Confronting the great, white outdoors
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- Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00
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As I prepare to head out on a trip into the wilderness this long weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about this Q&A with the founders of All Out Canada.
“I don’t know if I would have made it through this pandemic without access to nature and being in wilderness, specifically,” Shereen Ashman told reporter Inori Roy.
It’s a perspective that I, and I’m sure many of you, can relate to. But what about those who don’t have equal access to nature?
Yes, it’s about knowing how to steer a canoe, but it’s also about who can afford to buy hundreds of dollars worth of gear; and it’s about proximity to urban forests and green spaces. On all these fronts, racialized communities are being left behind.
So, starting with Instagram posts and TikToks, All Out Canada is finding ways to make wilderness more accessible for racialized people across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), whether that’s teaching paddling basics or helping people find affordable ways to connect with nature.
“We’re trying to facilitate this idea of inclusion, to disrupt the dominant narrative that the outdoors is only for the white adventurer who is an expert,” Ashman, a co-founder of All Out Canada, explained.
Fellow co-founder Kofi Hope put it this way: “There has been, historically, this idea that the ‘great Canadian outdoors’ and the surrounding areas are predominantly white — that is, folks who have deep roots in this country, who have access to cottages, who are doing things like canoeing. And it’s a strange narrative we’ve created in Canada: Indigenous people have in many ways been written out of that narrative, even though these are the folks who showed settlers canoes, kayaks and snowshoes and all of these technologies.”
“[The campaign] shakes up a lot of these stereotypes. We can go into these spaces as people from racialized communities, on our own terms.”
Take care and share your canoe,
Arik Ligeti
Audience engagement editor
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