UFV hosted its first-ever Pride Conference this weekend, with keynote speaker Jack Saddleback. Emphasis was placed on this event being billed as the first annual conference, especially by President Joanne MacLean, citing the importance not only of building and engaging, but doing so on a regular basis.
“I’m very pleased that we have tonight, but also tomorrow to continue this conversation,” MacLean said in her speech on Friday evening.
Keynote speaker Jack Saddleback captivated his audience with humour, heart, and the sharing of deeply personal experiences growing up as a queer person in Alberta. Saddleback is a Cree, two-spirit, transgender gay man. In his kickoff speech on Friday, Saddleback highlighted how Cree values were ingrained in his upbringing.
“I was allowed to be the young genderqueer kid that I was,” Saddleback said. This follows the Cree teaching that “If the child is happy, the community is happy.” However, as he grew older, his family started encouraging him to dress more feminine, because he would be going out alone into the colonized world, and he could not figure out why he was having to feel this “odd sense of self.” Saddleback held his audience captive as he shared experiences of growing up as a genderqueer child forced into a binary, into the sex he was assigned at birth, and of his suicide attempt as a youth.
Saddleback’s speech emphasized the colonization of Indigenous cultures, and the way larger institutions have enforced heteronormativity and cisgender normativity onto Indigenous cultures. He taught his audience Cree terms of gender identity: Iskwew (woman), Iskwehikan (trans woman, or a trans feminine identity), Ayahkw?w (nonbinary or genderfluid), Napêhikân (trans man or trans masculine identity), and Napew (man). Saddleback stated that the “in-between” people, the three identities in the middle, have been “attacked by colonization.”
On Saturday, Sept. 7, the conference continued, beginning with another speech by Saddleback in Evered Hall on reconciliation, decolonization, and the queer community. The conference ran eight more sessions after this in four time blocks so that in each time period participants chose which of two seminars they wanted to attend, and included a 90-minute lunch break to participate in Pride on the Green.
Pride on the Green included a number of resources for youth and LGBTQ+ individuals, such as Foundry, an initiative building a province-wide network of health and wellness resources, services, and supports, and the Mpowerment Project, an HIV prevention program tailored to young gay and bisexual men. Trinity Memorial United Church also attended to demonstrate their support for LGBTQ+ individuals and their inclusive vision for the church. Trinity Memorial is a participant in Affirm United, an organization of members of the United Church of Canada who help ministries become safer sacred spaces and foster support and community for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. As well, Pride on the Green advertised UFV’s own LGBTQ+ spaces: the Pride Collective and Equality-Diversity-Inclusivity Centre.
The sessions of the conference itself comprised of the following: LGBTQ+ Literature and Censorship in the Fraser Valley; Intersectionality and Barriers to Reporting — A Discussion; You may want to date a Transwoman; Changing Attitudes towards Bisexual Individuals in Abbotsford; Mpowerment: Queer and Trans Youth organizing on Sexual Health; Advocacy & Conflict: Harnessing both for Change; Creating Dependable Allies; and Queer and Christian? No Problem.
The Pride Conference is representative of how far the university has come in the past few years. Kyle Baillie, director of Student Life and Development, spoke about the inception of UFV’s rainbow crosswalk. When it was first proposed in 2016, Charlie Steele, former president of the Pride Collective, told him that the university did not deserve a rainbow crosswalk. Ballie stated that the Pride Collective made a list of changes UFV would need to make in order to deserve that crosswalk, and after becoming the first university to have a nonbinary gender option in school paperwork, and one of the first to have a “no questions asked” name change policy — which includes all university documentation and happens in less than 24 hours — Steele gave the go-ahead to paint the rainbow crosswalk. Of the 12-item list, eight have now completed.
“This work is never gonna be done. I recognize that. We have to keep working, to keep fighting,” Baillie said.
Image: Nadia Tudhope/ The Cascade
