Alex Maass

Prior to joining the Broadside Collective Alex Maass worked on several feminist publications and printing collectives beginning with Bellyful, a collective that produced a feminist paper for the Toronto Women’s Liberation Movement in the early seventies.  After Bellyful and the other feminist paper of the day, the Velvet Fist, merged with newly founded The Other Woman newspaper, Alex went to Montreal where she helped to found Les Presses de Mytilène, the first feminist press in that city, which operated out of the kitchen of the Women’s Centre on la rue Saint-Urbain and for a year or more in the mid seventies produced flyers and posters for women’s demos and dances, as well as various political pamphlets.  Alex returned to Toronto after it closed and became a founding member of the Broadside collective in 1978. During this time she also joined with Susan Sturman, another Broadside collective member to open Superbia Press, a small design and printing business.

Alex contributed articles for Broadside through the late seventies where she developed an interest in feminist anthropology, material culture, and theories of oppression. In late 1980 she left the collective and moved west to take up a job running the book press at Press Gang, the feminist publishing house in Vancouver. Once in Vancouver she completed an MA in Public History and Archaeology and has since worked as an historical archaeologist in the cultural resource management sector. Alex is currently employed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada where she leads a series of research projects to investigate historical deaths at Canada’s Indian boarding schools, including a field project to identify and relocate the cemeteries and unmarked graves associated with the schools.