“31 students, that’s pretty good, considering the weather!” I breathed a sigh of relief looking at the sign-in sheet for our school’s first Bike to School Day. It wasn’t torrential rain, but I was worried that even the gray drizzle would be enough to warn people off. But we had a full bike rack and a number of happy kids with Safe Routes to School goodie bags.

The event was a result of a few months of direct work, but even more organizing time before that. This was the first year I had truly been involved in organizing at my kids’ school. Even though I wrote in my book about how to make your kids’ school more environmentally friendly, it was all based on expert interviews, not personal experience.

In working with our school and school district this year, I learned quite a few things first-hand about general advocacy in schools and bike advocacy specifically.

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“But how does the story end?” my older son asked.

We had just finished reading We Are Water Protectors, a powerful picture book written from the perspective of an Anishinaabe girl. She talks about how her people regard water as life and how a “big black snake” threatens the water and therefore them. While the book never names what the “snake” is, the pictures clue the reader in – it’s an oil pipeline. Like many real-life young people like Autumn Peltier, the narrator is an Indigenous water protector committed to halting water from becoming polluted with death instead of life.

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