Mikaela shares how she grew up in a predominantly white community in B.C. and experienced racism, such as people making fun of her lunch. She voices how stories can be healing. She notes that belonging is a space where she feels permission to land and rest.
Mikaela Chia is a second-generation immigrant settler currently living on the ancestral and unceded Coast Salish Territory of the Lək̓ ʷəŋən (Le-kwung-en) and W̱SÁNEĆ (wh-say-nech) Peoples (Victoria, BC). As a Peranakan woman, she has ancestral roots in Singapore, the Malay peninsula and Southern China. Mikaela is currently an M.A. student in counselling psych at UVIC and is passionate about co-creating spaces that honour the voices, stories, and lived experiences of people & communities in the ways that they feel most heard and safely witnessed. As a Clinical Counsellor and in research, Mikaela centres her work in identity, intergenerational resistance, racial trauma, and the power of collective healing.
