The Shittiest Warrior

These days, when a comic takes aim at political issues, they assume a disposition of detached arrogance. Condescension (from a safe distance) is the shtick to which we are now habituated. The style is easy and stale, which is why Ryan McMahon’s album, The Shittiest Warrior, is so refreshing and original. McMahon is engaged. He is not that jaded satirist who passively mocks society from self-assumed heights. The Shittiest Warrior is uniquely entertaining because it comes from a place of restless honesty that refuses to indulge in charming but ultimately un-invested self-depreciation and social critique. McMahon takes it personally and his struggles make you laugh. He is a native comic who cares deeply about Indigenous issues. But, as he tells us, he also has man-boobs. He is genuinely pissed off about injustice. He grounds himself in his traditions. But he also prefers Indian buffet to the uncertainties of fishing, and therein lies the absurd predicament that he unpacks before us in The Shittiest Warrior.

McMahon delivers his reflections on racism and colonialism, all perfectly punctuated with hilarious bouts of fury over grocery checkout dividers, muddy pick-ups, and truck-nuts (those huge fake balls that super sexually confident men put on their truck hitches). When not challenging red-necks to combat, he ruminates on his paralyzing self-doubt over career choices, fatherhood, getting fat, joke endings, hitchhikers, and a mysterious buffalo that refuses to acknowledge him during a time of need. McMahon paints us a picture of himself shirtless on horseback. And if that isn’t ridiculous enough, try McMahon gasping for air in a woman’s maternity bathing suit.

McMahon of course follows greats like Charlie Hill in tackling Indigenous politics through humour. He is unique, however. His work is informed by the same kind of penetrating political insight that George Carlin deployed with such force, yet he keeps all of that in the background. In The Shittiest Warrior, McMahon chooses to foreground the question of what a ridiculously normal person could possibly do in these absurd conditions. Comics almost always focus on deconstructing only one of these aspects: the person or the conditions. But McMahon’s material is uncharacteristically alive to both. The wit here is anything but passive. He doesn’t invite us to either laugh at his follies or take up some self-satisfying vantage over and above the political fray. Rather, McMahon’s stories lead us into that preposterous space between truck-nuts and man-boobs, between the insufferable and the suffering. Good stories make you laugh. Great stories live in your soul because they matter. Ryan McMahon’s stories matter. You are not simply warm and satisfied by the end of it; you are motivated.

The first issue of Notes from the Briar Patch rolled off a Gestetner in the summer of 1973 in Saskatoon. According to founder Maria Fisher, the 10-page newsletter was to be “by and for poor people so that we could tell our own story,” and the logo, four stick figures with outstretched arms made from typewritten asterisks, meant “in unity, there is strength and support.”

After two years of failed attempts to secure funding, Fisher and co-founders David Hoskings and Vivian Fisher “just decided to do it,” disseminating 500 copies in social services offices and legal aid clinics across Saskatchewan.

Fisher, who passed on five years ago in Ladysmith, B.C., recalled that after the first issue, “donations of dollars and fivers came in, a unionist came with a handful of stamps, letters with some quarters taped to them arrived, while other people donated packages of Gestetner paper.” From this scrappy beginning emerged a magazine dedicated to those whose words were silenced (or at best, butchered) by the mainstream press, a grassroots outlet through which people could build their shared capacity to understand and influence the circumstances of their lives. While at best, mainstream journalism discusses what people do in society, the ‘patch has always looked to what society does to people, and why. It was, and remains, grounded in the convictions that everyone could (and should) be a writer and that the magazine belongs to the movement.

In 1975, Briarpatch moved to a dirt-floored basement office in Regina and has remained a resource-starved publication staffed by self-taught professionals in thrift, dipping into the red and back to the black again. That the magazine has been denied both provincial and federal grants and stripped of charitable status for fierce adherence to its principles is a point of modest pride. What stands is a magazine beholden only to its readers and comfortable in its intransigence.

Briarpatch has always been a labour of love, the key to its unlikely success, as past editor Dave Mitchell notes. “It consistently leads with the heart, and so it’s able to produce quality journalism with a tragic fraction of the masthead depth of most publications.” For forty years readers have consistently and creatively risen to its defence, often lending their scarce funds, but even more often and importantly, their time, tenacity, and passion.

In putting together this issue, what began as a dabbling in back issues soon gave way to a deeply humbling page-by-page combing of the archives. The yellowed newsprint of our first decades chronicles the early advances of neoliberalism in Saskatchewan, from experiments in strikebreaking legislation to prying open the North for uranium development. But also documented is an era when radical politics thrived: in rural communities fighting to defend the Crow Rate, in Indigenous communities organizing to protect children from state apprehension, and in extensive networks of solidarity with Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Palestine, and South Africa.

As the magazine shifted to a national focus and readership, it continued to be read by radical agrarians and pensioners in Abernethy or Elbow, SK, while proving invaluable to an increasing number of readers at the centre of radical movements in Montreal or Vancouver. For a small radical publication to not just survive but thrive in a climate increasingly hostile to print media and (more pressingly) the political left, is no minor feat. Briarpatch has kept the candle burning in dark times, incubating ideas and providing a point of connection to radical organizing and analysis.

When asked what’s kept the magazine going for the past four decades, Clare Powell, Briarpatch editor from 1979-1982, replied that “it’s never just the people in the office.” This issue of Briarpatch is dedicated to the hundreds of people – subscribers and sustainers, writers, photographers, and artists, board members and volunteers, casual and long-time donors alike – who have carried this little magazine on their shoulders and made this anniversary possible. You who continue to remind us that nothing is more valuable than what’s given freely.

To our army of supporters, we offer our most heartfelt gratitude for all that you’ve given of yourselves over four decades. And to Maria Fisher – we hope to do you right for another 40.

Illustration: Amanda Strong

A few months ago, I travelled from Mississauga, Anishinaabeg territory on the north shore of Lake Ontario, to Victoria, B.C., to speak in the Indigenous governance program’s lecture series. Before I left, I consulted with an Elder to remind myself of the protocols and diplomatic traditions we carry with us when visiting another nation. I wanted to make sure that I was respectful of both my Ancestors and of the Peoples whose homelands I was visiting.

Doug Williams from Curve Lake First Nation always makes time to meet with me and answer my questions. He reminded me to acknowledge the territory I was visiting directly after I had shared with the audience my clan affiliation, where I was from, and my name. We talked about how as a visitor in another’s territory, my primary responsibility would be to listen and to take direction from my gracious hosts. We talked about our protocols and processes of engagement that foster and maintain good relationships between our nation and neighbouring nations. We talked about how even though I am not a political leader, I carry those responsibilities no matter where I go. Off I went to Victoria.

I spoke in the First Peoples House at the University of Victoria, a beautiful building designed in the Coast Salish style. At the end of my talk, after having acknowledged that I was in the territories of the WSÀNÈC and the Lekwungen nations, a WSÀNÈC student came over and thanked me for that recognition. Although he couldn’t understand exactly what I said in my language, he heard the word “WSÀNÈC” and recognized my engagement with the protocols and philosophies of Anishinaabeg diplomacy. He was appreciative that I had invoked Indigenous political protocols of engagement even though our two nations have no formal diplomatic ties.

Had I been moving to Victoria, this kind of diplomacy would have carried even greater responsibilities. According to my own traditions, I would have a responsibility to listen, to learn, and to appreciate the jurisdiction, political culture, and traditions of the nation within which I was residing. I would have a responsibility to understand the issues this nation was facing, and I would have an obligation to support them and to stand with them. I would have a sacred duty to learn about my place and role within their political structure and their culture, and I would expect the same if one of their citizens moved to my territory.

A few weeks later, in the same room I spoke in at the University of Victoria, local Idle No More organizers held a teach-in. It was broadcast online and attracted over 1,000 people between the webcast and the live audience. Wab Kinew, a well-known Anishinaabe from the northwestern part of our nation, was one of the speakers. During his presentation he passed out gifts to the other panelists. Watching online, I smiled as he did this. Kinew was invoking the protocols of Anishinaabeg engagement. He was pointing to ancient traditions and acknowledging their importance and their relevance in contemporary society. He was honouring his hosts and fellow panelists.

Drawing on diplomatic traditions

Idle No More is the most recent surge in Indigenous resistance, a resistance that has been ongoing since the beginning of colonial conquest. Throughout history, Indigenous Peoples have continuously engaged in diplomatic traditions to seek restitution from the Crown for the abuses suffered under colonial rule and to forge a new, peaceful relationship. Each nation has its own spiritual and political mechanisms, rooted in its own unique legal system, for maintaining the boundaries of territory, for immigration and citizenship, and for developing and maintaining relationships with other nations regarding territory, the protection of shared lands, economy, and well-being, among many other things. Indigenous diplomatic traditions generate peace by rebalancing conflict between parties. Spiritual and social practices such as storytelling, the oral tradition, ceremonies, feasting, and gift-giving are designed to bond people together toward a common understanding. Our diplomacy concerns itself with reconciliation, restitution, mediation, negotiation, and maintaining sacred and political alliances between peoples.

The Idle No More movement has referenced these diplomatic traditions repeatedly in both our actions and our words. In early December, the media showed images of Wiindawtegowinini (Isadore Day), chief of Serpent River First Nation, carrying the 1764 Treaty of Niagara Covenant Chain Wampum Belt onto Parliament Hill. The Onondaga nation and its Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign brought a large replica of the Two Row Wampum into the city streets, and countless grassroots leaders have talked about the importance of honouring treaties as a way of transforming the relationships between Indigenous nations and the Canadian state.

On the West Coast in mid-February, hereditary Chief Beau Dick of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation walked from his homeland to the legislature in Victoria to perform a ceremony that involved breaking copper. To the Kwakwaka’wakw people, copper is a symbol of justice, truth, and balance, and to break copper in ceremony communicates a threat, an insult, or a challenge. Chief Dick and his supporters performed the ceremony on the lawn of the legislature because they want to change the political relationship they have with Canada – like their Ancestors, they are demanding a relationship based on justice, truth, balance, and protection of their homeland, the environment, and their way of life.

A sacred bond

Going to public school in the 1980s in rural southern Ontario, I learned nothing about Indigenous diplomacy. My experience is by no means unique. Unless Canadians have taken it upon themselves to seek out Indigenous political traditions, they likely have encountered few opportunities to learn about Indigenous diplomacy and our legal and political perspectives – yet it is precisely these concepts that hold the most promise for resetting the relationship with Canada.

For us in the Mississauga part of the Anishinaabeg nation, treaties are ongoing relationships. The word relationship is paramount here. Anishinaabeg political and philosophical traditions emphasize good relationships – with the natural world and with neighbouring nations – as the basis of good governance and a good life. For Anishinaabeg, signing a treaty means a commitment to ongoing meaningful negotiations. It means a political relationship that recognizes and respects parties’ nationhoods, legal traditions, and sovereignties. This is true whether the agreement is between the Anishinaabeg and the natural world, another Indigenous nation or confederacy, or a nation-state.

Treaties, from this perspective, are alliances with a commitment to continual renewal. Our politics are embedded within our spirituality, making treaties a shared, sacred bond between peoples. They are a commitment to stand with each other, a responsibility to take care of shared lands, and an appreciation of each other’s well-being. They are based on a profound mutual respect, and they are meant to be transformative. They transform conflict into peace by holding parties accountable for past injustices. They transform hardship into sustenance. They transform abuse of power into balanced relations. Treaties and other Indigenous diplomatic traditions transform differing perspectives into, as the Haudenosaunee say, “one mind.”

While Canada continues to engage in narrowly defined “modern treaty making” through processes like the B.C. Treaty Process and the federal Comprehensive Land Claims Agreements that require Indigenous nations to give up title and terminate many of their rights, Indigenous nations are moving forward with the resurgence of their own diplomatic traditions.

In 2011, a small delegation of people from Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) First Nation in northwestern Ontario travelled to Ardoch Algonquin First Nation (AAFN) in central Ontario to receive a Wampum Belt, or treaty, made by the women of AAFN. The bond between the two communities goes back to 2008 when members of the KI council were jailed for refusing to allow mining exploration in their territory. At the same time, Ardoch community member Bob Lovelace was also jailed for his role in resisting uranium prospecting in Ardoch territory. Paula Sherman, a family head on the traditional governing council of the AAFN, said at the ceremony: “As we present this belt, we pledge the support of our community to yours as you continue to deal with mining companies and governments.” Cecelia Begg, a member of the KI council and also a member of the KI Six who were jailed in 2008, accepted the belt on behalf of her community, saying, “We thank you for this. It marks our strong bond, a bond we may need to call upon as we face another struggle.”

Even in a modern context, treaties are a storied political relationship, consolidating sacred bonds between peoples. They are not about the cession of land or the surrender of Aboriginal title, nor do they assimilate Indigenous law into Canadian law. They are not a bill of sale. They are not a policy discussion. Whether the treaty-making process is historic or contemporary, treaties are not termination agreements.

Separate sovereignties on a shared territory

There is much evidence both in the oral tradition and in the historical record that, over time, Canada engaged in a treaty-making process that was increasingly based on coercion, deception, and violence. The Cree signed Treaty 6 while facing starvation from the massacre of the buffalo, a smallpox epidemic, and increasing settler violence. The final report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples documents several examples of misunderstandings, problems in translation, and acts of fraud on the part of the state. Although the numbered treaties were negotiated in the oral tradition of Indigenous diplomacy, the Crown failed to record Indigenous perspectives on these agreements. They did not implement what they agreed to within their own legal traditions and written documents, let alone Indigenous oral understandings.

So yes, the treaty-making process in Canada was fraught with duress. Yet, even as the political power was shifting in favour of settler governments during the signing of the numbered treaties, Indigenous leaders continued to exercise agency within the process. The negotiations for Treaty 3 were extremely difficult, and the Crown ended up making several concessions to the Anishinaabeg. Treaty 7 was negotiated under the reality that the Blackfoot Confederacy had been successful in defending their territory from outside encroachment. Indigenous Peoples still believe in the strength of their oral understandings of these agreements because, even under the threat of violence, our Ancestors made intelligent and far-reaching decisions as best they could.

Instead of interacting with First Nations through these negotiated international agreements, successive Canadian governments have chosen to interact with First Nations through the Indian Act. This continues to be a crucial mistake. Many of us believe Indigenous diplomacy is the best way forward in developing a just and fair relationship with the Canadian state, because this kind of diplomacy carries within it the terms for a nation-to-nation relationship that is respectful of separate sovereignties and nationhoods over a shared territory.

Oftentimes, divisions between Indigenous nations that signed historic treaties and nations that did not are amplified in the mainstream media. It’s an arbitrary division because treaties are simply the embodiment of a much larger set of politics and philosophies rooted in each nation’s system of international law, peacemaking, conflict resolution, and negotiation. The fundamental principles of protection of land and Indigenous ways of life, governance, nationhood, sovereignty, sharing, and non-interference remain consistent whether manifested in Mi’kmaq law or Gitksan Witsuwit’en law and regardless of whether Indigenous nations signed treaties or not.

We are all treaty people

When I asked my Elder about how to behave in another nation’s territory, he reminded me that it is individuals who carry political responsibilities within them. Indigenous diplomacy is not so much about dialogue, but about action and embodiment. Treaties are not just between Indigenous nations and the Canadian state; they are carried and acted out through the actions of individual people. In December of last year, Idle No More organizers in Toronto organized a large round dance in the intersection of Yonge and Dundas. During the round dance, I saw a non-Native man with a sign that read, “We are all Treaty People.” Under that, he had written the treaties that he was a part of, based on where he was currently living and where he grew up. He was reminding his fellow Canadians that they have enjoyed treaty rights for hundreds of years, and that they also need to uphold their treaty responsibilities.

Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred notes that Idle No More has demonstrated that many Canadians are supportive of a principled movement lead by Indigenous Peoples that addresses the protection of the land and the environmental, social, economic, and political issues facing Indigenous communities. If the resurgence of Indigenous political traditions is widely seen as the next step in decolonizing our relationship with Canada, it is critical that we understand and recognize the contemporary resilience and manifestations of Indigenous diplomacy. This kind of peacemaking is diplomacy based on love – the love of land and the love of our people – and this alone has the power to transform Indigenous-state relations into a relationship based on justice, respect, and responsibility.

Palestinian farmers plant olive trees inside the “buffer zone” in the Zaytoun area during an international day of action on February 9 to call for a boycott of Israeli agricultural products. Photos: Desde Palestina

“Both of the fishermen captured today have returned to their homes,” explains Zakaria Baker in his home in Gaza’s crowded al-Shati refugee camp the night of February 20.

Baker, an activist with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), oversees the organization’s committees of fishers in five cities in the Gaza Strip.

“Their boat is in Ashdod, and the Israelis shot the motor,” he adds.

Three days later, the two fishers recount their experience in the sandy courtyard of their family’s home in the northern town of Jabalia. They are surrounded by a dozen relatives, with a similar number of children clustered outside an iron gate.

“Suddenly the Israeli navy came with two small ships, with between five and seven soldiers per boat,” says Mohammed Shehda Sadalla.

“The captain of one of the boats ordered us to drop our nets and swim to the navy ships. We protested, telling them that we were in Palestinian waters. They said, ‘Shut up or we will shoot you.’ We didn’t follow his orders but went to the engine and turned it on. Then one of the soldiers shot it.”

Facing lethal violence, Mohammed and his younger cousin Mahmoud Moussa Sadalla followed the soldiers’ orders, removing their clothes and swimming through the cold sea to the naval vessel. Once on board, Mohammed says, they were blindfolded and shackled, then transferred to a larger ship that took them to the Israeli port of Ashdod.

After medical testing, soldiers drove them to the Erez checkpoint where they were questioned about their work, their neighbourhoods, and the Gaza seaport. “They took our names, ages, and addresses. Then they showed us an exact picture of the roof of our home on a computer.”

The interrogators tried to recruit them as collaborators. “They asked us about our economic situation and how much we earned per day and if we could help each other,” says Mohammed. He and Mahmoud were released through the checkpoint into the Gaza Strip later that evening.

The Gaza Strip, a coastal stretch of 360 square kilometres, sits at the crossroads of Africa and Asia. One of the world’s most densely populated territories, it contains 1.7 million people, two-thirds of them refugees driven from their homes in Palestine by Zionist militias, and later the Israeli army, during the State of Israel’s 1948 founding. It shares a narrow southwestern border with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and is surrounded on every other side by Israel or the Mediterranean Sea, which is constantly patrolled by the Israeli navy.

Israel has occupied the strip since 1967, but dismantled its settlements in Gaza and redeployed its ground forces in 2005. However, it kept control of the territory’s borders, seaways, and airspace, as well as its banking and telecommunications systems, its imports and exports, population registry, and even the issuance of building permits to international organizations. In 2007, Israel imposed a crippling siege. In addition to a nautical blockade, it sharply reduced the goods allowed through checkpoints under its control, ending nearly all agricultural exports from the Gaza Strip.

It also reasserted its buffer zone policy, typically enforced with live gunfire. Previously it had banned Palestinians from coming within 150 metres of the barrier separating the Gaza Strip and Israel or sailing more than six nautical miles offshore. By 2008, the buffer zone had grown to encompass a 300-metre-wide strip of land around the territory and all but three nautical miles offshore.

These areas included over 35 per cent of the Gaza Strip’s agricultural land and, many say, all of its fisheries. “From zero to eight miles there are no fish,” says Mohammed al-Bakri, general manager of UAWC in the Gaza Strip.

UAWC, founded in Jerusalem in 1986, organizes farmers and fishers in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank into agricultural and fishing committees. “We have 16 local committees for farmers,” says Sa’d Eddin Sha’ban Ziada, who coordinates the UAWC’s agricultural committees in Gaza. “We have another five for fishermen.”

Altogether, al-Bakri says, the Gaza Strip committees include 5,125 farmers, fishers, and other agricultural workers.

“We need strong local committees that can represent their societies,” says Ziada. “We support them through several training programs to build their capacity: leadership, teamwork, need assessment, gender, advocacy and community mobilization, organizing syndicates, documenting Israeli attacks, and food sovereignty. UAWC insists on these bodies being strong.” In addition to its organizing work, UAWC supports farmers and fishers with projects like home gardens, water carriers, and aquaculture programs.

Despite UAWC’s efforts, Israel’s restrictions have taken a heavy toll. Between 2007 and 2009, the Gaza Strip’s agricultural workforce fell by 42 per cent even as food insecurity had reached 61 per cent of the population. By November 2011, the Gaza Strip held only 3,097 registered fishers, down from about 10,000 in 2000.

A one-sided ceasefire

On November 14, 2012, Israeli forces used an aerial drone to assassinate Ahmed al-Jabari, Gaza Strip commander of Hamas’ Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Eight days of Israeli airstrikes and drone bombings, artillery fire, and naval shelling, answered with rocket fire by resistance groups in the Gaza Strip and mass demonstrations in the West Bank, followed. By November 21, when a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian resistance group Hamas took hold, six Israelis and 186 Palestinians – including two in the West Bank – had been killed.

The first line of the Egypt-brokered deal read: “Israel shall stop all hostilities in the Gaza Strip land sea and air, including incursions and targeting of individuals.” The text went on to promise Israel’s “refraining from restricting residents’ free movements and targeting residents in border areas.” The next day, the Palestinian government in Gaza announced that the fishing limit had returned to six nautical miles, and farmers began cautiously exploring the 300-metre buffer zone.

“After the ceasefire, the local government told farmers that their land was open,” says al-Bakri. “After they had cultivated it, Israeli bulldozers entered and destroyed it.”

As for fishers, Baker says they had even less of a reprieve. “In the three days after the ceasefire, four small boats with engines and one trawler were captured. One small boat was bombed and destroyed. The motors of two others were shot.

“Since November 24, five boats have been captured, five have been shot, and three fishermen have been injured.”

The experiences of these farmers and fishers reflect those of Gaza Strip residents as a whole. In the three months following the ceasefire, British journalist Ben White found that Israeli military attacks killed four Palestinians and wounded 91. Israeli forces launched 63 shooting attacks on the Gaza Strip and 13 military incursions into its land, as well as 30 naval attacks on fishers.

Meanwhile, Palestinian resistance groups kept their part of the deal, to “stop all hostilities from the Gaza Strip against Israel, including rocket attacks and all attacks along the border.” Aside from two mortars launched from the Gaza Strip after Israeli attacks in December, the ceasefire held – if only one way – until the morning of February 26, when Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades fired a rocket into Israel in what the group called a “preliminary response” to the death of its member Arafat Jaradat, allegedly under torture, in Israel’s Megiddo prison three days earlier.

Fishers say most attacks on them since the ceasefire have occurred within six nautical miles of the shore. But according to al-Bakri, the new limits remain insufficient. “After the ceasefire, they only opened the sea three more miles,” he says. “There are no fish in these three miles. It is the same. They just wanted to show the international community Israel giving something to the Palestinians. The situation is the same; the market is the same. Nothing has changed in the life of the fishermen.”

On March 21, the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson announced that the fishing limit would again be reduced to three nautical miles.

Farmers, he says, face small improvements for certain crops. “Some of them plant wheat close to the buffer zone. They’re afraid they won’t be able to cultivate it.”

In the Gaza Strip, farmers often plant crops according to their distance from Israel’s concrete walls and sniper towers: those requiring the least attention are planted closest. “From 50 to 150 metres, we can grow wheat,” says Ammar Saleh el-Rahel, a strawberry farmer in Beit Lahia. “After 150 metres, we can grow potatoes. This depends on how much water the crops need. We don’t have to take care of wheat or potatoes every day. And their harvest only takes a day or two. We risk our lives to grow these crops to gain any possible profit.”

El-Rahel’s rented 1.2-hectare farm lies 400 metres from the separation barrier – not far enough, he says, to save the expensive plastic sheets used to cover rows of strawberries at night from being shredded by bullets during the November attacks. And because he was unable to remove the sheets over eight days, about 80 per cent of the harvest was destroyed. “This wasn’t only for me but for all the strawberry farmers in the area.”

“We need a clear decision from the international community,” says al-Bakri. “Most of them talk about development programs for the buffer zone.” In the West Bank, UAWC organizes farmers into agricultural co-operatives to distribute their products effectively. But in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s siege has all but eliminated agricultural exports. Through its partnerships with 16 international non-governmental organizations, UAWC has launched new projects to help local farmers remain on their lands.

Near the buffer zone, al-Bakri says, many donors see these as poor investments, a perception Israel does little to discourage. “Representatives from several European countries went to the buffer zone a few weeks ago to inspect a site where they wanted to implement a project,” he says. “Israeli troops shot at them to scare them away and discourage them from developing any new infrastructure here.”

In the short term, he adds, “we don’t wait for Israeli decisions about this area. We support the farmers who are going to the buffer zone to exercise their rights to use it. We know that the Israeli bulldozers may come later and destroy it. But we have to say to the international community, ‘These are our rights. This is our land.’ ”

Boycotts are working

It is because of the uncertainty, Ziada says, that UAWC emphasizes political engagement. “We seek to push for farmers and fishermen to have a say and voice their opinions.”

He recites events for which the local committees have mobilized hundreds of participants: Prisoners’ Day, Nakba Day, Land Day, Labour Day, a festival supporting Gaza’s Samouni family (which lost 21 relatives to Israeli attacks in January 2009), a rally for fishers in the seaport, and a protest of the Palmer Report, which denied Israeli guilt for its attack on the 2010 Freedom Flotilla.

For its most recent demonstrations, UAWC joined protesters in the West Bank and 40 European cities to support a boycott of Israeli agricultural companies. Gaza events, which lasted several days, ended with a February 9 march, rally, and mass planting of olive trees in the buffer zone. On March 3, several hundred fishers sailed a flotilla of over 50 boats from the Gaza seaport to the northern town of Beit Lahia to protest Israeli naval attacks and confiscation of fishing vessels.

“To make pressure, we need a boycott of the Israelis by the international community,” al-Bakri says. “Only this will force them to allow Palestinians to use our lands and waters.”

But he thinks international reactions show UAWC’s mobilizations are working. “When I receive phone calls from Belgium, Norway, Italy, and England … it means our voice is raised and people know the issues.”

Illustration by Shantala Robinson

One year after the student strikes and Maple Spring that erupted in Quebec in 2012, the ongoing wave of social protests is having to recalibrate itself to meet a new set of challenges.

Former Liberal premier Jean Charest incited popular outrage with a proposed university tuition hike and broader austerity measures, but with last September’s election of Parti Québécois (PQ) leader Pauline Marois, many are finding that the neoliberal policies of the Charest government are only taking on slightly subtler forms. In late February, Marois held a two-day summit on post-secondary education and announced that her government would continue to increase tuition costs, much to the chagrin of the student movement.

Also continuing is the northern Quebec development project known as Plan Nord under the previous provincial government and recently rebranded Le Nord Pour Tous under Marois. According to its official website, Plan Nord is a 25-year project estimated to bring in $80 billion in investments and create 20,000 jobs in mining, forestry, and dam projects. On February 9, 36 people were arrested at protests outside a trade fair on natural resource industries in Montreal, where demonstrators chanted “Charest, Marois, même combat!” (“Charest, Marois, the same fight!”) and decried what they saw as the same colonial development plan with a new name.

Several Innu communities of Nitassinan, the name for the traditional Innu territory of northeastern Quebec and Labrador, have for years been engaged in a heated struggle against Plan Nord. On January 1, Jeannette Pilot, an Innu grandmother and long-time activist for the defence of Nitassinan, began a hunger strike. She was joined by Aniesh Vollant, an Innu youth from the Uashat reserve on the north shore of the St. Lawrence Seaway, in eating only fish broth, a cultural symbol for hardship, sacrifice, and strength for many nations, according to Indigenous scholar Leanne Simpson. Their action was directly inspired by Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence and the Idle No More movement. Vollant continued her hunger strike for 43 days, and Pilot, 82 days.

Asked why she decided to take up a hunger strike, Pilot weaves together many different issues of different scopes. Like many in the Idle No More movement, she wants Bill C-45 abolished. But she also wants an end to Plan Nord and an autonomous government for the Innu.

“Right now, Indigenous people all across the country are rising up and demanding that the government recognize their autonomy,” says Pilot, her voice noticeably weakened from her hunger strike.

Pilot’s struggle began long before Idle No More took off. In 1992 she was arrested for protesting the SM-3 dam near Sept-Îles. In 2012, she marched over 900 kilometres from Uashat Mak Mani-Utenam to Montreal to protest Plan Nord.

The Innu have never signed a treaty with the Canadian or Quebec governments, although one is currently being negotiated with the Innu band councils. Pilot sees the Idle No More movement as a way to open up the dialogue for Innu self-determination, rather than a treaty.

“The Idle No More movement has really touched me personally, and others in our territory as well. This is why we are demanding self-government,” says Pilot. “Now is the time to manage ourselves, to make our own laws, and to cut the ties with the federal and provincial governments.”

For Pilot, Plan Nord is a direct threat to Innu culture and way of life.

“We have our medicines up there, our hunting, our animals, our rivers – everything is there for us. What is in the forest is anchored in our souls. If it is destroyed, it will really be a total assimilation for us.”

Conflicting expectations

One of the main points of concern for the Innu with Plan Nord is the Romaine River dam project. The Romaine is a 500-kilometre-long river that runs south from the Quebec-Labrador border and empties into the St. Lawrence. The area is home to woodland caribou, black bears, wolverines, and other large mammals. The river, one of the last undammed rivers in Quebec, teems with salmon, eels, and many other species of fish. Hydro-Québec is hoping to complete a series of four large dams along the Romaine by 2020, which would generate a total annual output of eight terawatt hours, or the average energy used by 450,000 Quebec households.

Many Innu activists have protested the Romaine dams not only because of the threat to biodiversity, but also because large swaths of forest will have to be destroyed to make way for the high-tension lines to transport electricity from the dams to consumers in Montreal and other cities.

Gary Sutherland, a spokesperson for Hydro-Québec, says that, despite opposition, the Crown corporation does try to get the support of Indigenous communities.

“One of the main concerns of Hydro-Québec is that our projects are well received by the local communities. So we work hard with those communities to establish partnership agreements with them,” says Sutherland. “We know there are going to be conflicting expectations sometimes. We take the necessary steps to make sure that those host communities, including the Aboriginal communities, are involved both in the development and benefit from the economic spinoffs at all stages of the project.”

Hydro-Québec held two referendums in 2011, one in the Uashat reserve and another in Uashat Mak Mani-Utenam, asking if communities would allow transmission lines from the dams to be built across their territory. Neither received majority approval.

“A huge, dirty project”

Chris Scott is a Montreal-based environmental activist with l’Alliance Romaine, a coalition devoted to protecting the Romaine river against Hydro-Québec’s dams. Scott has travelled the length of the river on a few occasions to observe the impacts of development now underway.

“It’s a huge, dirty project,” says Scott. “It will drain the river, flood huge amounts of boreal forest, and force the river out of its normal course into an underground tunnel.”

Another point of controversy is the amount of public subsidies going into the development relative to the royalties coming out.

“Previously, under governments like [Maurice] Duplessis’, companies would have to pay for their own access to these territories,” explains Scott. “They would build their own road, and if the road was clearly serving the company to get into a mining site and take the minerals out, the company would pay for that road. That was the old approach. The new approach says ‘we need to encourage these companies to take our minerals for almost nothing.’ So they pay very low royalties.”

According to Scott, the Quebec government is paying for industrial development roads in the areas around Natashquan and Chibougamau that were previously untouched by large-scale development. He says that the government is also furnishing the electricity that companies need to conduct their mining and smelting operations.

Fighting to be heard

On an official trade mission to New York City in December 2012, Marois reiterated her support for development in Quebec’s north but underscored that she wanted to do it differently than her predecessor. In an interview with the business news website Bloomberg.com, she stated that “We [the Quebec government] want to raise more revenues from royalties, but we don’t want to kill the industry.” The provincial government is hoping to bring in new mining legislation that would set a five per cent minimum royalty on minerals extracted from the ground in addition to a 30 per cent tax on “super profits” from the extraction of non-renewable resources.

Regardless of the amount that mining companies will pay in royalties, or the referendums with Hydro-Québec, the impact of ongoing mining and dam projects on the land will be severe, according to many Indigenous people and environmental activists. As Scott says, “I’ve seen month by month, week by week, the deforestation taking place. There will essentially be nothing left of the natural ecosystem when this is finished.”

While environmental activists in Montreal are busy strategizing, the Innu in northern Quebec are living the consequences of development that is pushing ahead unhindered. Few have faith that Marois will offer anything significantly different from Charest in terms of environmental protection.

“Nothing has changed; they just changed the name to make it seem nicer,” says Mathieu Morin-Robertson, an Innu man originally from the Lac Saint-Jean area in central Quebec. “The projects are continuing, regardless. Whether it’s the Liberals or the PQ, we need to keep fighting to be heard.”

For her part, Jeannette Pilot has made it clear that she sees her hunger strike in the context of a larger struggle that extends beyond Native reserves and territories. “We’re doing this just as much for non-Native people, because Mother Earth is in danger,” she says. “We will continue until the government recognizes that we exist, because right now we are invisible. We don’t exist to them. This movement will continue until we win our ancestral rights as Indigenous people.”

The following poem was pieced together from snippets of letters to the editor over Briarpatch’s 40-year history. Each line is a direct, unedited quote from a Briarpatch reader, with the voices of dozens of readers represented in the whole poem.

Hello from Yellowknife (north of 60)

Greetings and solidarity from this little island in the middle of the North Atlantic

I am an old age pensioner with income supplement, residing on my father’s original homestead and have a small mixed farm

I am 21 years old, and I work 3 jobs and go to school
I have passed my 82nd birthday
Am over 80
I am 85 years old
I’m 86.

I hear that you had a very restful and relaxing holiday recently in some Caribbean resort
I trust it didn’t bother your conscience too much.

I am working my way through the February 1995 issue, and have a minute or two before my ‘fav’ show, This Hour has 22 Minutes, comes on.

J’ai récemment entendu parler de votre revue (magazine) et il m’interesse beaucoup
I read in Spanish and French too
I’m mostly a hermit and hardly see anyone
I had a part in the 1945 liberation of Holland
Describe me as a business man
I have a reg. 8-5 job – damn.
I have devoted the last 10 years of my criminal justice work to public education
I’m out of light bulbs – and they nixed my drivers licence a long time ago
I’ve been obsessed with finishing the first draft of a novel
I tend to take things one at a time
I love happy endings.

I’ve been feeling rather nauseous lately
I have been sidelined with cancer for some months, but just had the great news that the tumor has shrunk 2/3 so am back in action, thanks to prayer first, and other aids secondly
Guess I’m lucky to be alive and healthy but I’m tired!
I’m running out of steam!

All my credit cards were stolen when I fell asleep in the park walking home from the hospital. I did not renew them. It’s about 1 mile and the bus goes only down and up – not across from the hospital.

I’m a widow now
I’m on a small widow’s pension
I’m a widow now
Sorry, I repeated.

My bank acct is limited
but I would like to give what I can afford
I am low-income
but I hope to keep up my subscription to Briarpatch
I wish I could afford more
Eyesight and income failing
What I am able to give is but a pittance of the necessary
I do feel guilty that I’ve sent so very little help.

I should be taken out and whipped for being so remiss in not maintaining
communication with you

Shame on me for not responding earlier! I have been so busy…
I know I know I procrastinate

I’m afraid it’s a case of putting some things off too long while we focus on the demands of “modern day” living, which seems to consume too much attention

You did or said nothing wrong. I just have little time to read you.

I intended to pay – just ran a little short of cash – it’s hard trying to start a new career, even if it is as a professional – in the 80s

Since moving back to Winnipeg last August to go back to college, my partner, baby and I have been living off meagre savings and a disappointingly low student loan

At my age, I am only subscribing a year at a time, but I am enclosing a donation to help keep up the good work

We, Florence and I, send you a hundred bucks to keep on keeping on

We sold some cattle a few weeks ago, and didn’t receive too bad a price for them
So thought we would pass some of our good fortune on
I do hope that I can do better next year.
I’m renewing because Briarpatch is an institution, but I don’t really enjoy it
I’m afraid around here there isn’t much interest in reading Briarpatch
While I appreciate the concerns expressed in Briarpatch, I must admit there are times that I wonder why I keep investing money in its publication
In general, the articles are extreme left wing. The points many journalists hammer home is wanting things their own way, bettering a few at the expense of many

Glenn did a good job on the article except – horror of horrors – he referred to us as social democrats instead of socialists

Some of my friends in Ontario saw and called me “a hard-core activist who appeared in a famous leftist prairie magazine”

I hope you will forgive me for saying so, but I just don’t think your analysis has depth No Marx perhaps?

It is the most appallingly bad piece of writing that I have seen in some time
A piece of cowardly journalism I never thought I would see in Briarpatch

Perhaps this was a throw-away donation piece, hastily written in between your trips to the Volvo dealer for new car warranty service, and trips to China to check on your business ventures
Not only does it contain an inexcusable number of factual errors, it also crushes any hint of thoughtful analysis under a rant of crude and petty personal insults

I hope that the quality of analysis from the left becomes keener and less pejorative

Hope breeds hope

Even though I’ve been rather sarcastic in my response to you, I nevertheless do want to thank you for your article. It prompted me to respond, at least.

You have empowered me to continue to pursue my writing career
Regards to your staff at Briarpatch for thought-provoking journalism
Still think it’s the best mag in Canada
Good luck to the joint effort of the 2 young ladies at the helm
More power to your elbow
Thanks.

Anyway, my program’s on
Enough babble
I have run off at the mouth for long enough
You probably need to get back to that damn computer, don’t you?
How about restoring my interest and confidence?

Sincerely,
Briarpatch Readers

ps. Please move into the 1990s and put Briarpatch on line, set up a web site and get yourself a private E-mail address.
pps. I’ll be in Regina around July 20 for a few days… Would it be possible to meet someone from Briarpatch for a drink?

A communications specialist and intrepid freelancer, Dave Mitchell worked as Briarpatch editor from 2005 to 2010. In the short time since his retirement from the magazine, Dave has co-edited the book Beautiful Trouble, spent time in Mexico City researching the political uses of the war on drugs, worked as director of communications and policy development for Ryan Meili’s recent campaign for leadership of the Saskatchewan NDP, and guest-edited an issue of Briarpatch. In between bouts of hyperactivity, you can find him calmly contemplating Buddhist ethics over a pint of Guinness.

When I started at Briarpatch in 2005, I was 28, over-educated, under-qualified, disenchanted, and suspicious of any organization that had the money to pay a decent wage.

I was, in other words, a perfect (mis)fit for a magazine that was determined to change the world by force of wit, analysis, investigation, edgy design, and sheer tenacity. Briarpatch was my dream job, and I threw everything I had into it.

The workload and learning curve were daunting enough that I briefly contemplated setting up a cot in the attic of Huston House, where Briarpatch is based, in lieu of renting an apartment – I was at the office most of the time anyway. Fortunately, I eventually found a more sustainable work-life balance as we shifted to a more realistic publishing schedule and found ways to share the workload with some very talented volunteer copy editors and proofreaders.

When I started, the magazine had yet to fully enter the digital age. There was only one computer in the office with access to email and the Internet – it was kept in a corner of the administrative assistant’s office, quarantined, for fear of viruses, from the editor’s and administrator’s i486 computers on which most of the actual work was done.

Briarpatch has always been a labour of love, and I believe that’s the key reason for the magazine’s unlikely success. It consistently leads with the heart, and so it’s able to produce quality journalism with a tragic fraction of the masthead depth of most publications. From the writers and illustrators, to the staff and board, to the subscribers and sustainers, hundreds of people over the years have given their all to produce quality content designed to incite, inspire, provoke, and harangue readers into action for a better world.

Clare Powell has clocked more than three decades as an active contributor to Briarpatch, filling almost every role we have, including writer, editor, board member, envelope stuffer, and podcast host. After retiring from a long career in the labour movement in 1999, Clare remains active as an anti-nuclear activist, a Briarpatch volunteer, and host of Eclectic Café on CJTR Community Radio 91.3 FM, where he kicks back to the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee.

How did you come to work at Briarpatch?

I had been working in radio for about 10 years. I started out in Flin Flon, Man., and went to four different stations in Manitoba before moving to Regina to work for the CBC for a year. I spent a short time working for the provincial government before getting into a dispute with the NDP over their support for nuclear power.

I don’t know how long I’d been buying Briarpatch but when I saw that they were looking for an editor, I applied. I think I was the only one.
 
What did the production process look like in 1979?

Quite different. We had an addressograph, a steel machine that stamped out lead address plates and weighed a ton. We got it over here in the back of a truck and had to set up a pulley system to haul it up the back fire escape with about five guys on the end of a rope. It was immense. We used a typesetting machine and pasted sheets of text and headlines onto each page by hand.
 
You came on as the editor immediately after the NDP government cut Briarpatch’s $54,000 annual funding, which comprised about two-thirds of the magazine’s budget at the time, ostensibly because it had “lost touch with its low-income origins.” Presumably, Briarpatch’s criticism of the Blakeney government’s pursuit of uranium mining and nuclear development, and its cuts to day-care and legal aid, had much to do with it.

We were all onside when it came to opposing the uranium industry. But we also started covering more union issues, and while the NDP was allegedly not anti-union, there were a lot of anti-union people, and they didn’t like the emphasis on defending the rights of union members. I suspect that was part of it too.

We had to cut back to a four-page newsletter for one month in September 1980. But we were back full-swing in October. We appealed to our supporters, and money came in. That was the only time that the magazine hasn’t published. I don’t know, quite frankly, how we managed. One person, Bev Crossman, laid herself off. One thing we did was set up the typesetting company, First Impressions, which brought in quite a bit of revenue for a while. All of us would go out to try to get business. It wasn’t easy. We just muddled through.
 
You didn’t skip a beat in taking the Blakeney government to task. You wrote in the first issue after the funding cut was announced that the NDP government was far from its posturing as “champion of the downtrodden and disadvantaged” and that it was content to “patch up and plaster over the most gaping inequalities in the capitalist system.”

I was very colourful, yes.

There are two schools of thought. One is that government should be neutral and provide funds for magazines. The other is that if you’re reliant on government for funding, chances are that you’ll back off from criticism, which we never did, and we paid the price.
 
You’ve described Briarpatch as a “champagne magazine on a beer budget.” An alternative tagline recently suggested by former editor Dave Mitchell was “scraping by since 1973.” What do you think has kept Briarpatch going for 40 years?

It’s never just the people in the office. People used to pop out of nowhere and send us articles … 90 per cent of them were better writers than I was. They didn’t get a penny. We just couldn’t afford to pay them. But they just kept coming and coming. Many of these dedicated people are still here in Regina. I’ve had a lot of disappointments with politicians and other people in my life, but not with Briarpatch.

Educator and trade union activist Adriane Paavo worked as editor of Briarpatch for three stormy years in the 1980s, during which she fended off the collective wrath of business, government, and mainstream media interests. She now works as an education officer for the Saskatchewan Government and General Employees’ Union and also kayaks and quilts. She continues to be a sustaining subscriber and active supporter of Briarpatch.

Grant Devine’s government in the 1980s gave Saskatchewan its first taste of neoliberal casino capitalism. While we may be used to the card tricks by now – deregulation, privatization, tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy, a shrinking of the public sector – today’s players are smoother, more polished, and better schooled in how to make their moves without scaring the audience. In the 1980s, things were more flamboyant, more Wild West saloon poker than Monte Carlo baccarat.

Briarpatch worked hard to keep an eye on Devine’s hand, right from his election in 1982 through until when I was editor from 1987 through 1989. Two events stand out for me from those days.
In the first, I was heading home in a cab from the Regina airport, in a post-flight daze, when the driver mentioned that he too had just gotten back from a trip. He and some friends had been in Calgary putting together a deal to buy the publicly owned bus company, Saskatchewan Transportation Company. All had strong ties to the provincial Conservative party.

When I and Briarpatch volunteer Murray Dobbin started phoning around, saying we were with the party and had some money to invest, we found out a lot more. Fortunately the deal never happened, but it showed how the scent of big, easy money was in the air, and it wasn’t just attracting men in suits (see “Mike buys a bus company,” Briarpatch, March 1989).

The second event involved a group of the province’s top business leaders, academics, and lawyers who had formed the Institute for Saskatchewan Enterprise (ISE), a “non-partisan” organization dedicated to “stimulat[ing] public awareness of all aspects of enterprise from an economic, rather than a political, perspective.” ISE organized a major international conference to take place in Saskatoon in May 1990, billing it as providing definitive proof of the values of privatization.

Those were the days before the Internet. Using traditional public library reference systems and the help of Briarpatch volunteers John Warnock and Cheryl Stadnichuk, I found a trove of information detailing ISE board members’ self-interests in privatizing Saskatchewan resources and the track records of many of the conference’s experts (“With a little help from their friends,” Briarpatch, July/August 1989). At the conference, a team of people from the labour movement, Briarpatch, and the Action Canada Network spread the information to the media and conference-goers, giving the event a lot more attention than organizers wanted.

Those more innocent days, when the people wanting to gut collective, public mechanisms were honest and open about their greed, are over. Today, the stakes are higher and the players are global. Fortunately, the tools at our disposal to fight back and articulate an alternative are also more sophisticated, with Briarpatch, now age 40, among them.

Phil Johnson is an independent consultant in labour relations and human resources. He has honed his knowledge of Saskatchewan culture and politics through years of living in Aylesbury, Craik, Saskatoon, the Cypress Hills, and now Regina. Phil swims like a fish and has participated in Briarpatch’s swim-a-thon for each and every one of its 20 years. He is currently spearheading guerrilla-gardening actions in an unspecified area of the city.

My relationship with Briarpatch Magazine began in the early 1980s when I found a copy of this radical rag on the newsstand in rural Saskatchewan. I’ve been a subscriber ever since.

Between 1995 and 2010 (with a few years off in the middle), I spent many Sunday mornings and Monday evenings at meetings in drafty union hall basements and at Huston House (also drafty) as a member of the magazine’s board of directors. Of course, much of the time during and between board meetings was devoted to generating fundraising and story ideas. This was the fun part. The hard work of making the ideas happen usually fell to our staff, whose devotion to the magazine has always amazed me.

What has always appealed to me about Briarpatch is that it tells stories from inside the community. It digs deep and wide, offering perspectives that the corporate media ignore. It allows the people affected by public policy or corporate actions to tell the reader what life is like for them and what they believe needs to be done to get a little justice for themselves and many others like them.

Briarpatch is a far different magazine today than it was 40 years ago, or even 30 years ago when I first picked it up, but it still has that burning drive to uncover injustice and provide a vehicle for getting the truth out. It has expanded the discussion. Although it is no longer the 10-page forum for low-income earners, welfare recipients, and the unemployed that it started out as, these topics are still covered, and the philosophy of siding with the oppressed and impoverished remains. Over the years, there has been more than a little debate over whether Briarpatch should focus on Saskatchewan news or evolve into a national magazine, and it now covers local, national, and international issues.

The quality of research, writing, and editing is often superb. Looking at the last few issues, I have to note a couple of articles: “Defining Who is Métis” by Tara Gereaux and “Killers in High Places” by Dave Oswald Mitchell (former Briarpatch editor). They exemplify what Briarpatch has become. Both discuss timely issues of local, national, and international importance, both are by Saskatchewan writers, and both are thoughtful, thoroughly researched, and superbly written. Briarpatch has come a long way indeed, without losing any of its courage or principles.

Edith Mountjoy was born in a displaced persons’ camp in Denmark in 1945. She and her family emigrated from Germany to Canada in 1954. After her mother’s early death, she was fortunate to be raised by an intrepid woman, her grandmother, who showed her how to love the natural world and care about social justice. Her involvement with Briarpatch began as a volunteer contributor, and she went on to work as a staff member in the 1970s and again in the 1990s.

For an independent, Saskatchewan-based magazine to have survived for 40 years is a remarkable achievement. The only explanation for this success is that its founding message – that a better world is possible if we act together to bring it about – has resonated with its many friends and supporters throughout the years.

When Briarpatch was founded in 1973 by a group of unemployed people, it was to give a voice to those struggling against poverty, injustice, and oppression, to help fill the gap left by the mainstream media. As founding member Maria Fischer explained in Briarpatch’s 15th anniversary issue, the magazine’s purpose was to be part of a grassroots movement to challenge a system that preserves privilege and breeds prejudice. When Maria died five years ago at the age of 87 in Ladysmith, B.C., she remained a loyal Briarpatch supporter.

In the early days, funding to produce and distribute the magazine around the province was provided through a grant from the provincial government’s Department of Social Services. This funding was abruptly cut in 1979. Although the official line justifying the cut was that Briarpatch had lost touch with its low-income origins, the real motive, it appeared, was to muzzle the magazine because of its anti-uranium stance. The cut was not only sudden, but also retroactive, leaving the magazine in a precarious position. The Briarpatch collective appealed to its community for help with survival strategies. A Save the Briarpatch Support Committee was formed, and the community quickly came to the rescue.

Those were challenging, but also good, times as everyone worked together to stabilize funding. Benefit dances and banquets became a way to not only raise money but to build community and celebrate together for a common cause. A monthly donor program was established, and subscription drives were initiated. Briarpatch’s typesetting machine was put to use for contract work. Among the first to come on board was the University of Regina’s student newspaper, The Carillon, and the Retail and Wholesale Department Store Union’s newsletter, The Defender. This was the beginning of First Impressions, the typesetting and design arm of Briarpatch, formed in 1980 to take on commercial work to subsidize the magazine.

I returned to work at Briarpatch in the early ’90s when the magazine celebrated its 20th anniversary. By then, due to changing technology, First Impressions no longer existed. What remained was the continuing need to challenge the status quo. That need is even greater today, in a time of global corporate domination and a widening gap between rich and poor.
For 40 years, Briarpatch has remained true to its radical roots. It has spoken out strongly and courageously against injustice in all its forms. It has also provided a home for activists working for social change. I feel privileged to have been part of this movement and grateful for the many friends I met along the way.

Estimated total donations, 1973-2013: $1.039 million

Number of Facebook fans in Pakistan: 85

Number of years we’ve automatically renewed Noam Chomsky’s subscription to continue counting him among our subscribers: 7

Number of new Regina residents attributed to Briarpatch staff recruitment efforts: 6

Number of former editors who ended up in Mexico: 1.5

Times we’ve been sued: 2

Times we’ve been threatened with being sued: 21

Total federal grants received by Briarpatch between 2010 and 2012 to help publications “overcome market disadvantages”: $26,047

Total federal grants received by Glacier BIG Holdings Company Ltd. (publisher of Canadian Plastics, Oilweek, and the Canadian Mining Journal, among others) in the same period: $893,202

Number of issues published by our short-lived sister publication, The Sasquatch: 8

Estimated number of people who phoned The Sasquatch looking for an actual sasquatch: 5

Year that Briarpatch got its first computer: 1985

Number of times proofreader Kim Kovacs has saved our ass: ∞

Year in which she stopped us from inadvertently referring to Rick Hillier as the “pubic face of Canada’s military”: 2010

Year in which Briarpatch incorporated the Oxford comma into our style guide: 2012

Number of days required to conclude this debate among staff: 11

Cost of a subscription in 1973: $2

Number of pages in the first issue and the 40th anniversary issue, respectively: 4, 44

Number of issues cancelled for lack of funds in 40 years: 2

Number of times the magazine has been evicted: 1

Years since staff joined the Retail Wholesale & Department Store Union (RWDSU): 37

Percentage of subscribers who learned about Briarpatch through word of mouth: 23.5

Percentage of subscribers who can’t remember how they first heard about Briarpatch because it’s been too long: 26

Percentage of subscribers who never throw out their Briarpatch copies: 52

Estimated number of Briarpatch copies rotting in people’s basements, attics, and bathroom magazine racks: 62,400

Percentage of subscribers who have shaken their fists in silent fury after reading Briarpatch, according to our 2007 reader survey: 47

Member of the editorial collective Marian Gilmour eyes the copy to see if columns line up, 1978.

A welfare rights groups in Saskatoon decided in the fall of 1970 that people should be able to know what welfare regulations meant for them. The Unemployed Citizens’ Welfare Improvement Council (UCWIC – pronounced “You Quick”) began a pressure program to get special needs allowances for winter clothing, housing repairs, and transportation to attend job interviews and medical appointments, – all of which had previously been grudgingly given or refused altogether.

As a tactic in the greater strategy of organizing people on welfare, we agreed to focus pressure on the director of the Saskatoon regional office of the Department of Social Services. His name was Brierley.

Mr. Brierley was a very disciplined civil servant. He took the view, apparently, that it was not right for civil servants to get involved in controversies with pressure groups, so he declined all public comments on any matter dealing with specific complaints about the department. In doing that, he became the perfect target. We blamed everything on Mr. Brierley, as if he were personally accountable for every misdeed of every social worker – in fact, for everything done or not done in the whole department.

After several months of organizing, during which UCWIC swelled to over 300 people, the steering committee decided a newsletter was needed. Of course we named it after the unfortunate Mr. Brierley. Briarpatch was born.

The first issue was photocopied in March or April 1971 at the Saskatoon Family Service Bureau (where I was working at the time) on one of the early machines that used rolls of that grey, waxy paper. As a new technology, it was too expensive to continue to photocopy Briarpatch, so we switched to Gestetner. No copies of the first edition remain, because the grey photocopy paper disintegrated within a couple of years. Perhaps some readers have copies of the Gestetnered issues, though only three or four of those editions came to print.

In about 1973 or 1974, UCWIC split over some internal polit­ical issues, and Briarpatch evolved into a more broadly focused newsmagazine covering unemployment, women’s and Aboriginal issues, the environment, progressive social policy, agriculture, and rural issues. The official 1973 inauguration of Briarpatch as a magazine makes it now 40 years old, but its root beginnings in UCWIC seem to have continuing power and inspiration as a magazine dealing with the issues of common people and the oppressed.

Adapted and reprinted from Briarpatch’s 20th anniversary issue in 1993.

Whitetail Shooting Gallery
By Annette Lapointe
Anvil Press, 2012

Whitetail Shooting Gallery follows cousins and neighbours Jennifer and Jason as they grow up in the stark landscape of the Bear Hills near Saskatoon. The two are close as children, but their friendship slowly unravels as they move into adolescence. The growing uneasiness between the pair erupts into violence when Jason wounds Jennifer and her horse in a shooting. She survives, but whether the shooting was accidental or motivated by anger or fear is never made clear.

As the cousins struggle with the repercussions of this event, they also have to contend with the teenage trials of exploring their own sexual identities. Jennifer eventually finds ecstasy in the arms of her friend Donna, the goth daughter of an evangelistic preacher. Jason, too, is queer. During the chaotic night of a hockey hazing ritual, which begins as a game of hunting one another in the dark, Jason has sex with a teammate.

Whitetail Shooting Gallery contains frequent metaphorical allusions to predators, often when describing the relationships between characters. A disquieting mood pervades the novel, keeping tensions at an interminable simmer. Yet instances of violence, which are numerous, are often incidental; rarely are they acts of cruelty motivated by malicious intent. Lapointe’s characters develop scars, becoming hard in the process rather than fearful: “They might hurt all over, but that’s not an emergency; it’s just the state of them.”

As Jason and Jennifer move into their 30s, the world around them changes, but they continue to drift with little in the way of revelatory insight. The shooting is revisited in a final, violent confrontation between the two, but questions of motive and circumstance continue to linger. There is no redemption or closure in the final pages, atypical for a coming-of-age narrative. One can still close the book satisfied, largely due to the strength of Lapointe’s graceful prose and the novel’s haunting, melancholic atmosphere.

“In the good old days, children like you were left to perish on windswept crags,” the young Jennifer writes on the walls of her friend Gina’s bedroom, unsure “whether it’s aimed at Jason or her, or some other kid she’s never met.” Whitetail Shooting Gallery offers a piercing glance at children who manage to survive as they stumble, unflinching, through this dangerous world.

Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis and Movement Building Strategy
By Chris Crass
PM Press

Chris Crass is a longtime activist originally from California where he was active in San Francisco Food Not Bombs (FNB) and the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. As an educator and organizer with the Catalyst Project for over 10 years, Crass supported anti-racist politics and leadership development in the U.S. left, working to foster and support multiracial alliances. Towards Collective Liberation collects several of his essays from the last decade about anti-racist feminist practice and anarchist leadership and intersperses them with material written from his new home in Tennessee.
After a short essay on what anarchism might offer those attempting to enact a visionary left politics, Crass provides a fulsome, critical history of FNB, a group that has introduced thousands of young, mainly white, people into radical politics. He offers an engaging insider’s account of the class struggle in San Francisco in the early ’90s, as well as a frank discussion of the struggles within FNB around organization and strategy and internal sexism and racism.

Crass sees “collective liberation” – a term borrowed from an essay by bell hooks – as a “vision of what we want and a strategic framework to help us get there.” Acknowledging his debt to feminists of colour, he shares honest, personal reflections on challenging male and white supremacy. While he does not offer a developed analysis of the difference between “anti-oppression” and “collective liberation,” he seems to prefer the latter term and critiques the tendency to focus on “what not to do, rather than what to do.”

Towards Collective Liberation includes interviews with a variety of activists from organizations that are leading anti-racist efforts in white communities and in majority-white campaigns. Amy Dudley from Oregon’s Rural Organizing Project explains the group’s success in strengthening anti-racism and queer-liberation politics in primarily white, rural communities, contesting the idea that these places are a ready-made base for the right. Carla Wallace describes how Kentucky’s Fairness Campaign intervened in electoral and policy issues in a relatively conservative, mid-sized city to develop long-term multiracial alliances that were able to mobilize a grassroots base to defend queer rights and fight racist police abuse.

The experiences of these two organizations offer Canadian radicals valuable lessons as they grapple with the reality that, while Canada is becoming increasingly urban, half of the people in Canada still live outside major urban centres where the right tends to dominate, and, apart from a few large cities, the country is predominantly white.

Also of interest is the work of the Groundwork Collective, which played a leadership role in amplifying a racial justice analysis during the recent uprising in Madison, Wis., something only possible after building bridges with people of colour who were leading ongoing, local racial justice organizing. Groundwork provides a reminder that newly politicized people who are directly experiencing economic oppression want to shrug off their alienation and connect with their humanity. The white anti-racists Crass interviews understand that “struggle is the greatest teacher” and encourage anti-racist activists to show leadership and help develop a movement committed to collective liberation during moments such as the Madison mobilization or the anti-immigrant battles in Arizona.

Crass leaves the reader with eight practical lessons. Among them, he reminds us of the importance of setting concrete and measurable goals and cultivating a “developmental organizing approach that is reflective and supportive of all its members’ political and skills development.”

Crass understands that “good ideas are not enough,” but the short essays he includes addressing “strategic, liberation organizing praxis” are somewhat disappointing. Written in the early 2000s during the height of the anti-globalization movement, they highlight the importance of critical leadership and an organizing culture that works to build and nurture new leaders and strategic thinking, as exemplified by Ella Baker’s work in the civil rights struggle. However, given the importance of building our movements’ capacity and power, a more in-depth and substantive discussion would be welcome.

It takes hard work to create and refine “liberatory processes and practices in the here and now while we fight for the future.” Crass has given white activists and others an excellent resource to continue this work. Towards Collective Liberation is a powerful and honest work that underscores the importance of confronting racism and sexism and nurturing the leadership skills of new organizers to reach their full potential as a force that can radically transform society.

Tania Willard

I am often conflicted as an educator. As a Native woman, I consider the current system of education in Canada to be inherently colonial, and I hate my role in perpetuating it.

Many Native people have negative feelings toward the education system, and for good reason. It was one of the main tools of what I call annihilationist policies toward us. (I think the term “assimilationist” is too mild for what was intended.) It continues to be a place where we are forgotten, or actively belittled, as peoples. But the negativity also comes from an awareness that Indigenous ways of knowing are ignored completely by the educational system. We can have all the “Aboriginal content” you can shake a stick at, but ultimately, Indigenous peoples do not pass on our wisdom in this way.

As a Native mother, I want my children to have an Indigenous education. But an Indigenous education is not valued in Canadian society. If I focus all my energy on providing my children with as much of an Indigenous education as possible, I will still have to ensure they succeed in Canadian schools or I will be setting them up for failure. And failure for us is not being unable to be a doctor or an astronaut. It means marginalization, poverty, suicide, death. I cannot allow that to happen.

The reality of our situation is that unless we succeed in Canadian schools, we will never be able to revive Indigenous education. We will never have the capacity to bring back into being a fundamentally different way of learning about the world. We have already been losing pieces, and eventually there will be nothing more to lose.

What is required is nothing short of superhuman effort. Not only do we have to excel in a foreign system of education, we must do so without sacrificing ourselves, without succumbing to annihilation. At the same time, we must root ourselves in traditional pedagogy. We have to do it all.

Right now, many of our communities are in conflict. They want Indigenous education, not “education for Indigenous peoples,” which is merely Canadian education with cut-and-pasted medicine wheels or four direction teachings. We often don’t buy into Canadian schools, even when they’re run by the local band. Knowing that we are not going to be validated, or celebrated, or sometimes even discussed at all, means that we have little incentive. Sometimes we believe that lack of success in Canadian systems means we are more Indigenous, less colonized. We want the system to fail because maybe then it will finally be understood that the system has been failing us all along.

We don’t have the capacity yet to create our own educational systems in a way that allows us to send our children out into the world prepared for a reality that places European values above all others. My eldest daughter is almost 11. She can’t wait for that capacity to be developed down the road. But she’s got to do her best with what exists now.

Idle No More is calling on its superheroes. Rather than waiting for some magical time when Canadians recognize that our ways of knowing are valuable, as though suddenly the “bush PhDs” among us will finally get noticed, we need to first ensure that we value those ways of knowing ourselves. That means doing the difficult work of reclaiming Indigenous pedagogies.

We all have an important role to play. Whether we are setting up language nests in our living rooms or taking kids and parents out on the land, we need to be doing more of it. We must all become students of our own cultures and dedicate ourselves to learning for the sake of our children and grandchildren.

At the same time, we should be supporting our children to excel in the Canadian system. It isn’t fair and it isn’t right, but it needs doing. Our peoples have shown themselves to be masters at integrating new technologies and adapting to new situations without losing their core values. Shifting our expectations so that we create a support system for our children to succeed in Canadian schools and in traditional settings is how we are going to build this capacity. We need to buy in, while remembering that Canadian education is nothing more than a means to an end.

So let us kick out the substandard teachers and the administrators who do not believe in our kids. Let us bring the parents and the whole community into the classroom. Let us expect more of our kids. Let us expect more of ourselves. Let us expect superhuman effort, knowing we can absolutely rise to the occasion but that we cannot do it alone. We cannot let our hopes for the future blind us to the work we have to do right now.

Clare Powell has clocked more than three decades as an active contributor to Briarpatch, filling almost every role we have, including writer, editor, board member, envelope stuffer, and podcast host. After retiring from a long career in the labour movement in 1999, Clare remains active as an anti-nuclear activist, Briarpatch volunteer, and host of Eclectic Café on CJTR Community Radio 91.3 FM, where he kicks back to the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee.

How did you come to work at Briarpatch?

I had been working in radio for about 10 years. I started out in Flin Flon, Man., and went to four different stations in Manitoba before moving to Regina to work for the CBC for a year. I spent a short time working for the provincial government before getting into a dispute with the NDP over their support for nuclear power.

I don’t know how long I’d been buying Briarpatch but when I saw that they were looking for an editor, I applied. I think I was the only one.
 
What did the production process look like in 1979?

Quite different. We had an addressograph, a steel machine that stamped out lead address plates and weighed a ton. We got it over here in the back of a truck and had to set up a pulley system to haul it up the back fire escape with about five guys on the end of a rope. It was immense. We used a typesetting machine and pasted sheets of text and headlines onto each page by hand.
 
You came on as the editor immediately after the NDP government cut Briarpatch’s $54,000 annual funding, which comprised about two-thirds of the magazine’s budget at the time, ostensibly because it had “lost touch with its low-income origins.” Presumably, Briarpatch’s criticism of the Blakeney government’s pursuit of uranium mining and nuclear development, and its cuts to day-care and legal aid, had much to do with it.

We were all onside when it came to opposing the uranium industry. But we also started covering more union issues, and while the NDP was allegedly not anti-union, there were a lot of anti-union people, and they didn’t like the emphasis on defending the rights of union members. I suspect that was part of it too.

We had to cut back to a four-page newsletter for one month in September 1980. But we were back full-swing in October. We appealed to our supporters, and money came in. That was the only time that the magazine hasn’t published. I don’t know, quite frankly, how we managed. One person, Bev Crossman, laid herself off. One thing we did was set up the typesetting company, First Impressions, which brought in quite a bit of revenue for a while. All of us would go out to try to get business. It wasn’t easy. We just muddled through.
 
You didn’t skip a beat in taking the Blakeney government to task. You wrote in the first issue after the funding cut was announced that the NDP government was far from its posturing as “champion of the downtrodden and disadvantaged” and that it was content to “patch up and plaster over the most gaping inequalities in the capitalist system.”

I was very colourful, yes.

There are two schools of thought. One is that government should be neutral and provide funds for magazines. The other is that if you’re reliant on government for funding, chances are that you’ll back off from criticism, which we never did, and we paid the price.
 
You’ve described Briarpatch as a “champagne magazine on a beer budget.” An alternative tagline recently suggested by former editor Dave Mitchell was “scraping by since 1973.” What do you think has kept Briarpatch going for 40 years?

It’s never just the people in the office. People used to pop out of nowhere and send us articles … 90 per cent of them were better writers than I was. They didn’t get a penny. We just couldn’t afford to pay them. But they just kept coming and coming. Many of these dedicated people are still here in Regina. I’ve had a lot of disappointments with politicians and other people in my life, but not with Briarpatch.

As both an organizer and participant over the years, I have long seen the need for social spaces but find there is a lack of support and dialogue with others working on similar projects. When I learned that a Social Spaces Summit was being organized by the Purple Thistle Institute in Vancouver, I was excited to make the trip. According to the organizers, “the summit was intended for members of radical social centers, info-shops, libraries, student resource centers, co-ops, artist-run spaces, anyone who works in a physical space that aims for radical social and political justice.”

The Summit was based on a popular education framework, the belief that we are all learners and we all have knowledge to share. Workshops were proposed by anyone who was interested and drew on the collective wisdom of people who work in radical social spaces all over the country. A whiteboard in the main hall had a schedule drawn on it with empty time slots where people could spontaneously add a suggested discussion topic and location throughout the weekend. This way, many of the participants were also facilitators, which made for lots of dynamic exchange.

With over fifty of us from places including New York State, Seattle, Portland, Victoria, Salt Spring Island, Guelph, Winnipeg, Calgary, and from various projects in Vancouver, it was evident that there are many people reflecting on social spaces, questioning the meaning of our work as organizers and wanting to explore how we can do it better. Workshops happened simultaneously at different “social space” venues throughout the weekend, including Rhizome Café, The Dogwood, The Stag Library and Toast Collective Space. It was great to showcase examples of spaces in Vancouver, while evoking the complex reasons why these spaces exist and why organizers pour their energy into creating and sustaining them.

Anti-Oppression and decolonization in social spaces

Along with conversation about the nuts and bolts of creating and maintaining spaces, discussion throughout the weekend of the Social Spaces Summit often returned to decolonization and resisting gentrification. Since physical location and social interaction are so integral to the work of radical social spaces, deconstructing larger processes of colonization and systemic oppression framed the content of the Summit.

Collectively organized “social spaces” often function as a place where we can apply our theory, test our analysis, and develop skills to work together on projects and campaigns for social change. Our centres interface with neighbourhoods and people, ecology, and habitat. Physical place connects with history, human habitation, colonization, gentrification, and the complex processes of development and displacement.

“Wandering Through Colonial Space” was a walking tour led by Cole Smith, a participant of the summer 2011 Purple Thistle Institute program, who explained that “this method is primarily informed by the Dene First Nations and how they map through story. Also by concepts that originate with European thought: the situationalist practice of psychogeography and Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the production of space.” The walk explored the East Vancouver neighbourhood of Strathcona, where five of the social space venues featured in the summit are located. Participants examined the surroundings, noticing traces of colonization, deconstructed settler colonialism, discussed what decolonization actually looks like, and became aware of our places within the framework of decolonization and anti-oppression.

“Keepin’ It Real: Learning to face ourselves for stronger communities,” a workshop at the Summit facilitated by Ruby Smith Díaz, was based on the premise that “oppression can be hard to unlearn, and sometimes even our biggest efforts to be anti-oppressive can still be hurtful to others.” At another workshop called “Control of the Commons”, concerned with how gentrification affects neighbourhoods and the role of social spaces in this process, Smith Díaz contributed recommendations for how spaces can be more inclusive in the form of a poster titled “Solidarity > Integration.” Her message was: “Many radical/anti-capitalist spaces are often very white or ‘sub-culturey,’ leaving many to wonder, ‘Why aren’t they coming to our events?’” Instead of this phrasing, she suggested, “Try asking yourselves, ‘Why aren’t I supporting other peoples’ events?,’ keep a gentle and open heart, and be willing to look critically at historical/generational trauma that still has a very real and present effect on relationships between white folks and Indigenous and people of colour.”

Purple Thistle, a place to root ourselves

Because the concept of social centres can be somewhat amorphous and difficult to define, due to the diverse contexts in which they arise, it helped to have the Social Spaces Summit based out of such a strong and well established centre as the Purple Thistle. Talking with one of the core organizers, Carla Bergman, shed light on the long term strategy involved in operating a social space.

The Purple Thistle Centre is a youth-run community centre for arts and activism. Tucked into the landscape of concrete and metal warehouses in the industrial area of Strathcona in East Vancouver, “The Thistle” is a colourful hive of activity, arts and crafts, guerrilla gardening, workshops and self-publishing. According to Bergman, “The centre is a physical space to root ourselves, a place to work together, and a site to learn new ways for radical organizing for social change.” The Purple Thistle Institute, a radical collective interested in building counter-institutional space and horizontal relationships around learning critical social theory and praxis, is an offshoot of the Centre and was responsible for making the summit happen.

According to Bergman, “framing the Purple Thistle as an arts based project has done it’s purpose of keeping it going (and fundable!) for a dozen years.” She says it particularly supports their desire to invite youth from all ideological backgrounds. Bergman says, “Being explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian offers up a different way for youth, who run the day-to-day operations of the centre, to engage together while at the same time learning organizing skills and many other skills.”

In describing the Thistle’s approach, Bergman said, “One of our goals is being a truly convivial space and really striving to connect to the folks who live near and around the centre. We do pretty good, especially with our drop-in participants, but the core collective is often made up of folks who are a lot alike in their predilections. There’s lots of reasons for this and I think a lot of it has to do with the explicit radical way in which we organize. We like to say we are politically overt but not ideological pure – we are always looking at and reworking this.”

Beyond the summit

If the goal of the Summit was to cross-pollinate, share resources, challenge our praxis, and gain skills, then it was successful. Working on sustaining a space financially, physically, and collectively can be frustrating and exhausting. It’s affirming to know there is a network of people working towards similar goals, overcoming challenges and finding fulfillment in the work.

We ended the last session of the weekend summit sitting in a circle, and then started stacking chairs and cleaning up the space. Everyone pitched in to wash dishes, mop the floor and haul boxes out to the van. We were all familiar with this routine, chatting while sweeping up, and acknowledged that the best conversation usually happens in the kitchen, doing the work, making things happen. Exchanging email addresses and hatching plans for future get-togethers, the space was alive with the buzz of “social spaces.” We asked each other questions: “Who will take the initiative to organize the next summit? How could we make it better?” We came away with tools, insights and contacts to supplement our practice beyond the summit.

The Social Spaces Summit was a kind of meta-social space, trying out the many principles and practices used in DIY and radical communities. These are places where the messy, dynamic process of community converges with radical analysis of social and environmental justice. Through the intersections, strategies for change emerge. By drawing attention to their role, self-managed radical social spaces might be better able to function as strategic infrastructure in larger social movements.

“Solitary Confinement” by freexero.com.

This is the kind of place where Ashley Smith died in 2007. It is also the kind of place where Julie Bilotta gave birth on a cement floor last year.

It’s the place where prisons send people to punish the already imprisoned.

I’m writing with pencil and paper from a solitary confinement cell in the segregation unit – the “Hole” – at the Central North Correctional Centre (CNCC), a maximum security provincial prison in Penetanguishene, Ontario. Here we spend 23.5 hours a day or more locked in an eight-by-twelve-foot cell. We are allowed nothing but one religious book and a pencil and paper, in addition to our prison-issue clothes (but no shoes) and toiletries (disposable toothbrush and toothpaste, a bar of soap, a towel). We get access to the yard – a large caged balcony – for 20 minutes a day, and a shower every second day. On alternating days we’re allowed a 20-minute phone call.

People like me on “administrative segregation,” isolated for security rather than punitive reasons, are granted a few extra “privileges.”

By contrast, people in the Hole for misconduct are put on LOAP (Loss of All Privileges). Following adjudication, a fancy word for the extra-legal disciplinary procedures that masquerade as hearings, one may be put on LOAP for up to 30 days. This means no access to writing materials, phone, mail, or any reading material but the Bible. The luxuries of a mattress, sheets, and blanket are withheld 14 hours a day.

The deprivation of being on LOAP can become a vortex: a spiral into personal oblivion. At its upper reaches, spending 30 days in solitary confinement with no stimulus is tantamount to torture. In response to these conditions many people act out: from frustration, rage, and desperation. They revolt. This can lead to new misconduct charges, extending their time on LOAP, or even to new criminal charges, extending their sentences. Some become trapped in this torturous cycle indefinitely.

“They push you till you snap,” a man imprisoned in these circumstances told me. Days later, the prison equivalent of a riot squad rushed his cell. Dressed in full storm trooper gear, they dragged him off to a separate section of the unit – medical segregation – and threw him into “the rubber room.”

People who have a history of self harm, or who threaten to hurt themselves, are often put in a “suicide gown,” which is designed to be untearable. They a get a flimsy mattress and blanket made from the same tough material, and nothing else.

Ashley Smith was wearing a suicide gown when she died.

Once someone is in the segregation unit, or Hole, there is almost nothing the guards can do if he or she is in distress. They can either be lenient (breaking the rules of the institution) or punish people further. Luckily, the segregation unit guards here at the CNCC seem to tend towards leniency.

Guards are not metal health professionals, yet an alarmingly high percentage of prisoners in segregation units suffer from inadequate support for mental health conditions, ranging from PTSD and ADHD to severe dissociative disorders and schizophrenia. Many days the halls echo with cries of anguish.

It could happen anywhere

The Toronto Star’s February 7 headline for its story on the inquest into 19-year-old Ashley Smith’s prison death reads: “Kitchener correctional officer fell in line despite orders that were ‘clearly ridiculous.’” Smith was imprisoned at the Grand Valley Institute (GVI), a federal women’s penitentiary in southern Ontario, where she cut a piece of fabric from her prison gown and choked herself to death. The guards, following orders, simply watched her die.

According to the Star, GVI correctional officer Melissa Mueller “shook with frustration” at the inquest and testified that “there are inmates who need a level of help that she doesn’t know how to provide.” It is painfully clear this is also true for the guards at the CNCC. There is only one psychiatrist for a prison population of 1,200. What happened to Ashley Smith in 2007 could easily happen in this place.

Ashley Smith wasn’t the only name of an imprisoned woman to appear in the Star on February 7. Also featured was the story of pregnant prisoner Julie Bilotta, who “said jail staff didn’t believe she was in labour and ignored her pleas […] She gave birth to a boy, Gionni Lee Garlow, on the cement floor of her cell.” But Bilotta’s pleas were not totally ignored. In fact, it was her refusal to stop crying for help that landed her in the segregation cell where she gave birth.

This too could happen at the CNCC. There are nearly 200 women imprisoned here on another unit. And unlike Ashley Smith, Bilotta was imprisoned in a provincial facility, like the CNCC, in Ottawa. The Star notes that Ontario’s Mother-Child Coalition for Justice “has repeatedly asked to meet Ontario Corrections Minister Madeleine Meilleur to discuss the plight of women in jail.” And “those calls have gone unanswered.”

Prisoners here at the CNCC are all too familiar with being ignored by the Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services. Many imprisoned people, as well as lawyers and prisoners’ advocates with whom I’ve spoken, feel there is no real accountability for what occurs in Ontario prisons.

Neither the Ontario Ombudsman nor the Client Conflict Resolution Unit of the provincial Ministry is receptive to queries and complaints by prisoners and their advocates. Cindy Berry, the prison warden who was fired after Ashley Smith’s death, is now a senior project officer at the Correctional Service of Canada’s Ontario regional headquarters.

Funding and fostering mental health

In a recent letter to me, my friend Danielle asked what I thought about calls for increased funding for psychiatric programs in prisons, given that “criminalization and pathologization work hand in hand,” and state-run mental health services seem to “range from paternalistic to full-on abusive.”

While there are indeed historic and ongoing linkages between pathologization and criminalization, as well as irredeemable problems with state-run services, the reality is there are thousands of prisoners in state-run institutions whose suffering is unnecessarily compounded by woefully inadequate mental health supports. There is thus a dire need for harm reduction strategies and initiatives, including psychiatric services.

Ideally, I believe mental health supports should be funded and fostered at the most grassroots levels to build community-based structures that meet people’s needs. This would keep people out of prison and freer from state oppression. That said, I support increased funding for prison-based mental health support, including psychiatric programs, and believe it is desperately needed.

Unlike many people who identify as prison abolitionists, I do not necessarily oppose all increases to prison spending. The key is that any budget increases must be directly tied to per-prisoner spending (on programming and services), not, as now, on an expanding regime of incarceration that slashes per-person spending while swelling the prison population.

Better support for mental health is needed in both federal and provincial prisons, especially with the recent tabling of the Not Criminally Responsible Reform Act by the federal Conservatives. This legislation concerns people found Not Criminally Responsible on Account of Mental Disorder, and would mean increased rates of potentially indefinite detention and incarceration for people with mental health issues. Under the Act, their release will depend on a risk assessment, whose outcome one can imagine will largely depend on the level of mental health support available while in custody.

With dedicated mental health professionals on all segregation units, with adequate staffing and better staff training, with robust mental health support programming, and with enhanced oversight and accountability, it would be easier to believe another death like Ashley Smith’s isn’t just a matter of time. Of course, if we really want to guarantee this failed prison system doesn’t take any more lives, we could stop locking people in cages.

Postscript: This article was written between February 6 and 12, before I was returned to general population after a four-week security review in the segregation unit. Once out of the Hole, I had a chance to read a blog post by Nyki Kish, an activist imprisoned at Grand Valley Institute, where Ashley Smith died. Kish is a brilliant writer and advocate against the prison system and I strongly encourage people to read her blog post “The Unempowerable Prisoner.”

“So what do you plan to do with your university education?” Rosa asked me after our restorative justice meeting in the chapel.

Twice in a month, Rosa and other John Howard Society volunteers visit Pacific Institution, a federal prison located in Abbotsford, B.C., to support us in our reintegration into society.

“Well…” I hesitated. “I’d like to work for an Aboriginal organization that deals with social justice issues, but my criminal record may limit my options.”

“I think it’s difficult for anybody with a university degree to find employment these days,” Rosa said. “Where I work, we had an opening for an administrative assistant job. We had dozens of applicants with all sorts of degrees. And that’s just for an assistant position.”

As I reflected on her comment, I realized that finding a place in society was difficult for any university graduate, let alone one with a criminal record. But I also thought of all the other Aboriginal prisoners who didn’t have the same opportunity to pursue higher learning that I had—those who had not even completed a GED let alone a high school diploma. I couldn’t imagine the difficulties they would have after prison. It then occurred to me what I could do with my university education: formulate some answers on how to improve higher learning for fellow Aboriginal prisoners.

My story as an outlier

At a recent conference on Aboriginal policy, Assembly First Nations (AFN) National Chief Shawn Atleo passionately called for public support of First Nations students who are “outliers,” accomplishing things in an educational system that does not support them. As a 26-year-old Gitxsan First Nations outlier, I will earn my Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology this April, after years of diligent study, from Thompson Rivers University (TRU).

When I tell volunteers like Rosa about my education, they always ask me how I did it in this system. I explain that all courses were “print-based,” which means Internet access was not required. This is critical since all federal inmates in the custody of the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) are restricted from accessing the Internet. Each course is developed with the same format. Let’s use Abnormal Psychology as an example, a course that could easily be called “Prison 101” given the high numbers of prisoners suffering from mental health issues. For this course, I had to write four assignments consisting of multiple choice and short essay questions, based on the textbook chapter readings. When I needed to read case study articles, I notified the TRU Library and they promptly delivered the material. Then, after sending my work off to the professor and receiving marks by postal mail, I wrote the final exam in the prison school under the supervision of the CSC contracted teachers. To find out how I did on the exam, I spoke with the TRU Exams Department over the prison’s pay phone. After finishing a full semester, I sent off my transcripts to my community’s post-secondary coordinator, Cindy, and registered for another five courses. By following this process, I am becoming an accomplished Aboriginal outlier.

Prison as a place of cultural accommodation

Given the tragic national statistic that one in five federal inmates is of Aboriginal ancestry, the CSC is mandated by law to provide cultural resources, including Aboriginal staff and programming, to Aboriginal people in custody. At Pacific Institution, for instance, there is a beautiful Aboriginal cultural centre called Huli Tun, a Hul’qumi’num word meaning “place of healing.” When I started my geology course, I remember going to Huli Tun, where Elder Tom helped me to understand the spiritual significance of igneous rocks from a Cree First Nations perspective.

“I’m learning that igneous rocks form when molten material from earth’s core, known as magma, cools and solidifies,” I said, as I looked at the pile of speckled granite stones beside the sweat lodge grounds.

Elder Tom smirked. “We call the stones ‘grandfathers’ because they were the first to form in the womb of Mother Earth. They were born before us humans— the children of the earth,” he replied.

I stood there beside Elder Tom, feeling a deep sense of connectedness. Although I did not have a Geology professor or a class of students to discuss the text book with, I had weekly field trips to Huli Tun and the wisdom of an Elder schooled in our spiritual ways.

Prison as a place of learning

The prison also influenced my learning process. From my Sociology 101 course, for instance, I learned that as a liberal democratic nation Canada believes each citizen has “equality of opportunity.” In the six years of my imprisonment, I have met many Aboriginal prisoners who have grown up in poverty and experience racism and abuse in residential schools. Their stories taught me that equality of opportunity is largely a myth. From my Child Development course, I learned that Romanian orphans who spent most of their infant years in Communist-run institutions experience the worst developmental outcomes. After seeing so many Aboriginal men leave, only to return on new charges, the prison taught me that institutionalization is a problem across the lifespan.

Improving university education for Aboriginal outliers

According to a recent report, upon arrival at a federal prison, about 65 percent of inmates test a completion level lower than Grade 8, and 82 percent test lower than Grade 10. Less than ten percent of inmates enroll in post-secondary education. I believe these low rates are due, not to lack of motivation or intelligence, but to a lack of resources and support networks. Grounded in this conviction, the following are my recommendations for improving education for Aboriginal prisoners:

1. The CSC should establish correctional policy and contractual arrangements that support post-secondary education.

According to CSC national policy, inmates are required to pay the cost of their post-secondary education. Even if inmates secure funds, teachers hired by the CSC are not contractually obligated to facilitate education beyond Grade 12. This is problematic, since TRC, for instance, requires an official invigilator for its final exams. In my case, two teachers were willing to go beyond the call of duty by serving as invigilator. However, the lack of formal mechanisms to support post-secondary learning suggests incarcerated Aboriginal learners are indeed “outliers,” accomplishing things in a correctional system that does not support them.

2. Aboriginal organizations and communities should give priority to their incarcerated members applying for post-secondary financial support.

I am grateful to have the financial support of my Kispiox Band, which sponsors me through the federal post-secondary program for Status Indians registered under the Indian Act. However, the fund is shrinking in real dollar terms for bands across Canada and thousands of qualified applicants are turned down every year for lack of money. In considering qualified applicants residing in federal prisons, band decision makers should factor in the research that supports a correlation between education and lower recidivism rates—that is, the higher one’s educational attainment, the lower the risk of re-offending. Given that many First Nations inmates plan to return to their communities upon release from custody, it is in the communities’ interest to invest in their education.

3. Canadian universities should maintain a selection of print-based correspondence courses so that degree completion remains a possibility in prison.

One of the challenges I faced as a psychology major was a shortage of upper-level psychology courses available in print-based format. To complete my major requirements, I needed 30 upper-level credits, and TRU only provided 18 credits. I overcame this barrier by earning the remaining credits from Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C., and transferring the credits over to TRU. However, with the growing trend towards online distance education, Canadian universities are offering fewer and fewer print-based courses. Since Internet will likely continue to be restricted to federal inmates in the future, this trend will only exclude Aboriginal prisoners from accessing university courses and resources.

The economics of educating inmates

It is clear that it will take a team effort on the part of all levels of CSC management, Aboriginal organizations and communities, and Canadian universities to improve university opportunities for Aboriginal prisoners. Given the work involved it may be asked: What is the payoff?

To begin, consider that the average cost of keeping a federal inmate in custody exceeds $100,000 per year (just over $275 per day). To cover the cost of holding the 2,589 Aboriginal federal inmates estimated to be in prison today, Canadian taxpayers pay close to 259 million dollars per year. In contrast, the tuition for a four-year degree program from TRU for Canadian residents is $11,972 (or $299 per 3-credit course). To register 2,589 Aboriginal learners in TRU’s general studies B.A. program comes to approximately 31 million dollars, or about 12 percent of the annual cost of incarcerating today’s over-represented Aboriginal inmate population.

Especially in light of the fact that Canada has an aging general population and an economy that will be facing serious labour shortages in the near future, I ask: Is it wiser to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in incarcerating, or tens of millions of dollars in educating, the nation’s fastest-growing demographic under the age of 15? This obvious economic incentive alone should motivate the public to action.

What grade will we receive?

AFN National Chief Shawn Atleo often reminds the public that in some First Nations communities, the youth are more likely to end up in prison than they are to attend university. My dream is that Aboriginal youth in prison will find freedom in pursuing higher education, as I have. To realize this dream, each of us as Canadians must personally answer the initial question posed by a committed John Howard Society volunteer names Rosa: “So what do you plan to do?” Ultimately, how we answer will determine whether we pass or fail as an inclusive country that claims equality of opportunity.

nomad of salt and hard water
By Cynthia Dewi Oka
Dinah Press, 2012

Cynthia Dewi Oka’s first collection of poetry, nomad of salt and hard water, drops anchor in the transoceanic struggle of bodies against borders. Grounded in recognition of the complexities of her immigrant attempt to settle on stolen Indigenous land, where the colonial project continues through prisons and pipelines, Oka’s activist poetics provide a way for readers to understand and enact lateral solidarities in the struggle for social justice.

Oka’s poetic production, like her lived experience, is a composite, fragmented body made whole by performing many kinds of work at once. It relates a history of invasion, division, and flight from Indonesia. It tells of settlement in the occupied land of the Musqueam, Skwxwu7mesh, Tsleil-waututh, where discourses of the Yellow Peril still determine who will be granted Canadian citizenship. In her “postscript to Marx,” she foregrounds and articulates what Marx misses: coloured women’s bodied labour barbed-wired by the tense fiscal eroticism of capital. It is a lush circumvention that denies Manifest Destiny: a footpath powdered with the crushed jade and cloves of migrant struggle.

whether moss & water were baptism enough, I hid
from my father’s hand in the smooth stone of her
mouth, pressing my dirt against sun

pouring out her back. there were lessons, arched
over dishes and uniforms, on decoding
time from the way ash collected in her calluses.

before my father locked the door between me
and the servants’ quarters, we flip flopped through
Denpasar’s mud, expatriating English like arsenic

through cloth, our hips vapour and ebb
to the equator’s bass line.

This poetry enacts an aeolian process, shaping and eroding the linguistic and representational landscape of dominant media to inscribe intergenerational narratives of migrant motherhood that pulse an anticolonial heartbeat.

around us old brown women knit sinews with fishbone,
their backs coiled into the urgency of each stitch, vigilant
to the thunder of combat boots on rented timber –

that synonym to their grandchildren’s heartbeat
at first dances, reciting first poems, in every attempt at love

like a frontal assault. what love could survive such metal?

my words too began as piracy

navigating three generations of placenta blindfolded and hiding
from the bodies that carried them –

For the monolingual reader, Oka’s poems are a poultice of salt and chili rind held under the tongue, making a wound where histories of dissent and resistance can penetrate. A transnational/refugee/migrant/
youcan’tkeepusoutpoetry that delineates the circuits of late capital. For tongues that yearn for never learned or for forgotten languages – broken, whole or otherwise – Oka’s poetry is it. Spines of surplus value hip and womb, hands and eyes, are girded with the steel of Oka poetry.

The end of contract supper starts out like a normal meal in a normal restaurant, but then Smiley hails the waiter and the five of us closest to him realize it’s on. With an hour left on the open tab, the waiter is doing his best, black tie swinging as he takes drink orders on his way up the table towards us. The camp boss and the owner are down the other end and everyone’s still using indoor voices.

“Are you ready for dessert?” the waiter asks.

Smiley puts down the menu and says “I’ll have the baseball steak,” and the waiter’s eyebrows do the wave, same as at a hockey game.

I’m done a Sterling Sirloin. Hammy had a New York. Chewy is cleaning up a surf and turf. Kenny the Kindle Cutter sits back from his prime rib. Thibeau, maybe on account of the fever, ordered chicken and there’s a napkin over it. I’ve had a double Caesar and another, so I order dark beer. Hammy is on rye and gingers. Chewy’s on rum and cokes. Kenny downs Budweiser. Thibeau believes he’s fighting scurvy, so he’s nursing vodka and oranges.

“Yes sir,” says the waiter, taking the plate from in front of Smiley, “how would you like it? With all of you, I forget how you had your first one.”

The first time, Smiley froze. Because he was called sir or had never had a steak to order, I don’t know.

“Medium rare, with a baked potato.”

The waiter gives a slow and serious nod. The menu says a baseball steak is so thick, the most they can cook it is medium-rare.

Smiley proudly wears a flannel jacket that could cloak a barbeque. The way he walks in it, his shoulders back, you’d swear it was a uniform with a medal for each year of service, though all the years are in his face. Creases like the grain in dark cherry ripple as he sips iced-tea.

We are brush thinners. Piece workers. Groomers of the forest green. We go into land that was reforested too densely and knock down all but the best crop trees. We eliminate the competition so they grow wide into logs rather than pencil-thin and tall, striving for sunlight. After us, the trees get plump, rounder at the bottom. We’re told that overall they come back quicker and stronger than if we let nature do it on her own.

We closed the contract late in unreal snow. Snow like in children’s books. Snow haphazardly shelved in laden branches of Spruce trees so a clumsy motion brought it down swift and shocking into your collar and down the back of your neck. Before you shrugged it away, it felt like an enormous owl on your shoulders. Then, if only for a second, it muffled the always groaning saw.

The snow came early, heavy and often and made for tough access on the logging roads and even slower and more dangerous progress for us. You couldn’t run because you had to place your feet. One guy ran and beneath the white blanket his foot slid between two windfallen trunks. His body kept moving, not his foot. They are going to have to try to rebuild his ankle down South.

The cold followed the snow. It made it hard and crunchy and on one block of land we killed time while waiting for stragglers at the day’s end by building an igloo. At the start it was easy, but we didn’t take it very seriously and didn’t have any idea how it would go at the end. For the last half hour of the last day in that area we were wide eyed kids, even the camp boss, trying to finish our igloo before the last guy wandered to the van. We barely did before we had to leave. The last few blocks were carved in a rush, inexpertly, while we supported the others. Once the circular cap piece was slipped into place atop the structure, each block was reliant on the ones it touched, making it whole.

The cold takes a toll. It’s been twenty or more below for three weeks and it numbed us and ground us down and made us sick and it cut deep into our dwindling crew that used to be fifty strong. With the holidays looming, men are sneaking away to the airport or by night time bus, whereabouts unknown.
Those of us left are opportunists, or lifers. Thibeau and I are opportunists. The contract was pie. We got as big a piece as we could. Hammy, Kenny, Chewy and Smiley are lifers. All they eat is pie. Next season there would be more. Working into December meant more work, more money, more meals cooked for them. It wasn’t the worst life, but they are lifers. By December, they are sick of pie.

Smiley’s steak arrives. Earlier in the season, I’d seen him leave the dinner tent after polishing off two plates of supper. He sat on an overturned milk crate with his belly like a beach ball between his knees.

“You should try the dessert sandwich,” he said, mischievously. In his hand was a piece of apple pie between two pork chops.

When the waiter comes back, it’s nearly time to close the tab and we want drinks. Smiley leans back and opens the menu.

“A dessert for you tonight?” asks the waiter, recognizing he still has it in him.

Smiley takes his time, on purpose. Only you wouldn’t know it unless you knew those lines around his eyes. For the waiter’s benefit, he studies the menu.

“I’ll have the baseball steak,” he says, exactly like he’s ordering his first.

The waiter’s eyebrows climb his face like a kitten in a tree that doesn’t know how to climb down. Hammy and Kenny are mirthful and Chewy who knows him best cackles like it’s an old joke he knows but loves to hear. He bangs on the table with his hand. This isn’t noticed, as along its length, we’re getting going pretty good and long gone are indoor voices. The restaurant has stopped seating people in our section and the manager hovers nearby.

Kenny had told me privately that the two previous years only a select few – those without a drinking problem – had been invited to the end of contract meal. The rest had a bonus added to their last cheque. The meal was supposed to be secret. Someone told someone though and soon everyone knew. Kenny thought the distinction between who could come and who couldn’t was flimsier than a Walmart work boot.

Some of the closest to Smiley went to him. That was Chewy, being a cousin, and a few of the others who were quiet and didn’t speak a lot of English and used their own languages. For a few seasons Smiley had been a go-between for them and management, clarifying hours and start dates and layoff papers, trusted by all. He helped navigate the shared camp world between the rules and details of the day-to-day and the men who came from the far north to work the contract.

Before leaving town to head out for the last shift, which was to be a work-as-many-days-as-it-takes grind, the owner spoke to us in the small lobby of the hotel. He thanked us for our hard work that season and for sticking it out. When he finished, Smiley asked him straight up, in front of us all, if everyone could come to supper. Smiley said it takes everyone to close the contract and it wasn’t fair to only invite some. The owner looked at the group of us dedicated enough to still be there and no head was still. That’s how Smiley and his boys got to attend their first end of contract dinner.

Smiley was a gambler on the best streak of his life. It wasn’t compulsive and he seldom bet money. He was doing it as calmly and confidently as he wore his work boots and jeans into the restaurant that night. He had been betting all season and had kept rolling his winnings forward. He’d bet on the right contract – it went longer than any rival contract had and it made him good money. He’d bet on how to talk to our sweet, dark-eyed cook, Isabelle – who made our mouths water and who saved Smiley the drumstick from the turkey, the seasoned first slice of the roast beef, the biggest muffin each morning. He’d even bet on the right bed – it cradled his suspect back so it didn’t give him too much trouble. He’d bet on how the owner would react to his request to open up the end of contract dinner to everyone and he’d quietly bet the five of us, so you couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, that he could eat a baseball steak for each year he’d worked for the company.

“The back pay will be delicious,” he boasted.

When the waiter comes back, his brow is wet. It is past 9 PM and he’s been working for it. The tab is supposed to be closed. The waiter takes Smiley’s plate.

Smiley sighs and opens the menu. It’s balanced on his belly and there’s a whiff of the impossible at the table with us amongst our empties. Then one of them down the other end takes notice. He’s a veteran and has been there for a few of the suppers. He sees the menu, the tilt of the waiter’s head, sees us stone-still, watching.

“Tab ended at nine, boys,” he says loudly, so the owner and the waiter hear him, “anything here on in is on you.”

For the first time in hours, there is quiet along the table. We sit with our last drinks, ice settling in the rocks glasses, free beers half empty, feeling like we had our hands slapped.

“C’mon, Smiley,” says Hammy with wonder, then, with a whisper – “grand slam.”

The table erupts into hoorays, peals of laughter and one wild yee-haw, all of it underscored by Hammy’s squealing and Chewy banging his fist on the table over and over.

“And I’ll buy you that steak,” yells the camp boss and the joyous sound redoubles. The last table in our section picks up and hastily leaves. The manager is showing them the palms of his hands.

On two occasions that season some from our camp spent a cold night in the holding cells in Ignace, once for hoisting garbage barrels like the Stanley Cup, hooting victory and hurling them concussively against the brick wall in the parking lot of the IGA. That season one of us lost a week’s wages on an upturned card and an unexpected flush. That season we jumped on borrowed picnic tables until they collapsed like Chilkoot pack horses, then made a bonfire from the carcasses. We toasted the night sky and made deliberately slow marches through the flames, work boot soles softening, secret guts of embers exposed and searing red below a darkness shot through with wavering emerald columns.

We’d had shouting matches, fist fights. Tables had been tossed aside like shovelfuls of snow. We failed to call home, forgot, neglected, or couldn’t pay credit cards. We rode in taxis and rented hotels and bought beer and shots for sudden friends. We’d backed a work van into a fire hydrant. We’d missed work, missed rides to town, missed rides back to camp. We’d been too hung over on day off in town to do laundry and had to wear reeking, sweat crusted clothes for another six-day shift. We’d missed out on conversations and plenty of women, well, there really are none to meet up here, but we really had no chance the way we got.

The waiter comes back, hair limp, shirt coming un-tucked and there’s Smiley with that menu open to the desserts. The waiter says nothing, only stands there shaking his head side to side. Smiley orders the Belgian Chocolate cake. He takes a last look at the menu and the price he must realize would buy a whole cake at a grocery store.

“No charge, sir,” says the waiter and our friend’s face widens and crinkles.

The cake is out of a magazine. It’s huge, it doesn’t look real. Smiley picks up a dainty fork in his giant mitt and pushes it down into the point of his cake. He lifts it and closes his lips over it, pinching and pulling the silver clean. His cheeks move as he tastes it.

“How’s that?” I ask, breaking the spell. He comes back from a long way off, looks up and over at me, swallows.

“That’s the best cake I ever tasted in my life,” he says and there go his eyebrows up the tree.

Coming in we were bundled against the cold. Leaving, it’s another story. Some are stumbling, some singing. Faces seem sunburnt, no one’s cold. The manager insists he arrange taxis, rushing off to make it happen. Kenny bets Hammy fifty dollars he can’t put fifteen napkins down his pants. Thibeau bear-hugs the slack-armed waiter, who is past defending himself.

In the parking lot outside, our jackets are unbuttoned, slung over shoulders, or on snow banks. We’re laughing, we’re unstoppable. Smiley stands steady, plenty warm in his Sudbury dinner jacket, belly full of steak and iced tea and asks what we’re going to do next. Thibeau has six cigarettes in his mouth, lights them, passes them out. Hammy pulls a napkin out of his pants, then bends double, chugging out plumes of breath like a steam engine.

The first taxi turns into the parking lot. I shake Smiley’s and Chewy’s hands and then the hands of Smiley’s crew, wishing them all the best. The group is headed different places and some are all done for the night and season and in an instant we will start to dissolve again into our own lives.

For months we rode quietly shoulder to shoulder in the work van. Then the snow came and those of us who hung in until we brought the contract down realized something. In December, with the earth in its furthest orbit from the sun, rays coming in slow and low over the North like migrating geese touching down on a black lake, when the nights are the coldest, the longest, we find ourselves in the tightest orbits with each other and that is well worth celebrating.