo says. 

But unlike in Canada, where most thrift store wares come from local donations, the garments sold in Nigeria are largely imported by the bale from Europe, Asia and North America.

‘Fusion’ self-portraits created through thrifting

The donation-based system in Canada transforms the thrift shop into a kind of archive, Akinbo says. As garments pass “from one place to another, from one household to another,” they form a picture of the city’s identity.

Eras of fashion history are preserved in the passed-down threads. Local sports team logos are emblazoned on jerseys, sweaters and t-shirts. Rows of parkas and heavy sweaters nod to the cold climate. The city’s fashion sensibilities — mostly simple styles and muted colours, Akinbo notes — are reflected throughout.

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When Akinbo set out to capture the culture of Canadian thrifting through portraits, she wanted to merge that Winnipeg identity with elements of home.

Inspired by West African photographers of the late 20th century — Malian artists Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, and Cameroonian-Nigerian photographer Samuel Fosso — she looked to emulate their characteristic hard lighting, dynamic posing, stark contrasts and bold, patterned fabric backdrops.

She searched the stores for clothing and backdrops that felt true to her own style. She found textured, sheer curtains that evoked memories of her grandmother’s beer parlour and a grey suit that would make her mother, a lawyer, proud.

“It’s like a fusion,” she says. “Bits of home, bits of Winnipeg.”

For Akinbo, the “culture of giving” fostered by these donations sets North American thrifting apart from the second-hand culture she’s used to.

Passing clothes down from one family member to the next is a common practice back home, Akinbo says, but she doesn’t know of any okrika vendors who accept donations.

“This is so different because it’s more sustainability driven, consciously or unconsciously,” she says.

As she roamed Winnipeg thrift stores speaking to shoppers and staff, many told her they were drawn by the discounts and the thrill of the hunt. Shoppers are proud to find unique items for a good deal, she says, and share tips on where to find the best-curated second-hand items. 

But while “the thrift store serves different purposes here outside of recycling and sustainability,” Akinbo says, “in all of these things there’s that silent but loud voice of Winnipeggers being sustainable.”

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There’s data to back that up: market research by ThredUp, a digital thrift and consignment marketplace, found the top reason American shoppers turn to second-hand is to save money, with sustainability ranking as the fourth most important reason to thrift.

A 2022 survey commissioned by Savers, the for-profit company that owns Value Village, found one in two Canadian shoppers reported caring more about the environmental impact of their outfits than they did three years prior, and nearly three-quarters believed thrifting was better for the environment. 

---

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of fashion waste end up in landfills every year: report

But not everything donated to the thrift store ends up on the shelves. ​​Searching for herself among Winnipeg’s hand-me-downs made Akinbo curious about how curators decide what to sell — and where the rejects go. 

“Whatever is not needed is moved away. Maybe it’s sold to another thrift store, maybe to somewhere in another country, so it’s still migrating,” she says.

In the back rooms of Canadian thrift stores like Value Village, employees sift through donated goods, marking about half of what they receive as saleable merchandise, according to a 2021 report from Fashion Takes Action, a Canadian fashion sustainability non-profit. 

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But the invisibility of Canada’s clothing waste is misleading. Canada doesn’t track its textile waste, as few cities have a separate waste stream for textiles, but Fashion Takes Action estimates the country generated approximately 480,576 tonnes — four times the weight of the CN tower — in 2018 alone. The Recycling Council of Ontario estimates the average Canadian sends 37 kilograms of clothing to the landfill every year.  

The global scale of clothing waste is a much bigger problem.

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Okrika sellers, for example, receive bales weighing up to half a tonne and stuffed with thousands of used items in an assortment of brands, styles and sizes. That makes the market an ideal place to find something unique and unconventional, Akinbo says, but also means there’s plenty that doesn’t sell — and ends up in the trash.

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“At the end of the day, this clothing isn’t going anywhere after Nigeria, after Africa,” Akinbo says. “Africa becomes the final dump site for Western countries.” Last year, Nigeria Customs Service announced the government’s intent to ban the second-hand clothing trade, joining Uganda and other members of the East African Community trade bloc — including Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan and Tanzania — which have also been trying to stop the import of used clothing since 2016.

Non-profit Global Fashion Agenda pegged global clothing waste at 92 million tonnes in 2015, expected to increase approximately 60 per cent by 2030. In Canada, a private member’s bill that would develop a national strategy to reduce textile waste is currently stalled in Parliament. According to the bill, 500 million kilograms of Canadian textile waste end up in landfills every year — and more than three quarters could be reused or recycled.

Winnipeg business adds upcycling to thrift store

At Reclothify, a Winnipeg thrift store focused on sustainability, Akinbo learned about a slightly different model from owner Alisha Murray. 

The store doesn’t accept community donations, instead taking in bales from a handful of non-profit partners and companies with unused stock. While some items are sold as is, Reclothify also works with Manitoba brands that upcycle clothes into something new: a remade garment, accessories, artwork and more. 

And unlike some traditional second-hand stores, Reclothify occasionally opens its sorting warehouse to the public for “thrift by the pound” days. 

“When I hear somebody say ‘I want to throw this away,’ it almost hurts my heart now,” Murray says. “I do have hope that sustainable fashion is going to grow.” 

At the sprawling Reclothify warehouse, Akinbo watched as curators quickly and systematically sifted through teeming boxes for special, sellable pieces. 

“These are the people that make the decision about what stays and what doesn’t stay. It’s super fast — you’re holding it up and throwing it here, throwing it there,” Akinbo says. 

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Murray says about two-thirds of what the store receives is sold. The rest is compacted into large bricks and sold to textile recyclers. Most recycling involves shredding or breaking down fabric for use in other applications — some absorbent fabrics can be turned into cleaning rags, some is respun into new yarn or used to make products like insulation. 

Murray says she’s inspired by a rise in creative approaches to textile recycling. One French company, for example, has combined discarded denim and resin to make building materials like bricks. More homegrown textile recyclers use fabric scraps as stuffing for household items like bean-bag chairs. 

“It’s a challenge that I take on everyday: how are we going to figure out what to do with those textiles that can’t be worn?” Murray says. 

Now an expert on the scene, Akinbo has joined the legions of Winnipeg residents for whom thrifting is fun and fashionable, but also meaningful. 

“I’ve become very conscious about where clothing is coming from, how fibres are made,” she says, reflecting on what she’s taken away from her months spent in and out of second-hand shops. 

“And I’m proud to say: ‘I got this from a thrift store.’ ”

Ebunoluwa Akinbo is a Nigerian photographer living in Canada. She blends her background in sociology with her fine arts education to explore themes of memory, identity and migration in her work. Using photography as her primary medium, she communicates these themes through both figurative and abstract forms, while also engaging in traditional storytelling within photojournalism, documentary and conceptual photography. Akinbo has worked on commissioned and personal projects and has exhibited her work locally and internationally.

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Thirty-four years ago, Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel was thrust into the spotlight when she was chosen as the spokesperson for the Kanienʼkehá:ka (Mohawk) communities of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, as they resisted the planned expansion of a golf course on into their sacred lands and burial grounds in southern Quebec and police and military attempted to subdue them by force. 

“You do not call it the Oka Crisis,” Gabriel tells me, of the village near the golf course that media and Canadians generally use to refer to the confrontation. “Oka caused the crisis. It was Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke that were under siege, and were attacked because of the municipality of Oka and the private corporations behind the project.”

In the decades since the 78-day standoff ended, Gabriel has remained a steadfast defender of Indigenous homelands and an advocate for Indigenous Rights and sovereignty, particularly the rights of women. She has spoken at the United Nations and addressed Parliament, and served for more than six years as president of the Quebec Native Women’s Association, drawing connections between the protection of Indigenous lands and the rights, dignity and future of Indigenous nations. 

In a new book, When the Pine Needles Fall, Gabriel and settler historian Sean Carleton chart a course from the events of 1990 to the present, while extending into a generous and expansive vision of the future. The book, which they began writing in 2019, evolved during the pandemic, taking shape as a series of conversations that articulate the urgency and necessity of Indigenous resistance. Centring Gabriel’s own words through dialogue, Carleton writes, was a way to “divest my power and authority as an academic to create space for Ellen’s brilliance … to hold space and amplify Ellen’s voice, while also co-creating through conversation.” 

In a conversation with The Narwhal, Gabriel discussed the intentions behind the book, what’s changed (and what hasn’t) since 1990, and her vision for the future.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In the book, you discuss the biased and incomplete media coverage during the 1990 crisis in Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke. How can media do a better job of covering acts of Indigenous resistance and Indigenous land rights?

Learn about Canada’s real genocidal history. That’s one of the frustrations that I had, and that many of my community members had about the media, is that sometimes they had no clue. You know, there was the assumption that we didn’t exist anymore, that everything was taken care of, everything was settled, right? Media just took that at face value. But armed resistance is not new to Indigenous Peoples on Turtle Island. It was the way of the land when the colonizers came. 

So the approach by journalists was very naive and racist and ignorant, especially the French media. Overall [the media] is just a propaganda machine, as far as I’m concerned, for Canada and the provinces and the corporations. And we’re deemed to be the radical, ridiculous ones for defending our rights. So they didn’t see our rights as human beings, they didn’t see our rights to self-determination. 

All the commissions and reports that had gone out — from the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples — there are recommendations for everyone at every level to learn the truth about how Canada was formed. But we see today that this is still not the case. They’re still teaching history the way I learned it in the ’70s: that we’re savages, and all these stupid stereotypes. So I think the media has a responsibility to search for the truth, and to dig deeper.

‘That fight for survival is in our blood’

There have been some very significant victories in the recognition of Indigenous Rights and title, like the legislative recognition of Haida title over Haida Gwaii. But we’re still seeing Indigenous land defenders met with militarized violence in nations like Wet’suwet’en, and the same kind of justifications for that state violence provided by the media. Do you think that things have changed, in terms of how Indigenous struggles for recognition of rights are understood by non-Indigenous people? 

I think we’ve come a little further in the public understanding. But in terms of sovereignty and what that means, or land back and what that means, it’s superficial. And government has not changed. They just repackaged colonization. We’re still at the same point in regards to our land rights, our rights to self-determination, as we were in 1990 — and as we were since Canada’s inception. 

Letters reveal what energy companies told RCMP before Wet’suwet’en raid

I see that there are more opportunities for Indigenous artists, filmmakers, writers — but how do you change the curriculum in the schools that would teach future lawyers, judges, policemen? To be sensitized to the history of colonization that we’re aware of, that we know and feel on a daily basis? If I look at my community, and it’s lawless, there’s nothing that has changed. We’ve lost more land. I don’t see anything as far as where I’m from — I don’t see any improvement whatsoever. In fact, I see us going backward. The community that was directly affected [by the siege] is still reeling from that trauma.

There’s so much more work to be done in regards to education, in regards to respecting our human rights. There’s a lot of rhetoric about inherent rights, but I don’t hear any politician talking about respect, and that’s a vital part of reconciliation. That’s a vital part of reparations. 

If I respect you, I will respect your personal space. I’ll respect your right to have peace, to live in security. I won’t interfere in that right. I’m not going to push you around. That’s not what Canada does. Canada creates a police force that continues to brutalize our people and laws. There is no justice when we go to court. 

The new Trans Mountain pipeline is now flowing. Could an Indigenous Rights case impact operations?

If there was respect for our human rights, we would be getting land back without having to pay for it. We would not have the provinces interfering in the education of our children and youth. And we would have the resources needed to restore all of our pre-contact institutions, and to restore the authority of women in our communities. There’s a long way to go. It’s nice to think that everything has changed, but it really hasn’t.

You write about how the understanding of the crisis focused on the Mohawk men who were at the forefront of the standoff, whose photos appeared in media, while women were marginalized — both in the immediate and long-term narrative. Can you talk about the role of women and how decolonization, as you say in the book, requires restoring that balance?

I heard something really interesting, which is that instead of using the word decolonizing, it’s “Indigenizing”. And I think that really goes to the point of what we’re talking about as Indigenous Peoples, in the restoration of those values and institutions that helped our people survive for centuries. 

I can only speak for Haudenosaunee women — I can’t speak for your nation or other nations — but we have title to land. The clans are passed on through women. The women choose the chiefs. The women had an equal role in the Constitution of Kaianere’kó:wa, the Great Law of Peace. 

That summer, the men looked to the women for decisions. And the women would be the ones who were leading, through the words that were being said, and the support given to the men who were defending the people. But you never really saw that in the media; the focus was on the men, not the women who were negotiating and trying to help people not lose their minds. 

You know, people forget it was two communities that were under siege, denied our basic human rights. [In Kanehsatà:ke, closer to the golf course,] we went without food, water, medicine, that kind of stuff. And in Kahnawá:ke, there were 40 women on Highway 207 blocking Canadian Army tanks from coming in to raid the Longhouse. So the women were out there physically as warriors, but we were not recognized as that. 

It was this whole patriarchal perspective, but actually the women were in charge. 

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As I was reading, I was thinking about the connections between extractive resource economies and violence against Indigenous women — which is an epidemic everywhere, but is concentrated in these regions where there are resource-based industries. 

Indigenous women who have been working on this issue for a long time — in 2004, my good friend Beverly Jacobs and Amnesty International wrote Stolen Sisters — have talked about the root cause, which is colonization and the dehumanization of Indigenous women. For us, this is not a woman’s problem. This is a man’s problem. The majority of the violence is by men. And the man camps are no different than when the first explorers came to Turtle Island and wanted to have women for sex, right? We’re seen as a commodity. We’re not actually equal to them as human beings. 

I think the rape of the land is personified in the rape of the women, and the murdered and missing Indigenous women, because we are not valued. The Earth is a commodity only — they don’t respect the land. They dig. They create destruction and devastation, and prevent future generations from enjoying those lands. And one of the things that I think is important to connect is that if there is a healthy environment, then there are healthy people.

‘Above the poison’: Mohawk land defenders refuse to surrender Barnhart Island to New York

The babies inside the mother’s womb, the water that keeps them growing and floating, all those aspects for us as Haudenosaunee — all those things that the women are responsible for — have been attacked by colonial laws and policies. [Mohawk scholar] Dawn Martin-Hill [is working on] a map of the majority of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and they are all near man camps. It goes to the respect of women, which is a value that is not taught to the little boys and young men, and that’s where the change needs to come from. Along with Indigenizing Canada’s laws.

I’ve noticed commitments to Indigenous people being framed as “economic reconciliation,” the idea that prosperity and security will come from getting a cut of resource projects. In the book, you say many Indigenous leaders are challenged by the real urgency in many communities to meet basic needs. How do you think Indigenous nations can resist those short-term economic survival prospects in order to protect their homelands?

Well, colonial-rooted poverty will not be solved by more colonial solutions. On our traditional homelands — which extend far beyond the reserves that we’re allowed to live on — the government’s perspective is always “accommodating concerns” of Indigenous people, and talking about consultations rather than free, prior and informed consent. There are many court decisions that talk about the different levels of consultation. But free, prior and informed consent is much stronger, because you cannot be coerced into accepting, like: well, this will create jobs. That’s a form of coercion. What are the consequences of having this in our communities? 

I think often the band councils are making choices as politicians, and not as Indigenous Peoples — as if their role as an Indigenous person is secondary to their role as a leader in their community. So you have these rich corporations coming in and saying: ‘Oh, you’ll benefit from this.’ But what will it mean for picking our medicines — will that area be gone? What about the biodiversity? What about the long-term consequences? 

We are not creating sustainable economies. Service providers are the majority of our employers. I hear, ‘You’re against every kind of development.’ Well, I’m not against sustainable development. But if we’re looking at the climate crisis, the desertification, the floods that are erasing good agricultural soil … there has to be a better way to get out of this colonial root of poverty, where we’re not accepting these destructive forms of extraction. 

For traditional people — I’m not talking about all of the Mohawk Nation, I’m talking about traditional people — we think about the faces not yet born, and how our decisions today will impact the future, as our Elders did when we were those faces not yet born. We need to come up with a better approach if we’re going to be part of that solution for your children, your grandchildren. I think we’ve lost that. We’re just duplicating what Western society wants us to duplicate. 

What’s the way out of that?

Understanding your own culture. Having a strong sense of identity. And having discussions like, how are we going to get out of this? How are we going to survive? How are our teachings, our identities, our languages, our cultures going to survive? 

And we need to start using our minds for better purposes, other than trying to survive and doing whatever is the priority of the Canadian government to issue grants and financial arrangements.

Looking beyond our Indigenous nations, in the book, you and Sean discuss how important allies are for Indigenous resistance. What would you say to non-Indigenous people who want to be allies? 

Educate yourself. Don’t try to speak on our behalf. Support us. But more important, change the laws of Canada. Indigenize the laws to the First People’s values, those original values that helped us survive colonization. 

I have always believed that we should be assimilating the settlers and not the other way around. In small ways, we’re doing that, and getting them to understand who we are and our perspective.

But as human beings we’re flawed. We can be of the same nation but have different approaches, different beliefs. We’re not a monolithic culture, or a static one. And we have to have our rights respected, which includes our right to self-determination on our lands.

There need to be better discussions. There has to be stuff out there that they can use to Indigenize their institutions. Because reconciliation is not our job. Reconciliation is their job. They have to step up to the plate, and not be afraid to say, ‘You know, the Indian Act is pretty racist. Why are we still using it?’

Learning the genocidal history of Canada, but also looking at Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal: all those countries that came and killed our people. Then they’ll understand why we’re so angry sometimes.

One last question: what is your vision and hope for the future?

I go back to the constitution that I’m a part of [Kaianere’kó:wa]. The main mission of it is peace. And what does that mean? For me, I hope that the people on this beautiful little planet will wake up and see what really matters. Not just here on Turtle Island, but everywhere. I hope the Indigenous youth will start learning their languages and cultures. 

And I hope that we have time to heal. Every day, I see that in people who have been traumatized. You know, the six people who were killed in two weeks by the RCMP — some had mental health problems and probably some, if not all, had residual effects from the Indian residential school system. There’s a whole issue of feeling worthy, right? Our people need that, in order to have this future. But we don’t have time. Because what is coming will be worse than what we’ve seen. 

We need to help those who will survive, the faces not yet born. We need to do that today. To make that road a little bit easier for them. To push back against corporations, against corrupt politicians. We need to change our lives, to change how we consume. We need to learn how to love the Earth again. We need to respect her. 

I just hope that there will be peace — peace, love, compassion, respect. Those are some of the elements that our people believe in. I know it sounds like a really lofty dream, but it’s okay to dream.  That’s what people need to know: you don’t have to feel so alone, if you feel like something isn’t right in this big, capitalistic, colonial world we’re living in.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Editor’s note: Karsten Heuer passed away on Nov. 5 surrounded by family in Canmore, Alta.

This story has been co-published with The Globe and Mail.

In October 2021, Karsten Heuer found himself sprawled on the ground, helpless, at the bottom of an aspen tree. 

He had been searching for elk in Alberta’s Bow Valley, perched in a hunting stand nearly eight metres off the ground. Then he fell. He doesn’t know how. He was unconscious, lying on the ground for more than an hour before rescuers arrived. 

His back was broken in several places, ribs too; his sternum was cracked and he was struggling to breathe with collapsed lungs.

He was alone in the mountains he loves.

“I wasn’t in pain,” he remembers, sitting in his backyard in Canmore on a June afternoon, sun streaking one side of his still-youthful face. “I was actually okay with it. It was October, the sun was on my back, I could hear trumpeter swans on the lake calling, and other bird songs, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is actually a pretty nice place to die.’ ”

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It’s the kind of thought that might only occur to someone who has lived like Heuer. He has traversed thousands of kilometres through the Rockies on foot and followed a caribou herd for months through the north of the continent. As a conservationist, he worked to protect wildlife corridors in Banff long before they were well known. He led the team that brought bison back to Banff National Park for the first time in 140 years. He was executive director of the non-profit conservation group Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative for a time. He is a perpetual thorn in the side of a local developer that wants to dramatically expand Canmore. And he has written three books and is working on a fourth.

He was one of the early advocates of what is now known as large-landscape-scale conservation. This model takes into account the huge scope of some animals’ terrain, a departure from caring for the land in a patchwork of small protected areas. 

In conversation, Heuer, 55, flips easily between the large and the small — the 4,800-kilometre-long stretch of mountains he considers home, and the comparatively modest town of Canmore, whose population could be doubled if the development he’s fighting is green-lit. He also moves between straight autobiographical facts to experiences that touch on the spiritual. 

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He fits the smallest pieces into the larger whole, his philosophy the result of a collection of experiences that few could match over the course of a long life.

But Heuer’s life won’t be long. He expects to be dead by the fall. 

Two years after surviving that fall from his tree stand, he noticed changes — he couldn’t drink a single beer without acting drunk, for one — and was diagnosed with a fast-acting and fatal neurological condition called multiple system atrophy.

Heuer says he isn’t willing to wait around for the worst of it. He has scheduled an assisted death for the fall, leaving on his own terms. 

It’s not known if the neurological condition was triggered by his accident in the woods, but lying there in the aftermath of the fall shifted Heuer’s relationship to his own mortality. When he finally received his diagnosis, there was an earned wisdom that gave him a measure of peace. 

“I was really close to the precipice already, staring at it,” he says. “And I was like, ‘This is okay.’ ”

A kick from an elk leads to a career in Parks Canada

Heuer has long made his home in the Rocky Mountains. The famed range conjures images of untrammelled national parks and snow-covered peaks, but the ecosystem is under threat. 

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In the 1990s, research emerged showing the impacts of roads crisscrossing the landscape. Expansive ecosystems were being cut into smaller and smaller fragments. 

Not only that: clearcuts are common in this wilderness. Pipelines carry crude oil across the continental divide. Coal mines have taken apart mountains. Charming towns have exploded in popularity, sending development deeper and deeper into the woods. The climate is changing. A natural wildfire cycle has been suppressed and blazes are burning bigger and hotter. 

In some ways, the situation is now more dire, but over the decades, Heuer and others like him had been fighting for better outcomes, and winning victories along the way. 

He entered the conservation scene in the early 1990s, when he was in his 20s. It was a time when few acknowledged the importance of preserving landscapes for reasons other than tourism. Canada’s national parks had long prioritized the enjoyment of visitors. 

Then came Pluie — a female wolf collared by a researcher in 1991. As a result of the tracking device, researchers were able to conclude that she wandered more than 100,000 square kilometres across Alberta, B.C., Montana, Idaho and Washington, travelling far greater distances than previously documented. Wildlife had been traversing these expanses for millennia. Indigenous people had known, of course, but now the understanding was widespread. The idea helped to spur the modern landscape-level conservation movement.

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Heuer was familiar with those landscapes. He grew up in Calgary and travelled to the mountains almost every weekend with his German-born parents to hike, camp, cross-country ski and fish. Heuer has never been far from wild places. He always knew he wanted to work outside.

“Our son’s 19 right now. I was a little bit like him — not knowing what I wanted to do.” For a time, he thought he would be a wildlife veterinarian. That didn’t work out. “It turned out I was allergic to everything with hair and four legs,” he says.

It was a setback, but as Heuer recounts the pivotal moments of his life, it’s striking how he seemed to have been in the right place at the right time. He has good timing, which he says is “a pretty funny thing to say to a guy who’s going to die prematurely.”

Or perhaps he just knows when to seize a moment. 

In 1991, while he was studying ecology at the University of Calgary, Heuer volunteered for a study to recolonize the Rockies with wolves. One day, as he was chatting with the biologist in charge of the study, someone came into the office with a bruise on his face in what Heuer describes as the exact shape of a hoof. 

“He and I got talking,” he says. “Turns out he was kicked by an elk.”

Some would take it as a warning, but Heuer was intrigued.

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The man was a Parks Canada warden. It was after that conversation that Heuer started working for the agency, first as a student and then as a warden. It was the perfect job to anchor Heuer — he was able to take leaves to pursue other passions — and he worked in various roles for decades, culminating in leading a program to reintroduce bison to the park. 

‘A wild success’: Karsten Heuer led effort to re-introduce bison to Banff National Park

Early settlers to North America hunted Plains bison aggressively, culminating in the animal’s near-extinction in the late 1800s. The animals had been absent from the Banff National Park ecosystem for more than a century when Heuer led an effort to release bison in the mountains again, starting with 31 of them in 2018.

Harvey Locke, a renowned conservationist in his own right, calls that project a “wild success.” 

“We’ve restored a missing species to Banff that’s been gone for 140 years,” he says. “It’s not gone anymore and it’s fantastic. It’s a really tangible thing.”

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The bison are deep in the backcountry and Heuer and his colleagues travelled by horseback to check on them.

It is just one of the many things he’s had to say goodbye to. 

“It was kind of hard putting all the horse stuff away in the locker for the last time,” Heuer says. “One of the gifts of this is … there are a lot of lasts and you can take a moment to honour those feelings.”

An early lesson in the importance of big ecosystems — and pushing for change

One early experience in his career showed Heuer what his job could be at its best. In 1992, he was contracted to help conduct a study into wildlife corridors in developed areas in Banff. 

It was life altering. 

That winter, the team trekked through the snow on foot, following wildlife such as wolves, lynxes and cougars to map the animals’ travel patterns.

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When they presented their findings to town council, the response was immediate. A neighbourhood expansion was stopped and soon the park moved other developments — the old bison paddock, airport and cadet camp — out of wildlife travel routes, too. Wolf use in that reclaimed area jumped 700 per cent, according to Heuer.

“The moral of the story was — I saw it at a pretty young age, basically fresh out of university — that if I apply my knowledge in the field, you actually could make a difference.”

It’s part of why he continues to fight. In 2021, he helped revive Bow Valley Engage, an organization that advocates for what it calls “responsible development” of the town of Canmore. Much of its work has pushed back against Canmore’s proposed development, Three Sisters Mountain Village. 

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Heuer sees the expansion as a clear threat to the travel corridors used by wildlife, with implications both at the local level and also for the larger Rocky Mountains ecosystem. He will fight as long as he can, even if he may not see the final result of his work

Heuer trekked 3,400 kilometres to bring attention to the Yellowstone to Yukon project

Heuer’s understanding of the Rockies as a vast, connected ecosystem started to crystalize when he first met conservationist Harvey Locke in the early ’90s. Heuer watched a presentation Locke gave about the need to consider the Rocky Mountains one contiguous stretch of habitat that needed protection — an idea spurred by wildlife like Pluie the wolf. Heuer was captivated.

After that talk, Heuer attended an early meeting of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, Locke remembers. “And he said, ‘Gee, I’d like to walk from Yellowstone to Yukon, on my own money. Is it okay if I do it kind of in association with what you’re trying to do?’ ”

Locke was struck by Heuer’s determination. “I said, ‘You bet. You bet you can.’ ”

“I see Karsten as a guy who does what he thinks is important no matter what the effort required is,” Locke says. “And I think that’s as good a one-sentence summary of Karsten as you can come up with.”

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Heuer embarked on his 3,400-kilometre journey from Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, to Watson Lake, Yukon, in 1998.

During that months-long trek — there were 188 days of actual walking — Heuer’s life and outlook changed. He saw first-hand how interconnected the land was, understanding not just how the land was used, but how intact it still was. 

Traversing it footstep by footstep, from valley to valley, he started to understand the grand sweep of it all at a human level. 

“By the end, the Rockies really felt like my home: not just Canmore, not just the Bow Valley,” he says. 

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The journey attracted plenty of media attention, with stops along the way used to promote the Yellowstone-to-Yukon idea at a time when local papers and television news were critical to people’s information ecosystem. He did hundreds of interviews, talked to rooms full of people with differing viewpoints, experienced corporate pushback, confronted conspiracy theories about United Nations land seizures and even received death threats.

“It was a good training ground for finding commonalities in disparate audiences and building off those commonalities,” Heuer says. “Not in a compromising way — in a productive way.”

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He took those skills and used them as a warden and biologist, but also as an activist. He took the helm of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative in 2015, but flying around fundraising and socializing sapped his energy and kept him from the wild places he loved. 

He took a leave to recover from burnout and never returned. 

That didn’t stop his passion for working to protect large swaths of the Rockies. He just found ways to do it without the “strategic planning and all that bullshit” that he said wore him down.

It’s difficult to quantify the impact Heuer’s efforts had on large-landscape-scale conservation, but recent research has found the total protected area from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to the Yukon grew by 45 per cent between 1993 and 2018 and at the same time the population of grizzly bears doubled.

Heuer says the Yellowstone to Yukon vision changed how we look at the natural world, and that it helped to leverage small issues into ones that are continental in scale — thinking about how 100 acres on one parcel of land could impact tens of thousands of acres across a region. 

‘Boyfriend and girlfriend in kindergarten,’ kind of

Heuer’s trek wasn’t just a catalyst for a lifetime of conservation advocacy — it was also the proving grounds for a great love story. 

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Leanne Allison and Heuer first met in an arts-focused downtown Calgary school where Allison’s mom played piano. Heuer would spend afternoons at her family’s home while Heuer’s mom pursued her own studies. When Allison, an award-winning filmmaker, joined Heuer for the last half of the hike, it cemented the connection that had been sparked decades earlier.

“We kind of joke that we were boyfriend and girlfriend in kindergarten,” Allison says by phone one day in June. “Then we met again in university. Karsten was teaching canoeing down at the Calgary Canoe Club and his boss was a good friend of mine. She said, ‘Man, you gotta meet this guy. He’s like the male version of you.’ ”

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She took up the offer and joined Heuer to paddle on the Glenmore Reservoir. She immediately realized he was the boy etched in her memory from years prior. 

“We recognized each other and we became fast friends,” she says. 

The two bonded over a shared love of the outdoors and eventually found themselves romantically entwined. Sort of. 

“I think we were 21 when we went up and paddled the Nahanni River together,” Allison recalls. “In the Kraus hot springs we had our first kiss under the Northern Lights. Totally romantic. But then we got back to Calgary from that trip and he dumped me.”

It’s not, Heuer says, a moment he’s proud of. 

They remained friends — Allison says it would have been impossible not to — and then came the Yellowstone to Yukon trek. She credits that trip in 1998, and Heuer’s view of the world around them, with changing her own outlook, from the idea of mountains as playground, to the mountains as an ecosystem worth fighting for. 

“We were together from then on,” she says. 

They married and raised a child, Zev, who they introduced to adventures when he was just two, taking the long way around — about 5,000 kilometers by canoe — for a visit with famed Canadian author Farley Mowat. 

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Zev has taken up some of his parents’ passions. Four years ago, he decided to canoe to his new summer job, more than 1,000 kilometres away in Saskatchewan.

A couple spends months following caribou on foot across the tundra

Both Heuer and Allison save their most reverential tone for one of their other great adventures — following the porcupine caribou herd for months across 1,500 kilometres of tundra in Alaska and the Yukon for a film and book entitled Being Caribou. The duo wanted to draw attention to threats to the herd from drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska as the U.S. government pushed to open the calving grounds to oil and gas exploration. 

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The calving grounds, which were excluded from full protection when the refuge was created in 1980, weren’t opened up then, but the fight has continued. In 2017, the Donald Trump administration opened the area to drilling, but a moratorium was put in place by President Joe Biden and existing leases were officially cancelled last year. 

The project involved months of hiking and camping with no planned routes, following wildlife paths in some of the most remote places on earth. There was no agenda but that set by the herd. The experience would cause a profound existential shift in Heuer and Allison.

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“As time went on, we started to rely on these different ways of being as we shed the clutter in our own minds,” Heuer says. “We actually became more attuned to signals that the caribou themselves were following, or the signals the caribou are giving each other to coordinate their movements.”

When Heuer returned home and started to write his book, he struggled. He was trying to write about something scientific but it felt more like recounting a dream.

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“We came back to the Bow Valley and we looked a little lighter, but generally the same,” he says. “We were treated the same, because we looked the same, but we were fundamentally different. And we kind of didn’t ever feel like we truly belonged.”

But he did belong with Allison. 

“I feel so privileged to have shared that with Leanne,” Heuer says. “Imagine you come back and now you’re trying to communicate to your partner in life how you’ve changed. What you experienced. We didn’t have to do that.”

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He says that experience left him with a different understanding of his work and its purpose. When he fights to protect wildlife corridors, it’s not just the science behind how wide a corridor should be, or the need to balance X with Y. 

“It’s much more than a scientific, logical thing. It has become a spiritual thing where cutting off the corridors, to me, it literally is killing animals knowingly,” Heuer says.

“You couldn’t argue that in front of a judge or at a public hearing or something, but it’s something that I feel in my heart, having known these caribou, the intricacies with how they communicate, the kinds of things that got revealed to us when we just had the time to truly listen and shed our human agendas.”

Allison says the experience has informed all of her work as a filmmaker and environmentalist since, viewing stories through the lens of the animals and spaces she documents. But it changed more than that. 

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She says it’s “totally cheesy,” but she’ll never forget, near the end of the caribou trek, seeing swans paired up and flying south together as a unit and feeling like she and Heuer were on that same level. 

“We were just so in sync and moving across the landscape together was just …” Allison says, trailing off as she fights back emotion. “Yeah, it’s hard. This is kind of hard.” 

A life spent trying to ‘do what you believe in’

Across from a small reading chair in the modest mountain home that Heuer and Allison share, a large window frames a view of mountain peaks that climb steeply from this corner of the Bow Valley in central Canmore. 

An immensity looms. The bulk of the mountain, the heaviness of what’s to come for Heuer, Allison, their son and their close friends and colleagues. 

Bow Valley Engage continues to fight against the massive Three Sisters development. Heuer and his collaborators are awaiting a judicial ruling on an Alberta government decision to skip an updated environmental impact assessment (the original was conducted 32 years ago, long before the current iteration of the proposal). Heuer says the valley and the proposal have changed significantly over those decades. 

It is just one of the foundations Heuer has laid for those he will leave behind. He says he has struggled throughout his life to pass tasks on to others, but he’s learning to let that go and make peace with the fact he won’t know how things end. 

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“Again, that’s another gift,” he says. He lets people help him more now than he ever did before. 

Living up to Heuer’s legacy will be challenging. Locke, his friend and early collaborator, says the ease with which Heuer appears to confront any situation comes from a deeply entrenched sense of right and wrong, but that doesn’t mean his life and his work have been easy. 

“To live a life where you do what you believe in the whole time is really hard to do,” Locke says. “He has done that.” 

Saying goodbye

Heuer isn’t going on any more long treks, at least not on foot. But he still travels to wild places in his mind, sitting in meditation and walking the peaks and valleys of the mountains he loves. At the same time, he is working on his last book, tentatively entitled Buffalo Lessons: Teachings from the Banff Herd. It will be short — and published posthumously.

He is facing his final journey the same way he has faced all his challenges, both determined and grateful for those gifts it offers — saying goodbye, appreciating what he has experienced. 

He is making the most of the months before his death, knowing, as he puts it, he has always favoured quality over quantity. 

Allison says the two recently paddled out to the tree where Heuer had his accident, a place she hadn’t visited. 

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There was a tiny red hummingbird waiting for them, perched on a branch, and morel mushrooms were sprouting from the place where Heuer had lain broken. Allison said she expected big emotions from visiting the site, but she was filled with a sort of calm. 

“What we were experiencing with the caribou is these huge cycles, and here we are caught up in that very same thing,” she says.

Updated on Nov. 14, 2024, at 10:46 a.m. MT: This story was updated to correct a photo caption that identified Allison peeking out of a tent in -30C as the couple followed the porcupine caribou herd on foot. In fact, Heuer is peeking out of the tent in the photo.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Melissa Hafting has a long history with birds. Hafting, an ecologist and bird guide from Richmond, B.C., was introduced to birding by her father, eventually surpassing him in both enthusiasm and expertise. After he passed away in 2023, just fourteen months after her mother, she found refuge from grief in birding. 

This month, Hafting published Dare to Bird: Exploring the Joy and Healing Power of Birds, which pairs her photography with reflections on the lessons and insights she gleaned from observing — and protecting — birds. Below, she talks about how to make birding more inclusive, the impacts of climate change on birds and how aspiring birders can get started.

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What first drew you to birding? 

My dad got me into birding when I was really young. He was not a hardcore birder or anything, not like me, but he loved nature and hiking and camping. He got me my first bird book and took me out to look at birds in the sanctuaries. He taught me how to feed birds at home and at the Reifel Bird Sanctuary in Delta, B.C. We would come home and tick off all the little birds we could see in my Golden Field Guide. 

It just grew from there. 

And when did your bird watching turn into bird photography? When did you first pick up a camera?

Actually, that was my dad again who bought me my first camera and lens for my birthday in 2014. Before that, I had a small point-and-shoot camera that I would take pictures with, but I used to bird with just my binoculars and a field guide. Then my dad got me a very rudimentary type of digital camera, and I did some photo workshops and practiced with it. When I first started taking pictures, I was terrible at it! It took a really long time to hone my craft. 

I love capturing birds for memories. Like, years from now, I can look back at a picture of a bird and remember where I was, what I was doing. Now I always go out with my camera because you never know what you’re going to see.

What’s the most surprising encounter you’ve had?

There have been so many. Once I was out on Boundary Bay [in Tsawwassen, B.C.], where my friend Kevin had found a little stint, which is from the Old World — a very rare shorebird here. And while I was looking at that, a snowy plover — which is another really rare bird — dropped down for about 10 seconds. If I hadn’t had my camera, no one would have believed me. It was amazing. To capture two rare shorebirds in the same day! But I’ve had tons of these encounters, where you’re just out and a rare bird flies by where you don’t expect to see one. 

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Have you noticed that you’re just constantly attuned to birds around you, compared to the non-birders in your life?

If I’m with my sister or my friends who aren’t birders, I’m always spotting things they don’t see. But I also do a lot of birding by ear. It’s nice when I go for a walk and can just count all the birds I’m hearing, even though I may not see them. Especially in the spring when they’re singing, because they’re nesting and breeding. Even when I don’t see them I hear them and that calms me. 

In your book, you document the impacts of the climate crisis on birds. What are you seeing?

I’m seeing a lot fewer birds around, period. It’s especially noticeable in swallows. I have a nest box project in the city of Richmond, B.C., to monitor tree swallows. I also [monitor] purple martins, the largest swallows in the world which come all the way from Brazil. And I’ve noticed the numbers are really low. On top of that, during the 2021 heat wave, I lost a lot of babies and a lot of adults. That’s not good, it’s not normal. I worked with the city [of Richmond] to retrofit all my nest boxes. I came up with the design of heat shields that we put on the boxes and we painted them all white and added vent holes. That’s helped to decrease the temperature inside of them by about five degrees Celsius. 

Sofi Hindmarch, who is a wildlife biologist here in B.C., was noticing the same thing in her barn owl boxes. They’re very endangered, and they’re at the northern limit of their range here in Vancouver. She has lots of boxes up, which helps them because they’ve had so much habitat loss; they basically exclusively nest in these barn owl boxes. And she’s found that in lots of those boxes, many baby owls were jumping to their deaths [during the 2021 heat dome] because they were overheating. They’re very sensitive to temperatures, and they huddle together in there, and they’ll suffocate and die in there. She’s since put heat shields on her boxes, and we’ll have to continue that going forward because it’s only going to get warmer. We should be planting trees to give more shade, because many of these boxes for barn owls and tree swallows, they’re in the middle of open fields with no shade. So we’re doing the best we can with what we have at the moment, but it’s a really hard thing. 

In addition to all that, I’m seeing way less of everything than when I started birding 30 years ago. There were more birds, more diversity, and it’s just really sad to see. I just went to Iona Beach [in Richmond] where ordinarily you’d see hundreds and hundreds of swallows and I barely saw any. It’s just devastating.

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What can everyone — birders or non-birders — do to create refuges for birds?

Birds are up against a lot: habitat loss, the climate, pesticides. A lot of the marshes, where I have nest boxes, have dried up and there are no bugs in them for birds to eat or feed their young. On top of that, because the climate is so warm, birds are migrating back earlier, but if they return too early, there’s not enough to eat — the bugs aren’t back yet. They nest early, they can’t feed their young and then they die too. So even what we do in our own backyards won’t be enough.

But if you can, put up a nest box in your yard. I have one in my yard for chickadees. If you can, try to paint them white and put in vent holes. Add heat shields, if you can. And then, reduce your plastic use, reduce emissions. And hopefully we can stop logging the old-growth forest. 

Are any bird species doing well or making a comeback, despite the changing climate?

Bald eagles and peregrine falcons have made a huge comeback from the ‘70s when there was dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (a highly toxic pesticide commonly known as DDT, which was banned in Canada in the 1980s.) Bald eagles and their nests are also protected under the B.C. Wildlife Act. So that helped. But other than that, I can’t think of many examples, unfortunately. Wildlife surveys show that everything is declining, and birds are suffering everywhere across Canada. It’s not looking very optimistic at the moment but we still have time to change it around. 

In the book you write about how to avoid inadvertently causing harm while birding in sensitive ecosystems, like in Hawaii where you have to take care not to spread fungus on your boots. How can people ensure they’re respectful of nature while they’re out appreciating it?

It’s important to follow the rules. Don’t have off-leash dogs where you’re not supposed to because they chase the birds that are already under so much stress. Stay on the trails, don’t litter. If you’re trying to get a photo, stand in one spot and observe; let them come to you, don’t chase them. Make sure you give them their space. Also, some people use audio recordings to attract birds and that’s not good to use during the breeding season because the birds are already under stress.

Is there a good time for a new birder to get out? When will they have the most success?

You can bird any time of day, but the morning is usually the best, especially in the springtime when they’re singing. You can bird in the day, in the evening — but midday is the worst, because the birds don’t want to be out when it’s baking hot. You’ll still see birds but you’ll definitely see fewer.

In the book you write about experiencing racism as a Black birder, and share stories from others who have been harassed or targeted while birding. How can birding be made safer and more inclusive for everyone?

First of all, by acknowledging that there is a problem. It was hard to get that from societies and birding clubs when I first started. They would just dismiss it and say, ‘everyone is welcome.’ They’d be defensive. There are many experiences I didn’t talk about in the book, like getting racist emails and microaggressions, which were very upsetting. One of my young birders, who is Black, was harassed while birding legally in Iona [Beach Regional Park] and the police were called on him.

Then you need to make a real difference. Put welcoming statements on your website — which was a huge uphill battle for me to get organizations to do but now I finally see them doing it in 2024. But I’m happy to see it. Because you can’t assume anymore that people feel welcome. You have to make the effort to let them know. I lead a lot of walks with the Stanley Park Ecological Society that are for Black and Indigenous people and people of colour, or for the queer and trans community, and those weren’t a thing when I was a child or a teenager. But I’ve been told by the people who come out to them that this is the first time they’ve felt safe or included. 

When I started out, some people would ask me, ‘Where did you come from? You don’t look like a birder.’ Some wouldn’t say hello to me, or shake my hand. If I wasn’t so passionate about birds, I don’t think I would still be here. But I pushed my way through. I don’t want people to give up this hobby — because the more people protecting birds, the better it is for birds.

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For someone who wants to connect to a welcoming birding organization, where would you suggest they start?

Look at the Stanley Park Ecological Society because they’ve done so much work — they have inclusive walks and series that are free. They even give people binoculars when they come. The leader is usually person of colour or a member of the queer and trans community. You see people who look like you, which is important. When you’re the only one there — I was the only Black person when I first started — you don’t feel as included and nobody wants to talk to you. It’s very important that these walks are not exclusionary, that they make people feel more welcome. 

What about young people?

I started the BC Young Birders program in 2014, because I saw all of these young people birding alone. These kids were really keen. So I asked if they’d like to join a group, so I could take them to look at birds in different parts of the province, the ones you don’t normally see in your own backyard. I take them on field trips, like overnight boat trips off Tofino and camping trips up to the Okanagan. Now the first group from 2014 has all graduated [from] universities but lots of them are still friends, they still go on their own trips. Some of them are now biologists working in conservation, which is amazing to see. Especially after losing my parents, it’s been so nice to have that focus on working with kids.

Having young people involved is so important, because they’re the ones that are going to be the future stewards of this earth. And they’re the ones who will be left to protect the birds. So we want them to have a vested interest — and I find when you mentor a child it enriches your own life. They teach me so much about life, and about birds themselves, so it’s a beautiful thing. I’ve been really happy to see how many kids have come through the program, who love it and say that it changed their life. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

In her new book Signs of Life: Field Notes from the Frontlines of Extinction award-winning journalist Sarah Cox takes readers on a journey across Canada: from old-growth forests in B.C. to endangered grasslands in Saskatchewan to the banks of the Wolastoq (Saint John) River in New Brunswick.

In each place, Sarah, an investigative reporter at The Narwhal, details devastating declines in nature, most often wrought by expansive human development and the efforts — sometimes last minute and Herculean — being taken to ward off extinctions. We, the reader, tag along as she visits a military base in Alberta where burrowing owls, hatched at the Calgary Zoo, are deposited into artificial burrows. We’re there too, as she visits the only spot in Canada where black-tailed prairie dogs can still be found in the wild, and as she watches sharpshooters take out double-crested cormorants to protect endangered trees from their acidic feces.

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We meet people working desperately to restore and protect habitat, and rebuild declining wildlife populations, from Indigenous leaders to ranchers to biologists and many others. Along the way, Sarah dives into the laws and policies that have led to these dire straits for nature and explores a new way forward.

I had the chance to chat with Sarah this week about Signs of Life. Here’s what she had to say.

You’ve spent years reporting on habitat destruction and at-risk species here in B.C. and your reporting for Signs of Life took you right across the country. From what you’ve seen in your travels, how would you describe the state of biodiversity right now?

People think of Canada as a country full of wildlife and nature. And, compared to many other countries in the world, we still have a lot of wildlife and nature, but we are losing it and we’re losing it at a great rate. More than 5,000 species are at some risk of extinction in Canada, 900 of them are critically imperilled. We don’t even know the state of a quarter of Canada’s 80,000 species. We’re losing a lot of wildlife in the southern part of the country where there is also the greatest biodiversity.

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I’m alarmed by a global report that came out in 2019 saying that we’re at risk of losing almost a million species in the world, many within decades, if we don’t do something to turn things around. Canada is no different. We’ve already lost 135 species — 136 if you count the spotted owl.

Signs of Life opens at the northern spotted owl breeding centre in the Fraser Valley, which is one of the last-ditch efforts that you talk about in the book to save a species on the brink of extinction. Why did you choose to start the book there?

The spotted owl is a poster child for how we’re doing things wrong in Canada. It is one of the most egregious examples of how we are treating a species at risk of extinction. The U.S. has done things so much better when it comes to the spotted owl, they still have spotted owls in the wild. We don’t.

The alarm was raised about spotted owls decades ago in the 1980s by scientists who pointed to declining populations. And then over the past 40 years, very little has been done. The B.C. government spent millions on a spotted owl captive-breeding facility while it continued to sanction clear-cutting in the old-growth forests where the owl lives. The federal government twiddled its thumbs and didn’t want to get involved. And now, although no official will come out and say this out loud, we very likely have no more spotted owls left in Canada’s wild. We had three when I wrote the book, that went down to one. Last I heard, that one wild-born spotted owl hadn’t been seen. It’s probably gone.

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So, we’ve known for decades that spotted owls are in great decline. They were listed under Canada’s newly minted Species At Risk Act in 2003. Here it is two decades later, and a recovery plan for the species still hasn’t been finalized.  

You spend the first part of Signs of Life exploring some of these desperate efforts being made to save species from extinction, from culling wolves to protect caribou, or cormorants to protect endangered trees to artificial insemination and even cloning. What really stands out for you about these dramatic efforts to save species?

They are certainly dramatic, and they are very expensive. We need to switch things up so that we’re not always trying to save species at the very last minute. And, so my intention with the first part of the book was to lay out the somewhat crazy things that we’re doing in the absence of fulsome habitat protections, in the absence of an ecosystem-based approach to species-at-risk conservation and in the absence of transparent budgets attached to recovery efforts.

I think many people aren’t aware that we’re going to such lengths, often at public expense, to pull wildlife back from the brink of extinction. And, that is not to say that these efforts don’t have a role because they do. There are many instances where eleventh-hour efforts have helped to save and start to recover or even to fully recover a species. The peregrine falcon, for instance. 

One chapter focuses on shooting one species to “save” another — shooting barred owls to help spotted owls, shooting wolves to save mountain caribou. I went out in an observer boat in Lake Erie while cormorants were being shot to save Kentucky coffee trees and other at-risk species in the Carolinian ecosystem, which ironically has mostly been destroyed by human activity. 

And there is scientific evidence that wolf culls can help save a highly endangered caribou herd from winking out. But that is a very small piece of the puzzle. We can’t just continue to shoot wolves, we need to safeguard sufficient caribou habitat, especially in light of climate change. If shooting wolves is our only strategy, it is not going to work in the long-term. And it is going to be very, very intensive and very, very expensive. The B.C. government, for instance, spent $10,000 for each wolf killed in the habitat of one endangered caribou herd.

One of the contradictions you point out in the book is that the habitat at-risk species rely on is still in many cases being actively destroyed — even as governments are heavily investing in these sort of last-ditch efforts to save them. Can you expand on why habitat conservation is so important if we’re serious about preventing more extinctions?

Habitat conservation is essential. Take a species like wood bison. Wood bison — a species of great spiritual and cultural importance for Indigenous Peoples — are only found in six per cent of their original habitat. And so, do we not want to make a concerted effort to safeguard this six per cent? I think most people would say yes, when we look at it in that context.

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The few genetically pure wood bison herds left are still facing threats, whether it’s from oilsands development or forestry. But the main threat right now is actually disease, which is a whole other story I tell in the book. Scientists in Saskatchewan and at the Toronto Zoo are working together to enhance genetic diversity in wood bison and tackle disease that was brought to the herds through human activity. They are literally scrubbing embryos free of microbes and using surrogate wood bison to produce mainly female young, including with sperm flown in from a Saskatchewan facility.

It doesn’t mean that we have to stop all activity on all land bases, we just need to, in many instances, do things differently. We need to have protected areas as well, we also need to have buffer zones and connectivity. Indigenous-led conservation is key. And we need an ecosystem-based approach. In many parts of Canada, super interesting initiatives are also underway to protect endangered species and their habitat on private land. 

Take the Prairie grasslands, one of the most endangered ecosystems on the planet. There are about 60 at-risk species that rely on the grasslands at some point during their life cycle, including many songbirds. I talked to ranchers who are grazing their cattle differently to protect native Prairie where birds nest. They move their cattle onto those fields later in the summer, after the birds have fledged. And by protecting the grasslands they’re also keeping carbon in the ground; grasslands hold a lot of carbon in the soil. So they are protecting biodiversity and addressing climate change at the same time. 

Governments often tout different laws and policies that they say are in place to protect at-risk species and to achieve this kind of balance between the environment and the economy. But I think in reading Signs of Life, it’s clear existing laws and policies aren’t enough to prevent the biodiversity loss that we’re seeing. What do you see as the major gaps in legal protection that need to be addressed?

On paper Canada’s Species At Risk Act is reasonably sound. The problem is that it is rarely implemented in most of the country. Environmental law groups like Ecojustice are constantly having to take governments to court so they follow their own laws. So, while we have this federal safety net for endangered species, there are big holes in its implementation and decisions are often political. And then there are supposed to be other safety nets for wildlife in each province and territory — and yet we have four provinces, including B.C., and a territory with no stand-alone legislation to protect species at risk. No wonder we’ve lost spotted owls from Canada’s wild. Most people don’t know that Canada’s Species At Risk Act only automatically applies to federal land, which is about four per cent of the country outside the territories, including national parks and post offices.

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We need the provinces and territories to step up. And, right now, they’re not doing it. We’re not protecting species at risk, and wildlife and biodiversity. There’s been a lot of talk, there have been many, many years and decades of waiting for something to happen. Signs of Life looks at why it hasn’t happened, at the very heroic and dedicated efforts to bring about stronger protections for species at risk and how we can do this in a very solutions-oriented way.

These solutions are already happening. It’s a question of stepping them up. It’s a question of having more of an ecosystem-based approach to species at risk conservation — an approach that doesn’t focus on species at the very last minute, like spotted owls when they’re already critically imperiled, but starts to safeguard ecosystems and address the needs of all the species in that ecosystem, and also really addresses the needs of humans as well, because we’re so interdependent. We’re dependent on biodiversity for our own survival, on pollinators to produce our food, on healthy kelp forests to become nurseries for fish that humans and other species eat.

We ignore wildlife loss and biodiversity loss, I think, at our own peril.

There are a lot of reasons to be worried about the state of nature, but in Signs of Life you also give us, as readers, a sense of hope as you explore some of the different conservation efforts underway across the country. For yourself after spending the amount of time that you have reporting on these issues what keeps you hopeful for the future?

I started the book feeling quite cynical and despairing about the state of wildlife and biodiversity in Canada. And I came out of it feeling a lot more hopeful. I was not expecting that. I think what really gave me hope were all the people that I met — scientists, people from Indigenous communities, people in the Canadian military, ordinary individuals just working in their own neighborhoods — who are all engaged in so many unique and dedicated efforts to protect wildlife and biodiversity. Those are the stories I tell in the book.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah will be speaking about Signs of Life, in conversation with The Narwhal’s biodiversity reporter, Ainslie Cruickshank, at the Vancouver Public Library on Thursday, April 25, at 7 p.m. Admission is free; reserve your spot here.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

When I hop on a Zoom call with David Suzuki and Tara Cullis-Suzuki in late January, David is wearing a collared shirt with a red zip-up jacket over top, sporting his trademark wild white hair, beard and glasses. As for Tara, well, it occurs to me that many people probably don’t know what Tara looks like. That’s because she’s been largely behind the scenes orchestrating David’s success during her 51-year marriage to Canada’s most famous scientist.

But David isn’t letting Tara continue as the unsung hero any longer. He interjects several times during our 45-minute conversation to brag about his wife — about her “mind-boggling” thesis, about the time she learned Portuguese and chartered two planes for 40 people into the Amazon rainforest at the drop of a hat and that time she flew with a three-week-old baby and a three-year-old child to meet up with him in England.

At ages 87 and 74, David and Tara are mostly trying to stay out of the limelight these days and act like retired people. But on this day they’re doing publicity for their play, What You Won’t Do For Love, which makes its West Coast premiere this week in Vancouver. 

It’s a production they were initially reluctant to get involved in, but the more they shared their story, the more they realized the playwrights were helping to make sense of their lives. 

“It became clear that the hero of the play is Tara,” David said. Indeed, while he was becoming increasingly famous and travelling around the world filming TV shows, Tara was starting the David Suzuki Foundation, raising their children, finishing her PhD in comparative literature and being “the backbone of the whole thing.”

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What You Won’t Do For Love is described as “an intimate experience that poses the question: can the love we have for each other save our planet?” During the 90-minute play, David and Tara are joined onstage by actors and real-life couple Miriam Fernandes and Sturla Alvsvaag. 

“We have to consider what kind of advice we’re going to give and it becomes quite emotional,” Tara says. “It isn’t just two old fogies sitting on the stage, reminiscing.” 

As in life, David and Tara spend the play balancing the dire straits of the planet with the need to have hope.

“Action is hope. Without action, there is no hope,” David says. “You’ve got to be doing something.”

He trails off, referring to them as “old and decrepit now” but Tara cuts in with a rebuttal: “He goes to the gym every day. He says exercise is his medicine.”

She has her own message of hope: “One of the things we’ve noticed is people feel that they can’t make a difference because they are just a drop in the bucket. And yeah, they’re a drop in the bucket. I’m a drop in the bucket. But there’s a hell of a lot of drops, and there’s a lot of us, and it’s so much fun when you suddenly realize, ‘Hey, we’re really powerful.’ ”

Read on for more on how David and Tara met, who hit on who and the best job David has ever had.

What is one of the most poignant moments in the play for you two? What does the other couple ask for advice on?

Tara: They’re really trying to figure out whether they should have children. And that’s a very personal and painful and difficult topic nowadays. And David has been telling them all kinds of things about where we’re going with climate change and species destruction and so on. And so they start asking: is there any hope and why would we bring children into this world? And since our great joy is our children and grandchildren, we’re left with a bit of a conundrum on how to answer that question.

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Did you ever struggle with the decision to have children?

Tara: No, our first child was born in 1979. So that was pre real awareness of climate change, which for me came around 1988. There were murmurings of it, but it wasn’t really a daily topic.

David: Well, I like to think that when you have a child, you have made the greatest commitment to the future, and the planet.

Tara: You know, there is nothing a parent or a grandparent wouldn’t do to try to improve things for their offspring.

David: So the child wasn’t just a commitment for Tara and me, it was really reinforcement that we’re in it for the long run. And we’ve got to pull out all stops. I mean, they are what keep us going now. To me, when you stop and you say ‘I’m not going to have children’ deliberately, you’re stopping 150,000 years of evolution. That is a very, very profound moment that we have come to a time when we actually are beginning to say, ‘This is the end, I’m not going to even try to carry on with my species.’ It’s an evolutionary thing that is very, very profound.

How did you first meet?

David: Oh, that’s in the play.

Tara: It was epic really.

David: She picked me up.

Tara: He picked me up. We picked each other up. Well, I had decided that I ought to put in some effort to finding a partner who I was going to spend the rest of my life with because I was in the second year of my master’s degree and I thought ‘Gee, I’ve worked so hard for every essay I write but I never lift a finger to find a partner.’ So I said to myself, ‘Okay, so now if you meet somebody you think is interesting, you’ve got to make an effort. And make sure you meet the person. And don’t just let them wander off and say, “Oh, I hope we run into each other again.” ’ And then two weeks later, along comes David and I go to his lecture. And then I think, ‘Well, that’s the first person I’ve seen who I’d consider marrying, but now I’ve gotta do something about it.’

Okay, so you went to his lecture — and then did you make the approach?

Tara: I just hung around. I didn’t know what to do.

David: I saw her the minute she came in and sat down. It was like there was a light shining on her. But there was something that happened halfway through my speech. It was a big room with over 400 people, it was packed. And suddenly I realized nobody’s listening to me. There’s this kind of commotion. And so I look up and there at the window is a huge snowy owl and this is on the top floor of the highest building on campus. And there was this giant bird kind of looking in the window. And all my Indigenous friends say that was a sign, that owl was there to tell me something. When I finished my lecture, she came down.

Tara: But I didn’t have any question to ask. I was just trying to obey myself.

David: So I said, ‘I hope everybody’s coming to the party tonight’ and I left.

Tara: Then I had to find the party. Anyway, I found it.  

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What experience tested you the most as a couple?

David: My being away filming was the real challenge. I mean, I spent so much time in the field and being apart was really the most testing.

Tara: I had two children, I was finishing my PhD. And he was travelling so much. And then I was often a single mother because he was gone. But it was such a blur that I don’t remember it too well, except I remember trying to feed the children at nine o’clock at night and thinking ‘It’s awfully late to be feeding young children and I’m a bad mom.’ My parents lived upstairs, so I could go off back to work. And there were times when I was there until three or four in the morning just trying to get the Suzuki Foundation up off the ground. And it was a lot to do. But it was really exciting and a lot of fun.

Did you ever feel resentful in moments like that, of what you were carrying while David was trotting around the globe being the star?

Tara: Oh, yeah. He always said, ‘Your turn will come. I’ll back you up at some point.’ But he’d always say the next trip is the last trip. And then I’d think, ‘Well, how can that be? He’s doing the show.’ And then I realized, ‘Oh, yeah, the next trip is the last trip. It’s the last trip before the next trip.’

David: But did you ever feel resentful?

Tara: Sure, I would feel resentful. It seemed like I was carrying a lot of the weight of the household. But as I mentioned, my parents were upstairs. I didn’t expect David to be able to carry half the weight because I knew he was doing Suzuki on Science, a national TV program. And I didn’t want him to stop, right? So it wasn’t as if I thought he should be home all the time. And I just felt well, okay, we got to spread the load out. And my parents were happy to help. Like, my dad took care of the house, his father and mother lived just up the road. So they were over every day to help with the kids. And we’ve always had at least a three-generation household. Even now. At one point, it was a four-generation household. And I feel like people need to know that for David to be David Suzuki, he had this huge team … that’s what it takes. 

What You Won’t Do for Love is about the question of whether our love for each other can save our planet. And so many people are struggling with a sense of despair about the state of our planet these days. How does love help you through that sense of despair?

David: Well, without the love, I think you give up. The love is what gives you the strength and the two of us, we both get down and despair, but thank God, it’s never been simultaneous. It’s one or the other. And she has pulled me out many, many times. But I also think it’s a love of Turtle Island, a love of nature.

Tara: I think it’s a very odd thing that when we are trying to work as environmentalists, we are always getting all these facts — we’re using our left brain and we’re trying to use logic and convince politicians and the public and so on. But what is really at the heart of everything we do is emotion, it’s a sense of what could be done to make life better. And that is a kind of love, and it’s not really logical. And that’s why I’m so pleased with the play because it gets at the fact we’re usually ignoring. 

If it weren’t for the love my parents had for us, we wouldn’t have been able to raise the kids well, we wouldn’t have been able to do the work we do. If it wasn’t for the love that all the people who donate money have for whatever their little river is or their grasslands or their trees, then they wouldn’t send any money, we wouldn’t be able to do the work we do. When you get down to it, it’s really based on love.

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What is the pace like for you these days, play aside? In your older years, are you getting a chance to kind of sit back and relax and reflect on it all?

Tara: He just retired from The Nature of Things last June. And so you’d think we would be able to do some kind of classic retirement stuff, like go on a nice trip or something. But now he won’t fly because of climate change. And besides, he’s flown so much. So we can’t do that. So we have to kind of travel inside B.C. But our kids are at that stage where they need what we got from our parents.

David: Our youngest daughter is now a co-host of The Nature of Things. So I told her, ‘When you’re gone, I’ll take your place.’ So I’m now in the happiest, greatest job I’ve ever had: I’m a full-time grandpa.

Tara: He catches the bus and goes over to Victoria, and gets up at 6:30 and makes the kids breakfast and gets them into the car to get them to school and everything. They love him and they crawl all over him.

David: Meanwhile, Severn, who’s now the executive director of David Suzuki Foundation, lives upstairs, where her grandma and grandad lived until they died. And so Tara is spending a lot of time with her two boys.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

After four whirlwind weeks on the campaign trail chasing her first-ever seat in Manitoba’s legislature, newly-elected MLA Tracy Schmidt needed a little time to process.

She had just flipped the Rossmere riding for the NDP as part of an orange wave across the province, and the people close to her suggested she take a moment to drink it all in.

So Schmidt grabbed her kayak, dragged it to the nearby Red River and spent a day on the water.

The labour lawyer, who had most recently been working for a Winnipeg public service union, decided to pursue politics in an effort to change the province’s trajectory and build a secure future — close to home — for her three young children.

Weeks later, she would be appointed Manitoba’s new minister of Environment and Climate Change, inheriting a complex and important file that, despite a relative lack of experience with the issue, sits close to her heart.

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“One of the reasons I love living in Manitoba is because of our natural environment,” Schmidt says, sitting in her new office.

A lifelong Manitoban, Schmidt has spent countless hours in the province’s wilderness. Growing up the child of two school teachers, her summers were spent traipsing the province’s campgrounds and provincial parks. She tries to inspire that same passion for her children, aged seven, 10 and 13.

On top of prioritizing regular camping trips (every weekend they can), day hikes and fishing expeditions, Schmidt is an avid canoeist and kayaker. For the last decade she’s also been a commuter cyclist — at least when there isn’t too much snow on the ground.

“I’m a proud Manitoban and I plan on spending the rest of my days here,” Schmidt says of her motivation for entering politics.

“I hope my children stay close to me and also want to spend their lives in Manitoba, but I feared for the last several years under the mandate of the previous government that there was not a lot of opportunity being left here in Manitoba.”

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Before her law career, Schmidt spent 10 years at Canada Post, taking part in several environmental initiatives spearheaded by the postal union. The experience has provided her some background on climate issues, but it’s her legal expertise, she says, that likely earned her the climate post overseeing a host of interwoven legislation and regulations.

There’s a bit of a learning curve to the climate file, she admits, but she considers herself a lifelong learner (having gone back to law school as a 34-year-old mother in 2015) and more importantly she hopes to bring a fresh perspective to the file — one that isn’t in the business of mincing words about climate change.

“Climate change is an existential threat. I don’t think I’m overstating it when I state we’re facing a climate crisis,” Schmidt says.

“Our goals do have to be lofty and I think they have to be ambitious.”

Indeed the job comes with a lot of big asks. Her ministerial mandate letter, made public last week, outlines several “bold” commitments, including making Manitoba a “leader in clean energy,” following through on federal net-zero targets and conservation goals, protecting Lake Winnipeg and investing in provincial parks.

For Schmidt, the most important task in the early days of her tenure will be to strike a balance between immediate action and “getting things right.”

Schmidt says her department will need to come to grips with a number of challenges left behind by the previous government, including the task of working within the confines of the existing budget — for now. The department suffered repeated funding and staffing cuts under Conservative party leadership, leaving fewer resources for services like environmental monitoring and enforcement.

What is clear to Schmidt, however, is the new provincial leadership wants to take climate issues seriously.

She is proud, for one, that the department was renamed to include the words “climate change” and not simply “climate.”

“You can’t you can’t fix a problem you don’t acknowledge,” Schmidt says.

“It’s a real signal to Manitobans that they have elected a government that understands climate change, that believes in climate change and that takes it seriously and is willing to name it.”

Tracy Schmidt on conservation goals

As part of reversing the Tory legacy, Schmidt says her department has re-assumed responsibility for the parks and trails branch — which had been shuffled into the Natural Resources portfolio late in the previous government’s tenure — and her priorities include “protecting them, improving them and keeping them public.”

Of top priority for Schmidt in the coming months is to start work towards conservation targets the NDP committed to during the campaign. Namely, the 30-by-30 targets established by the United Nations, which call on governments to protect 30 per cent of their lands and waters from development by 2030. To date, Manitoba has protected about 11 per cent of its land area, leaving a lot of work to do (about 140,000 square kilometres worth) in the next six years.

Manitoba’s parks have become an arena for conservation debates in recent years as the resource extraction sector quietly pressed government to allow prospecting in all corners of the province — including parks — and advocated for the suspension of all protected areas.

For Schmidt, conservation targets are non-negotiable, both for the sake of the land itself, but also in pursuit of one of the new government’s central philosophies: “making strides towards meaningful reconciliation in the province.”

“I don’t think there’s a way to move forward on protecting 30 per cent of our lands without working really closely and in partnership with Indigenous nations in Manitoba,” she adds.

There are currently a handful of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area proposals in development across Manitoba, most notably the Seal River Watershed Alliance, which has proposed a 50,000-square-kilometre conservation area stewarded by local land guardians to protect the province’s only undammed river and the thousands of barren ground caribou, beluga whales and other species that call the Seal River home. The Seal River protected area alone would protect nearly eight per cent of the province, while seven other proposed Indigenous protected areas could safeguard another 10 per cent of the province.

Schmidt responds to questions about Sio Silica mining project

The most pressing file on Schmidt’s desk, she says, has been Sio Silica, the highly controversial proposal for a silica sand mining operation in a freshwater aquifer serving thousands of southeastern Manitoba residents.

The proposal was referred to Manitoba’s Clean Environment Commission last year after a wave of public concern the project would devastate the region’s drinking water source. The commission compiled a report after weeks of hearings, which outlined unaddressed risks associated with the mining proposal. The previous environment minister passed that report to a committee of technical experts to make recommendations for an environmental licence. Schmidt says she has had “daily briefings digging down through the project one level at a time,” but has not yet met with the technical advisory committee.

Tracy Schmidt lays out her energy policy

The environmental issue dominating the headlines of late, however, has been the future of Manitoba Hydro, as the utility grapples with the uncertainty of a looming energy transition.

Schmidt’s portfolio includes responsibility for Efficiency Manitoba — the government arm in charge of cutting back on provincial energy use — and the minister has been tasked with helping guide Manitoba towards net-zero emissions targets. The province aims to have an emission-free power grid by 2035 and to achieve net-zero emissions province-wide by 2050, in line with national targets.

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At the same time, the government is juggling affordability concerns stemming, at least in part, from the cost of fossil fuels. That mix of responsibilities has generated some mixed messaging from ministers, the premier and Manitoba Hydro about the direction the province will take in its pursuit of both affordability and environmental responsibility.

During the campaign, the NDP committed to electric vehicle rebates and a subsidized geothermal home heating program as part of the push towards decarbonization. Premier Wab Kinew has publicly suggested the days of new hydroelectric dam production are over, touting instead the possibility of developing green hydrogen technology.

Manitoba Hydro has sounded the alarm that demand for electric power will soon outstrip grid capacity, noting hydrogen production would seriously strain existing resources and indicating the most cost-effective, near-term solution would be to invest in natural gas production. Kinew has said new natural gas plants are not part of his plan.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

When ​’Cúagilákv, Jess H̓áust̓i, began community organizing and activism as a young adult, they were filled with an urgency to defend their Haíłzaqv (Heiltsuk) homelands, taking a stand against trophy hunts and the controversial Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. 

A lot of their drive came from fear. They fed off that fear for years until, eventually, it was unsustainable.

“I didn’t know how to have a sense of hope. No matter how hard you campaigned and built momentum around things and tried to protect the things you cared about, there were these variables that you couldn’t control.”

They had to simplify their life in order to feel hope and joy, so they could maintain their roles in community, where they write, parent two children and work as executive director of the non-profit Qqs (Eyes) Projects Society. They had to prioritize the things that made them feel whole, not torn apart. And a big part of that groundedness, for them, comes through poetry. 

“I kept telling myself that poetry was a luxury, and I didn’t have time for luxuries,” they said. But not only does it bring them personal healing, they hope it contributes to the tradition of storytelling.

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“It feels so important to me to create some record of what is here now, and what we know was there from the things that our ancestors have passed down,” H̓áust̓i said. 

The Narwhal caught up with H̓áust̓i about their new poetry book, Crushed Wild Mint, released on Oct. 14 — and how the words on paper are connected with H̓áust̓i’s ability to protect the land and water around them.

It would be cool to hear you talk about your practice of being a poet. When did you start, how did you start?

I started writing poetry when I was really young. It happened through my relationship with my dad. We had a cabin at a place called Ellerslie Lake, where we would go at every possible opportunity. Our practice in that sacred lake was that we would write poems back and forth to each other — and they’re all still captured in this old, damp notebook that’s tucked in the cabin. That’s really where it came from, that wellspring of land, love and connection with my dad that I got to share.

I stopped writing for a really long time in my 20s and into my early 30s, because it felt like it wasn’t the most important thing I could be doing. I felt like I had to do urgent, productive things, particularly around the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, and so many big environmental and social fights and campaigns. I kept telling myself that poetry was a luxury, and I didn’t have time for luxuries.

And I really believe that was a big contributing factor to the deep burnout that eventually happened — that I didn’t have the grounding practice that writing poetry has become for me.

And maybe that’s a good way to lead into talking about how poetry is part of your advocacy and stewardship.

They’re not things that I can even really separate anymore. A lot of that early time in my life doing community organizing work was so rooted in fear, which showed up as anger when it was outward facing. That all felt very isolating. The work felt isolated and compartmentalized from the rest of my life. So, as I was working through the burnout, it felt really clear to me that I needed to have a much more holistic way of being in relationship with my community and my territory — to be grounded more in love than in fear. To really accept that my community and my homeland deserve abundance, and that I want to be a conduit for that. 

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For me, writing is one way for me to externalize the wellspring of love that’s just bubbling over for me all the time — love for my culture, people, territory, identity and family.

What did that journey look like, moving from burnout, to reaching this understanding, and then changing how you were doing things to be more holistic?

That sort of fear mentality for me really started creeping in in the early days of the Enbridge pipeline, which was the first time I stepped into a community organizing role. The second I heard about that project, I felt this crushing weight. An entity or corporation which had nothing to do with the territory, and was completely external to everything that I experienced, had the power to destroy everything I cared about.

Looking back now, I was in my early 20s — I was a baby. I had no idea what I was doing. I made so many mistakes, and they were so devastating for me every time I made them, because I cared so deeply. I didn’t know how to engage people, I didn’t know how to meet the community where they were at. I hadn’t been doing that kind of work in community long enough to build trust.

There have been lots more fear-based moments since then — conflicts and campaigns that brought fear, anger and frustration. I am relatively introverted, I don’t like being in the limelight. But I eventually stepped into an elected role with our tribal council for a couple terms.

It really peaked for me in 2016 with the Nathan E. Stewart oil spill [in which Kirby Offshore Marine Corp. spilled 110,000 litres of heavy oils and diesel in Heiltsuk fishing waters], that was devastating to me — even though it wasn’t my fault, that it was happening on my watch, and that there was nothing I could do to intervene.

I was appointed as incident commander for tribal council during the spill response, which was really stressful, really traumatic and ultimately felt pretty futile. When we emerged from the other side of the emergency phase, I was coming off 40 straight days of working 12, 15, 18 hour days. I had a baby then and he weaned himself because I wasn’t home to nurse him. 

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And all of a sudden it was over, and the hundreds of people that had come into the community to participate in the response left. And I just had this deep feeling that people can come in here, and they can fuck everything up, and then they can just leave, and we’re still here. 

I struggled really hard for a couple of years after this spill happened, trying to figure out how to be a good community member, how to be a good steward of the territory. How to have hope and love in my heart again.

I recognized at a certain point that a really big component for me was the loss of control over our food systems. That led into the food sovereignty work we’re doing in the community. I truly needed something as simple as, I’m gonna take a seed, I’m going to plant it in the soil, a plant will grow, I will harvest it and I will give it to somebody to eat. 

In 2017 I conceived my second child, and I really struggled with knowing whether I was going to be able to be a good parent to my child and offer my children connections to places that had been special to me, if I didn’t have the ability to protect those places.

Ultimately, it was the love and patience of my kids and my family, and the really simple acts that I brought back to my life, like working with the soil, that helped me through the burnout. I truly believe that the land saved my life in that instance. It’s really been important for me to be more present with the land, to let myself feel all of that more deeply and to give myself space and permission to capture it in the ways that feel good for me — and so that’s also the time that I really came back to writing.

I don’t think I’ve heard you talk about going through that dark time before, and it’s beautiful to hear how you found your way out of it too. Earlier, you mentioned the importance of oral storytelling. I see a connection with how this poetry grounds you, and you want to share it as a means of storytelling. Can you talk about that sharing aspect?

That’s definitely a huge element of it. There’s a series of poems at the end of the book about mountains in the territory, and it’s really centered around the flood story. I felt really compelled to share that story of the flood — not as a teller of that story, but just understanding the space that it holds in my life and my psyche, and how it compelled me to develop a relationship with those mountains and understand them as kin. It feels really important for me to practice that, and insist on people, especially outside the community, that our stories are real, and they are core markers of our identity and really deeply inform who we are and how we show up in the world.

In terms of sharing, one of the things that’s been really beautiful for me as I’ve been doing events outside my community is realizing how many urban Indigenous people are really excited to commune with me and others at the readings. For Indigenous people who are displaced or choosing to be away from their homelands, they’re reflecting on all the ways they give themselves permission to develop an identity that is very rooted in land love, oral practices and building community, which show up really differently in urban areas. 

I feel really grateful and moved that young, urban Indigenous youth that I’ve connected with have generously shared with me just how excited they are to have my poems as one of many points of connection for them to their sense of identity.

That’s something that I think about a lot. And that’s a beautiful point to make — what land love looks like when so much has been lost and paved over.

Things are so different even from my childhood, let alone the stories that my parents and my grandparents’ generation have told me. I think about how precarious so many aspects of our relationship to the land are in the face of escalating climate change impacts and it scares me. I’ve made a really strong practice for myself of trying to be based in love and hope. But when it comes to climate change, it’s so hard to feel based in love and hope, and not in anger, fear and grief. 

But if there’s one small thing that I can do, I hope it’s recording the amazing abundance and resilience that is there now, and upholding the accounts that I’ve heard from my relatives, recent ancestors and oral history of what was there — and insisting on the deep, inherent value and power of those things. That won’t necessarily stop it from being lost. But I hope that, if we can create that record and share it with the world, people will become more awake to their responsibility to be in relationship with place and stand up for it.

What does it mean to feel grounded?

Imagine blunt roots, grown roots,

reaching outward from your palms

How is it you’ve become unshakeable?

Like you said, there’s power in not letting it be erased.

Another piece of erasure I want to address is that even amongst really well-intentioned environmentalists and conservationists, there’s this idea that if you want to present land as being worthy of protecting then you call it pristine and untouched. You erase the human presence there to make it new, unspoiled. And I hate that language so much. Everything around me in my homeland is deeply touched by my ancestors, physically and spiritually.

It’s so rooted in white supremacy culture that, in order to present something as worthy, you are erasing Indigenous people from it. You’re just deleting us from the places that we’ve helped to thrive and that we’ve mutually thrived with because of our deep relationships and reciprocity. I actually find it quite disgusting that that is the narrative people use to push conservation agendas. In my writing, I hope I can help people understand the deep interrelationship between Indigenous Peoples and lands is intrinsic to the need to protect them, and how we protect them.

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I know there are many examples in your book, but do any specific examples come to mind where you show how the land is deeply touched by your ancestors?

I think the most obvious one is the series of mountain volumes, and sharing that really important ritual of climbing, and that I literally go and sit with the bones of one of my ancestors. He was buried across the inlet from where I started my hike, and at some point a hand logger, who knows who, robbed his grave and his bones are scattered. But his skull is resting in the moss, just looking out over the inlet. And if it’s not physically in front of you, it’s in the stories that talk about our relationships with all of those places.

Can you talk about the connections between land sovereignty and body sovereignty in the book?

I’ve spent so much of my life feeling like my agency has been taken away from me by patriarchy, and capitalism and supremacy. And the space where I feel like I have the most agency over myself is absolutely when I’m out on the lands and waters in my territory, where I feel like a whole, unapologetic person that can just be in the whole of my physical and spiritual being. I had a lot of frustration around a lack of bodily autonomy, particularly when I was pregnant with my kids. I was born in Bella Bella, but sometimes in my childhood, a policy was put into place that the hospital in Bella Bella wouldn’t deliver babies anymore. And I really wanted my children to be born in their homeland. Elders in the community remembered generations of babies being born there. There was this really deep sadness that lots of people felt that as a community, people can die at home, they can’t be born at home. 

It really made me reflect on how much of my sense of well-being is derived from a sense of control over myself and my body and identity, and how deeply disrupted that sense of self and well-being is when I’m in colonial spaces, versus how whole and capable and loved and safe and held I feel when I’m in the territory. The themes of land sovereignty and body sovereignty are both just inextricable parts of my identity that really informed the themes that I was exploring, and the images that made their way into my poems.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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