Created by and for youth, The Matchstick is Amnesty Canada’s Arts & Human Rights magazine, dedicated to amplifying the perspective of young activists who use art as a tool to resist injustice in all its forms.

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For too long, those in power have attempted to dictate whose histories are told, whose struggles are recognized, whose pain is worthy of mourning.

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We refuse to be shaped by the hands of those who erase, distort, and disfigure.

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We create to survive, to expose, to imagine a world beyond the enforced reality of power.

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We wield art as resistance, as rebellion against the false constructions imposed on us.

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We believe that art and poetry, in their rawest form, will always exist beyond the grasp of control. They are a sign of our living culture, and a force that breaks through the silence imposed by oppression. Art cannot exist in isolation—it is always a dialogue, a confrontation, a refusal to let fear dictate the next step in time.

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We are the friends of all Indigenous peoples fighting against oppression. We are students and activists, artists, immigrants, and children of immigrants, living and working on stolen land — horrified and wide-eyed, paying close attention as those in power choose cowardice, violence, and performative diplomacy when the future demands more.

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We must always be in the process of creating and reclaiming because they are always in the process of stealing away those rights — our stories, our agency, our right to define who we are and what we expect from the world. Each word and chosen shade in this volume is a declaration of our presence, our concerns and our hope for a better world.

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