To coincide with the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, them. is publishing a series of stories that explores how queer and trans folks are working to protect our planet through organizing, creative expression, and insurgent pedagogy. Read the rest of the pieces, and our ongoing climate coverage, here.
It began with a single teepee, fronted by a post bearing a hawk’s feather, oriented toward the rising sun. The structure rose from the earth of Victoria Park, in what is known as Kitchener-Waterloo (K-W), twin towns in so-called Ontario, Canada, on June 21 — Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
This was no accident. Those behind the teepee included the Two-Spirit IndigiQueer activists Bangishimo (Anishinaabe) and Amy Smoke (Mohawk, Turtle Clan). Along with Terre Chartrand, the trio sought to create a gathering place for local Black and Indigenous folks to process the tumult of Covid healthcare disparities and the recent state-sanctioned murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, along with nearly a dozen Indigenous people.
“Organizers in the community had had enough,” Smoke tells them. “We needed somewhere to discuss bringing to light what COVID had done and what the police were doing.”
They expected the teepee and the gathering it occasioned to last no more than a couple of days — “a symbolic thing,” Bangishimo explains. Then the kids came. “I guess the world is ‘flock,’” the organizers says of the sudden influx of young people to the park. “Within a week, we ended up with about 20 people. What started as a single teepee and a couple of tents grew into a full camp of a dozen tents, organized in the shape of a circle.”