I am remembering how I would spend my mornings driving on Highway 7 with the river to one side and the stunning mountains up ahead and all around me. I would spend these mornings just in awe of all that surrounded me, so full of gratitude for the natural world.

And then I would slowly pull up to my destination and see the fences surrounding a cold, sprawling compound of grey, soulless buildings heavily secured with barbed wire. The disconnect was, as I wrote, jarring, bewildering, and infuriating.

I couldn’t help but think to myself about how settlers really saw all this abundant, fertile, beautiful land, stole it from Indigenous peoples, and chose to build systems of control and punishment. And how politicians of today really see all this abundant, fertile, beautiful land, ignore our treaty obligations, and continue to choose to expand these systems of control and punishment. What stunted imagination…

Last year rocked my world.

My dad had a medical emergency while living in the Philippines and had ongoing health issues throughout the year…as in had-a-medical-emergency-and-ongoing-health-issues-and-then-moved-back-to-Canada-and-lived-with-me-and-my-partner-for-6-months kind of a situation.

A few months later, my mom almost died…as in, had-a-medical-emergency-abroad-and-couldn’t-breathe-on-the-plane-home-and-had-to-be-rushed-to-the-hospital-upon-landing-and-had-to-stay-there-for-weeks kind of almost died.

So yeah, last year rocked my world.

Why am I sharing this with you all?

I spent most of this past November in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Sto:lo, Sts’ailes, Semá:th, Mathxwí, Kwantlen, Sq’éwlets, Katzie, and Leq’á:mel peoples. I was there because Living Hyphen was asked to facilitate a series of writing circles in the federal prison system. We wrote and shared stories with 60 incarcerated men from Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities exploring our heritage, our ideas of home(s), and what it means to live in between cultures.

On my second day, one of the men – we’ll call him Mark – came in and right as he sat down, he told me quite gruffly that he struggles with reading and writing and that he has "some kind of disability".

"Is that going to be a problem?" he asked me sharply.

In these times of fierce division and never-ending destruction, the work of building intentional spaces of care and belonging isn’t just important, it is vitally urgent. And I remind myself that the work that we do at Living Hyphen – of cultivating and fostering a culture of courageous and tender storytelling amongst racialized communities – is revolutionary work.

At Living Hyphen, we approach storytelling as a connection both to ourselves and to others. We approach storytelling as a pathway to healing. We approach storytelling as a key to unlocking just and equitable futures.

That’s why over the last few years, we have been partnering with school boards across Ontario, with settlement agencies across the country, and with cultural institutions across North America to train educators, settlement workers, and frontline staff to centre storytelling in their work in ways that are decolonial, intersectional, anti-oppressive, and most importantly, rooted in care.