The QTBIPOC Youth Gathering came out of a collaboration between the Urban Native Youth Association (UNYA) and QMUNITY, alongside other organizations. It was a day-long gathering that occurred on 30 January 2017. The gathering invited over 50 queer, trans and two-spirit youth of colour from across British Columbia to share information about resources, as well as discuss what is lacking in their communities to facilitate change while centering the voices of those for whom changes are to be made. Together with the facilitators (also QTBIPOC youth), they put together a QTBIPOC Road Map to be shared with each of the youths’ communities. The event also notably included workshops for adults and non-QTBIPOC people, while funding was made available for youth who live outside of Vancouver to participate in the meeting (Takeuchi, 2016).
The plan to create a youth gathering grew out of conversations that began in 2016 between UNYA, the Vancouver School Board and youth support workers around creating safer spaces for queer, trans, two-spirit, people of colour youth. Aimee Beauchamp of Squamish Nation, a school support counsellor notes that upon beginning her work with UNYA, she received many requests to run programs for two-spirit and queer indigenous youth. After connecting and consulting with various organizations, they decided that the best way to understand needs of the youth was to have them partake in discussion (Takeuchi, 2016). Ayesh Ismail-Kanani, one of QMUNITY’s youth workers co-facilitated a brainstorming session, while Tiaré Jung followed along with conversations and drew live images of the ideas that were being presented to produce an infographic. By documenting and facilitating discussion rather than leading it, QTBIPOC voices are centered, as opposed to a reliance on assumptions about how youth navigate institutions (Ismail-Kanani, 2017).
The QTBIPOC Road Map maps out important sites in the everyday lives of youth and their needs within those spaces. Needs are marked with red dots to denote a higher level of priority; some examples of this include gender neutral washrooms, quiet public spaces to decompress, healthcare professionals always learning, staff training in schools, inclusive learning that acknowledges queerness and transness and people of colour histories, accessible queer recreational spaces and affordable housing. The emphasis on different spaces and the significance of various relationships that QTBIPOC youth have with different institutions importantly points to the need to move away from the production of cis-white-centered queer spaces (e.g. Davie Street) by moving away from idealizations of the metropolis, as such work reveals the operation of interconnected systems of oppression across cities, suburbs and rural communities. This is exemplified by its mention of the need for accessible and meaningful community consultation of public space alongside issues around affordable housing, including spaces for more marginalized youth. This connects QTBIPOC to issues around settler colonialism, including gentrification and neoliberalism’s centering of the ‘free individual.’
The discussion between QTBIPOC ultimately disidentifies with identitarian politics, recognizing its strategic uses in terms of queer, trans and two-spirit, people of colour advocating for their needs, while also emphasizing the desire to be seen as ‘whole,’ and, thus, beyond mainstream queer politics’ tendency to devalue or erase race and class from discussions around sexuality and gender. The presentation of the lived realities of QTBIPOC and their navigation of societal constraints in the everyday moves away from the homonormative white middle class subject, centering identitarian ideas about queerness, sexuality and gender that is supported by a post-racial and multiculturalist understanding of the lower mainland (Bacchetta et al, 2015, p. 771; Manalansan, 2005, p. 147). The articulation of discussion about the everyday lived lives of QTBIPOC youth through a road map reveals the “inadequacy of conventional narratives where self and community progressively unfold,” as the desire for transformation is shaped by the need to navigate institutions to survive, highlighting important work being done within institutions (Manalansan, 2005, p. 147). While this is not necessarily ‘transformative’ or radical, the livability of queer and trans lives of colour and two-spirit lives becomes a site of contestation that centers the desires, affect and, thus, futurity of QTBIPOC and two-spirit youth.
The success of the road map has yet to have been reported, but it has been made available as a resource on QMUNITY, UNYA and other web pages, as well as reportedly being made accessible to the communities of the youth who participated in the gathering. The bringing together of QTBIPOC from beyond the ‘Vancouver’ area provides a more nuanced notion of queerness that is not limited to the bounds of the metropolis that brings into the realm of possibility alternative spaces.
References:
Jung, T. (2017, January 30). QTBIPOC road map [Illustration / Online image]. Retrieved from http://qmunity.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/QTBIPOC-Youth-Road-Map.png
Ismail-Kanani, A. (2017, February 28). Hearing from the youth: QTBIPOC youth gathering. QMUNITY. Retrieved from https://qmunity.ca/news/qtbipoc-youth-gathering/
Manalansan, M. (2005). Migrancy, modernity, mobility. In Eithne Luibheid and Lionel Cantu (eds.), Queer migrations, 146-160.
Bacchetta, P., El-Tayeb, F., & Haritaworn, J. (2015). Queer of colour formations and translocal spaces in Europe. Environment and Planning D, 33(5), 769-778.
Takeuchi, C. (2016, December 12). Urban native youth association to hold gathering about safe spaces for queer youth. Georgia Straight. Retrieved from https://www.straight.com/blogra/844226/urban-native-youth-association-hold-gathering-about-safe-spaces-queer-youth