Brielle Beardy-Linklater capped off an extremely busy 2018 by winning the Sybil Shack Human Rights Youth Award, which recognizes Manitobans aged 25 and under who have made it their business to fight for people’s freedoms.
The LGBTQ+ activist received this recognition at the most recent Manitoba Human Rights Awards Dec. 10 and had to contend with an unexpected fire alarm halfway through her acceptance speech.
“I ended up just pushing through,” she said Jan. 29. “I was going to take as much time as I needed to because … I thought to myself, ‘When is the last time that any of these people have listened to a two-spirit person before?’”
This isn’t the first time that Beardy-Linklater has spoken about her identity in front of a large group of people, since she spent a lot of 2018 raising awareness for Indigenous health and issues that uniquely affect members of the LGBTQ+ community.
While this information was conveyed at youth speaking engagements across the country, Beardy-Linklater’s most high-profile gig last year was serving as the grand marshal of the 31st annual Winnipeg Pride Parade.
Beardy-Linklater said she enjoyed going “rogue” in her duties of leading the parade by diverting part of the crowd away from the scheduled route to the busier Portage Avenue in order to give their cause more exposure.
“Back when Pride first started it was very political, so I kind of went with the narrative that Pride is indeed political and should be a celebration of our human rights,” she said. “We should be using that as a platform to talk about issues that are affecting queer and trans and non-binary and gender varied individuals.”
After growing up in Thompson, Beardy-Linklater moved to Winnipeg in 2017 to enrol in a political science degree at the University of Manitoba, but eventually drifted away from higher education in favour of her activism.
However, the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation member has found her way back into the world of politics by working on the campaign of Leah Gazan, who is currently seeking the NDP nomination in the Winnipeg Centre district for October’s upcoming federal election.
“She’s known for helping promote UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, so she’s a really large activist here,” Beardy-Linklater said. “We’re going up against an incumbent MLA, Andrew Swan, for that nomination, so it’s kind of a battle right now, but I feel really optimistic.”
Moving forward, Beardy-Linklater said one of her biggest long-term goals is to establish a two-spirit centre in Winnipeg, where she can provide other Indigenous transgender and queer individuals with a space to meet and access harm reduction services.
Otherwise, Beardy-Linklater says she eventually wants to return to Thompson in the hopes of talking with locals who might be contending with the same struggles that she encounted during her upbringing, like addiction, depression and prejudice.
“I think that’s the largest part of what I do, to share my story,” she said. “My hardships of growing up in a small mining town with a lot of homophobia and racism, because it was really difficult growing up there.”
