Confronting class
Renaissance activist takes it to the streets
BY Jeff Nield
Photography by Frank Vena
Thirty-seven years ago, first-year Simon Fraser University student Michael Barnholden dropped out of school. The social historian, poverty activist and poet says it was a political statement of a kind that still guides his work. “The fact is that I’m a white, middle-class male and I’m of a demographic that has all kinds of privilege,” says the now 56-year-old Barnholden. “I can’t deny those things, but I can refuse them.”
His latest book project, a collaboration with his wife Nancy Newman and photographer Lindsay Mearns, is Street Stories: 100 Years of Homelessness in Vancouver.
Due out in November, the book illustrates how the demographics of homelessness have shifted to affect the most vulnerable in society—women, Aboriginals, the elderly and children. “There was homelessness in the ’80s, but it’s taken on a different character now,” he says. “It’s become institutionalized. I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that as long as we have neo-liberal regimes in power we’re going to have homelessness. It’s part of that agenda.”
“You can be a writer without being an activist and an activist without being a writer,” he explains. “I just happen to do both of those things.” Barnholden’s work includes an English translation of Métis leader Gabriel Dumont’s memoirs, editing and writing poetry as part of the Kootenay School of Writing and being a social historian of Vancouver’s class struggle.
Barnholden is also a disability advocate, an educational director and an inner-city tour guide, with one principle uniting his diverse work life. “If it ain’t political, I’m not interested,” he says.
Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, he moved to the Toronto suburb of Scarborough when he was six, before arriving in Vancouver. He says he’s inherited a strong sense of fair play from his journalist father, but rejects the elder Barnholden’s belief in objective journalism, preferring to take a stand.
As the managing editor of Simon Fraser University’s English department literary magazine, West Coast Line, he encourages other writers to express radical points of view that challenge preconceptions about race and class.
In the midst of all this, Barnholden also works as the associate director of Humanities 101, a decade-old, student-conceived program run out of the University of British Columbia. The program offers free university-level liberal arts and social sciences courses to those who can’t afford formal education.
Barnholden has come full circle from his rejection of post-secondary education, now drawing a salary from both of the region’s major universities, using their resources and influence to give a voice and opportunity to people who are marginalized.
“I think that class is a really important, neglected thing in our society,” says Barnholden. “Why are some people poor and some people rich? Why can some people pay the rent and some not?”
