Photo by TJ Rak

Rosie Archie knew she wanted to be a skater when she was 12 years old. Her older sister Charmie was already good enough to land tricks, and Archie was not far behind. There were no skate parks in Canim Lake, a Tsq̓éscen̓ First Nation reserve in interior B.C., so the sisters would travel to nearby towns to skate, where they were often the only girls—and always the only Indigenous girls.

Skateboarding became an escape of sorts for Archie. “There was funeral after funeral on my reserve when I was a kid. I was always surrounded by sadness and alcoholism and suicides. I would just go pick up my skateboard because it got me away from what was going on around me, and it made me focus on me, what my body was doing, how my board was flipping,” Archie says. “It calmed down my nervous system, just gliding down the road, listening to my wheels.”

In late 2019, after her sister’s passing, Archie had a vision: she wanted to use skateboarding as a way to reach youth in remote Indigenous communities and talk about mental health and their culture.

Nations Skate Youth was born in her living room, after a conversation with fellow skaters and co-founders Joe Buffalo, Dustin Henry, and Tristan Henry. The organization is based on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples–Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations. Its mission is “to give kids hope, and to remind them that they’re loved, and to remind them that they matter,” says Archie. “To tell them to be proud of who they are and where they come from.”

In the four years since, Nations Skate Youth has done just that, hosting skating events and donating skating equipment across Canada, and more recently, the U.S. As a non-profit, the organization is supported by donations and sponsorships from skateboarding brands, such as Dime and Vans. Using skateboarding as a conduit for connection, Archie and her co-founders set the stage of vulnerability by sharing their own stories with youth, who are anywhere from toddler age to teenagers. “It has to come from the heart,” says Archie. “Kids see the truth.”

According to the 2021 census, more than 1.8 million people in Canada identify themselves as Indigenous, making up about five percent of the total population. It’s the fastest-growing and youngest population in Canada. For Nations Skate Youth, sharing stories and lessons can empower and set a positive example of what Indigeneity looks like for these young people.

“The work that we do with the youth is giving our time and listening to them,” Archie says. “And they will often tell you stories that will make you cry on the spot or will inspire you to change how you think.”

Nations Skate Youth also uses skateboarding as a way to build self-esteem and leadership skills. Recent research indicates that there’s something to this: a 2020 study by the University of Southern California (funded by Tony Hawk’s The Skatepark Project) found that skateboarding improves mental health, helps people build community, and promotes resilience. It also found that racialized skaters felt safer in skateboarding communities than they did in other contexts. The sport has a unique ability to channel complex emotions. There’s a certain sense of infallible perseverance required when it comes to learning how to land a trick—fall down five times, get back up six. And for young people, working at something over and over again until you get it right builds an unshakable sort of confidence.

“A lot of kids say that, ‘I’m usually pretty angry. But when I’m skateboarding, I don’t feel like that,’” says Archie, who now gets regular requests from communities across North America to come visit. This year, members of the organization plan to travel to Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and for the first time, Kansas City. Archie has her eye farther afield too: her dream is to bring Nations Skate Youth to visit Indigenous communities in Australia and New Zealand.

Archie feels a connection to colonized spaces around the world, where Indigenous communities are collectively learning to re-embrace their cultures amidst the aftershocks of intergenerational trauma. When working with Nations Skate Youth in places like Hawaii or the Yukon, Archie gets to observe kids relearn their languages, their dances, or even be proud of their braids and names. It’s something special.

“The effects of colonization are still happening,” Archie says. “The intergenerational trauma is still going on. And that’s reminding us [that] there’s no right or wrong [time to] learn your language, learn your culture.”