One of Michael Sikorsky’s first business ventures, when he was seven years old, was what he calls Desk Sales. “I would open up the drawer where I put all my top possessions and auction them off to my brother and sister. I would bundle items or hold back items till the next desk sale. I loved it.”

Flash forward to 2009. Sikorsky has started six businesses, made two exits and was forced out of a company he founded. He is an angel investor, software programmer and self-professed hair product enthusiast. And he’s done all of this with a computer engineering degree from the University of Alberta and the help of books. Thousands and thousands of books. Based in Calgary, Sikorsky has created what you might call his own personal MBA-style reading list and, in the open-source tradition he comes from, posted it on Google Books for everyone to see.

Sikorsky’s list offers a peek inside the mind of a successful young entrepreneur. Unlimited talked with him about how he got started, which books have influenced him most and why he doesn’t read in the bathroom anymore.

Were you an obsessive reader as a child?
No, it didn’t really hit me till around 12. Until then, I think I had read – by volition – a few Encyclopedia Brown books. I got passionate about reading when I realized how it helped me do stuff, like learning how to program computers.

You’re not just a serial reader, but also a serial entrepreneur.
The first real company I started, when I was 26, was Servidium, which ThoughtWorks bought when I was 28. After selling Servidium, I entered what I like to call my post-exit depression. You’re supposed to be happy, so, you feign it, but on the inside I felt like my “meaning bubble” had just been popped.

Why did you post your reading lists on Google?
I love what Google is doing for books. And I knew that putting my books online would help other entrepreneurs. Most people guard their book lists or forget what books helped them grow. Being able to search the books I’ve read for quotes, for instance, is really powerful. When I search my books list for the word “enzyme,” I find one of my favourite quotes, by Gérard Bricogne: “Mankind is a catalyzing enzyme for the transition from a carbon-based to a silicon-based intelligence.” [This appears as an epigraph in Mark Buchanan’s book Nexus.]

Would you have learned as much only from school?
Reading is how I learned pretty much everything I know, so if you said I could only have one of the two, I would pick reading. But I loved university. Reading plus school plus doing is the secret combination. And doing is at least 50 per cent of the equation. Doing gives context to everything you read in a book.

What do you read in the bathroom?
I used to read in the bathroom. Now my 18-month-old twin daughters always want to come in there with me. Basically, we floss and do makeup.

If you were to write a business book, what would it be called?
Opposite George: The George Costanza Guide to Business. The premise is, basically, to do things opposite to what people expect. Why start a company when you’re 40? Start one when you’re 20. U

Stuart Bailey is a private person – at least when it comes to work. In agreeing to speak with Unlimited about his job, for instance, he cheerfully and apologetically said, “I can only speak for myself, not for the government.” That’s because Bailey is an information management and privacy strategist for the Ontario Ministry of Finance, where he navigates the complex, sometimes intangible and often confidential world of data. Not that he’s necessarily trading in top-secret information – “I don’t have a lot of sensitive material,” he admits – but for someone whose work is all about managing, sharing (and sometimes not sharing) information, Bailey is sensitive to the challenges of describing what he does without saying too much. He gives it a try.

The Man Who Wasn’t There: Stuart Bailey’s official office at the Ministry of Finance

“My job is to help regular people in different program areas integrate practice and information into their daily work.” Huh? “Really, it’s helping people deal with information overload,” Bailey adds. Oh, right.

That could range from helping staffers manage email to helping colleagues understand the logistics and legalities around sharing information. “Storage is cheap, but finding it is very expensive,” Bailey says. A gigabyte of storage might cost only 20 cents, but a company will have to shell out another $1,300 or so to manage, share and protect that information. “It’s not just about an object sitting in a space.”

“The type of work I do is about understanding broad abstractions. Information,” he points out, “is always part of something else that you do.” In that sense, we are each de facto information managers, even though we might not consider this part of our real jobs. It is always, Bailey explains, wrapped up in our other tasks.

After earning a BA in cultural studies and philosophy from Trent University, Bailey went on to complete a master’s in information studies at the University of Toronto. Warm and engaging, his philosophy background quickly surfaces. “A large part of the work I do is – pardon me for lapsing into code – to understand basic metaphysics, entities, attributes and relationships. I have to operate in abstract areas. Privacy is not a monolithic object. It’s not a like a shoe,” he says. “A shoe will have certain dimensions, it goes on your foot, you can wear it in certain weather. But privacy could be a whole range of things.”

Bailey’s Virtual Office

Bailey, whose official mailing address is for the Central Agencies Cluster at the Ministry of Finance in Toronto, in actuality divides his time between three offices.

Bailey telecommutes from his couch-office

+ This office in the picture is where I’m stationed, but sometimes I work with the rest of the team in Oshawa. I also work at home. My employer has a great teleworking project and a lot of flexibility. I spend more time focusing on work and less on additional stressors like whether I’ll make it home in time to pick up my daughter before her daycare closes.

+ I have one computer and BlackBerry. It’s not like I produce a certain number of widgets a day. Where I’m located is sometimes not as important. I don’t always have to be tied to a desk, but I do have to ingest, analyze and provide comment on information for colleagues.

+ Yeah, sometimes I can’t find things. It’s like asking a ditch-digger where you put the shovel. Well, you can just find another shovel.

+ That’s a tennis ball on my desk. I bounce it around to relieve stress or think about things in a different way. Sometimes the best way to focus on an abstract problem is not to focus on it. You have to let the brain refresh and let your mind wander.

+ Those boxes are filled with paperwork. Although I work a lot with electronic media, I like the tactile quality of reaching for an article. I have to stay on top of new developments such as the use of wikis or policy development or a recent court decision. I make sure I don’t keep more around than I need. U

On my last stop of the trip, autumn arrives in the form of a cold wind ripping through Saskatoon’s streets. I head to the Mendel Art Gallery, not for the art per se, but for the coffee (I’m told its cafe, Museo, serves the best espresso in town). While the rest of the city is quiet this Sunday afternoon, visitors jam into the gallery to see three new exhibitions. I flag down a curatorial assistant, who introduces me to Troy Gronsdahl, alone in the basement, away from the crowds, where he plans the popular programming of the Saskatoon’s best arts institution.

VITALS: Troy Gronsdahl, public programs assistant, Saskatoon

For those unfamiliar with how museum programming works, could you explain your job?
I handle a range of programs, write interpretative texts, help with the website and develop new media. I manage our drop-in DIY art space called StudioXPRESS. People can work with professional art materials and the activities are designed to dig deeper into the themes of the exhibitions. I also spearheaded and launched a podcast that’s sort of like Mendel Radio. I interview artists or curators and play music by Saskatchewan artists. Museums are constantly going through self-critical analysis: What are we doing? How can we do it better? Are we reaching our audience? Are we responsible to our community?

How did you become a jack-of-all-trades Saskatoon’s art scene?
One of the great, but also most challenging, parts of working in the arts is that is is chronically understaffed. You learn a lot of different jobs and take on many roles.

As an artist and musician, I’ve always worked on DIY projects. I run an indie hip-hop label, Clothes Horse Records and an online record shop which used to have a bricks-and-mortar shop. It was a vanity venture that ended in… [laughs] personal failure. I’ve also had about five years of gallery experience before the Mendel, doing arts communication and a website, installing shows, running an arts placement program, working with artists, organizing talks. I’ve picked up a lot of skills along the way.

You’re definitely immersed.
My pet peeve is when art organizations hire from outside the community. Art jobs are rare and competitive, so it creates a fracture. They’ll parachute someone in from Toronto with a more illustrious professional background and that person doesn’t know anybody here or the needs of the community. They don’t have the sensitivity that comes from being a part of a place. So, yeah, I’m glad they picked me. U

Laura Trethewey is riding the train from Toronto to Vancouver and meeting regular Canadians along the way for our Job Training series. Every city she stops in she’ll ask one regular person about what they do for a living. Unlimited is posting the conversations on our interactive map.

This looks like it could be bible camp. Young people, mostly in their late teens, are making the cheerful, tinkling sounds of breakfast. Even the groggy kids are smiling, talking about the hows and whys of their grogginess.

In a room beside the dining area, the sun shines through a stained glass Jesus and someone plays a piano in the way people at parties absentmindedly strum guitars – half to stumble on a potential hook, half to get attention. The event, what with all the bright religious paraphernalia on the walls, sounds like a hymn written by Rufus Wainwright. Maybe. Only this isn’t Bible Camp. It’s Gay Camp. At least, that’s what one of the founders calls it.

Photograph by Curtis Comeau

Kristopher Wells stands in the middle of the morning hubbub. Breakfast is over for the most part, and the campers are starting to look busy, entering the lobby, exiting, returning, grouping up. Wells talks to the campers who come up to him, like the big, copper-haired kid in a neon blue Obama shirt. But mostly, Wells, who is well built, head shaved, and wears the eternally unfashionable uniform of a camp counselor – khaki shorts, socks rising out of outdoorsy shoes – is playing host to a group of media. He selects a few articulate, camera-friendly kids to tell their stories to a local news reporter. After he ushers the interviewer and interviewee outside to talk in the morning sun and then sits off to the side watching the younger generation spread the good news of Camp Fyrefly. He looks proud. This, just as much as what will go on at the camp itself, is what the camp is about.

Wells started Camp Fyrefly as a place for Canada’s “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-identified, two-spirited, intersexed, queer, questioning, and allied youth,” (or LGBTTQ&A) in 2004. That broad definition is how Fyrefly is described on the website, and it’s a big tent. (The “y” in Fyrefly is not a typo – it stands for youth.) Embedded in that misspelled jumble is the goal to foster leadership in teens. The camp doesn’t exactly have sessions on how to give, say, Obama-style, hope-infused speeches or to create the next generation of LGBT CEOs; the leadership training is more internalized. Which makes sense, considering that a lot of the problems LGBT youth face are internalized, too.

Before he started Camp Fyrefly, Wells was a teacher in St. Albert, a suburb of Edmonton. After a student from the school killed himself, Wells felt responsible. “That was a significant turning point in my own life,” he says. “We had never been able to talk about our identities in the school environment. I saw how the school dealt with it, with complete denial and silence, and decided that I couldn’t be in that kind of environment as a gay teacher who had to be closeted to work.”

He left teaching and joined a youth group called Youth Understanding Youth, which became Camp Fyrefly. Now Wells runs workshops in four provinces and has worked with more than 150 teens (the average age of attendees is 18, who can attend for a subsidized cost of $25). This is possible because the camp is more about community than bricks and mortar. It can go anywhere, even to this church in St. Albert.

As kids mill around, the local media are talking with one such kid who just ran for city council in Surrey, B.C. He is confident and eloquent, a born leader. “Our unofficial motto is ‘take what you need and give to others,’” Wells explains. “Someone has created the opportunity for you to be here, and it is investing in you as a leader. How are you going to repay that investment? We let the young people define the kind of leadership role they are going to take, and recognize for many of them, they need to spend the time being leaders to themselves first.”

After the campers have their time on camera, Wells is up. He speaks effortlessly and manages to make his sound bite material sound sincere. He’s like the cool teacher who had that remarkable, yet elusive ability to connect with students. Watching him, you can see just where the campers who had their moment on camera might be in a few years. U

Get out your crayons and click on the first image below to see an illustrator’s homage to the customer service industry.

HAYLEY WICKENHEISER
Forward for Eskilstuna Winden, in the Swedish Men’s league
Hayley Wickenheiser is arguably the best female hockey player in the world, and possibly the best that’s ever lived. Wickenheiser, who is 31, led the Canadian national women’s hockey team to two Olympic gold medals, played in the Summer Olympics as a softball player, and in 2003 became the first woman to score a goal in a professional men’s league.

: What’s Eskilstuna like?
It’s a quiet, industrial city of about 100,000 people, west of Stockholm. It’s known for motor sports and handball; hockey is third or fourth on the list. I live on sort of a farm, and we are constantly around horses. I love it.
: How’s your eight-year-old son, Noah, adapting?
He really enjoys it but he misses his friends back in Canada. He’s learning Swedish at school. At the grocery store I ask him, “What do these labels say?”
: How does Sweden compare with Finland, where you played in 2003?
Finland was my first experience living abroad by myself. That was a pretty interesting, yet isolating experience. I think I was better for it. You have some bizarre experiences. I remember winning Player of the Game once and getting a bag of fish. That was supposed to be a good thing. Crazy.
: How is Swedish hockey different from Canadian hockey?
It’s a more patient game, more of a thinking game. The trap style makes it very tough; in a women’s game I might get six, seven chances to score. Over here it doesn’t happen as much. They also focus a lot on skill development: on skating, shooting and passing.
: You’ll return to Calgary this spring to train for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Then what?
Post 2010, I don’t know if I’ll play in another Olympics. I could see myself working for the International Ice Hockey Federation, developing the game around the world. Or developing better options for elite women players. With my experience I’d probably have something to offer an NHL club. If I ever step out of the game completely, medicine is something I’ve always seen myself pursuing. But it’s a great life to be a professional athlete. When I was a kid, I never thought I’d have this opportunity. It’s nice to be living it.
: What do you miss about home?
Right now, I miss sunlight. I miss Hockey Night in Canada. A lot. And I really miss a good Alberta steak.

: photograph by calle abrahamsson / JAN 22.09 / 11:19 AM / ESKILSTUNA / SWEDEN

MATT THIRLWELL
Western zone vice-president of sales, Foster’s Wine Estates
As a top executive with Foster’s Group, the world’s second-largest wine company, Matt Thirlwell oversees brands including Wolf Blass,
Penfolds and Beringer, and manages a portfolio that includes wines from Australia, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa and California.

: How did you get interested in wine?
When I was at school, I worked at a wine store part time, which felt somewhat glamorous. Like any 18-year-old, I was pretty interested in drinking beer, but I think when you’re around wine, it’s tough not to develop an interest. I like the fact that it changes every year. Some wines have such an incredible pedigree; some vineyards have been around for over 100 years.
: Don’t you ever get bored of drinking wine?
If you look at what people drink when they’re starting out – and that’s about 80 per cent of the population – it’s fruit-forward, easy-drinking products, like Little Penguin and Lindemans. Over time your palate develops and you look to more complex and sophisticated wines. Collecting wine is a huge hobby of mine, and I’ve had the opportunity to taste some of the greatest wines in the world.
: How’s the wine industry different from Alberta to B.C.?
Alberta has come a long way. I love going back home to visit family and seeing the great restaurant and wine businesses in Edmonton and Calgary. But Vancouver’s always been ahead of the curve in that sense.
: What have you learned from visiting your company’s vineyards?
Because wine is a luxury product, people associate wineries with luxury. I think it’s a big surprise for people that winemakers are actually farmers. I visited Coonawarra, which is a tiny, tiny wine region in South Australia. You go there and it’s a small rural area, as flat as Saskatchewan, but it’s the top Cabernet-producing region in all of Australia. That’s the reality of the wine industry. Big rubber boots and dirty hands.

: photograph by adrian brown / JAN 21.09 / 1:41 PM / VANCOUVER / CANADA

Joel Berube has a strong stomach. It takes more than a few bus explosions, bloody limbs and bazookas in the face to give him stage fright.

Last summer, the actor and model spent a month portraying an Afghan villager/terrorist/opium farmer in training exercises at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright, about 200 kilometres southeast of Edmonton. Berube was usually woken before 6 a.m. and, along with other actors, shuttled from his bunker to the makeup chair. There, artists would produce a gruesome replica of, say, a throat wound on his neck. Then he would wait, out of sight, for a smoke bomb to explode – his cue to be “discovered” by the medics, who would pantomime an emergency tracheotomy and airlift him to safety on a chopper. His performances helped prepare Canadian soldiers for duty in Afghanistan. The scenes were graphic, often featuring disembowelled and otherwise broken actors and dummies (one of them nicknamed “the napalm dude”).

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“To be immersed in a scenario where someone is hurt, it really got to some people,” Berube says. “It felt so real.” Add in 12-hour days and being separated from friends and family for a month, and “work stress” took on a whole new meaning. But it was no problem for Berube, who has the sort of irrepressible energy you can’t get from a caffeine buzz. “People often ask me how I do it,” he says. “I drink orange juice. Every morning.”

The 29-year-old started acting in 2001. (You can see him in The Walter Gretzky Story and the opening scene of Brad Pitt’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.) At CFB Wainwright, however, he operated more on instinct than experience. “At one point, I had to jump out from behind this corner,” he explains. “So I popped up, and this soldier was pointing a gun at me. I fell over as if I’d been shot and people said how realistic it was. But I wasn’t acting at all.”

Berube, who was born in Manitoba and moved to Edmonton as a child, intends to continue acting but plans to resist the call of Hollywood. “When I first started out, it was a tough couple years. But after that I’ve never had trouble finding work. Hollywood is coming here.” So, no, he’s not ready to sign up for military service overseas. U

As kids funnel into the cafeteria of the Ben Calf Robe-St. Clare school, Scott Ward is uncharacteristically flustered, even if he doesn’t show it. He’s waiting calmly at one end of the boxy, beige room, repeatedly flipping and catching a cordless microphone with one hand, his dark, short hair gelled back, his blue shirt traditionally decorated with red and white ribbons dangling from the back and sleeves.

Ward is standing beside a row of chairs for volunteers he hopes to pull from his audience, the 40 or so aboriginal junior high students who attend this northeast Edmonton school for its focus on native spirituality and culture. But filling those seats won’t be easy. For one thing, the audience is rather small – which wouldn’t be so bad if Ward had the chance to handpick his subjects, like usual. No such luck. Of the group sitting cross-legged and antsy on the hardwood before him, only seven returned parent-signed permission slips letting them participate in today’s show. So he seats them and two reluctant teachers, then gets on with it. He introduces himself to the students and declares that he’s a hypnotist, adding, when their chatter diminishes slightly, “like Criss Angel,” a young American Goth-styled illusionist the kids might know from TV or YouTube.

At least one does. “He’s the antichrist!” a young girl shouts.

“Huh?” responds Ward. He quickly checks a look of shock and mild confusion, masking it with cool confidence. The show, of course, must go on.

While rough gigs are anomalies, it’s not unusual for Ward to walk into one with no idea of what to expect. Four days ago hewas in Winnipeg performing at an aboriginal health careers fair before a crowd of 70 that included government, industry and native rep-resentatives. There, after picking people who might respond best to a few suggestibility tricks (arms fall beneath imaginary weights, mouths salivate as hands squeeze juice from invisible lemons), he even managed to bend a couple of elders to his power of suggestion, convincing them they were late for line-cook jobs at McDonald’s.

But today at the school, success is sporadic. Ward gets most of the kids to kick off shoes teeming with unseen spiders; he gets one to forget her name. At the same time, though, one of the teachers refuses to impersonate Shania Twain, and a girl who’s proven rigidly immune to hypnotic suggestion joins the audience after a whispered word from Ward.

And still, the school show is actually the type he prefers. A teacher by training, Ward would probably still be one if he believed kids could rely on classroom curriculum alone to guide them past the pitfalls of youth – gangs, drugs, teen pregnancy, ennui – and into adulthood. Instead, he gave up the profession in 2006 for the long shot of a life on stage. Since then he’s travelled the continent, mostly via native reserves, conjuring up promising futures in young, subconscious minds. Luckily, it has proven to be an untapped entertainment market, one that he, as a 32-year-old aboriginal, has cornered.

And now, in the afternoon sunshine blanching the Ben Calf Robe cafeteria, Ward paces before his volunteers, their heads resting on neighbours’ shoulders, eyes closed. He’s turned serious.

“As a hypnotist,” he says, his cadence calming, “you can help people with their dreams and goals. I want you to know that any goal you have will come very easy to you, as you will work very hard to accomplish it.” He asks them to imagine a dream career. Hockey player. Nurse. Just finishing school. “Make it big and bright,” he commands. “Make it beautiful.”

On stage, a girl picks animatedly at her teeth – a future dentist, perhaps? But other than that, responses are subtle, like those of a boy at the end of the row, smiling, his hands twitching in a way that seems to betray consciousness. But maybe his current state of mind doesn’t matter. The important thing may simply be that he’s smiling.

Last summer, the National Aboriginal Health Organization dispatched a dozen role models to travel to aboriginal communities and schools across Canada to talk about their lives. The group’s spokesperson, James Makokis, 25, is a second-year medical student at the University of Ottawa who is from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation near St. Paul in eastern Alberta. He likes to make an impact when he speaks to large groups. Once, he wore his sister’s traditional Cree dress on stage while talking about being “two-spirited,” an aboriginal term for people who have the gift of seeing the world from both female and male perspectives. Then he took off the dress to reveal the lab coat and stethoscope underneath. _Dan Rubinstein

FIRST YOU MUST LEARN TO WALK
In my first year and a half of med school, we had one lecture on native health and it was presented by a non-native person. The very first thing he said was that native people came here 2,000 years ago across the Bering land bridge. So he started out with something that’s contrary to our own creation stories. Then he proceeded to go into all of these statistics – we have the highest suicide rate, the highest rate of diabetes – without providing the necessary historical and social context.

I was sitting with another indigenous classmate. She got up and left. I stayed, only because I was recording the lecture and couldn’t leave without causing a scene. Because of incidents like this, some classmates and I created the Medical Diversity Awareness Group to address issues that are under-recognized within our curriculum. We had an Algonquin lawyer – because Ottawa is situated on Algonquin territory – come and talk about the effects of colonization on indigenous people in terms of health, and we’re having a Cree physician come to talk about traditional medicine and ceremonies. A lot of the time, when our people go to hospitals, they don’t follow the care plans prescribed to them or take their medicine due to issues of trust. For so many years, authorities told them to do things that were incongruent with our own belief systems, resulting in adverse outcomes. If doctors aren’t aware of this, it’s harder to help their patients.

When I graduate, I want to go back to our community and work in health. Whether it’s a direct primary healthcare role as a physician or as a community medicine specialist working with larger populations, I’m not sure. But I do know that when I was at the hospital in St. Paul doing a practicum, whenever people from Saddle Lake came in, their faces just lit up when they saw me. “I’m just a med student,” I’d tell them. “I can’t do anything except listen to your heart.” But I saw the impact one person can make.

THEN YOU CAN RUN
I started running marathons four years ago. In 2006, when I was doing my master’s degree in public health at the University of Toronto, I went home for a practicum and created a running club called the Saddle Lake Health Warriors. We based it on the Running Room approach to delivering “clinics” and did three group runs every week. I gave talks on nutrition, bio-mechanics and the proper clothing to wear. Maybe 40 people came out the first time.

On the reserve, there aren’t many paved roads or sidewalks. Cars drive by and there’s a whole bunch of dust in your face; stray dogs follow you. Two people had been hit by a car and were killed a couple weeks before we started because they were walking on a dark road at night. There are a lot of barriers to doing physical activity. That’s one of the reasons we have high rates of obesity and diabetes. So we needed to create something that was cheap and accessible. Some people didn’t have proper clothing or shoes, so we fundraised. I wrote letters and got the Running Room to give us discounts. We got shoes and reflective gear. About 20 to 25 of us ended up completing the Vancouver marathon in 2006. The youngest was 10 and the oldest was 65.

With four months of training, people went from being sedentary to doing a marathon. Scientists often say we’re predisposed to diabetes because it’s in our genetics. But our ancestors were endurance athletes; they ran for miles and miles, chasing buffalo. So it’s also in our genes to be athletes.

We named the club the Saddle Lake Heath Warriors because we used to have warriors who protected the tribe. It was a very important role. Now we need to think about taking on leadership roles in other areas, like being warriors of our own health.
After I left, the group continued. They went to the Las Vegas Marathon and some of them did the Ottawa Marathon. They’re planning to do the Vancouver Marathon again in May. Our ultimate goal, when I graduate, is to do the Great Wall Marathon in China.

AND THEN YOU WILL SOAR
I came out when I was 18 and going to college in Edmonton. The first person I told was my mom, who is a professor. She was flying out to Victoria the next day and I told her that I needed to talk to her. We went to the Old Spaghetti Factory. It was getting towards the end of the meal and she knew that something was up, so I just came out with it. “I still love you, my son,” she said. “Nothing’s changed.” So off she went to Victoria, and she came back a week later with a huge stack of books: What To Do When Your Son Tells You He’s Gay, How To Cope With A Gay Child. My mom always tries to learn everything she can.

My dad’s reaction was different. Even though he always took me out trapping and fishing, he thought it was his fault because he didn’t spend enough time with me. He was very upset – and then he went and told all of his extended family, his brothers and sisters, to help him through the process. That made it easy for me, because I didn’t have to tell everyone myself. And their reaction helped him: “So what? He’s still just James.”

A lot of my dad’s reaction had to do with the fact that he went to residential school, where being “different” was not a good thing. Children were taught that “good little Indians” didn’t cause trouble, so they didn’t try to be individuals. They conformed so they could survive.

One of my dad’s brothers, the chief of Saddle Lake, told him that two-spirited people used to have an important role in our culture: they were healers, leaders, warriors, visionaries and medicine people. They had many layers, and everyone was respected for the gifts that the Creator had given them. That was one of the things that was lost when the church came here. We need to get back to those teachings.

My mom, dad, sister and kokom (grandmother) came to visit me during Pride week when I was studying at the University of Toronto. We went to the parade. There were a million people there and we were right in the front row. My kokom kept picking up the condoms and other “goodies” they were throwing and putting them in her purse – maybe she didn’t realize what they were, or maybe she did! I think she took three rolls of pictures of totally naked men. She just loved it! You don’t see that on the rez.

We took a family portrait with one of the drag queens. It symbolizes how fortunate I am. In our culture, we believe that children choose which family they are born into. My mom always reminds me, “You knew which family to go into. You knew that you would be loved, no matter what.” And I am. U