From the dark of the stage, theatre artist esi callender speaks: “Slave Play is a comedy of sorts. It should be playedas such. I’m not sure where the music is coming from, but it’s there. You should not work to make the audience comfortable with what they are witnessing at all.” And so began Black Theatre Workshop’s (BTW) Montreal reading of Jeremy O’Harris‘ highly controversial Slave Play.

In its original 2019 run on Broadway, Slave Play riled audiences and critics. In one talkback with the director, for example, an audience member rose from the crowd and shouted to air her grievances about the piece. The play, she claimed, was just “a whole bunch of stuff about how white people don’t get how racist they are.” Not all agreed with this perspective, however. Despite Slave Play’s ability to provoke, or perhaps because of it, many critics celebrated the work for its bold approach in confronting the historical legacies of slavery that persist within interracial relationships.

The title Slave Play is a double entendre; representing both the play’s discussion of slavery and its use of play in the bedroom to explore those legacies. Act I sees three couples roleplaying as an enslaved woman and her overseer, a white mistress and a mixed-race man, and an enslaved man and an indentured servant, respectively. Featuring brown-skinned dildos, slur-filled dirty talk, and incendiary slave-master power play, the first act thrusts (pun intended)uncomfortable stereotypes about Black people onto the audience, to show that they subtly persist within everyday life.

Act II arrives with a twist. Titled “Process,” this portion of the performance is interrupted by two therapists, who emerge from the crowd. These therapists reveal to the audience that, all along, the couples have been participants in a group therapy project known as “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy: A RADICAL therapy designed to help Black partners reengage intimately with white partners from whom they no longer receive sexual pleasure.”

The conversations that follow are both hilarious, and deeply psychoanalytical. Characters fight, cry, and plead with one another as they explore their desires in their relationships, as well as their desires in relation to their identities. At the Montreal reading of Slave Play on October 24, audience members were laughing, clapping and even interjecting. I heard one person yell “Oh shit” from the crowd.

Beneath the comedy, of course, the weight of the subjectmatter endures. Being Black in the United States, where the historical and continued oppression of Black people pervades daily life, is not so easy, especially when non-Black loved ones cannot understand this experience.

As complicated and painful the themes are in Slave Play, writer O’Harris also weaves in a sublime wit. His stage directions are poetic. Music is ubiquitous. Love is the premise. None of the characters would be in therapy if it weren’t for the care they had for their partner. What the play argues, then, is that care and romantic love in the United States is inextricable from its history of slavery.

Slave Play is a part of BTW’s series of readings titled tête-à-tête, which invite viewers to engage in conversation with theatre. Rather than put on a main stage show, BTW produces three readings of plays which might otherwise not be shown due to cast size or controversy. Alongside these readings, BTW also hosts pre-show conversations, in collaboration with Concordia University’s Black Community Engagement Office and University of the Streets Cafe. The goal is to bring private tensions into public discourse and ask new questions.

In an interview with the Daily, artistic Director Dian Marie Bridges explains that in running Slave Play, she wanted to “really question why do we do theater? Why are these plays important? What gives people an incentive to come to theatre? What is the role of art in the Black community? …That comes down to community. That comes down to conversation.”

O’Harris is equally interested in these questions. In his documentary about the making of the play, Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play, he states that Pornhub created a map of the most popular porn per state, where “ebony and lesbian porn were the top porn in New York.” O’Harris continues: “[I]f all you people are going home and watching this in your secret little rooms and then also like, you know, voting for Obama but like saying the N-word when you hear a Kendrick Lamar song [when] you’re all alone…I want to play with all of those aspects in this room because like, I know you can handle it because you do at home…so let’s see you handle it here.”

This is the sentiment of tête-à-tête. Bridges tells the Daily that part of the reason why she programmed Slave Play was because she “wanted to see if we were ready for it [Slave Play], if we could have a conversation about it.” So what kind of conversations emerge from Slave Play? What does it mean to show Slave Play in Montreal?

For Bridges, “Slave Play as therapy really speaks to the psychological impact of slavery on [America]…It’s a different relationship [in Montreal].”

At the talkback following the show this weekend, audience members were curious about actors’ relationship to their characters. They asked questions such as, “Did you take your role seriously?” and “Was it difficult to play a character with trauma that might parallel your own?”

Perhaps these questions demonstrate that despite not being in the United States, we all have something to take away from the intrinsic complexities of race and traumatic history within our identities and how they affect our relationships. Or that as the stage directions declare, “Everything in life is a performance.”

Whether ugly, beautiful, explicit, poetic, or painful, language is the power that shapes us all. It can poke at us, hang over us, or give us a voice. Slave Play plays with all of these factors, highlighting how conversation is where we can make sense of it all.

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For McGill students, the solution to these qualms comes in the form of a website, with shrouded origins and a dead-simple user experience, called Seat Alert.

Seat Alert, for the shrinking minority that has never heard of it, is a service that notifies students when free spaces open in full courses or their waitlists. Using Seat Alert is a straightforward process that involves paying two dollars to receive text updates as spots open in a class you’re interested in. Because of the demand for certain classes at McGill, that notice is crucial. If at the start of the year you hear a text chime at the library followed by rabid typing, that person probably just got a Seat Alert.

Despite its growing presence on campus, the history of the website remains obscure; some peers I spoke to even thought it was an official McGill website. The interface, anachronistically simple at a time when anyone can build a glitzy website in one or two AI prompts, stands out. The website gives one nod to its origin at its very bottom: the name Ethan McAuliffe, in small print.

To learn more about the story of Seat Alert, and why it looks so unique on the internet today, I decided to give him a call. As it turns out, the complete lack of ads, branding, or any commercial zeal isn’t an accident. Ethan has it exactly as he wants it.

Ethan is from Toronto, and began as a student at McMaster in 2018, where he completed a joint degree in engineering and business. In 2021, as COVID-19 put school online, Ethan opted instead to do a co-op, one of many during his degree. During this time, he found himself driving his sister and her friends to their university of choice — McGill — for the start of term. On the road, the topic of course selection and how difficult it was to get the schedule you wanted came up. A friend in the car then mentioned a service called Get A Seat, where McGill students could pay to be notified when space in a class opened up. This type of service was new to Ethan as nothing like it was offered at McMaster; but was one that he knew would be appreciated, especially given the lack of waitlists at his school. Ethan, armed with the necessary technical abilities, decided to build a similar website for McMaster.

The service was a quick hit, spread only by word of mouth. In time, while McMaster remained the most active hub, Ethan expanded the service to Laurier and other schools, though Seat Alert is now no longer offered at them. Despite having connections at McGill, there was no need for his service here; it remained Get A Seat’s territory, and Ethan didn’t strike me as the Machiavellian type. During this time, Ethan reached out to the creator of the service looking for advice on how to grow his own, but never got a response.

It remained this way until 2023, when Ethan received an email from a student at McGill inquiring about whether he had any plans to spread Seat Alert to Montreal. Get A Seat had shut down, he was told, supposedly because of a routing issue. Ethan figured out how to fix the error and launched his service at McGill that same year. At the start, it was free for McGill students as Ethan expected more errors to come and didn’t feel that charging people during that time was good practice. He also knew that a free service would spread quickly — and it did just that. He attributed this to a market in need, and Seat Alert showing up as the first result when anyone searched for the now-defunct Get A Seat. To get the word out further, Ethan also posted on the McGill subreddit and got his sister to spread the word to friends. He didn’t pay for any marketing, and instead focused on making something that worked reliably.

As his service expanded, so too did the security procedures enacted by many of the schools where Seat Alert was used. Many of them started to require a secure login to be able to access the class information. This is why Seat Alert is no longer available outside of McMaster and McGill, where secure logins aren’t required. With AI posing new risks to institutions’ cybersecurity, this could soon change.

I asked Ethan about the possibility of hiring students with secure logins at these defunct schools to gather the necessary information. Ethan had thought about it, but an experience he’d had in the early days of Seat Alert, where he was called into McMaster’s IT department and questioned about what he was doing, deterred him from putting other students at risk of disciplinary action in this way. Looking at past student-focused startups, his worries aren’t unfounded. OneClass was a startup founded by students at the University of Toronto in 2010, that allowed students to share course notes and lecture materials online. It grew quickly and raised venture capital, but at the expense of its own reputation and certain copyright laws. In 2016, it was issued a cease-and-desist by the University of Waterloo and in 2020 it was fined $100,000 by the Canadian government. The startup has since ceased operations.

Ethan has now graduated from McMaster, and has been working on other projects since then, with Seat Alert covering costs in the background. When I asked if Seat Alert could ever be his full-time job, Ethan laughed and responded that the revenue was far lower than I must think.

I followed up by asking him why he wouldn’t increase the price by even a dollar — a 50 per cent increase in revenue that I didn’t think would deter many students from using the service. He responded that with rising costs related to running the automated texts that are core to the service, he may soon be forced to. Barring this, he didn’t think it would be fair to raise prices arbitrarily in order to make a greater profit. This is what interested me most about Ethan: his idealism and complete lack of self-interest in the face of a culture that values prestige and profit above all else.

Undeterred, I asked him about bundling, which would let users buy alerts for multiple classes at once. This would lower the cut of revenue that Stripe (the online payment platform he uses) takes from each order. He agreed with the principle of this idea, but felt that it might ruin the simplicity that makes the site so user-friendly. Bundling would mean introducing accounts, which require emails and passwords, and storage, which is expensive. I also asked him about waitlist intelligence, an additional service that could tell people how quickly spots typically opened up in a class. He hadn’t thought about it, but was interested in it.

As a big fan of David Fincher’s The Social Network, I found myself during parts of our conversation comparing Ethan to Mark Zuckerberg, who, in his pre-Facebook life, had made a website that showed the courses a user’s friends were taking. Their motivations both centred around making tools they themselves wanted, and both prioritized speed and simplicity for the user. However, this is where the similarities ended. Ethan appears to lack the greed and unsettling guile that has made Zuckerberg a persona non grata the world over. More importantly, Ethan sounds cool. He’s easy-going and doesn’t take himself very seriously, even when being asked about a business he created. At this point in our call — with me pressing him to raise prices on a service for students in need — I was in fact the Zuckerberg, which wasn’t a great feeling. Ethan, as aware of this as I, laughed and said that if he implemented a price hike, he’d be putting me down as the person who had recommended it.

Despite his idealism, or perhaps because of it, Seat Alert has been growing at a pace of about 5 per cent per term for the past two years, according to Ethan. Even so, Ethan has doubts as to whether he’ll pursue it much longer, given other projects on his horizon and his distaste for web development. He clarified that this would just mean taking a further step back from it, and not shutting it down completely unless he is forced to.

I’m confident that Seat Alert will remain reliable, regardless of how deep Ethan’s involvement remains. The website’s continued success is a good reminder to all of us that not everything in life or in business must be made with growth and profit margins in mind. In the end, simplicity and honesty prevail in making the world, course selection included, better. If I’m wrong, or if Ethan cedes control to me, be ready: price hikes incoming.

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There is something particularly disturbing in hearing someone admit to celebrating acts of violence. Even more unsettling: learning that this same violence was treated as a routine aspect of military life. Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, NAZA (2026) examines Israel’s genocide in Gaza through the testimonies of its very perpetrators. The particular success of the documentary, then, lies not only in what it reveals, but also in the shocking reality of who reveals it.

NAZA features interviews with 24 ex-Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel, who confess their military experiences and explain the systems behind attacks on Gaza. While the interviewees remain anonymous — their faces are hidden in shadow and their voices have been altered to protect their identities — the accounts of violence which they share are painfully detailed. That the filmmakers allow the subjects to speak for themselves is also effective; their testimony tells a story more unsettling than any other narration could likely achieve.Then there ist he staging of the interviews themselves. Abraham chose to conduct his interviews on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, filming the shadowy participants against the backdrop of the illuminated city. The darkness of their admissions is thus foregrounded and unsettlingly contrasted by the bright, ordinary urban life which spreads out behind them. Perhaps the most horrifying moments come when former soldiers describe how little remorse they felt for their actions. Some recall celebrating attacks alongside their comrades. One interviewee remembers that “it was fun” and compares the experience to playing a video game. This comparison becomes even more disturbing when the film explains the meaning behind its title.

‘Naza’ is an Israeli military term referring to expected civilian casualties. As one former soldier explains, “You would not say ‘15 people have been killed,’ and certainly not ‘15 women and children have been killed.’ You say ‘15 Naza.’ Instead of acknowledging the deaths of civilians, the military terminology reduces them into an abstract quantity. This language turns the violent eradication ofentire families and communities intoroutine military procedure. The people being killed becomenumbers, obscuring the human consequences of military actions, even to those leading these attacks.

In a particularly poignant moment, one former soldier asks,“I still see theNazis as evil. But what does that mean I am?” His words reveal adisturbing contradiction between the condemnation of Nazi atrocities and the violence carried out against Palestinians. The Nazis are remembered for their cruel persecution, dehumanization, and the systematic murder of millions of people. Yet the soldier’s question forces him to confront the violence he took part in against another group of people. He questions the difference between the atrocities he condemns and his own actions. Another soldier is more blunt, and his confession is all the more horrifying. “Gaza is full of bodies,” he says “It’s not a grave, it’s a pit.”

Beyond the testimonies, one of NAZA’s most compelling features is its portrayal of Tel Aviv. Throughout the film, signs of Israeli propaganda appear in public spaces while people continue their daily lives. Businesses remain open, streets are busy, and ordinary routines continue, all the while the rooftop confessions speak of unthinkable violence. This creates an unsettling, almost uncanny feeling for the viewer; Palestinian suffering — less than a hundred kilometers away —is pushed aside in the public consciousness, but its ugly truth lurks in the shadows nonetheless. This contrast raises questions about collective responsibility, indifference, and the normalization of violence. While the interviews reveal military desensitization to violence, the footage of Tel Aviv asks viewers to consider the spread of these attitudes into the general populace.

NAZA also raises questions regarding testimony and credibility. Palestinian journalists have spent years documenting the destruction of Gaza, often while experiencing the very violence on which they are reporting. Many have been killed while doing their work. Yet their accounts have repeatedly been dismissed by Israeli officials. This is the most uncomfortable aspect of the documentary’s approach to portraying the violence in Gaza through the testimonies of Israeli soldiers; it is precisely through giving perpetrators of genocide a voice thatNAZA offers a perspective that isundeniably revealing. Unfortunately, it would seem that the words of those responsible for violence carry more weight than the words of those experiencing it.

Ultimately, NAZA invites a reflection in its viewers that extends far beyond the film’s final scenes. Through its unsettling personal approach, the work forces audiences to contend with questions of guilt, indoctrination, and perspective, as well as exposing horrifying truths of this continued genocide. The resulting film makes for an unsettling watch, but then again, if this were easy, such a work would not be needed in the first place.

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On October 23, Beth Lew-Williams, professor of history and director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University, won the 2026 prize for her book John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law. Lew-Williams’ work was chosen from a pool of almost 400 international submissions, making the eight-book shortlist in September before earning top honours. Jonathan Cheng of The Wall Street Journal and Alexander Lee of The University of Warwick were named as the year’s two finalists.

Also on October 23, before the allocation of the awards, all three writers spoke in the Cundill Forum at McGill’s Thomson House, where the Daily was in attendance. Moderated by McGill History and Classical Studies professor Jeremy Tai, the discussion explored the motivating research questions and resulting discoveries key to the three books in competition. The Forum formed part of the October 22-23 Cundill History Prize Festival, which also featured a lecture by previous winner Lyndal Roper for her book Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War, the student-organized Cundill Fringe, and the awards ceremony.

During the forum, Lew-Williams explained that John Doe Chinaman began with questions about everyday life. After researching anti-Chinese violence and immigration restrictions in the 19th century American West, she realized how much was not known about the specifics of Chinese immigrant life in America. Could they enter a barbershop, for example? Where could they sit in a segregated theatre? These were things she did not know. “I wanted to understand the racial norms, the rules of everyday life,” she explained.

This line of questioning led to a shift in research, moving from her previous focus on American border restrictions faced by Chinese immigrants to studying the laws that governed those who successfully became residents. Combining a review of trial transcripts from the 1850s to the 1920s with digital research, she identified more than 5,000 discriminatory laws. Machine learning helped locate potential legislation, but she personally reviewed approximately 9,000 matches to determine their relevance.

Lew-Williams also turned to trial transcripts containing testimony from Chinese immigrants for research. From this angle, she was able to uncover a more personal side of the story. Despite restrictions on Chinese testimony, Lew-Williams found that some immigrants had managed to leave behind anonymity-defying accounts in the historical record. “When you’re given only fragments, you learn to make the best of them,” she said.

As a part of his discussion moderation, Tai asked the finalists to share the story of someone who stood out in their research. For her part, Lew-Williams introduced Ruby Tsang, a Chinese-American woman who filed a lawsuit in 1916 in order to challenge segregation at a theatre in Reno, Nevada. In response, the theatre threatened to lobby for segregation-permitting legislation, and Tsang subsequently withdrew her case. “[T]his is not a story where she triumphs in the end and desegregates all the theatres in Nevada,” Lew-Williams explained, but in her eyes that makes Tsang’s story all the more important. “[W]e get a sense of [the] pushback that those in power, state governments, ha[d] against Chinese communities.”

In the official winner announcement, Emily Greenwood, chair of the jury and a professor of classics at Harvard University, described the book as “a dazzlingly innovative and hard-hitting work.” She highlighted its combination of data analysis and storytelling to recover Chinese voices obscured in legal and bureaucratic records.

Fellow panelist and finalist Alexander Lee described a similar challenge of working with fragments in writing his book The First Ghetto: Venice and the Jews. He argued that scholarship often separates Jewish residents’ experiences from the surrounding Christian society, “as if the ghetto’s walls were also built around the archives.”

With his book, Lee examined how the Venice Jewish community’s position was continually negotiated. Alongside persecution, his account considers the relationships and institutions through which residents sustained community. He described studying architecture, commerce, and domestic space to understand experiences that government records alone could not capture.

Jonathan Cheng, the third co-panellist and other Cundhill Prize finalist, was honoured for his work, Korean Messiah: Kim II Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult, about the intersections of religious influence and political power through a history of North Korea’s founding Kim family.

This project, Cheng explained, grew from his own curiosity about the Kim family’s Christian background, beginning as a newspaper article but eventually becoming the 768-page book in question. Cheng relied on missionary diaries and correspondence, alongside critically-examined North Korean publications, to investigate connections between Kim Il Sung’s upbringing and the political system that the leader established. “It is about personality cults. It is about the blending of politics and religion,” Cheng said.

When the panel discussion turned to the contemporary significance of these respective histories, Lew-Williams highlighted the continuing influence of nineteenth-century anti-Chinese legal cases on immigrants’ rights. Cheng, for his part, discussed the intertwining of politics and religion across contemporary societies. Lee cautioned that prejudice can persist by changing its form, even as historical circumstances differ.

Lee also emphasized the importance of empathy in historical research. “We seek to put ourselves in their shoes, to see what they saw, to feel what they felt, to know their hopes and fears,” he told the audience. Together, the three books show how recovering personal accounts and stories can deepen our understanding of the laws, communities, and political systems that shape history.

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In 2025, Netflix released psychological crime drama Adolescence, a British TV series that would change the way we think about the manosphere, online incel culture, and its implications on contemporary misogyny. The story, set in South Yorkshire, follows the arrest of a 13-year- old boy on suspicion of murdering his female classmate after she rejected his romantic advances. Each episode is shot in one take, inviting us into the story in its entirety; every moment of silence, every improvised line, every facial expression brings us closer to the feeling that we are there in the room, with those characters — whether we like it or not.

The story of Adolescence did not come from nowhere. Rather, it was a response to the frequent cases of gender-related knife crimes occurring in the United Kingdom. This included the murder of Ava White, a 12-year- old girl in Liverpool who was stabbed by her 14-year-old schoolmate Harry Gilbertson following an argument over a Snapchat video. He was given a minimum sentence of 13 years, while the three other boys involved in the incident were released without charge. Elianne Andam, a fifteen-year- old student from Croydon, London, who aspired to be a human rights lawyer, was stabbed to death by her friend’s seventeen-year-old ex- boyfriend during the couple’s breakup . Noticing these cases, Adolescence screenwriter Stephen Graham wanted to find out what was behind this terrifying “male rage” responsible for the deaths of innocent young girls, remarking “this kind of thing didn’t happen when I was a young lad.”

Surprisingly, the term “incel” (short for “involuntary celibate”) was actually coined by a female university student in Toronto who wanted to create a community for people who had difficulty forming romantic or sexual relationships. Her website, Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project, was founded in 1997 and was open to people of all genders and sexual orientations. As her own dating life improved, she stopped maintaining the website and passed it on to someone else. It was only in the mid-2000s that the “incel” discourse came to be dominated by men. Men who felt resentful about their lack of romantic and sexual experience and who chose to displace the blame onto women. Following the tragic Isla Vista attacks of 2014, in which 22-year-old Elliot Rodger murdered six people in the vicinity of a sorority house to “punish” all women for rejecting him, the creator of the “incel” term expressed regret for the way her project had become tragically misinterpreted. She compared herself to “a scientist who invented something that ended up [becoming] a weapon of war.”

Later in the 2000s, incel communities thrived on online platforms like Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, and Gab. They also turned to the dark web for their more insidious communications which included planning and promoting gender-related murders and attacks. Today, popular online figures within the manosphere movement include Andrew Tate, Sneako, Clavicular and Vox Day, as well as anti-feminist women like Hannah Pearl Davis, who claims that divorce should be banned and that men have the “right” to watch porn if they don’t want their marriages to fail. Violence linked to incel culture and the manosphere h a s killed as many as 50 people in the US and Canada, and more in the UK and Germany. In Canada, the first time that a court made a finding of incel-motivated terrorist activity was in 2023, following 17-year-old Oguzhan Sert’s brutal murder of a female receptionist in 2020. He had written a note reading “Long Live The Incel Rebellion” prior to the attack and used abusive language during the murder, calling the woman a “whore” and repeating “die, die, die.”

McGill University students who were interviewed on the topic in my own investigation expressed mixed knowledge about such incidents; 100 per cent of women interviewed were aware of both incel culture and cases of incel-related violence, compared to only 60 per cent of male interviewees. One male student noted the existence of different types of incel figures online, including “looksmaxxers” who encourage young men to undergo unsafe cosmetic procedures or take steroids as a measure to attract women. Most students attributed the rise of these cases to online trends and cultures. However, students also acknowledged that whilst this particular form of misogyny is relatively new, extreme incidences of gender-based violence, femicide and misogynistic ideologies have been around since the beginning of time. A particularly poignant example is the École Polytechnique massacre of 1989, in which fourteen women were shot in a savage anti-feminist attack. Perhaps what is most shocking is the return of such heinous instances during an age of supposed progressivism. When asked if they view these cases as a personal threat to themselves, 100 per cent of female students said yes, while 100 per cent of male students said no. One male student stated “I’ve never read an article in the news and thought, ‘this is a personal threat to me.’”

Recognizing these cases as nothing short of wicked and pernicious acts of violence against young girls and women, and treating them as such in court and beyond, is essential to combatting the normalization of incel culture. Former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer praised the Adolescence series, welcoming Netflix’s initiative to make the drama available for free screening in secondary schools and in parliament. The UK has incorporated potential incel radicalization into its national counter-extremist monitoring program, “Prevent,” but has not yet categorized severe incel attacks as terrorism (the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation concluded that its current legal definition of terrorism is broad enough without needing a new category specifically targeting incel-related attacks.) Meanwhile, Canadian authorities have prosecuted incel-linked attacks, such as the Oguzhan Sert case, under terrorism legislation, and Public Safety Canada announced over $25 million in funding to deal with radicalisation and incel- related violence. The US government recognizes incel extremism as a single-issue motivator to terrorism, but has historically treated cases as hate crimes rather than terrorism. Legally, then, Canada has taken the most steps toward treating incel- motivated violence as the destructive and harmful crime it is.

It is one thing to enforce legal consequences for incel-related violence, and another to prevent it in the first place. In this respect, the UK has taken the most effective measures in implementing anti- radicalization measures into its national curriculum. Schools are mandated to teach students about incel culture, as well as the links between pornography and misogyny and what constitute positive conceptions of both femininity and masculinity. Canada and the US, meanwhile, lack national equivalents, and responses tend to be fragmented across provinces and states. NGO White Ribbon offers free online training for teachers in Canada, but this alone is not sufficient. As one McGill interviewee said in my investigation, sexist and misogynistic tendencies “sadly start young,” making proper education and the prevention of these ideologies in the classroom crucial. Of course, any number of factors can contribute to harmful ideologies, from a particularly influential older brother to a humiliating romantic rejection. But the influence of the environment in which children spend at least six hours a day in must not be understated.

Spreading wider awareness, implementing effective prevention mechanisms, and passing strict legislation and proper online regulation are all steps governments must take to deal with this relatively new phenomena. These girls and women, many of them students, had futures full of possibility. Yet they were made victims of brutal misogynistic murder for the crime of their very existence. They should be remembered and honoured through real efforts at change.

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As Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Curry embodied a flamboyant, gender nonconforming character who defied conventional ideas of sexuality, masculinity, and self- respect. The film’s enduring cult following and its famous participatory midnight screenings have transformed it into more than a purely cinematic phenomenon: it has become a space where audiences continue to experiment with identity, celebrate their differences, and find community.

Parton’s influence, meanwhile, demonstrates how a mainstream icon can foster acceptance for the socially outcast through a different kind of cultural power. Rooted in country music and Southern traditions, she has time and time again chosen to use her wide-reaching appeal and gift for storytelling to bring LGBTQ+ experiences into the broader public consciousness. From writing and recording the original song “Travelin’ Thru” for Transamerica, a film centred around the exploration of transgender identity, to her unwavering public support for LGBTQ+ rights, Parton showed repeatedly throughout her career that compassion need not be constrained by such arbitrary divisions as who one is capable to love.

These two public personalities reveal how utilizing their massive cultural influence with deliberation can create transformational possibilities for people who rarely got to see themselves reflected with dignity in mainstream culture. Curry’s theatrical defiance makes space for experimentation, transformation, and the joy of refusing conventional labels; while Parton’s warmth, humour, and generosity demonstrate the power of extending that space through empathy and public advocacy. Neither legacy can be reduced to a single character, song, or statement — instead their significance lies in the ways their work continues to give audiences permission to envision lives and realities beyond any external expectation.

Tim Curry: The Power of Being Unapologetic

Few performances have become as inseparable from queer cultural history as Tim Curry’s in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. With glittering eyeshadow, towering platform heels, fishnet stockings, and an unapologetic appetite for pleasure, Curry transformed an unconventional sci-fi musical into a celebration of sexual liberation. Decades later, audiences still gather in theatres worldwide to recreate its scenes and sing along to its musical numbers. For LGBTQ+ audiences, Frank-N-Furter represented something rarely afforded to queer characters in mainstream entertainment: the leisure of extravagance. Curry’s legacy extends beyond a memorable performance — through Frank-N-Furter, he helped bring alternative expressions of gender and sexuality into the spotlight which challenged social norms. Adapted from Richard O’Brien’s 1973 stage musical, The Rocky Horror Picture Show follows wholesome American sweethearts Brad and Janet, whose encounter with the inhabitants of a mysterious mansion upends their conventional understanding of sexuality and desire.

At the centre of their surreal experience is Frank-N-Furter, a flamboyant scientist from the planet Transsexual whose androgynous appearance and uninhibited behaviour disrupt the couple’s carefully ordered world. The risk of taking on such a role was considerable. Frank-N-Furter required a bold performance, that of someone utterly unaffected by society’s traditional expectations of masculinity. Curry, however, was drawn to the challenge. Reflecting on the role, he explained being attracted to risk: “I would choose risky over anything. That’s the best way to be.” Although Brad and Janet technically occupy the roles of the protagonists, Frank-N-Furter commands the screen from the moment he first appears. His entrance and the ensuing performance of “Sweet Transvestite” establish a character who refuses to be diminished by convention. Curry plays him with a magnetic combination of theatricality, sensuality, humour, and a sense of danger making Frank-N-Furter simultaneously seductive and menacing. He does not merely challenge the rules — he makes breaking them look irresistible.

At the time of the film’s release, and for a few of the decades that followed, LGBTQ+ people were frequently relegated to limited or stereotypical portrayals in mainstream entertainment. The 1970s saw queer characters that would more often than not serve to provide comic relief, tragic storylines, or cautionary tales. Frank-N-Furter offered a striking alternative: a character whose gender expression and sexuality were central to the story, rather than details to be concealed. Through its camp aesthetics and exaggerated performances, Rocky Horror’s gleeful parody of existing sci-fi and horror conventions challenged audiences to reconsider the boundaries between masculinity and femininity; normalcy and deviance. Its irreverence managed to make challenging the tropes of the genre entertaining without stripping them of meaning.

Yet Frank-N-Furter is no straightforward hero. His story does not culminate in a celebration of any moral virtue, nor does his gender expression map neatly onto any single established LGBTQ+ identity. But that complexity is part of what makes Curry’s performance so compelling. Queer characters need not to be flawless in order to deserve representation. Allowing gender nonconforming characters to be morally ambiguous — even outright villainous — challenges the expectation that marginalized people must demonstrate some sort of exceptional goodness to justify their place on the silver screen. Frank-N-Furter’s outsize, monstrous exuberance can be read as a reflection of the historical association between queerness and deviance, but it can also be understood as a source of power. Rather than seeking acceptance by becoming “respectable,” Frank only ever takes pleasure in his
own excesses. His character invites audiences to consider whether being an outsider might be something more than a cause for shame. The film’s mantra, “Don’t dream it, be it,” distills that philosophy into a simple invitation: stop treating self- expression as an impossible fantasy…and begin embracing the person you want to become.

One of the most remarkable aspects of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, however, is the unique showgoing tradition that has developed around it. Screenings of Rocky Horror are rarely passive experiences: spectators often arrive in corsets, feather boas, leather jackets, formal gowns, and whatever else allows them to participate in the spectacle. They shout familiar lines, dance along, and watch live performers reenact the same scenes before the big screen. These gatherings have transformed a cult film into a living theatrical experience. For LGBTQ+ viewers, they can offer an opportunity to experiment with appearance and identity in an environment where unconventional self-expression is part of the celebration. O’Brien, the creator of Rocky Horror, has acknowledged the production’s impact on conversations about gender and sexuality. In an interview with The Guardian, he reflected on how the work had helped people feel less isolated, expressing gratitude for its wider social impact. More than five decades after its stage debut, Rocky Horror continues to demonstrate how a performance can challenge the most stringent of cultural expectations.

To reduce Curry’s career to a single role, however, would be to overlook the extraordinary range of his work. His performances demonstrate a particular gift for combining theatrical extravagance with mischievous humour. In Clue (1985), he cultivated an impeccable sense of comedic timing to the absurd and intrigue-driven murder mystery. As Pennywise in the 1990 television adaptation of Stephen King’s It, he brought to life a deeply unsettling villain whose lurking menace became unforgettable. He has also appeared as the Lord of Darkness in Legend, Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, and the concierge in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Across these performances, Curry added a fantastical feeling of glee to characters who disrupt ordinary life, always making room for the strange, the excessive, and the unexpected. That same sensibility is what connects his broader career to the spirit of Rocky Horror: a willingness to find delight in what convention tells us to reject.

The world has changed considerably since The Rocky Horror Picture Show first reached audiences: LGBTQ+ representation in film has expanded, and conversations about gender identity and sexuality have become considerably more visible. Yet acceptance remains uneven across social and cultural fields, and the freedom for people to express themselves freely cannot be taken for granted. The film remains meaningful because it celebrates the refusal to be confined by expectations: Frank-N-Furter is excessive, and impossible to contain. He does not ask permission to occupy space — he simply arrives and commands all attention. Curry was the one who brought the character to life, with a performance that was as mischievous as it was subversive. His portrayal helped turn what could’ve been a merely provocative stage creation into an enduring cultural icon, inspiring generations to question the boundaries around gender, sexuality, and self-expression. Yet what makes Curry’s performance so enduring is not simply that it challenged conventional ideas of gender and sexuality, but that it made defying those expectations look liberating. To me, that is part of what makes his legacy so meaningful to queer audiences.

Dolly Parton: A Voice for Belonging

Dolly Parton occupies an unusual place in North American pop culture. A country music superstar known for her rhinestone-studded outfits, towering blonde wigs, and unmistakable voice, she has long appealed to audiences even far outside her genre. Among her most devoted fans are disproportionately many LGBTQ+ people, for whom the meaning of her work extends beyond her music. Parton’s appeal to queer audiences begins with her public persona: her exaggerated femininity and ‘camp’ have made her a favourite among drag performers, who frequently recreate her signature looks. Parton has largely embraced these impersonations — in her appearance on the cover of Out magazine in 1997, she acknowledged her established place in the queer culture.

However, the connection goes deeper than rhinestones and wigs. Parton has spoken about being judged for her appearance and background, experiences that according to her have informed her empathy for groups who are treated as outsiders. Her 1971 song, “Coat of Many Colors,” recounts how children mocked her for wearing a coat sewn by her mother from scraps of fabric. Rather than presenting the coat as a source of shame, Parton celebrated the love behind it. For LGBTQ+ listeners, the song’s emotional logic can resonate with the experiences of bullying and rejection all too common in their childhoods. Parton has connected her appeal to queer audiences with her own experiences of feeling different, allowing listeners to find personal meaning in a story that was not explicitly written about queer identity. Others of her songs have acquired similar significance through reinterpretation — “Jolene,” with its intense focus on another woman’s beauty, has inspired numerous queer readings into its lyrics. Meanwhile her 1991 song “Family” more directly acknowledges differences that can occur among one’s relatives, including sexual orientation, while affirming that familial belonging should not be contingent on any sort of conformity on the part of the individual.

When Parton made her transition from country music into film and television, it only expanded her cultural reach into the queer community. Her move to Los Angeles brought her into partnership with Sandy Gallin, an influential talent manager who was openly gay. Their professional relationship helped expand her career into mainstream entertainment, including major film roles. Her 1980 debut role in
9 to 5, in which she stars alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, follows three women confronting workplace sexism and an exploitative boss, contributing to her appeal among audiences — often queer ones — drawn to narratives of resistance. In 2005, she wrote and performed “Travelin’ Thru” for Transamerica, a film about a transgender woman travelling across the United States. The song received an Academy Award nomination, and Parton performed it at the 2006 Oscars, bringing a story centred on the transgender experience to one of the entertainment industry’s most visible stages. She also explored queer family relationships in her 2019 Netflix anthology series, Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings. One episode follows a gay couple navigating family secrets and rejection around a New Year’s Eve wedding. Its recognition from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) highlighted the value of incorporating LGBTQ+ relationships into mainstream storytelling. Above all, these projects demonstrate how Parton translated her cultural influence into opportunities to underline queer narratives, placing stories that might otherwise have remained at the margins before much wider audiences.

Her support for the queer community became particularly evident during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when gay men were faced with widespread stigma, discrimination, and public rejection. Her production company, Sandollar Productions, co-produced Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, the landmark 1989 documentary about the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Her book editor, Elissa Altman, has also revealed that Parton privately covered the medical costs of a staff member’s gender transition in the 1990s. Her advocacy continued for decades: she spoke up in support of same-sex marriage in 2009 and voiced support for transgender people amid Tennessee’s passing of Bill 1, which banned gender-affirming medical care for minors as of July 1, 2023. Across the decades, her support for the LGBTQ+ community took on many different forms from public awareness campaigns to personal assistance. Her activism takes place within a broader philanthropic mission: in 1995, Parton established the Imagination Library, which distributes free books to young children in honour of her father who never learned to read. Following the devastating wildfires in Tennessee in 2016, she provided financial assistance to families who had lost their homes, as well as later contributing to COVID-19 vaccine research. It is clear that, for this star, compassion extended beyond words and into meaningful projects that directly affected people’s lives.

Parton’s relationship with LGBTQ+ audiences is particularly significant in the American South. For some, she represents a connection to the music, humour, and cultural traditions of home without requiring them to accept the prejudice that can accompany those traditions. Her influence has surfaced in legal debates over queer expression: in a ruling striking down a Texas law restricting drag performances, federal judge David Hittner cited Parton as an example of a mainstream entertainer whose flamboyant clothing and suggestive performances could potentially be restricted under an overly broad interpretation of the law. His reference illustrated the difficulty of regulating drag without also raising questions about artistic expression in mainstream entertainment. This example is particularly fitting for an artist whose public image has long played with the boundaries of femininity and theatrical exaggeration. Parton’s appearance is not merely decorative; it has become part of a cultural language that drag performers can reinterpret and that queer audiences can claim for themselves.

Parton’s significance lies in her ability to challenge prejudice without distancing herself from the culture that made her famous. Her career demonstrates that advocating for LGBTQ+ acceptance does not have to mean abandoning one’s roots. Through songs that invite reinterpretation, films that foreground LGBTQ+ experiences, and advocacy spanning the HIV/AIDS epidemic to contemporary debates over transgender rights, Parton has made queer acceptance part of a broader cultural conversation. The rhinestones and wigs may make Parton instantly recognizable, but her enduring influence comes from what she has accomplished with her visibility for those who lack a voice. For LGBTQ+ audiences in particular, her legacy continues to represent the possibility of making compassion a principle that transcends differences in identity, background, or belief. Though the impact of both Curry and Parton’s lives and careers will eventually belong to history, their art continues to invite new generations to dream boldly, express themselves with freedom, and build communities where difference is celebrated. Between Tim Curry’s theatrical defiance and Dolly Parton’s enduring compassion, these two cultural icons have helped generations of LGBTQ+ people embrace their identities, find community, and live unapologetically.

The post The Freedom to Be: The Enduring Legacies of Tim Curry and Dolly Parton Within the Queer Community appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Inspired by his friend Peter Knegt of QCC Toronto, founder Jeremie Romain has been running QCC Montreal since May 2024. The club first screened at the one-room Cinema Moderne in the Mile End before moving to the bigger Cinema du Parc as of November 2025. “I wanted to start something especially for queer cinema,” he explains in an interview with the Daily.

While programming has in the past included more contemporary titles, such as Mysterious Skin (2004) and 120 BPM (2017), Romain’s main focus for QCC is the history of queerness on screen. “It’s kind of a queer history course, if you will,” he says, “it’s about showing the firsts. [For example,] the first time a character was a known lesbian in a movie, and [was labelled as such].” Although, not everything is about overt queerness as history has not always welcomed an openly queer character on screen, of course. Romain is therefore equally interested in screening films with what he calls queer “sensibilities.” “When you look into it, and you read about the history of the people making movies, you can find out who was queer… and how [that] impacted their work.”

Equally, Romain admits that some representation has not aged well. “In a lot of stuff from the eighties and nineties, the representation is kind of problematic… but it was the first [of its kind] and it was groundbreaking at that time.” It is still “very important,” Romain thus believes, in showing “the history throughout the decades, [and] how stuff changed.”

Genre and tone must also be considered. “I like dramas and intense stuff,” he says, but admits that he’s consciously trying to strike a balance for QCC’s 2027 programming. He has more comedies planned for the upcoming year, for example. “I think the community, at least in Montreal, responds more to [comedies], and it’s just more fun for people… but I still think we need some of the dark [stuff] once in a while, to show the history.” Romain seems to have a quota of sorts to keep his selections varied. “I love to program at least one documentary, at least one film in black and white…not, obviously, all American movies,” he explains. “But there’s only twelve months in the year. I can’t hit everything, but I try to diversify [as much as] I can.”

Next month’s screening of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) is both a nod to this comedy-loving audience Romain speaks of, and a choice of personal significance. “[Pee Wee Herman] is kind of the person who raised me,” he shares. “I watched those movies over and over again.” The film, he explains further, is an example of these aforementioned “sensibilities” which queer artists lend to their work. “The character [of Pee Wee Herman] isn’t queer,” explains Romain, “but the actor is… [and he has] a humour and a way of moving that I resonated with as a kid.”

It goes without saying that art and representation go, and have always gone, hand in hand, but Romain sees cinema as particularly well-suited to queer visibility and storytelling. “In terms of art and culture, I think cinema is kinda the thing where you can see yourself represented. For me, when I was growing up, [film] was my portal to culture. I’m from a really small town and that’s how… I saw that other types of people were out there.”

On the whole, Romain says that the reception to QCC has been positive. “When I started the club, I got so many messages, and everyone would [tell] me at the events, ‘Thank you so much for starting this, this was missing in Montreal.’” While the typical showing is a relatively low-key affair, QCC screenings have in the past featured live performances and Q&A sessions with the local queer community. A screening of Paris Is Burning (1990), for instance, included conversation with members of the Montreal ballroom scene. Romain also speaks highly of the audiences, who, apparently, sometimes hold discussions amongst themselves afterwards. “I always ask [if anyone] has seen this movie before, and it’s always fun when basically no one has seen it. That means they’re gonna be excited to talk about it after.”

Romain is also keen to highlight the posters present at all QCC screening, which are exclusively artist- commissioned and custom-made. “I try to pick artists [where] I see something [in their art] that could resonate with the movie I’m trying to book, and it always surprises me how well they turn out.” The posters are then sold at the screenings as a souvenir. “I like that there’s little pieces of this club that…live on elsewhere”.

This month, QCC is celebrating Halloween with a screening of the black-and-white horror cult classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962). At the time of writing, 41 of 133 seats remain available. For now, Romain seems proud of the club, but is open to future growth. “I do still feel, even almost three years in, that there are a lot of people who don’t know about the Queer Cinema Club that would probably enjoy it. We’re not as known as we could be, slash should be.”

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane plays Thursday, October 29, 9pm at Cinema du Parc. You can find all of the upcoming QCC programming on their Instagram, @qccmtl.

The post “This Was Missing In Montreal” appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Good People is a bi-weekly article series highlighting McGill students doing community-oriented work on and around campus. Because it’ s important to celebrate good people doing good things.

Finn Jacobsen was in his first year of law school in the fall of 2025 when he and his colleagues formed a community of transgender students at McGill’s Faculty of Law.

The Trans Law Collective — a volunteer-run organization that provides free legal information, education, and advocacy support for trans, non-binary, Two- Spirit peoples, and individuals questioning the gender binary in Quebec — was born out of this group of peers. The Trans Law Collective offers monthly legal clinics, free of charge, on McGill’s downtown campus to help students and Montreal residents navigate the legal process for changing their legal name and sex designation. Beyond clinics, the collective also hosts social events, a pre-law mentorship program, and conducts legal research with an eye towards using the law as a tool of liberation.

The Daily spoke with Finn Jacobsen, second-year law student and the Trans Law Collective’s Vice President of Communications, about the organization. We talked about making legal information accessible, building community, and their organization’s vision for growth and continuity.

This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Enid Kohler for The McGill Daily (MD): To get started, I want to learn more about you. How did you get involved in this organization? What drew you to it?

Finn Jacobsen (FJ): I’m a second year law student, and this club started up last year, when I was a freshman. A bunch of my first year colleagues and I reached out to the trans community in our first year law class. We were really lucky to have a ton of trans people in our 200 person class. We ended up with twelve people in first year and we made this club. We’re building it from the ground up.

MD: How would you pitch the Trans Law Collective to a student who has never heard about it before in 30 seconds?

FJ: We have three main arms. We do legal research, social events — connecting the trans community and students at McGill — and then we provide services as well. The main service we do is legal clinics, like for name and gender marker changes. But in general, we’re just trying to support any initiatives that involve the intersection of the trans community and the law.

MD: From your perspective, why is the Trans Law Collective important? Why is there a need for these kinds of services for the trans community in Montreal?

FJ: When it comes to legal transition issues, I find the process in Quebec is actually really great. It’s pretty open, but it’s so hard to understand, especially if you don’t have a legal background. It can just stump people when it really doesn’t need to; it can be really confusing. Our clinics get people to feel confident to make the changes that they really need. It’s nice to talk to someone who has done it all before and who can just get you sorted and connected.

Generally, trans people are facing a lot of struggles right now. There’s a lot of laws trying to be put into place that make it harder to be trans. So it’s important that we keep on top of that, stay aware, and take control of the rights that we do have as trans people and as people generally.

MD: Since you launched last year, what has the response been like, particularly to your legal clinics?

FJ: Weve had some pretty great moments. It’s been really cool. We worked with one person who was nonbinary and who didn’t always feel seen in their gender. And then they got to submit all these things [paperwork] to get an X marker on all their IDs and to have their chosen name reflected on all their legal documents. At the end of their time at the clinic, they were super emotional and just really excited to have this done. When you see stuff like that, it’s really moving.

MD: What do you have planned for this school year? What’s in the works for your team.

FJ: We’re having a clinic right now, actually. I just left it to come here. For this year, we’re running bi-weekly clinics off campus in Verdun, at the Centre des Femmes. And then we do monthly clinics on campus to try and be as accessible as possible to McGill students. We’re doing social events too. Trans Tuesdays will be starting up soon, just fun social events for people to hang out.

MD: Imagine a student sees a post for Trans Tuesday but feels nervous about attending the event alone. What would you say to them?

FJ: I’d say it’s probably a lot less intimidating than you think. Everyone in the club is really nice. And everyone who’s ever been to these events is always friendly and happy to chat.

Feel free to bring anyone, like a friend if that will make you feel more comfortable. We just want to give people an opportunity to meet other trans people, queer people, or supportive allies on campus.

MD: What is your vision for the future of the Trans Law Collective?

FJ: We’re just focused on continuity right now. We want to make sure the service stays available, especially on campus. Hopefully, the further we go, we can get more funding, provide more support, and do more legal research, too. The sky’s the limit.

MD: The tagline for this column is “good people doing good things.” In the context of your work with the Trans Law Collective, what does being a “good person” mean to you?

FJ: I think for a lot of trans people, it’s just nice to be able to be seen and supported. I feel like the trans community often doesn’t ask for much, it’s just, “let people be who they are and then see them for who they are.”I think that’s what we’re trying to do. Let’s make sure people get access to that.

Learn more about the Trans Law Collective’s services, social events, and opportunities to get involved through their Instagram account, @translawcollective or via their website, translaw.info.

The post Trans Law Collective Dismantles Legal Barriers for Montreal’s Queer Community appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Daily spoke with Kimberly Wong, current director general of SILK, and Gregg Blachford, former president of Gay Line (1993-1996) and director of McGill’s Career and Placement Service (CaPS), about CAEO Québec and the SILK program. We discussed queer education and services for English-speaking schools, volunteering and outreach, allyship, and counteracting shame with queer joy.

This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Justin Friedberg and Mara Gibea for The McGill Daily (MD): What facilitated the expansion of Gay Line to CAEO Québec and SILK? How did the shifting media landscape’s impacts on the dissemination of information from the ’90s to the 2000s affect Gay Line’s mandate?

Kimberly Wong (KW): Gay Line served an important role from the ’70s to the 2000s; however, there are plenty of resources on the internet now and not many people who love to talk on the phone anymore.

Gregg Blachford (GB): There weren’t many comparable organizations that existed at the time. The original goal of what they were doing, giving information to a lot of people, has changed. Over the decades, many organizations have sprung up to deal with the police, health, and AIDS. The phone line in Montreal was no longer unique […] eventually phones stopped ringing.

KW: The organization transitioned to new opportunities: […] workshops to talk about queerness and sexuality, [and] collaborating with Queer McGill to get volunteers.

MD: The theme of CAEO Quebec’s 50th anniversary celebration is titled “Queer Joy.” What does queer joy mean to you?

GB: Queer joy is about pride, excitement, and fun. It’s about lifting the shame and engaging more with the joy of being gay.

MD: How did shame manifest socially and politically in Montreal’s queer community during Gay Line’s operation?

GB: Near the beginning of Gay Line, in the ’90s, Montreal’s queer life was full of difficult conditions: unsolved murders which the police weren’t taking seriously, raids on saunas and bars, and an AIDs crisis hanging over people’s heads.

MD: In 1993 you, Gregg, delivered a testimony to the Quebec Human Rights Commission on the inquiry into “Violence and Discrimination against Gays and Lesbians in Quebec.” Have any of the issues in your testimony been addressed? What has remained consistent or shifted in terms of the needs of queer communities in Montreal?

GB: Quebec, to its credit, gave the opportunity for the queer community to talk about what was happening and what they think should be happening [with the referendum regarding police violence against queer peoples and spaces]. What’s it like today? On one level, it’s much better: laws have changed, and there are no more police raids — they’ve apologized for the raids in the 70s/80s. What is consistent is the shame that hangs over people’s heads, despite the turn towards positivity in the queer community. Still, the expectation of having to come out and have some reconciliation with your mind is still there.

MD: How has the CAEO Québec facilitated this reconciliation?

KW: Reconciliation is about facilitating that education — making people more comfortable and making spaces to work towards educating different kinds of populations and adapting to the changes they need on the front lines.

MD: One way that CAEO Québec is creating these spaces is through the SILK program, of which you, Kimberly, are a director. Could you tell us a bit about that?

KW: The SILK program provides workshops that are testimonial-based. Queer volunteers go into schools and share about themselves. One of the main ways to connect to students is through storytelling: everyone loves stories, whether you’re young or old.

The program is about getting students to think about other perspectives that they haven’t thought about before. People may not realize their values have come from parents or religion, and some haven’t been exposed to the queer community. As a result, we strive for a safe learning environment where people can ask their questions, even if they’re uncomfortable or antagonizing. It’s a cool way to be able to enact social change through education and young people: if we can plant these seeds at a young age, they can carry that forward for the rest of their lives.

MD: Considering the organization is a non-profit, how vital is volunteering?

KW: CAEO Québec and the SILK program are all volunteer-run, which is very rare. Because we don’t have a specific funding body, there are positives and negatives. We don’t receive money (i.e. grants), but we’re also not beholden to a governing body’s priorities.

GB: The program is inter-generational too! We recently had a party at my house with past volunteers. Volunteering meant so much to them: it teaches active listening, which they’ve used in other areas of their life, making change. “New gay” volunteers get something out of it too… it’s a two-way street. Often students come who are exploring their own gender, sexuality, and identity.

KW: Something nice about the program is that the CAEO Québec takes time to train people and make them more comfortable. It can be a one-time thing, low stakes. Many volunteers feel a lot of satisfaction after speaking to students. We poll anonymous feedback about the workshop, and 95 per cent of it is positive. It is so rewarding to see that, as the workshops are something we would’ve wanted when we were in high school. They can be life- saving in some contexts. The whole thing feels very special, making space for volunteers, community — magic comes from it.

MD: That’s how both of you met working for Gay Line. Would you say these relationships foster lifelong contacts?

KW: Many people become long-time friends. You have Gregg, who volunteered from 1984 to 2007 — truly intergenerational. The program includes very passionate people who want to provide community support, using the privilege they have in their lives. It’s free; it’s volunteering.

MD: Considering Gay Line’s historic ties to McGill, how can students and allies get involved?

GB: The dances run by Gay McGill in the SSMU building were not just for McGill students, but for the whole community. People talked about how vibrant it was and how it made them feel. I was involved with admin to move the university towards better relationships with queer community, including starting the annual return of the Rainbow Reception.

KW: For volunteering, something notable about our organization is that we accept allies in our volunteer pool.

GB: Allies were important then, and allies are important now too.

KW: For SILK in particular, allies can demonstrate why community [exposure is important for] students who may not be able to relate to having close ties to the community.

MD: Would you like to share any parting wisdom after 50 years?

GB: The reason it’s lasted 50 years is because of Kimberly. She held it together when it could’ve fallen apart, which shows how individuals can keep things going. Being so upbeat, positive, and cheerful really helps.

KW: We don’t expect people to come in with perfect skills. Because we work with a marginalized group of people, there has to be more understanding and flexibility. The organization is as strong as the volunteers that make it up. We want the space to be an encouraging sandbox for people to learn, grow, and gain new skills.

CAEO Québec is currently hiring volunteers and SILK workshop facilitators. The next training will take place on November 7, 8, and 14 from 10:00 AM to 6:30 PM in downtown Montreal. Students can follow @caeo.quebec on Instagram for more information.

The post Celebrating CAEO Québec’s 50th Anniversary appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Pride initiative originated from Poppy Honeybone, the forward midfielder of the team, who felt as though a Pride Game was essential for celebrating and welcoming everyone in sports. Her teammate, Norah Ripple, said the team mobilizes behind causes that matter to its players. In the past month alone, they have also hosted a Truth and Reconciliation Game, as well as a Pink Game to raise funds for breast cancer. 

For the Pride Game on October 18, the Martlets also launched a campaign to support the GRIS-Montreal charity, which seeks to educate people on sexual and gender diversity in Montreal. Keeping the campaign local was a deliberate choice: the players wanted to make an impact that could be seen in their own community. Poppy expresses hope that the initiative would encourage other teams–across Montreal and Canada–to form similar partnerships with queer organizations in their areas. 

This season, the Martlets were the only McGill varsity team to host a Pride match. The team encourages other McGill athletes to follow suit and overtly support causes that matter to them. As varsity athletes, players on the team have a public platform, which they have used to support causes beyond the field. 

The Martlets’ initiative marks a parallel with Canadian soccer leagues as well. Unlike the men’s national soccer team, the Canadian women’s national team actively hosts annual Pride celebration matches, in which players wear Pride-themed jerseys, an initiative that originates at the institutional level. Canada Soccer, the official governing body for Canadian soccer, initiated this tradition in 2023. In men’s soccer, by contrast, Pride campaigns typically depend on individual clubs’ choice to participate. Moreover, major international competitions such as the men’s FIFA World Cup impose strict regulations on kit design and on-field displays, which limit the use of rainbow-coloured jerseys and similar symbols. 

As members of the McGill Martlets noted, advocacy is easier when it is shared across a team: players are more willing to speak up when they know they have their teammates’ support. The Martlets have fostered such an inclusive environment in which players feel comfortable to be themselves, and the team has thus used its games to raise awareness of causes its players care about. 

The post More Than a Game appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The motion called for “the SSMU General Assembly to compel the President and Vice President of University Affairs to advocate against renewal or reinstatement of the exchange program consistent with SSMU’s existing Policy Against Genocide in Palestine and the Policy on Harmful Military Technology.” While the current exchange agreement, signed in December 2023, is set to renew in 2028, both McGill and HUJI are required to negotiate renewal terms nine months prior, which would be late 2027. 

In order for this motion to be voted on at the GA, a quorum of no less than 350 McGill undergraduate students needed to be satisfied. If passed, the motion states that the SSMU President and VP University Affairs will be called on to present “a motion mirroring the language of [the GA] motion” at the Senate meeting, scheduled for January 13, 2027, per the motion. 

James Thomas Reid, the SSMU Speaker, called the GA to order and opened the assembly with a brief overview of the agenda. This included various summaries of reports including the SSMU executive committee summer report and the Board of Director report both presented by President Hamza Abu-Alkhair, and a report presented by the accountability commissioner Lounes Azzoun. 

Following these announcements, discussion was opened for a finite time, where students were able to ask Abu-Alkhair questions regarding the reports as well as current SSMU activities. The queries ranged from an update on the sudden closure of Midnight Kitchen last year, where Abu-Alkhair answered that SSMU had launched a new Free Lunches program, to questions regarding how to get involved in SSMU. As the questions progressed, more students entered the SSMU ballroom. Reid periodically gave updates on how many more people were needed to meet quorum, causing students in the ballroom to text friends and peers, encouraging them to attend the GA. Reid also clarified that meeting attendance as well as voting was in-person only, standing in accordance with clause 4 in the 2026-2027 SSMU standing rules, which said, “Meetings shall be in person, unless the Steering Committee deems it necessary to be hybrid (in-person and Zoom) for extraordinary reasons.”

At 7:25 PM, quorum was finally met, which led to the end of the question period. A 15 minute recess time was scheduled before the motion was presented, however, this was soon asked to be suspended by a student. The student body voted in favour of this suspension by a large majority, which allowed for the GA to move on to the presentation of the motion. Reid explained how the mover, Sumayya Kheireddine, will be given five minutes to present the motion. 

Similarly to last year’s GA, where her motion on the one day strike for Palestine was passed in, Kheireddine opened her speech by stating that, as of September 28, 2026,  it has been 1086 days since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza. Kheireddine went on to specify that the motion was not about any particular McGill student or faculty member, but rather about the significance of interuniversity institutional relationships. Kheireddine hence encouraged students to vote “yes” on the motion asking McGill to terminate the agreement between the school and HUJI for two reasons; the first being that through its training of Israeli defence and intelligence, HUJI is a part of the Israeli military complex, and the second being that the campus is located on the ruins of the illegally occupied Jerusalem. She encouraged students to recall McGill’s rich history of academic boycott, arguing one cannot treat partnerships as neutral when connected to a military involved in occupation, genocide, and denying Palestinians’ right to education. She further emphasized that by partnering with this institution, McGill normalizes these violations of human rights. 

The time allotted to deliberate this particular motion was 5 minutes. This was followed by a 5 minute question period and a 10 minute discussion period. Both of these periods were quickly suspended by individual students, and passed with a ⅔ majority vote, suggesting that students were eager to move onto voting. Correspondingly, Reid announced the voting period at 7:47 PM. During this time, no one could leave or enter the building. After a few minutes of voting, it was announced that the vote in favour of the motion was passed by a simple majority, and it would thus move on to an online ratification process opening within 7 days of the GA. The room erupted in cheers, chatter, and clapping. 

After the GA, the Daily spoke to a few students about the meeting and the passing of the motion. One student told the Daily, “I’m just really happy everyone showed up tonight and demonstrated substantial support for the movement.” They added, “We show up because we deeply care, and this [voting at a GA] is just one avenue we can add pressure [to the university].”

The Daily also spoke to the Speaker, James Thomas Reid about the importance of student politics. Reid said it was his first time speaking at a General Assembly. When asked if he expected the GA to meet quorum, he replied “I did, yes, because it’s a very pertinent affair. It was a very important meeting and I thought a lot of the student body was very much interested in showing up. So it wouldn’t surprise me that we did.” However, he added, “Did I expect the actual suspension of questions and discussions? I didn’t expect it, but also it wasn’t very surprising.”

Regarding the cheers and clapping after the motion was passed, Reid commented, “It’s unsurprising how people reacted. As I said, this is a very pertinent issue and people are very passionate about that. I’m not surprised of the reaction that happened in the General Assembly, but it was my job to make sure that even though that reaction did happen, we [had to] continue to support order. That was part of my job.”

The ratification was sent to the student body on Friday, October 2 and students will have until October 13 to vote. To pass, the ratification must meet the quorum of at least 10 per cent of the SSMU constituency and receive a simple majority vote. 

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Four years ago, McGill announced that it would begin the first stage of underground investigation on the site of the former Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH). Sustainability Park, formerly called the New Vic Project, was described by provost, Christopher Manfredi, as “the most significant project our university has undertaken since its inception.” The Société québécoise des infrastructures (SQI) is responsible for the entire site, and has been working with McGill on the project since the site was vacated in 2015.

However, the project has been stalled by fierce resistance and battles in court. The Kanien’kehá:ka Kahnistensera, also known as the Mohawk Mothers, allege that the site holds unmarked graves of Indigenous children. The Indigenous solidarity collective has been fighting the construction since it was proposed, arguing that McGill continues to deny and infringe on the group’s right to investigate those responsible for abuses against Indigenous peoples. “We deserve the opportunity to honour our loved ones and grieve them properly,” the Kahnistensera write on their website.

The group is also committed to searching the grounds for undiscovered evidence related to the CIA’s MK- ULTRA medical program, a series of illegal psychiatric experiments conducted at the Allan Memorial Institute between 1948 and 1964 under Dr. Donald Ewan. Victims were given drugs and psychologically tortured for the purposes of manipulating the psyche: speakers at the vigil detailed the program’s use of electroshock therapy to erase victims’ memories and the ubsequent use of “psychic drilling” to reprogram the mind. Activist and Kanien’kehá:ka nation member, Kahentinetha Horn, described the experiments as “sheer scientific cruelty.”

The Kahnistensera held their first vigil behind the Allan Memorial Institute on May 23, 2025. The event serves as a way to hold space for ancestors, says organizer CJ, as an answer to the questions of how we can educate and commemorate the site. They held 12 vigils throughout the summer of 2025, and returned Friday, Palestine to North America, known as Turtle Island by many of the continent’s Indigenous peoples. “The same thing is happening in many different places,” a participant shared on the “present-day perpetuation of colonialism” that the Kahnistensera describe.

Horn described the series of vigils as an invitation to pay homage to the people who may be buried there. The vigil began behind the Allan Memorial Institute next to the Morgan pool, which was constructed at the height of the MK-ULTRA experiments. “You can’t just take children and throw them in a mass grave and cover them up,” Horn said during the vigil. She expressed that the vigils are part of the responsibility to take care of those children. “When we’ve completed our mission here, we will come back and have a closing ceremony for them,” she promised.

The general sentiment of the vigil was that non-Indigenous residents in Montreal, known as Tiohtià:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka, are living on stolen Indigenous land. “This whole island of Montreal is Mohawk,” Horn stated. “This land is Mohawk land. [Tkaronto] is Mohawk land too. Ontario is a Mohawk name.” She reiterated that McGill is built on Mohawk land, echoing the Kahnistensera’s statement that “McGill is a gravesite,” and that “it’s all built on blood,” as written in their handout. “I hope some day you take the time to learn the history,” Horn said, urging attendees to listen to Indigenous voices.

In the 2022 announcement of the archaeological investigation of the former RVH site, the McGill Reporter wrote that “the university is mindful that in recent times there have been troubling discoveries in parts of Canada linked to the Residential School System, and that many members of our campus and broader community are deeply impacted by this. Hence, in the spirit of reconciliation, McGill’s work with the SQI is and will always be grounded in caution, and will involve ongoing conversation with local traditional and elected Indigenous leaders.”

The legal battle between McGill and the Kahnistensera has been long and ongoing. In March 2022, the Kahnistensera filed a lawsuit against McGill and the SQI alleging that the former hospital grounds contain unmarked gravesites. An October 2022 court decision from the Superior Court of Quebec granted the Kahnistensera with an injunction that halted development until a proper archaeological investigation could be conducted. Both parties agreed to appoint a panel of three archaeologists, which was mandated to assess and identify the archaeological techniques to be used on the site for the detection of human remains and unmarked graves.

“McGill is destroying evidence and making it harder for people to find their lost family members as we speak,” the @takebacktekanonontak Instagram account, dedicated to solidarity with the Kahnistensera, wrote in a March 2024 post. “McGill is continuing construction regardless of the damage it could cause to those searching for their lost family members and to those wishing to find more evidence regarding the CIA’s MK-ULTRA medical program.”

Nonetheless, McGill maintains that there are no human remains on the site. They deny that Historic Human Remains Detection Dogs (HHRDD) detected remains, and claim that the bone fragments found during the investigation are from animals and hold “no relation to or indication of clandestine human burial.” During a tour of the site at the vigil, the Kahnistensera claimed that many of the fragments were too small to identify, and that the university never performed the lab analysis that they claimed to have conducted. They write in a flyer that several pieces of evidence of human remains have been found, and that McGill, Quebec, and the SQI refuse to respect forensic practices. In the Instagram post advertising the vigil, @takebacktekanontak lists the “results of three remote-sending technologies” used near the Morgan pool, confirmed by Askîhk Research Services (run by the SQI) as “three separate lines of evidence supporting the presence of human remains.” These include ground penetrating radar, HHRDD, and “subterra grey probe, [which identifies] burials by detecting fatty acids resulting from soft tissue decomposition and changes in soil compactness from digging burial shafts.”

The overall cost of the project, including planning, restoring, and construction, is projected to be 870 million dollars. Amid budget cuts over the past two years, the university has described the Sustainable Park project as “a top priority for McGill…[that] will continue.” “Where is this money coming from?” the Kahnistensera asks. “Where is your tuition going? What are you paying for?”

McGill writes that the allegations that there may be unmarked graves on the RVH site are currently being investigated. “They just don’t know what to do, because we can’t stop,” stated Horn. “We have our duty, we’re not going to stop, we’ll never stop.”

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Although it was coined by Freud in the 20th century, the Madonna-Whore Complex is centuries old. One of the most notable historical references of it is in a painting from the 15th century CE titled “The Madonna of Humility with the Temptation of Eve.” An article by Brooke Brownlee, a clinical counselor, introduces the complex by dissecting this very painting. The composition shows Madonna, the Virgin Mary, nursing infant Jesus in her arms. She appears luminescent with a halo and is surrounded by archangels Gabriel and Michael as well as the martyr Saint George, an image of purity. Brownlee describes the Madonna, as “nurturing, motherly, and modest.” The arrangement itself is telling: below the Madonna, in the dark, a lustful and naked Eve dwells. Brownlee describes Eve as “using her naked body as a form of temptation, sexuality, and…[sin].” This is an overt example of the contrast between Madonna and Whore — the former is nurturing, while the latter is corrupting.

Another instance of the complex in history is outlined in historian Anna Clark’s book titled, Desire: A History of European Sexuality where she discusses gender roles in Ancient Greece. Clark breaks down the views of Apollodorus, an ancient Greek writer and scholar. Apollodorus described women’s roles as divided by function: mistresses for pleasure, concubines for care, and wives for legitimacy. However, Clark notes how a woman is never allowed to be all three.

These historical examples show how far back the complex stretches and therefore, how deeply rooted it is in society. While these patterns are often disguised in modern life, Apollodorus’ views surrounding women shows how blatant these ideas were in the past. The Madonna-Whore complex plays a subtler role now, but it systematically persists in the media we consume and therefore, the norms young girls learn to embody long before they learn to question them.

Children’s media embody the Madonna-Whore split in classic Disney films, where kids are introduced to the concept of heroes and villains. Princesses are often gentle, modest and innocent, while female villains are sometimes seductive, vain and sexual. A clear example of this is in The Little Mermaid, where the villain of the story, Ursula, with her dark lipstick and strapless, tight black dress reads as the evil seductress. Ariel, on the other hand, plays the Madonna. She is deserving of love and marries Eric in the end, while Ursula, the Whore, dies. This shows how deeply ingrained the Madonna-Whore Complex is in children’s media, working to socialize them into this fixed structure.

If we turn to pop culture, female celebrities are often forced into binary public images surrounding their sexuality. Britney Spears is a classic example of this. Spears started her career with her debut album and song “…Baby One More Time.” This album was followed by her hit music video where Spears plays the character of a Catholic schoolgirl. The character’s image was promoted as an innocent Madonna, with an emphasis on her virginity. However, the discourse surrounding Spears’ body had already categorized her as the Whore. As argued by Emma Spector in a Vogue article, Spears’ virginity was scrutinized by hungry fans, nosey journalists and news outlets. While the public so desperately wanted insight into Spear’s sexuality, they became outraged once Spears began to embrace it in her later music such as in her sensual single, “I’m a Slave 4 U.” Other cultural observers further argued that “If Britney had been more conservative, she would have been probed and prodded by hungry vultures, but when she confidently embraced her femininity, the crowd wanted her head.” Ultimately, Spears’ experience exposes the fundamental contradiction of the Madonna-Whore complex: women are condemned whether they embody purity or embrace their sexuality. There is no acceptable category for a woman to occupy, only different ways to punish her for failing to conform.

These examples boil down to a single message: before a girl has even begun to understand her own sexual identity, it could have already been moulded by the harsh dichotomy of a reality in which women hardly ever “win.” Although these examples are not all-encompassing of the pressures a young girl may feel to submit to the duality, she may first experience the jarring nature of the split in stories she consumes in childhood, where the gentle princess is rewarded and the glamorous villain destroyed. As she develops, she will further understand how this split functions in the real world, she watches it play out in public where a woman like Britney Spears is both scrutinized as the Madonna and condemned as the Whore.

What is the tangible cost of the Madonna-Whore framework? Research suggests that many women internalize it, meaning they adopt the judgments passed on them as their own, often resulting in shame irrespective of the Madonna or the Whore category. For the Madonna, the cost of the framework regards her own pleasure. A study shows that women who most often endorse the dichotomy rated their partner as more entitled to sexual pleasure than themselves. This sexual shame can be inherent for the Madonna, as she is valued for her purity and maternal nature and thus may never be fully sexually gratified. On the other hand, the Whore experiences sexual shame through her objectification. For her, the cost is being treated as a body and nothing more. In another study, researchers examined 160 couples and found that women’s self-objectification predicted greater sexual emotional labour partnered with lower orgasm rates. This shows that when a woman learns to see herself as an object for pleasing others, she may focus solely on how her sexuality serves a partner and entirely overlook herself.

The effects of sexual shame are not isolated to a woman’s sex life. Vladimir Hedrih, a professor in psychology at the University of Niš, claims that sexual shame in women “can manifest as a negative body image, difficulty discussing sexual desires, or avoidance of sexual experiences due to a fear of judgment.” This is particularly significant since sexuality shapes how we experience emotional and physical attraction, how we connect with our community and understand our own feelings. In a broader scope, it is a core facet of identity. For some women, being disconnected from one’s sexuality through shame can create fractures in one’s own identity.

So if the Madonna-Whore Complex is so deeply ingrained in society, how do we move forward? What does that entail? The Madonna is both rewarded and restricted by purity; while the Whore has sexual freedom, yet is reduced to her sexuality. Maybe the deconstruction of this double bind begins in realizing that the Madonna and the Whore are not all that different. What may appear to be two opposing classifications actually follow the same pattern: society’s constraint of a woman’s sexuality. The view of women should not have to be confined to the limits of choice between these reductive patriarchal models; she can want to be both or to be neither. She can change her mind while exploring her sexual identity, even understanding it differently over time. In other words, women should have the freedom to determine their own relationship with their sexuality on their own terms — without having to sacrifice one form of worth to gain another.

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Decisions about tuition and immigration affect where students can afford to study and whether they can remain in Quebec after graduation, yet students in the province do not have equal electoral power over those decisions. Voting in provincial elections requires Canadian citizenship and at least six months of domicile in Quebec, among other conditions. Eligible students can support candidates whose proposals on tuition, university funding, and immigration reflect their needs. Those who cannot vote must navigate the resulting policies without having a ballot to influence who sets them.

For international students hoping to remain in Quebec after graduation, the parties offer different approaches to immigration. According to New Canadian Media’s campaign reporting, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) proposes maintaining annual permanent immigration at 45,000 through 2029, while the Parti Québécois (PQ) proposes lowering that number to 35,000 and prioritizing students and skilled workers already in the province. Québec Solidaire (QS) proposes 70,000 permanent admissions annually and restoring the Programme de l’expérience québécoise (PEQ).

Beyond the parties’ admission targets, eligibility rules determine which graduates can apply to stay. The PEQ currently allows eligible international Quebec graduates and temporary foreign workers to apply for provincial selection for permanent immigration. Its current graduate intake, open until October 31, requires applicants to have obtained an eligible diploma by November 19, 2025, and to meet the program’s other conditions. Students beginning their degrees this fall therefore cannot treat the temporary reopening as a pathway secured for their own graduation.

The PQ’s proposed priority for students already here and QS’s promise to restore the PEQ deserve scrutiny on precisely this point: which students would qualify, under what conditions, and when? An overall admissions target does not answer those questions or guarantee an individual graduate permanent residence. Quebec selects applicants for skilled-worker immigration, while the federal government makes the final decision on permanent residence. Eligible student voters can weigh these competing proposals when choosing their representatives.

Provincial funding helps determine what resources are available for teaching, research,and student support. At McGill’s April 23 Board of Governors meeting, President Deep Saini reported that Quebec’s 2026-27 budget would increase funding for Quebec universities by 5.5 per cent. The board also approved a balanced budget for the 2027 fiscal year while projecting operating deficits of $33 million for the 2028 fiscal year, and a $55 million deficit for 2029.

The parties’ tuition proposals would also benefit different groups of students. According to The Concordian, Québec Solidaire proposes halving tuition for Quebec students during its first term while maintaining current rates for students from outside the province. The CAQ, meanwhile, has defended higher tuition for out-of- province students. A promise to make university more affordable therefore needs to be judged by which students it includes and which students would continue paying the same rates.

Language policy links university funding to another question: how can students from outside Quebec participate in the province’s public life? Under agreements announced in June, Quebec will provide up to $20 million annually across McGill, Concordia, and Bishop’s to support French learning. Beginning with the fall 2026 cohort, the agreements set an institutional target: 60 per cent of out-of-province students in eligible, in-person undergraduate programs should reach level 4 in spoken French on Quebec’s proficiency scale by graduation. Level 4 is the highest beginner level on the provincial scale and involves basic proficiency in everyday communication. If McGill or Concordia misses the target, Quebec can recover a portion of the funding provided, proportional to the shortfall. McGill should explain which French courses count toward degree requirements and provide accessible learning opportunities for students with limited room for electives. A target measured at graduation is only useful if students are given realistic opportunities to reach it.

Learning French can help students follow Quebec’s political debates and participate in them. That participation should include the freedom to question the immigration, tuition, and language policies affecting their lives. McGill’s efforts to encourage engagement with Quebec should therefore give all students, including those who cannot vote, opportunities to discuss and challenge those policies.

For students who cannot vote, participation can include asking questions at public discussions, contributing to student journalism by writing opinion pieces or sharing their own experiences, or working with community organizations. McGill and its student associations can support that participation through bilingual election information and discussions that welcome students with different levels of familiarity with Quebec politics. Students’ concerns should carry weight in university and public debate before October 5 and after the ballots are counted, whether or not they are eligible to vote.

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The final report by the McGill Provost’s Task Force on Indigenous Studies and Indigenous Education opens with a sober optimism. It was submitted to the university’s administration in 2017 as a conclusive plan of action to align the Institution with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s recommendations. At the time, McGill student athletic teams were still competing under the name “Redmen.” The name was long understood in the popular sense to be pejorative toward Indigenous people despite the university’s insistence that it only referred to the colour of the athletes’ uniforms. In the decade leading up to the report, less than one per cent of students and less than 0.5 per cent of all tenured and tenure-track professors self-identified as Indigenous. The Indigenous Studies Program, established in 2014, had only been offering courses for a handful of semesters. Nearly a decade has elapsed since the report outlined its 52 Calls to Action, which included targets for Indigenous faculty, staff, and student recruitment as well as providing a basis to fund initiatives for Indigenous learning and student wellness. Although McGill is expanding its recruitment of Indigenous students and faculty, the change has been gradual. The current decade has seen a definitive uptick in the number of Indigenous faculty and staff hired at McGill, though relatively few of them are tenured or tenure-track professors. The report’s more symbolic Calls to Action, which included landscaping part of the Lower Field to more prominently feature the Hochelaga Rock and flying the Hiawatha Belt flag, a symbol of unity for the Haudenosaunee First Nations, have largely gone unanswered. The “Redmen” name was only officially dropped from all McGill athletics teams in early 2019 following an announcement from then-Principal Suzanne Fortier.

McGill’s wavering progress toward change for its Indigenous students and faculty emerges from a tangled and troubling history of discrimination, disregard, and antagonism toward the Indigenous communities of northeastern Canada. As an institution, it had been sustained in part by the resources of Indigenous people in its early days as McGill College under William Dawson. During a period of financial hardship in the late 19th century, the school was granted a loan by the federal government consisting of a combined $40,000 taken from the General Indian Trust and Six Nations of Grand River Funds. The transfer of money was made without the knowledge of any of the intended beneficiaries of either fund, and, although McGill eventually paid its debt in full to the federal government, the money never found its way back to the accounts from which it had been withdrawn. When approached by the Six Nations Council in 1988 regarding the establishment of a scholarship or bursary for students from Haudenosaunee First Nations as a symbolic repayment of the loan, representatives from McGill refused outright.

In 1919, McGill received the personal collection of affluent lawyer David Ross McCord in an endowment that would form the basis for the McCord-Stewart Museum on McTavish. McCord himself was appointed curator of the museum. Included in the collection were several thousand items retained by undocumented means, some with incredible historical and cultural importance such as a headdress possibly worn by Tecumseh in the 19th century. Several decades prior to the establishment of the museum, the Arts building had housed a display of Indigenous archaeological artifacts, including human remains. George Mercer Dawson, nephew of William Dawson, had also previously donated his personal collection of West Coast Indigenous cultural objects to the university. He authored a book on Indigenous anthropology in 1879, in which he declared his support for the forced assimilation of Indigenous people into colonial North American society, deeming them “socially inferior.” By the 20th century, however, McGill’s relationship with the Indigenous community at large had become undeniably more complicated. After admitting its first Indigenous pupils toward the end of the 1800s, the university found itself involved in a different way with the people of Quebec’s First Nations. As a nationally renowned institution for research and education, it was equipped with the structure and methods to aid Indigenous communities who lacked the same resources. The 1940s saw the founding of the Arctic Institute of North America, a prominent organization dedicated to the research and preservation of northern Indigenous culture, under McGill leadership. By the 1970s, a certificate program had been established by the Faculty of Education to train First Nations teachers who would go on to work within their communities. Additional courses were being offered by McGill’s Social Work Program to revitalize the learning of Indigenous languages. The surge in nation-wide Indigenous activism in the ‘70s prompted members of the Departments of Geography and Anthropology to widen the breadth of their field research throughout Indigenous communities in Quebec. Those same communities, including the Eeyou (Cree) nation, benefitted particularly from the ecological research conducted on their territories and the practical advice offered by academics on liaising with the government. The Cree would go on to accept advice from certain of these researchers
toward later negotiations.

It wasn’t until 2014 that McGill established its Indigenous Studies program, with classes becoming available in the Winter semester of 2015. Earlier generations of Indigenous students had found it their own initiative to facilitate cultural exchange and the discussion of Indigenous social issues with their predominately white classmates. Faced with the ignorance and occasional avarice of their peers, Indigenous students built solidarity among themselves, forming collectives such as the Intertribal Council of Native Students to consolidate their voices on campus. In 1970, the Intertribal Council held a “Teach-In” symposium on Indigenous culture for the purpose of presenting non-Indigenous students with a clear framework and civil language for discussions around their Native backgrounds and identities.

The ’60s and ’70s also saw the McGill campus ecosystem emerge as a debate stage for well-known independent Indigenous activists such as Kahentinetha Horn, who would go on to head the National Indian Council in addition to playing a prominent role in the Oka Crisis of 1990. Much of the impact of earlier Indigenous activism at McGill was registered in print, largely through student publications such as The McGill Daily that served as integral vehicles for protest and discourse. The Daily is honoured to hold certain of these materials in our archives, including advertisements for the Intertribal Council of Native Students’ 1970 “Teach-In.” Past issues of the Daily, beginning from Volume 1, published in 1911, are available online and in physical print in the Daily Publication Society’s offices on McTavish. While our university’s administration meanders through the Task Force on Indigenous Studies and Indigenous Education’s goals, more about McGill’s history with Indigenous communities as well as Indigenous activism in Tiohtià:ke can be found under The McGill Daily on the Internet Archive.

• 1821 — McGill is founded by royal charter
• 1860 — McGill College receives a $40,000 loan from the federal government, made up of funds from the General Indian Trust Fund and Six Nations of Grand River Fund
• 1875 — George Edward Bomberry, MD, becomes the first Indigenous student to graduate from McGill
• 1911 — Joseph H. “Teronianente” Jacobs graduates as the first Indigenous student to receive funding from the federal government through the Department of Indian Affairs. He earned a Bachelor of Arts and would go on to complete his MD, also at McGill, in 1915.
• 1919 — The David Ross McCord collection is endowed to McGill. The collection included a 19th-century headdress said to have belonged to Tecumseh. Many of its items were obtained through undocumented and likely forceful means.
• 1925 — The Hochelaga Rock is placed by the Canadian government’s Advisory Board for Historical Site Preservation to commemorate the 16th-century Iroquois village that had stood near McGill.
• 1970 — McGill’s Intertribal Council of Native Students, formed several years earlier, holds a “Teach-In” to educate their malinformed classmates on Indigenous history
• 1975 — The Faculty of Education offers workshops to teachers in Nunavik. The first teachers certified to teach Inuktitut in Quebec graduated with degrees from McGill in 1978.
• 1988 — The first Native Awareness Week was held at McGill (later becoming Indigenous Awareness Week.) Joseph Norton, then-Grand Chief of the Mohawk Nation, spoke on issues around land claims and government petitions.
• 1990 — The First People’s House opens under the leadership of Linda Arkwright
• 2000 — First Powwow held at McGill
• 2013 — McGill signs a pledge to follow the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
• 2014 — The Indigenous Studies program is established. Students had the option to take on a Minor in Indigenous Studies starting in the Winter 2015 semester.
• 2017 — The Provost’s Task Force on Indigenous Studies and Indigenous Education presents its final report, comprising 52 Calls to Action, to then-Acting Provost Christopher Manfredi

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