Description: This paper highlights the role and experiences of participants in a grassroots cultural association in a small Northern Ontario city, the Sault Malayalee Association, in fostering associational life through cultural and minority-language maintenance activities. This work contributes to combating isolation, encouraging positive culture-specific associations to place, and fostering networks of mutual-aid. The research highlights the re-emergent significance of voluntary and mutual-aid societies in contexts of migration and significant local demographic change, transnational resource-sharing facilitated by technology, and factors that shape community conflict in such contexts.
Explanation of relevance to theme: The paper explores the re-emergence of grassroots, cultural associations in post-industrial Northern Ontario and their significance in fostering connections between people and place. While cultural mutual-aid societies have played historically significant roles in the development of urban and rural communities of Northern Ontario since the early 20th century, most have undergone significant shifts in focus or descended into moribundity following greater ethnic integration in the post-war years and declining rates of immigration following the region’s de-industrialization. Due to economic shifts and immigration policy changes in the 2010s, the region began to experience growing rates of immigration that began to significantly shift the region’s demographics, which were disproportionately older, white or Indigenous, and Anglophone. The case study of the Sault Malayalee Association underscores the continued relevance of mutual-aid principles in empowering newcomers and cultivating a sense of place-attachment. Similar to the first era of cultural associations in Northern Ontario, it highlights the importance of expanding the scope of “legitimate subjects” that can define a place as their own, while navigating the dynamics of the colonial legacy. Uniquely, however, associations in the contemporary era draw on new technologies that facilitate sharing of resources through organizations such as NORKA Roots, established by the Government of Kerala (the indigenous state of Malayalee peoples in India) to mitigate the challenges experienced by Non-Resident Keralites. Such connections facilitate the sharing of resources to foster a Malayalee sense of place abroad, such as through a common Malayalam language curriculum for youth and supports navigating Kerala government services.
