Naturally Ink-quisitive

Art is a great way to get creative, fire up different parts of the brain, and see something in a new way. To make colourful, sustainable inks that don’t come with excess packaging or contain microplastics that end up in nature, just reach for plants from the kitchen, forest, or garden.

Born in Little Buffalo, a remote Alberta community ringed by oil extraction efforts, Melina Laboucan-Massimo knows the feeling of being helpless in the face of a warming planet. Every time her family drove across their traditional Lubicon Cree First Nation homelands, the landscape felt drier, its vegetation less vibrant.

The Tla-o-qui-aht Nation’s territory extends from one of the few remaining ancient temperate rainforests down to the Pacific Ocean. It is a place of thousand-year-old cedars up to 12 metres tall. Elk run through the misty woods, and black bears catch salmon as they migrate upstream, pulled back to rivers and streams by an unstoppable urge to spawn the next generation where they themselves hatched.

More students in remote, rural, and Indigenous communities in Canada will have opportunities to become proficient in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), thanks to the Drax Foundation.