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Wenzdae (she/her) is an Afro-Indigenous, multi-media artist hailing from the Georgian Bay Metis Community, of which she is a registered and claimed member.
I’ve written before about how university, for me, was quite a lonely experience. The movies and TV shows I watched growing up—depicting college or university as this “straight out of a movie” experience—set me up for a sore disappointment when I found myself unable to adapt to the fast-paced, extroverted lifestyle I expected. I found it hard to make friends, and even harder to keep them.
The echinacea were still alive when the first bell of the school year rang. They’re also called coneflowers, and this is how my mother ensured we shared a name—that I carried her with me safely. Her name is Echina, mine is Connie. I didn’t understand, at first, why we didn’t have the same name. I both knew and didn’t in 2018, when the Toronto District School Board trustees voted to remove police officers stationed in their schools.