How to Become an Accidental Activist
How to Become an Accidental Activist
More than 100 Indigenous communities across Canada don’t have water that is safe to drink. Anishinaabe activist Autumn Peltier fights for clean water. A member of the Wiikwemkoong First Nation on Manitoulin Island in northern Ontario, Peltier travels around the world speaking out about the need for clean drinking water.
In the fall of 2015, Peltier and youth advocate Francesca Pheasant, also from Wiikwemkoong, represented Canada at the Children’s Climate Conference in Sweden. There they talked about how global warming is hurting the planet and causing water shortages.
The next year Peltier brought her message to a meeting of Canada’s premiers. She helped her great-aunt Josephine Mandamin (see sidebar) perform a water ceremony, sang a water song and spoke to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about her climate concerns.
In March 2018 Peltier spoke at the United Nations on World Water Day. “One day I will be an ancestor,” she said, “and I want to leave a legacy for my great-grandchildren so they know I worked hard to ensure they have a future.” She was back at the UN in September 2019, speaking at the United Nations Global Landscapes Forum. Peltier emphasized to her audience that water is vital, reminding them that people can’t eat money or drink oil.
Peltier is known as a “water warrior.” “We are water,” she said. “We come from water—and when the water is sick, we are sick.”
The creative team behind How to Become an Accidental Genius are back with a new volume. They follow the same template in this examination of activism. Ten chapters introduce key concepts for activists, including finding one’s passion, noticing what’s needed, staying focused, networking, and dreaming big. The introduction of each idea includes two short biographies related to the theme followed by three larger biographical profiles, each two to four pages in length and heavily illustrated with appropriate photographs. Sidebars are used throughout to present quotations, or very brief examples, that exemplify one of three concepts: taking action, never giving up, or Aha paragraphs that further shed light into a topic in the main entry.
The authors are to be commended for the varied and diverse range of activists that they include in the major biographies and the shorter examples. All but three of the major profiles are of people who are still living. Subjects range in age from those barely into their teens (Jonah Larsen, an American boy with many followers of his crochet channel on YouTube, who raises money for projects in Ethiopia), teenagers (including environmentalists Greta Thunberg from Sweden and two Wigsen sisters from Indonesia), young adults (including climate activist Katie Eder of the USA), adults (including Canadian-born performers Tegan and Sara Quin, Lilly Singh, and athlete and mental health advocate Clara Hughes) and older adults (including primatologist Jane Goodal, human rights activist and artist Ai Weiwei from China, and Mexican American Dolores Huerta who works for the betterment of the lives of farmworkers). While Canada and the United States are the home countries of 16 of the major profiles, New Zealand and China both are home to two of the subjects, and others are from the UK, Sweden, Indonesia, Nigeria, Nepal, Malawi, India, and Cambodia. Of the profiles, 19 are women, 11 are men. Several entries are collective, featuring sisters or, in the case of the founders of the Black Lives Matters movement, a trio of women.
Causes that activists endorse range from human rights, including the rights to live free of the dangers posed by landmines, and the rights of girls and children to education. Human rights overlap with environmental issues including the need to protect water from pollution and the pressing problem of human impact on climate change. Some activists want to see an end to discrimination based on sexual orientation or bullying of teens as addressed in the pink shirt campaign led by two Nova Scotia teenage boys. Mental health awareness and ending stigmatism are causes that are represented.
The authors do not shy away from some potential dangers that activists face. Democracy activist Joshua Wong in Honk Kong, China, is in jail, and Ai Weiwei from mainland China is living in exile. Iranian-born filmmaker Maziar Bahari was arrested when working in Iran as a journalist and continues to speak out for journalists around the world who are silenced by imprisonment or “worse”. If anything, this side of activism is downplayed in the book that focuses on the positive.
The authors’ hope “that reading about these amazing activists inspires you to think of ways you can make a positive change in the world” is definitely achievable. It may not be easy to advocate for change, but it is important and meaningful.
The 10 key ideas that frame the book are nicely summarized on one page at the end of the text prior to the end matter: glossary, resources (print, film and online), index, photo credits, acknowledgements, and author biographies.
Val Ken Lem is the collections lead for the Faculty of Arts at the Ryerson University Library.