Stories of Resistance, Resurgence, and Resilience in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, Ontario) is a multi-year project (2016-2020) which seeks to build a local oral history of activisms through intergenerational, activist storytelling workshops. These workshops, each of which spans several days, invite community activists, artists, and organizers together across generations, organizations, and movements to share and record diverse stories of working for change in Nogojiwanong. The project defines “activisms” widely, to include people who are activating not only through protest, but also through quiet advocacy, arts practices, ceremony, cultural resurgence, resilience, and survival, often in the face of ongoing marginalization and oppression. With a focus on “non-famous” activists, we record the stories of change-makers whose daily practices of resistance and reclamation might otherwise not be widely known, and whose contributions to this community might remain unrecognized. This project is led by Dr. May Chazan and the Aging Activisms Collective at Trent University, facilitated in collaboration different community organizations in different years. In addition, some years also involve fourth-year undergraduate students in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies (in the course “Activists and Activisms: Feminist and Decolonial Perspectives”). For each of these workshops, we gather gratefully on the territory of the Michi Saagiig Anishinaabe, in the territory covered by the Williams Treaties.

We will be adding to these in the years to come. Stay tuned!​

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Ownership of the stories shares rests with the storytellers, media capsules were created as a collaboration between
storytellers and Aging Activisms, and these are not to be reproduced, altered, or used for commercial purposes