Vern Harper is one of Toronto’s (and Turtle Island’s) most important figures – he is one of the key founders of the concept of the “urban elder.”

While so many indigenous people on Turtle Island have been forced off the land and into the urban working class, healers such as Vern have gathered the tools to make sure indigenous resurgence is not only possible, but powerful, in our cities. Vern helped organize the Red Road March on Ottawa in 1973; founded the Wandering Spirits Survival School in Toronto, which has saved so many indigenous youth fighting colonial violence; and is the only indigenous elder to have been granted Chaplain Status at CAMH when so many indigenous peoples were being violently institutionalized by a brutal colonial regime.