A Grande Prairie resident hopes to inspire social change for marginalized voices through her online publication, Bipan Magazine.
Founder and Editor-In-Chief, Natal Rox, says the magazine is a non-profit, online publication that aims to highlight BIPOC, queer, and disabled voices. She says the idea came to fruition while living away from the Peace Region over the summer.
“When I was living in Calgary in June of 2020, a group of friends and I were all artists. I just figured it would be cool to get everyone’s work together, make a digital account of it and offer it to people for free. It eventually grew into what it is now, where we get submissions from all over Canada for each issue,” she says.
Following the creation of the Magazine, Rox moved back to Grande Prairie, where she was born and raised to take on a few different responsibilities in addition to managing the online publication.
“Right now, I’m working as a substitute teacher with Grande Prairie Catholic School District and I also work at the Grande Prairie Art Gallery as well,” she says.
Rox says that the local community has responded well to Bipan Magazine and she’s really excited to see the publication continue to grow in the future.
“There’s a lot of local artists like Tegwyn Sky, some teachers I work with have been interested in it too. A lot of different people have been interested or submitted work in the past as well,” she says.
Rox is looking forward to seeing the engagement on the ninth volume she and the team have released to this point.
“We have some work from a Vancouver Tattoo Artist named Pengee Makade Makwa Ikwe and she’s doing a lot of work in the land back movement. She is also an activist for clean water for Indigenous people in that area. One of our content creators, Alexis, was able to get an interview with her so we are excited for people to read that content,” she says.
Volume nine is available for anyone to read on the Bipan Magazine website.