At The Forks

Introduction to Volume 4

Adele Perry — 2025-05-21

This is a rolling issue of At the Forks, the fourth volume of a project that began in 2021. This was a time of social distancing, changing patterns, and public health regulations adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our goal was to develop a platform for accessible, engaging research that speaks to the pressing questions for people who live where the Centre for Human Rights Research (CHRR) works, and territories and communities connected to them. These include Indigenous people, lands, and waters amid a colonial project that has not ended. These also includes questions of justice for migrant people, whether of the early twentieth century or today. Our questions also include the histories and rights of people as gendered subjects at a moment when reproductive rights and the rights of people to make decisions about their gender presentation and care are under threat.

Cover Image Credit

At The Forks — 2025-02-14

Cover Image Credit by NASA Johnson

Caption: July 1, 2018: Winnipeg, Manitoba and the Assiniboine and Red Rivers are pictured as the International Space Station was orbiting at the northern-most point of its 51.7-degree orbital inclination.

“Have them suitably married”

Karlee Sapoznik Evans — 2025-02-14

In their research over the past decade, Dr. Anne Lindsay and Dr. Karlee Sapoznik Evans have come across records of arranged and forced marriages that were perpetrated within the context of Indian Residential Schools. These records and the stories they document, some of which are discussed in Evans’ doctoral dissertation, corroborate the oral history accounts shared by Indian Residential School (IRS) Survivors and intergenerational Survivors. While arranged and coerced marriages have been referenced and acknowledged in a few publications, including those of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, to date, very little research has focused on these marriages, where elements of force, coercion, and unfreedom are at play. Today Evans and Lindsay continue to uncover new information, including the case studies that are discussed below. The histories explored in this article focus on the Saint-Boniface Industrial School, which was located across the river not far from The Forks, reminding the reader that arranged and coerced marriage is not something that happened somewhere else, and casting light on the connections between marriage and the coercion of IRS pupils on the prairies. At the same time, considerable work remains if we are to trace and understand the scale, scope, and enduring legacies of these unfree marriages.

A Habitable Future

Laura Majendaagoz — 2025-02-14

On June 15th, 2023, the Centre for Human Rights Research hosted Dr. Jeffrey Ansloos for a seminar on "When the land hurts: Indigenous feminism on suicide, environmental violence, and the struggle for inhabitability." Dr. Ansloos is an Associate Professor of Indigenous Health and Social Policy and the Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Indigenous Health and Social Action on Suicide at the University of Toronto. He is Cree and English and a member of Fisher River Cree Nation. In this seminar, Dr. Ansloos presented the results of his pilot study that links water insecurity and environmental degradation to higher suicide rates in First Nations communities (within Ontario).

This article is divided into two sections: an overview of Ansloos’ work and reflections on Ansloos’ call to “envision a life beyond the state.”

Histories of Gender, Reproduction and Care in Canada

Adele Perry — 2025-05-21

This annotated bibliography is a collaborative project of History 4000/7772, Histories of Gender, Reproduction and Care in Canada, University of Manitoba, Winter 2024, professor Dr. Adele Perry. It includes scholarship published since 2000. Entries are in alphabetical order, and users can navigate by searching for keywords.