“She Is Indigenous campaign highlights women's accomplishments, challenges negative stereotypes
'One of the main narratives about us is our struggle ... but there's also joy, strength, intelligence'
Filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin. Author Cherie Dimaline. Olympian Waneek Horn-Miller. Lawyer Pam Palmater. Surgeon Donna May Kimmaliardjuk.
These are some of the women a national awareness campaign wants people to know and recognize for being strong, resilient, inspiring, wise, nurturing and trailblazing First Nations, Inuit, and Métis women across Canada.
The campaign is called She is Indigenous.
Funded by the Province of Ontario, the campaign is led by Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak, the national organization representing Métis women, and supported by a number of provincial and national Indigenous organizations.
"We really want to re-write that narrative that Indigenous women are vulnerable and at-risk individuals. Instead, we see Indigenous women as profoundly kind, ambitious, and inspirational," said Tamsin Fitzgerald, senior policy analyst at Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak.
Close to 100 women have been featured since the campaign launched in June 2019 online with the goal of reducing violence against Indigenous women and girls.
It launched the same month as the release of the final report of the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak issued its own report in the fall.
With She is Indigenous, Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak wanted to work toward the same goal of reducing violence against Indigenous women and girls but from a different approach. 
Fitzgerald said the campaign challenges negative stereotypes, educates Canadians about First Nations, Inuit, and Métis issues, and supports Indigenous women by honouring their unique strengths and accomplishments.
"The main goal is to support everyday Indigenous women and highlight their contributions," she said.
One of those women is Celeste Beauchamp.
The 20-year-old Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) from Kahnawake works as a youth reconciliation initiative co-ordinator at Canadian Roots Exchange in Ottawa.
She said she likes that the campaign focuses on the inherent strengths of Indigenous women.
"We're empowered in just being women," said Beauchamp. 
"We get really caught up in our resilience, constantly fighting for our community, constantly fighting for our land and our languages, that we forgot that we're whole in ourselves. We have to take care of ourselves and honour our own power."
Tenille Campbell, the Dene/Métis poet of #IndianLovePoems and photographer behind Sweetmoon Photography, is another woman profiled in the campaign. 
"I really like the idea of visually taking up space," she said.
Every other day, She is Indigenous posts a profile of an Indigenous woman on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The plan is to continue indefinitely, and encourage others to participate by nominating themselves or an Indigenous woman in their life.
"So often, one of the main narratives about us is our struggle, which is important, but there's also joy, strength, intelligence, and kinship. There's so many other aspects of being an Indigenous woman other than just surviving," said Campbell.
"I like the idea that it was positive-based — highlighting our strengths and not what we overcome to become who we are but celebrating who we are."”

— Jessica Deer CBC News

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“When car trouble put Saskatchewan poet Tenille Campbell behind on her tuition fees, she thought of a unique way come up with the money.
"I wanted to fundraise but I wanted to be able to give back in a good way as well," she said. 
Campbell put out a call on Instagram: for $100 a pop, she would craft a custom love poem. The price also included a copy of her book #IndianLovePoems and some custom stickers.
Within four hours, her tuition was paid and people from all over the country had contacted her.
"There's a real community stepping up and supporting me and each other," she told CBC's The Morning Edition. "It was really beautiful."
Her services included a phone call with the customer to learn more about the object of their affection and Campbell said some people really opened up during the phone calls.
"A lot of these poems were about self-love and love for their family and these very emotional things that I think all people can connect with," she said. 
"A lot of times, it ended up with us both being teary-eyed and they were like 'I'd never talk about this.'"
Campbell said she never expected to be so attached to the people she interviewed.  
"It was really intimate. It really let me step back and see what I was doing and what I wanted my poetry to do which was create connections between us and how that this was a beautiful example of it working," she said. 
She said she will consider offering the promotion again because so many people have contacted her with interest.  
"February is right around the corner," she said.”

— CBC News Saskatchewan

Read the full review at CBC News Saskatchewan.

“I'm a sex writer who's not having sex
Abstinence has been an experiment of what boundaries I want to keep and what I define as sex.
I slowly count the days until my birthday. I'm turning 36 but more importantly, in less than five weeks, it will be exactly one year since I had sex with someone. 
Yep, I'm a sex writer who's not having sex. I make another mental note to reply to the messages in my various social media apps, a visual reminder that this abstinence is a personal choice, not for a lack of options. 
My last partner was a beautiful Black man who drank apple whiskey with me and we listened to his favourite songs from back home as we cuddled in bed. He made me laugh as we discussed the subtleness of Canadian racism and our favourite authors, basking in an afterglow of mutual satisfaction and mental stimulus. And once he left the bedroom of the Airbnb I was staying in, I smiled, turned over and slept, only waking for my flight back the next day. 
Once home, I was having coffee and telling stories about my trip to my peers, noting what professors I had met and what I had lectured about. They laughed, rolled their eyes and asked, "but who did you snag?" 
I laughed, brushing it off. As an author known for erotic Indigenous poetry, I'm used to questions about my intimate life, as if my body was consumable, too, even to those I love. 
"But for real – who was it this time? Do you even know his name?" And they laughed, leaning in. 
In that instant, I made a decision. 
"No one." 
"I don't believe that — you? Why not?" 
The insistence that I obviously was sleeping with someone and that they had a right to these stories was an ugly feeling. It took me a long time to identify that the separation between my poetry and my body is a real thing — a guarding, a protection, if you will. And everyone from boys in DM's to even my closest friends were acting like witigos of old: devouring stories I had already given, demanding more than I wanted to give, thinking they had the right to cross that invisible barrier between my art and my body. 
I leaned back, both physically and mentally, telling nothing. 
Weekends passed, and I let my Tinder go silent. Messages went unanswered and old boyfriends' texts at 2 a.m. were deleted. 
One month, then two, three and four. We were deep in the summer heat, me travelling to the coast, to new cities, to Toronto, to Ottawa, and still my bed remained empty. The questions persisted and awkward laughter surrounded me when I fed them nothing. 
We were coming into the fall again, a time of winter cuddles and hibernation, when I understood that this was an action-based choice I was making. At first, coming from a space of righteous indignation, but now sitting in a comfortable space of mentally letting go of the game of flirtation, of the pursuit, of being pursued. 
In the past year, I have finished the draft of my second book of poetry and started on my third. I've started working intensely on my thesis. I've attended birthday parties and social gatherings, sharing shots and tattoos with new friends. I've travelled throughout Turtle Island, speaking in classrooms and communities with women and people that connect with my work. These are things I would have done, regardless of a snag or not, but the mental clarity and emotional space that not being in multiple situation-ships has brought has been enthralling. 
Don't get me wrong — there have been kisses on dance floors under neon lights. There's been hand holding, driving around town. There's been hours upon hours of conversations over Timbits at midnight. There's been slow, sensuous nights in bed with men who don't push my boundaries, grateful for a chance to just be present with me. 
And now, here we are five weeks out from a year of no snagging, a transition I never expected myself to take. 
Abstinence hasn't been about personal growth and growing up; it wasn't about finding myself. I've always known who I am. It was about redefining my boundaries; not just in sex but in relationships, in my art, in defining how I allowed myself to be treated. It's been a beautiful year of consent and conversation.
And, no, you don't get to ask what happens once these five weeks are up.”

— CBC News Saskatoon

Read the full review at CBC News Saskatoon.

“This year, due to the vicissitudes of which box was opened when, I began with four first books from Signature Editions, a press I hadn’t perused a lot. They were all good though quite different. It is nice when a press comes out bold with lots of debuts – you get the anticipatory excitement of watching a draft class form, a cohort you can follow. These four are strange bedfellows – and speaking of that, there are lots and lots of bedfellows (or fellows bedded) in Tenille K. Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems, my starting point of the four. Every poem has a number for a title and is about a different nameless guy (well, some have nicknames) that the poet has known – you know, “known” in the old-fashioned sense. This was my first encounter with a hashtag-titled book and it was invigorating and somewhat scary to cross such forbidden boundaries. It felt a little like becoming the môniyas numbered “#782,” the one with “white guilt and privilege/narrow in your eyes[.]” It would be better to be like “#438,” “my first/môniyas/[who] was everything a/môniyas should be[.]” There are plenty of men from the rainbow of flavours to be had here, all numbered, some loved, none spared. There is “#92,” whose post-coital presence leads Campbell to “[ponder]/the age old question//how the fuck/do i get him out of here?” There is “#2001,” “my gifted Cree man [. . .]//make me/speak pleasure/once again[.]” There is “#32,” “warrior to my maiden/the one who makes me victory cry/as we ride to freedom//he speaks low and rough/nêhiyawêwin/run down my spine//my dene tongue licks/my thick lips kiss/a body that once/would have been/banned from mine[.]” One hesitates to quote the juiciest parts out of regard for the propriety of the UTQ readership, but there are lots of juicy parts. Having been tepidly if briefly promiscuous in my youth, and being a good moralist in public today, I am obliged to remark that such behaviour doesn’t always spring from the happiest of places or result in the most propitious of outcomes – and then there are the problems of voyeurism, objectification, stereotyping that might arise. “[J]udge me/i dare you[,]” Campbell warns at one point, a dare this critic is not brave enough to take. Noting at another moment that “this is dating/in 2017[,]” she paces the selection, so that the reader is all the more pleased at the pleasant (or mind-altering) encounters precisely because not all of them are. So, after all, are there sad or troubling or troublingly charged aspects of an honest book about sex, how one person (a very specific person, with an identity of interest) does it and imagines it and describes it? Yes, which is why it is good, because it is honest and unafraid; there is also its tactility, its debauchery, its wistfulness, and its sense of humour to recommend it.
With that, Cityscapes in Mating Season by Lise Gaston, Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems by Ted Landrum, and Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem by Emily Izsak (the rest of the quartet) cannot compete. As they say on draft night, their “skill set” is different – but not totally incompatible. One thing that caught my eye (or ear) in Gaston’s book was the diction. You could feel her rolling words around, especially in a section called “bonescapes,” where some of the freshness of the vocabulary is because it is fresh to the poet, although the occasion is a clinical one: “This doctor gives me sickness, pronounces its/polysyllabic name. I offer him glances,//teeth bared in a grin. He says chronic,/progressive. My blouse is open/just enough. He prescribes. Vocabularies slip/from his parted lips to mine.” The poet has something badly wrong with her back, her spine, and much of the book is dedicated to trying to find out what is causing pain and how to name it. The final series of poems titled “Silence” uses the relative blankness of the whole page nicely; but then Cityscapes in Mating Season is stably architectured and ably textured throughout. Ted Landrum’s book, on the other hand, is less textured but more memorably architectured. The Archi-Poems of his title are short for “architecture poems” (among other things) and the author himself is an architect (among other things). The use of erasure and negative space is indicative of talent. His “Eiffel Tower” poem (or his Roland Barthes poems) is (are) exquisite (superb). His “Fly-Trap Poem” is a concrete chuckle.
Izsak’s Whistle Stops is what its subtitle says it is, namely a serial poem on the move, on a commuter train back and forth between Toronto and London, Ontario. It is not all a waste of time, commuting: “Weather bastes our/latest interval with/sky lard and/crystal regimens of three/secret Kegels/per round trip[.]” The titles are the times and train numbers of each day’s trips, which are stultifyingly similar and sensorally and meditatively different. (This aspect of Whistle Stops is also similar to and different from #IndianLovePoems, with its numbered lovers, and which is, in its own way, also a serial poem.) “Oh train/it is strange for your shape/that I/am inside you[,]” she writes, flipping the phallic script, but also acknowledging a phenomenology of trains that has always made them good figures for simultaneous movement (what passes outside) and stasis (as you sit in your seat).”

— Andrew Dubois University of Toronto Quarterly

Read the full review at University of Toronto Quarterly.