Mentoring Through Community in the 19th Annual Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival

The 19th Annual Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival came to a resounding close after twelve days of events honouring the community organizations, artists, and ancestors of the Downtown Eastside who work together to celebrate the neighbourhood in profound and engaging ways.

This year’s festival theme—“Community Is Our Mentor”—guided the music, stories, poetry, theatre, ceremonies, films, dance, readings, workshops, exhibits, and discussions of the festival, placing a focus on listening and learning from the lived wisdom and cultural practices of Downtown Eastside community. SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement was honoured to support four events at the  Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival, featuring activists, performance artists, and a comic journalist, telling their stories and illuminating directions for positive change. 

Take a look below for descriptions and video recordings from these four events, as well as a playlist we curated from previous Below the Radar podcast episodes that highlight key community organizations and folks from the Downtown Eastside.

The Northwest Territories are home to valuable resources like oil, gas, and diamonds. With mining comes jobs and investment, but also roads, pipelines, and toxic waste, scarring the landscape and deforming the ways of life for Dene communities. Paying the Land is a masterful work of comic journalism, authored and illustrated by Joe Sacco, that explores these conflicts while lending an ear to Dene peoples, elders, and activists.

In a thoughtful discussion on October 28th, Joe Sacco was joined by Dene scholar Glen Coulthard. They discussed Sacco’s inspiration for Paying the Land, what he learned and what he was surprised by when he spoke to Dene community members, and how the theme of violence wove its way through the sweeping stories of loss, resistance, and culture. This conversation later opened to the audience, who asked questions inquiring about Sacco’s drawing process, the meaning behind his particular ways of illustrating, and his approach to documenting stories in unfamiliar places. 

It’s clear from the evening’s conversation that Sacco’s Paying the Land stands as an diligent example of conscientious storytelling; sharing the resistance and survival of Dene peoples and communities within a continued colonial context of attempted spatial and cultural dispossession. 

Death Rides a Unicorn Events’ Famous Last Words was a literary and spoken word performance, where contestants competed to win the approval of Sara Bynoe, their Master of Ceremonies, alongside her silent unicorn sidekick (Hillary Angus) – who won the audience over with their dancing and visual humour. A hilarious mix of improv and poetry, this comedic event brought laughter to the audience with poems about the 1922 silent German Expressionist horror film Nosferatu, why “I” would be the last to die in a Friday the 13th-style movie, as well as poems accompanied by interpretive dances from our favourite unicorn sidekick. This comedic literary event was inspired by the pandemic years, in which everyone has experienced varying forms of loss and sadness. To counter the bleakness, the organisers felt a need to share humour and joy in a fun format. Comedic performers included Dina Del Bucchia, RC Weslowski, Erin Kirsh, and Bendan McLeod.

This event was organized in collaboration with Death Rides a Unicorn, The League of Canadian Poets, Hummingbird Communications and Design, and SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.

To emulate the a purpose of the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival—to invigorate our deep connections to the neighbourhood, draw out prevailing urban issues, and appreciate the area’s array cultural and arts-based underpinnings—our office has created a special Below the Radar playlist that highlights episodes with key community organisations and figures from the Downtown Eastside. The playlist includes voices from Megaphone Magazine, Aboriginal Life in Vancouver Enhancement Society, the Binners’ Project, as well as community advocates Jackie Wong and Libby Davies, and substance use activists Eris Nyx, Micheal Vonn, and Ann Livingston.