Saskatoon Pride Parade holds festivities online again this year
Event celebrates with pre-recorded video and photo submissions, music and more
The Saskatoon Pride Parade on Saturday had the same technicolour fanfare as previous years, with people dancing and cheering while dressed in their best rainbow finery — all contained to a screen.
It's the second, and “hopefully the last” parade to go virtual, said parade co-host Kissy Duerré, who hosted the event alongside Elise Pallagi from a suite at the Park Town Hotel.
“It was a huge change in how (Saskatoon Pride) normally do things, in celebrating the Pride parade, but it also reminded us all how a community can come together during the toughest of times,” Duerré said.
The parade included pre-recorded segments and video and photo submissions, alongside performances from local musicians Too Soon Monsoon, Anna Haverstock, and Saul the Singer, Mitch Larson and LJ Tyson. It was streamed on Saskatoon Pride's Facebook and Youtube pages and is still available to view online.
The title of parade marshal, an honour bestowed to someone making noteworthy commitments to 2SLGBTQ+ communities and pushing for change, was given to the province's front-line workers this year for their work during the pandemic.
To start things off, Saskatoon Pride Co-chairs Kasey Atcheynum and Natasha King discussed the importance of intersectionality during the month of June, which is both Pride and Indigenous History Month.
Atcheynum acknowledged that the month started with the announcement from Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation of 215 unmarked burials at the site of a residential school.
For non-indigenous people, sharing that grief and trying to understand the experiences of Indigenous and two spirit people “is not easy, but important work,” she told King.
“I think it's important that those bridges also happen within Pride.”
This was followed by a series of pre-recorded segments discussing the year that was. In one featuring staff at Outsaskatoon, community support advocate Connor Rodriguez took a moment to think about the challenges faced by 2SLGBTQ+ people during the COVID -19 pandemic and beyond.
Even though people couldn't meet in person, when Outsaskatoon set up its community support hub to assist people during the pandemic, the same connections were happening, he said.
Community members who had used such spaces for years turned up “checking to see if we were here,” because they knew Outsaskatoon had their back, Rodriguez recalled.
And when Outsaskatoon put out a call to the community for supplies and resources, people were always there to answer.
“The community always comes out,” Rodriguez said.
“Stepping up in this way is nothing new for the 2SLGBTQ+ community. When I think about Pride and the way that we started off, it was us stepping up for each other.”