Counterstory works with schools, organizations, and artists to promote equitable narratives in storytelling and knowledge sharing.
Why we do it
Storytelling is not neutral. It reveals whose experiences are worth sharing, preserving, and celebrating. It produces and reproduces narratives through which we can understand ourselves, others and the world around us. It determines who gets to be the hero and who has to be the villain (or the victim). It tells us who is credible enough to listen to.
Across cultures, people have long created, shared, and preserved their own stories. And yet, a history and legacy of colonialism and oppression has enabled a dominant narrator (and accompanying dominant narratives) to monopolize the storytelling space. Our media has centred the experiences and biases of dominant culture. As a result, people on the margins are subjected to harmful tropes or erased from the story all together.
Solorzano & Yosso define counter-storytelling as “a method of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told”. Counterstory draws on anti-racist pedagogy, critical theory and an expanded conception of knowledge to challenge dominant narratives and create space for more equitable narratives to emerge.
The book that sparked our work.
In late 2019, Tiyahna and Merryl-Royce sent their manuscript to eight different publishers. Seven never responded. One made so many changes that the creators could barely recognize their work. Frustrated by the gatekeeping of traditional publishing, Tiyahna and Merryl-Royce considered self-publishing Trailblazers. But that presented its own set of challenges.
Finally, thanks to a fundraising campaign that mobilized thousands of supporters and raised nearly $50,000 CAD, the pair were presented with publishing options that they otherwise would not have had access to. Trailblazers was released in 2020 by a subsidiary of Indigo Books and went on to become an Indigo bestseller. This experience became the origin for Counterstory, a nonprofit publishing press committed to creating space for more books written by and about Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour.
Trailblazers was written by Tiyahna Ridley-Padmore and Merryl-Royce Ndema Moussa and published in November 2020. The book introduces readers to Canada’s Black history through the under-told stories of over forty incredible Black change makers.