It was a brisk sunny day in November 2007 when I first bounded up the stairs at Huston House, the historic building in which Briarpatch makes its home, brimming with energy and ideas. Four and a half years later, I am brimming instead with the many skills and experiences that Briarpatch has given me: a deep knowledge of even the most mundane aspects of non-profit administration, a keen eye for comma splices, an unhealthy capacity to juggle many tasks at once, a far more cynical sense of humour, and a penchant for punchy puns and alliterations, to name a few.

By far the most valuable gift that Briarpatch has bestowed is the vibrant and dynamic community of readers, donors, volunteers, board members, and staff who sustain and vitalize the magazine. This engaged community of people who are willing to give their time, dollars, privilege, and egos over to the pursuit of truth and justice, who seek out voices and perspectives that are difficult to find, and who listen attentively to ideas that are difficult to hear, are a wellspring of inspiration. To everyone in the Briarpatch community, I offer my most sincere thanks.

My work at Briarpatch – first as publisher, later as editor of Briarpatch_’s altogether-too-short-lived sister publication The Sasquatch, and finally as _Briarpatch_’s co-editor/publisher – has fed me in all kinds of ways. But if _Briarpatch has taught me anything it’s the importance of openness to change. As I move toward other projects that allow me to nurture my creativity in different ways, I am pleased to be handing the job over to someone else with a vibrant creative spirit that will no doubt find nourishment in the rich soils of the ‘patch.

Rebecca Granovsky-Larsen comes equipped with 15 years of experience in wide-ranging independent media, from CKDU FM community radio in Halifax to Entremundos Magazine in Guatemala City. She is the former editor-in-chief of the award-winning Ryerson Free Press, and fresh out of a master’s degree in environmental studies from York University. From labour organizing to Indigenous solidarity and environmental justice activism, Rebecca is a long-time community organizer and all-around revolutionary gal. Undeniably enthusiastic, she will be a valuable addition to the Briarpatch community. I wish her at least as much growth as Briarpatch has offered me.

With so much gratitude to all of you,

Shayna Stock
Outgoing Editor/Publisher

The house had a makeshift feeling she should have grown out of a long time ago, her scattered belongings littering the floor like residue. She liked to feel as though she could leave at any moment just by throwing a few things into a bag. The truth was it would take her as long as anyone else to pack up and move, but the makeshift feeling made her feel one step closer to escaping – the walls, the house, the city – and she liked that.

Ester’s home, her real home, was among the black spruce. She missed the Labrador tea that edged the mossy bogs, the night sky that danced. Like many people from the bush, work had led her to the city, and, like those same people from the bush, she wasn’t motivated by money, only by responsibility.

The phone rang, and she stumbled to find it, tripping over toys and clothes heaped on the floor. Remembering simpler times when receivers were attached to walls, she answered.

“Hello?”

“Aanii Ester! Niin Clarence.”

Clarence was taking language classes at the band office and never missed an opportunity to practice his rudiment-ary Anishinaabemowin.

“Hi, Clarence.”

“Aaniish na my beautiful sister?”

“I’m fine, Clarence. What’s up?”

Clarence launched into his news report from home, rhyming off fact-based stories in his best radio announcer voice like she wasn’t on the other end of the phone. She half listened while she dressed.

“… and Nosh and Wilma have called it quits. Wilma’s mom’s got the kids until she gets back on her feet again …” His voiced trailed off, waiting for some sort of acknow-ledgement from Ester. Ester wasn’t listening, but Clarence was undeterred. She only ever listened for one thing, and since sightings would have made the lead story, she felt safe in assuming there had been none. Another week with no detection.

“Holaaa Clarence. That’s a lot of stuff for one week,” she said.

“No kidding, sis. I don’t miss a thing.”

“But I gotta go. I’m going out tonight. The sitter is already here.”

“You? Going out? Holaaa, hot date or what?”

“Just an old friend coming through town, no big deal.”

“K then. I’ll keep you posted.”

“K. Bye.”

Ester gave the sitter her number, hugged the kids, and walked out into the cool summer air wearing an army jacket, a black T-shirt, and jeans. She rarely left those kids, protecting them like mama bears protect their cubs.

She walked down the front step feeling too exhausted to be leaving the house, much less meeting her friend, but she knew that staying in wouldn’t answer her questions. Plus, this was her only chance to see him. His band was only in town tonight, and then he’d be gone again for goodness knows how long. It was now or potentially never.

He wasn’t actually a friend – not yet, anyway. She’d never met him in person. His day job was as an editor for a left-leaning arts and culture weekly in a city too small to appreciate it. She was a contributing editor. He only knew her through her writing. She knew him through editorial comments and the album his indie band had released. But she knew him well enough that her suspicions had been aroused, first, from his gentleness and, second, from his honesty. He framed everything in the good, so gentle with whatever changes he thought she should maybe make. His quiet stillness endured even when her piece was a mess, hours before the deadline. But she had to be sure.

She walked the three blocks to the bar where he was playing. There was no lineup to get in, which was a relief because waiting in a line at this point in her life would have seemed like a failure. She told the bouncer she was on the list. He looked surprised but found her name and let her in. She headed straight for the bar to get a pint, in hopes that it would both warm her up and calm her down.

He found her.

“Hey. Are you Ester?” he said softly.

“Oh, hey. Hi. Nice to meet you in person,” she said, shaking his hand.

“Yeah, yeah. Nice to finally meet you in person.”

“Totally.”

“Maybe we can hang out a bit after the gig. I know I’ll be late …”

“That sounds wonderful.”

“OK. Wait for me.”

“I’ll wait.”

She got another beer from the bar, waited for the opening act to finish and for the stage to be reset. A half-hour later, he appeared on stage, guitar in hand. From the opening song, he seemed to focus directly on her. She tried to remember the last time she’d even been at a live music venue. Maybe the lights made everyone think the band was singing directly to them. Maybe the performers couldn’t even see the audience. Maybe they could.

Although he appeared to be in his late thirties, he’d been on Earth for much longer than that. In the old days, when only the Anishnaabeg were here, he had a different name, a gentler, kinder name. He lived among them, but he rarely revealed himself. His job in those days was like his job now; he looked after people who had gotten lost, both physically and metaphorically. His inner nature was so sweet and gentle. His fur so soft. His strength so quiet. He walked with the Anishnaabeg to teach them about both sides of honesty: the power of being forthcoming with another being and the art of cherishing another’s most naked truth.

Now things were different. Sasquatch. Bigfoot. Yeti. Sightings, like he was a UFO.

She waited for him after he’d finished playing. Past last call, past the crowd of fans surrounding him as he tried to make it to the bar to get the last two of his free beers. The roadies started packing. The rest of the band headed for the bus to relax and get high. He patiently spoke to every fan, thanking each one of them with a mixture of humility, genuine surprise, and embarrassment that only growing up in Manitoba can instill in a person for the rest of their lives. Then he quietly sat down on the bar stool next to hers.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” she responded, meeting his eyes and then dropping hers to the floor.

“Thanks for coming. Sorry it was an off night for us.”

“It was lovely,” she answered. “Lovely.”

“Ah, thanks, thank you. That’s really nice. I’m still sorry. I dunno what happened.”

What happened next was the kind of rare thing that happens only when certainty melts fear into nothingness. Their eyes met and no one looked away. Relief and breath poured into the space between their bodies. She pulled his body into hers, into an embrace of complete knowing, of profound acceptance. He let go of everything that he had to carry and fell into her arms. He had recognized her immediately.

Although she appeared to be in her late thirties, she’d been on Earth for much longer than that. In the old days, when only the Nishnaabeg were here, she had a different name, a gentler, kinder name. She lived among them, but she rarely revealed herself. Her job in those days was like her job now; she looked after people who had gotten lost, both physically and metaphorically. Her inner nature was so sweet and gentle. Her fur so soft. Her strength so quiet. She walked with the Nishnaabeg to teach them about both sides of honesty: the power of being forthcoming with another being and the art of cherishing another’s most naked truth.

Now things were different. Sasquatch. Bigfoot. Yeti. Sightings, like she was a UFO.

They sat together, each unable to see themselves fully, but basking in the power of the other. They talked. About how hard it had become, and about how easy it had been in the coniferous trees of the North compared to the concrete of the cities, back when they didn’t even know it was easy. They talked about the loneliness of their lives, so commonplace now that each hardly noticed. They talked about the last time they had run into one of their own.

When they finished their beer, he asked if she would walk with him. They left the bar and headed west toward the river, the one that bubbles like a beating heart. They walked beside each other, feeling the energy of the other resonating, but being careful not to touch or brush arms. Why, neither of them was sure. When they got to the river, he put his arm around her and gently circled her forehead with his finger as if to mark her with his affection. A tear fell from her eye, hitting the ground like a heartbeat. He told her 10,000 years of everything. They held each other.

The light of their Nokomis rose and then cascaded onto the water spreading out before them. She bathed them in her warmth and watched over them as they kissed, as their love echoed out from the riverbank in concentric circles. A nighthawk flew over the water, diving suddenly and dramatically toward the ground. With intensity and without hesitation, two metres from the water and at the bottom of his dive, he flexed his wings upward. Air rushed through her wing tips, making a thunderous sound.

Two worlds overlap, drifting sullenly between clouds and shadows. Only one body desires to consume itself in darkness overnight. Suited as predatory capitalists on a mission, manifest destiny manages to migrate across fictitious borders on its way to harvest flesh. War for “Whites” means humiliation to satisfy power through the rigours of sacrificial violence. Men aiding the men of property unshackle my ancestral relatives and lead them to a wooden structure. With the river’s strength flowing behind them, the water scripts its forever return downstream only to come back. That day in 1864, among a modest crowd drawn into the spectacle, five honest men hang.

***

The courtroom is a place of doubt. It is sterile and hosts normal temperature to give it the godly touch of neutrality. It appears the carpeted floors are kept relatively clean for the dirt that enters. The symbols of the Crown lay hanging: the Queen and country flag form the background. While the floor is seething red, the stained wooden tables divide the judge’s seat from everyone else. Black robes encompass formality, and their objectivity shows no sign of emotion. In the air, the audience nervously sits in cold silence. In the air, the reporters tick their scroll with ink, echoing words in print that act as blunt and crooked weapons. Deflecting and breaking truth is the substitute for mass violence. The damage has been done. It’s time to clean up. Someone calls this place Justice. Even in modern times – where media coins currency as message – time calls us back to the source.

***

Paradoxically, you think much has changed, and nothing has. Lingering trauma, death, being a part of life, changes things.

***

A large boat is anchored off the shore, a fair distance from port. The muddy scum from the shipmates’ boots rubs against the deck. The air is crisp. Every passing breath leaves tracks in the wind. The tobacco withers below rolling clouds. The morning is chill, more than enough to keep the living awake. Back against the ocean’s elements, every person on the coast is dying in agony, bursting in pockmarks and shrill tears.

All the while, the doctor, in good health, waits. He witnesses the last sorrows, and dying embers wither as if purgatory sits patiently along the beach. The timing is scientific, estimated. It has proven to work over and over again with repeatable success. He begins to pace back and forth in the sand, knowing he has a task ahead of him. Never turn back for too long. Committed, these men hastily hold the stench, while peeling the scabbed skin into containers ready for export.

***

Peering at an imaginary piece of history, a newly crafted painting titled Justice is permanently embedded in the B.C. legislature. An Indian man waits in a makeshift Quesnel courtroom, held in front of colonial officials like a little child, for justice to be done. The rules change, of course, when an Indian awaits trial. The legislature, where this picture hangs, represents the colony, which entered someone else’s country and mandated a foreign law to supersede the original peoples’ laws. Embarrassed by the potentially offensive mythological propaganda the mural displays, the colony first fails in its attempt to remove it and then decides to cover it up. Such a fitting response by colonizers: hiding their mistakes and then layering past history with story after story.

His story is elusive. She has her story mediated; it diverges into opposite directions. While one group of women arrives in Victoria by boat to be claimed by men, another group of women, gatekeepers and matriarchs, becomes a target of attack. His story is split between two wives, though he loves one more. Before his death, William Manning’s wife waits in Victoria with their two children, unaware of his activities. Meanwhile, he uses a Tsilhqot’in woman to gain access to Bendziny, an HBC custom of legitimate infiltration. He quickly builds a roadhouse, fences the pre-empted property occupied by a large Tsilhqot’in village, secures access to shared communal water, then aids the McDonald clan in armed robbery.

***

The medium of choice is the smallpox weapon: strong medicine, they say. Plagues sweep the land with carriers of guns, religion following closely at hand. Weapons wielded by conquerors assume there is no talking back, especially to the dead. Purging fear is easy when done with calculated violence. Known for his brawling manner and drunken fits, Ranald MacDonald travels extensively and becomes carrier of the weapon. Perhaps, you may say, the medium comes from somewhere else, from imported disease, religion, guns, and language. A philosophy of knowing thyself, the purifying kills the Indian in you. You, complicated soul, seek strong medicine. Some see the skin as mixed-blood and call you Métis after all.

***

On Indian land, bronze statues assume permanence. The poles carved of cedar stand tall but return to the earth like every person. In honour of past spirits, they watch over us. The colony’s capitol names its streets in honour of Indian killers: Douglas, Begbie, Tolmie, Helmcken. The killers watch over us, their presence emboldened by their permanence, like the horror it came from. You haunt us in the living; our living haunts you. The statue stands as long as the regime remains. The regime remains and so must the shadowy story of lies and fear.

***

Doubt. Empire writes right. Empire state building escalates, constructing zones, securing walls, to divide people into camps. The logic of Empire becomes a “conform or die” class system that takes other people’s land. Wealth is private. Poverty is created. The unrecognized names of the land erase original nations just by sketching a map: Tsilhqot’in, Nuu-chah-nulth, Stl’atl’imc, Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc, Ktunaxa, Haisla, Haida, Nuxalk, Heiltsuk, Dakelh, Dunne-za, Gitxsan, Nisga’a, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka’wakw, Syilx, Tahltan, Tlingit. Drawn in ink, everywhere the disappearance commences. Do you still believe that imperial takeover is innocent?

Would you believe that Governor James Douglas, of mixed blood they say, was so devoted to the Empire’s expanse that he helped orchestrate a plan of genocide while at the same time pre-empting occupied land? A loyal Hudson’s Bay Company employee, fully aware of British policy to obtain the extinguishment of land title through treaties, he supports his friends in carrying out the cheapest means possible for a bankrupt colony. Douglas, in competition with New Westminster, positioned to evade America’s northern migration, abandoned by his superiors in London, executes a plan to solve the headache of purchasing land from an Indian majority. Or assume – like every other colonist whose purpose was to cultivate other people’s land – that we admire the will of men whose desire is to, at best, establish reserves for future submission.

***

My family says our ancestors killed Samandlin, Donald McLean, to end the war. Leaving from Hat Creek Ranch, the Scot’s last days are spent heading a heavily armed militia into the Tsilhqot’in. A Hudson’s Bay Company employee, fully aware of British policy to obtain the extinguishment of land title through treaties, he seeks violent punishment as his means of dispute resolution. If you want to talk, then blood will be spilt. Knowingly, there was no need for talking. The Tsilhqot’in leave shavings from trees strewn along the ground as bait. Samandlin, aggressive and arrogant, bearing armour that once saved his life, catches a bullet through his cold heart. He dies miles upstream from where he once abandoned his Native wife and children.

***

Alexis is the Tsilhqot’in mediator who enters the scene soon after Samandlin is put to rest. Leading a group of horsemen, he times his arrival with that of the colony’s newly appointed governor, Frederick Seymour. Alexis and company hold their guns high overhead and dismount to acquaint themselves with the Chief, welcoming the crowd with a song to grant respect for the official occasion. Alexis speaks French, learned from his time interacting with the Métis traders, and wears a dark blue French suit. Translations required: the first nation-to-nation meeting is a curiosity of tense, conflicted feelings, though an understanding is forged. The tobacco offered to the Tsilhqot’in days before by the commissioner bears with it an atmosphere of safety and mutuality and, with it, the hope to amend peaceful relations. Afterward, Seymour requests and is granted safe passage from the territory. The war leaders are brought forward as a gamble to broker peace. Not long after, a handful of Tsilhqot’in are chained and led by horses to Quesnel for trial.

***

The trial, which ends in hangings, is a sham spectacle to enforce brute retaliation and terror. Shedding light towards the shadows of secrecy reveals this conclusion.

Lights, please! The public is shut out, the courtroom is closed to media. Commissioner Cox, assistant gold commissioner and temporary militia leader, bars the doors. Matthew Begbie is the judge, appointed by Sir Hugh McCalmont Cairns to take care of Indians and Irishmen. As soon as he arrives in Quesnel, he invests in property. Begbie’s regular clerk is Arthur Bushby, who is, coincident-ally, the land registrar. As Douglas’ son-in-law, he avoids the trial to evade disclosing insider information. Similarly, potential witnesses to the warring events – John Ogilvy, Frederick Whymper, Francis Poole, and Chief Inspector Brew, among many others – disappear during the trial.

The legal counsel representing the Tsilhqot’in defendants happens to be the brother-in-law to Alex McDonald, the man killed by these same defendants. George Barnston, Begbie’s acquaintance and the colony’s first lawyer admitted to the bar, is also a legal and business partner to Ranald McDonald, the man who happened to precede the parallel route of smallpox and land pre-emption.

A trial conducted by acquaintances and partners in crime. Every move is a conflict of interest. Justice, if you dare call it that, in the colony begins as an elaborate symbolic hoax. Opened wounds of war remain.

***

War, for Tsilhqot’in, is a commitment to persevere, accompanied always by the need for peaceful relations. A survivor writes in his testimonial that the Tsilhqot’in were enjoying the night singing and dancing just beyond their camp. So little did he know. His time at Bute Inlet was coming to an end. Having witnessed threats of smallpox, rape, and all-round disrespect, the Tsilhqot’in were timely in preparing for war. The song and dance is a ceremonial commitment to fulfil a duty. Once you begin, you cannot stop. As the sun bursts on the horizon, the Tsilhqot’in descend upon the road builders’ camp. The aftermath at Bute Inlet leaves fourteen dead. Three survivors retreat to Victoria. The Tsilhqot’in always leave one alive to tell the story. By deleting smallpox, his colonial story gets it wrong.

***

Tell the truth. The choice: if, by chance, people build a society based on lies and deceit, then we must decide whether we will choose the path of truth and justice together. The ultimatum: your prison is built on genocide. Its ultimate wreckage destroys healthy, communal life, scarred by the insistence of the colonial divide, torn by negation of the human spirit. What are you going to do about it?

Tell the truth.

On separate occasions, Raven recognizes that someone guards light and fire. The keeper’s protection chooses not to share. Like colonial times, the men of property have chosen to secretly covet the wealth and maintain the language of deceit buried in myth. But Raven takes every measure to get inside the walls of the keeper’s house, once as needle-born child and once as a pitch headdress dancer flying with the fire. Today, the sacred symbol that yearns to be set free is truth, hollowed consistently by the unreality of white supremacy. Colonial sickness is epidemic in the legislature, in the courtroom, secured in public spaces by erected statues, whitewashed maps carved on women, marked by stretched children’s arms.

***

Tell the truth.

Medicine encircles everything, all-inclusive, never sep-arated, ever sacred, and always changing. Raven encircles the fire. You, too, are invited.

“Wanted” posters are hard to come by these days outside of old westerns, but last July, ministers Jason Kenney and Vic Toews released a “most-wanted” list of 30 people the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) had deemed inadmissible to Canada. Kenney and Toews announced that these migrants had committed war crimes, and asked for the public’s help in locating and deporting them. The list came complete with mug shots and a 1-888 tip line for civilians to call with sightings, but no details about the basis or the seriousness of the government’s accusations.

Within a week, the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) had apprehended five of the individuals. By April 2012, a total of 16 people had been deported, and the Conservatives had expanded the list’s parameters to include migrants accused of breaking and entering. Evidently, the list has become a permanent and ongoing means of enlisting public support in the burgeoning business of deportation.

If there is indeed a need for civilian vigilance, it must be against the Conservatives’ off-loading of policing of racialized communities onto a citizenry already bombarded with anti-migrant fearmongering, and soliciting public support in sustaining a system of deportation that is both ethically and legally suspect.

The ‘poppycock’ of the people

The Conservatives use polarizing rhetoric to demonize leftists on all manner of issues, from environmentalism to Internet privacy, and to bolster the Conservative image of the mainstream citizen as someone who mocks all remotely progressive perspectives as fringe.

This was true, for instance, when the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops criticized a previous iteration of Bill C-31, Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act, which mandates the unreviewable detention for at least one year of refugees who use “irregular means” to flee persecution, including minors. Kenney, who identifies as staunchly Catholic, dismissed the bishops’ concerns as the work of “ideological bureaucrats … producing political letters signed by pastors who may not have specialized knowledge in certain areas of policy.” Yet the fact that IRB adjudicators do not have specialized knowledge in criminal policy has not stopped Kenney from claiming they can identify war criminals.

When the CBC did not immediately publicize the list, Toews publicly berated them. He insisted that “the state broadcaster” should be working more closely with law-enforcement agencies. When Amnesty International issued its critique of the list, Kenney ridiculed their letter as “poppycock” and “self-congratulatory moral preening,” which he contrasted with “the common sense of the people and the law.” However, what he calls the public’s common sense is nothing other than the xenophobia he seeks to normalize. The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) cautioned that the list would “reinforce existing xenophobia, hurting all newcomers, particularly in the context of repeated recent government messaging associating refugees and immigrants with criminality, fraud and abuse.”

Our brother’s keeper

The BCCLA’s warning was borne out by the government’s success in getting at least some citizens to moonlight as spies without, as Toronto Star columnist Carol Goar put it, “questioning the morality of turning in their neighbours, customers and compatriots, let alone any stranger who bears a likeness to the often grainy images on the website.”

The National Post, which described the Conservatives’ turn to vigilante anti-immigrant tracking as “a complete reversal of longstanding government policy,” published excerpts from emails sent to Toews, and later released under an access to information request, applauding the list. One enthusiast wrote that these “actions should have started long ago,” and suggested Canada move faster on deporting “Nazi war criminals.” Meanwhile, Vancouver’s own homegrown neo-Nazi criminals escaped the interest of authorities for years. Another letter only asked, “Is there a financial reward for helping capture those war criminals?” The thought of people turning strangers in for money is disheartening, especially so when we remember that serial killer Robert Pickton remained free for years, despite all the information about him provided to police by the women he eventually murdered and by their friends and families.

Of course, there is a common thread here. Most of Pickton’s victims were Aboriginal. Everyone who was attacked (and in one case lit on fire) by the Vancouver branch of the neo-Nazi group Blood and Honour was racialized. These are not isolated moments of violence. They are the inevitable effects of a systemic racism in which the state disregards the violence regularly visited upon Indigenous and racialized communities while simultaneously targeting them for disproportionate surveillance.

Kenney’s response to concerns about the list giving fodder to racists provides an instructive example of how determinedly he depicts racialized communities as guileless pawns: “I think that’s patently ridiculous. To the contrary, we’ve received nothing but a phenomenally positive response from new Canadians in general. And the evidence of that is most of the useful tips coming from the public are generated from cultural communities in which these people have been situated in Canada. So we thank members of those communities for their cooperation. New Canadians understand what perhaps some of the left-wing NGOs don’t.”

In pitting “new Canadians” against “left-wing NGOs,” Kenney perpetuates racist stereotypes of immigrant com-munities as inherently conservative. This is especially insulting given how actively Kenney seeks the mass deportations of immigrants to places of documented war crimes and torture, like Sri Lanka and Mexico.

Yet migrant rights organizations in three different cities successfully coordinated a campaign in which “the public” enthusiastically flooded the tip line with information on sightings of Kenney and Toews. The CBSA has provided no comment on how many of the thousands of phone calls they say they received in response to their call for tips were from these pranksters with a cause.

Fighting torture with torture

Under domestic and international law, Canada cannot deport people to countries where they would be at serious risk of grave human rights violations, including torture, the death penalty, and extrajudicial execution. As Amnesty International put it, “sending an accused torturer off to be tortured does not help eradicate torture.” The BCCLA pointed out: “The label ‘suspected war criminals’ could potentially put people at increased risk if deported to their home country.” Thus, as leading refugee lawyer Lorne Waldman noted: “If the purpose of this policy is to deport such people, then publicizing it is counterproductive.”

In October, Waldman stated the list had already led to death threats against one migrant. By December, a federal official concluded that the publicity from the list had put one migrant, Arshad Muhammad, at risk of torture in Pakistan where his family had begun to receive death threats after his mug shot made news there, consequently putting his deportation in question. All of this happened even after Kenney’s declaration in August that the migrants were en-titled to pre-removal risk assessments, a standard procedure available to all rejected refugee claimants.

This January, an Access to Information request revealed that, even before the list went public, the CBSA had been warned it could prove counterproductive. The fact that the government still went on to defend the list’s circulation as “integral in our efforts to locate and remove” migrants indicates that the Conservatives’ zeal for deporting people is trumped only by their commitment to fearmongering.

Why have courts when you’ve got the IRB?

The “most-wanted” list worked only because the government knew it could confidently rely on the public’s ignorance of the differences between Canada’s immigration and criminal systems. It has exploited that ignorance to undermine the rule of law and the presumption of innocence, values that Kenney otherwise likes to celebrate as distinctly Canadian.

In a personal letter lambasting Amnesty International, Kenney maintained that “the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) does not make allegations or accusations – it makes formal findings of fact.” But as Waldman has explained, IRB decisions are immigration findings, not determinations of criminal guilt. Determining criminal guilt is the exclusive domain of criminal law, which has a higher burden of proof than the IRB. The IRB is not a court; it is an administrative tribunal. Its adjudicators are not judges; they are government-appointed decision makers.

Moreover, as the BCCLA stated, Canada’s immigration laws have “very broad inadmissibility provisions … which go far beyond people who have actually committed crimes to people who only have an indirect association with crimes.”

For instance, the fifth person from the list to be arrested, Abraham Bahaty Bayavuge, has denied any wrongdoing, saying he was only a computer technician. Kenney’s rejoinder was very vague: “My understanding is that [Bayavuge] was involved in a former Congolese government that was gravely implicated in such crimes.”

Similarly, between 2009-2011 the Conservatives labelled Tamil asylum seekers “criminals” and “terrorists” for alleged associations with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which had been at war with the Sri Lankan government. Lawyers have stressed that the LTTE forced many civilians to provide menial services, such as digging ditches, against their will. Nevertheless, the government deported them to Sri Lanka despite knowledge of rampant war crimes there.

In any event, while the principles of fair trial are fundamental to both international and domestic law, Kenney has derided any interest in following these rules as an “ideological process obsession.” Instead, he has characterized the government’s flouting of these checks and balances as proof that Conservatives are exceeding their international obligations.

Why prosecute when you can deport?

While more than willing to accuse migrants of being war criminals, the Conservatives have refused to lay criminal charges and pursue trials that could ascertain any of the migrants’ guilt or innocence, despite being empowered and, in some instances, obliged under both domestic and international law to investigate and prosecute people accused of committing war crimes elsewhere. Accordingly, the family of one of the migrants, Khalil Abdul Khalil, has stated it will be filing a defamation suit against the CBSA.

But why would a government infamous for “tough on crime” rhetoric not want to bring a war criminal to justice? After all, Kenney maintains the migrants “are not merely ‘accused’ or ‘alleged’ human rights violators.”

As both Amnesty International and the BCCLA have noted, there is no assurance that once deported these individuals will face any investigations in their return countries. Apparently this is so with Cristobal Gonzalez-Ramirez. He was on the list and deported to Honduras, where a local human rights group is concerned that he may be able to avoid responsibility for crimes he allegedly committed there. Similarly, the Peruvian embassy in Ottawa said they only learned about Manuel de la Torre Herrera and Henry Pantoja Carbonel through the media and that as far as they know, “these two men are not subjects of any investigation or criminal procedure in Peru.”

Kenney has responded that the government “is not obligated to conduct full-blown trials, at the cost of millions of taxpayer dollars, to prosecute every inadmissible individual for crimes committed in distant countries, often decades ago.” Yet the Conservative government has had no qualms about pushing through omnibus crime Bill C-10, which will cost taxpayers millions of dollars at a time when crime rates are at an all-time low.

Kenney claims his “preeminent goal … is defending Canada.” Yet he has provided no evidence that these people, accused of crimes from “distant countries, often decades ago,” pose any threat to Canada’s safety.

Of course, the real value of these deportations is their air of finality. They score more political points in these anti-immigrant times than do trials, which generally allow for appeals. Still, the government could have easily deported these migrants without labelling them war criminals. That, however, would have denied the government the tough-on-crime capital it so desperately seeks.

Within a month of its initial release, the government expanded the list to include people wanted for “serious criminality.” The CBSA has yet to define serious criminality, but judging from the information they do provide, even breaking and entering warrants the label. There are now 40 people on the list, colour-coded by apprehension, deportation, and newness of listing.

Many of the descriptions of the migrants are impenetrably vague. They read, in their entirety: “This individual is the subject of an active Canada-wide warrant for removal because he is inadmissible to Canada. This individual has been convicted of an offence outside of Canada that, if committed in Canada, would constitute a Canadian offence.” What the CBSA conveniently leaves out is that convictions in some countries do not necessarily constitute legal findings of guilt in Canada, as not all countries provide for the same due process in criminal proceedings as Canada.

While the “most-wanted” list is ostensibly intended to bring perpetrators of violence to justice, we must remember that this list is being deployed against a backdrop of blatant state hypocrisies. Besides Kenney’s drive to deport even non-war criminals to places of widespread violence, Toews has authorized the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to release information to foreign agencies, despite the risk that this will lead (as it already has) to the torture of Canadian citizens.

What we learn from the Conservatives’ wilful denial of the public’s intelligence and humanity is that what is at stake is not so much what happens at borders as what happens within them. Though the Conservatives are obsessed with keeping most people out of Canada, they are much more interested in ensuring that we all live here in a state of perpetual fear of one another. In opposing their throwbacks to a cowboy age, ours is a commitment to meaningful cross-community trust and solidarity.

After months of mounting public pressure and protests, citywide resistance to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s 2012 budget succeeded in reversing $20 million in proposed cuts to social services this January. At the same time, the austerity assault continues in Toronto and across Canada with slashes to social services ranging from libraries to daycares, emergency services, and public transit. Toronto resident and health-care worker Megan Hope caught up with three community organizers at the forefront of the budget battle to discuss what made this victory possible, and what lies ahead in the struggle to stop the cuts.

Beth Wilson is the senior researcher with Social Planning Toronto, a non-profit commun-ity organization that works to advance social and economic justice issues and promote civic engagement in Toronto.

Victoria Barnett is a volunteer community worker. She co-ordinates meetings in neighbourhoods across the city with Toronto Stop the Cuts Network.

Maureen O’Reilly is a front-line librarian with the Toronto Public Library. She has been the president of the Toronto Public Library Workers Union since 2010.

Why did Toronto residents oppose the 2012 budget?

Wilson: The 2012 budget included $88 million in proposed service cuts across almost all areas of the city, including libraries, recreation, community services, arts programs, environmental programs, housing, homeless shelters, child care, transit, and emergency services. These cuts would have jeopardized public and community services for residents across the city and hit low-income communities the hardest.

In the summer of 2011, the city hired KPMG, a high-priced consulting firm, to conduct a core service review and deliver a list of recommended cutbacks. This set the stage for strong public opposition to the 2012 budget before it was even released. It was clear from the public engagement in the core services review process, which included two all-night marathon deputation sessions, that Toronto residents place a high value on our public and community services and that dismantling programs, increasing inequality, and targeting low-income communities is not part of our vision for the city.

Barnett: The 2012 city budget debate in Toronto was not about the needs of city residents, but about cutting the deficit by slashing services and presenting public workers as the problem.

The rhetoric surrounding the deficit was flawed in the first place. Ford cut from revenue-generating sources, such as the vehicle registration tax, and then claimed not to have enough money in the budget for core services. The discussion of the deficit was also based on hyperbole. We were initially told that there was a looming $770 million deficit, but by the time the dust settled, the city had a $154 million surplus.

O’Reilly: Rob Ford was elected on a mandate to cut the “gravy train” at city hall. But when KPMG delivered its recommendations, it became clear that the agenda was to really dismantle Toronto’s public services, to open the city for business, and to privatize city assets for individual gain. This would have had a devastating effect on the livability of the city, and Torontonians were incensed by this all-out attack.

Some have described the clawback of $20 million in proposed budget cuts as a victory, while elsewhere it has been described as “winning the battle, but losing the war.” What is your perspective?

O’Reilly: It was a massive victory in that these changes would not have even been contemplated months before. New political coalitions were formed, and the omnibus bill to reverse the cuts addressed many of the concerns that arose in the public consultation process. It also reversed many of the Ford administration’s directives.

When Councillor Cho’s motion to protect the library service from further cuts was passed, cheers and clapping erupted in the rotunda of city hall. In all my years of attending budget meetings, I have never witnessed such a response from the public. Clearly, the city had won that night.

In either the federal or provincial arena, such an event would have resulted in a non-confidence vote and the government would have been forced to resign and call an election. Unfortunately, this does not play out the same way in municipal government.

We have seen in recent weeks, especially in the debate over transit, that the Ford administration has lost power and authority to govern. There have been several calls for the mayor’s resignation. The budget battle was an important victory in instilling confidence that we can effect change at city hall.

Wilson: It was a major accomplishment to get city council to take tens of millions in proposed cuts off the table. When the budget was launched in November, it was not at all clear that we would be successful in moving council to save services in any significant way.

It was soon clear that library closures and cuts to student nutrition programs were not going to go through – there weren’t a lot of council members lining up to take food out of the mouths of hungry children – but it looked like most of the cuts were going to stick.

Ultimately, on the floor of city council, almost $19 million in cuts were taken off the table. That just never happens. Usually by the time a budget hits the floor of council it is mostly a done deal. In the end, while we didn’t end up with a progressive budget, communities were successful in saving vital services on account of mass mobilization on a scale that we have not seen in years.

The budget vote has also shaken up the dynamics on city council and emboldened many members of council. The mayor and his administration have been unable to move forward with selling off 10 per cent of Toronto Hydro or the mass sell-off of hundreds of Toronto Community Housing residents’ homes. City council has reasserted its position in support of expanding light-rail transit rather than the subway expansion promoted by the mayor. These recent events would have been unimaginable a few months ago. The budget vote was a significant turning point.

Barnett: In the broadest of senses, no real victory is possible in the sham electoral democracy that we live in. Until we have meaningful community control over community resources, mobilizing around budgets in the age of austerity will continue to be about fighting over scraps.

At the same time, there was a very real victory in that people from all walks of life became involved in defending their city services and demanding more. Toronto Stop the Cuts Network helped form 11 neighbourhood groups that are organizing across the city, and that is a victory. It’s a small step in building the kind of people power necessary to create real transformative change.

City councillors consistently spoke of hearing from their constituents that they opposed the cuts. Can you describe how your organization mobilized or campaigned against the proposed budget? What were some of the specific actions or steps you took in organizing against the cuts?

Barnett: The idea to form the Toronto Stop the Cuts Network emerged in a meeting between labour activists and community organizers from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, No One Is Illegal – Toronto, Toronto New Socialists, and others. We called a meeting of allies and developed a strategy that ran parallel to the budget consultation process.

When the city surveyed Toronto residents, we organized our own people’s poll, with organizers both standing on street corners and conducting online polls. This gave us the contacts to call meetings in a few neighbourhoods.

When the city organized meetings in different wards to talk about the budget, we organized our own meetings in neighbourhoods across the city, many of which evolved into ongoing neighbourhood groups.

When the city organized open meetings for residents, we organized our own mass meeting. Over 600 people came together, drafted a declaration from scratch, and conducted a vote among those assembled. We then distributed this declaration over email lists and on social media, gaining the signatures of over 3,000 people. Those who signed the declaration were encouraged to join an existing neighbourhood group if there was one, or to create one if there were enough people signing on from that area.

With this momentum, in addition to door-to-door community organizing and online outreach, we were able to build for a mass mobilization on September 24 when a special city council meeting was to take place to vote on the recommendations by KPMG. At the last minute, the city postponed the discussions until the actual budget vote on January 17.

On January 17, we organized a joint rally with Respect Toronto, a community/labour coalition headed up by the Toronto and York Region Labour Council. All of this culminated in the new motion that was brought to the council floor.

It is critical to note that throughout this process there were dozens of groups across the city mobilizing to defend specific services, be they libraries, community centres, wading pools, or what have you. Stop the Cuts Network was only part of this broad uprising against the mayor.

Wilson: Social Planning Toronto (SPT) has been involved in several ways. Through our city budget watch blog and email list, we have monitored and reported on every aspect of the budget process, from budget launch in November to final vote in January. We have provided analysis on the budget and promoted opportunities for community engagement. We canvassed each member of council to ask when they would be holding their local budget town hall meeting for constituents, and helped to promote these meetings widely.

We also created a map of Toronto that showed the location of service cuts and how low-income neighbourhoods would be disproportionately impacted, which caught the attention of councillors and media.

In our deputation to the budget committee, we spoke about the cuts impacting seniors, including the proposed elimination of the Hardship Fund, a city program that helps low-income seniors with serious health issues. Working with several seniors’ organizations we launched a campaign to save the Hardship Fund through the media. The Toronto Star dedicated news stories and an editorial to the topic, calling out individual councillors who had voted to consider cutting the program. In the end, the Hardship Fund was saved.

SPT always organizes an annual member forum on the city budget after it is released. This year, a panel of a dozen people working in community services, the environment, arts, and labour provided an analysis of the 2012 budget in the days following its release, which helped get people up to speed on what was an enormous and complex budget. Our staff also organized community budget forums across the city to engage local residents in the budget process.

O’Reilly: Library workers recognized at the conclusion of our collective bargaining in 2009 that greater challenges awaited us both at the municipal and at the library administration level. We knew that we had to better position ourselves to get our message out.

Fortunately we had already begun work in this area, and we were able to react quickly to the KPMG report recommending branch closures with the launch of Project Rescue and the online Love a Librarian petition, which greatly assisted us in our fight. Responses to the petition were collated based on postal address and sent as letters to the councillor for that area.

We have been told that the emails in support of the library service represented the greatest number of emails ever received on a given subject at city hall. Some councillors received over 2,000 emails from their constituents alone, and over 50,000 Torontonians signed the original petition.

Library workers also launched the My Library Matters to Me contest which featured, as the prize, lunch with one of 11 participating Canadian authors, most notably Margaret Atwood. This contest, along with read-ins, an appearance at the Word On The Street festival, and other cultural events allowed Torontonians and library workers to come together and express their mutual support for the library service.

What was effective about the mobilizations? What were the weaknesses?

Barnett: Toronto Stop the Cuts Network now has 11 neighbourhood groups that continue to organize across the city. The budget was only one step in a long journey that will include continued struggles at municipal, provincial, and federal levels. The neighbourhood groups will continue to organize, and it’s been great to see the expanding network of people committed to making change.

In terms of weaknesses, one of the primary obstacles we’ve faced has been disseminating information. Like all grassroots groups, we are run completely by volunteer labour. Ford has the media at his doorstep and the financial resources to reach out to all parts of the city whereas we have to build that power and engage people without those resources. That’s part of what we’re organizing for: community control over community resources.

Wilson: The educational work, the media work, the mapping, the ward teams, working together with residents and groups with common cause – it was all important in pushing back against the cuts. But we know this agenda of cutbacks is far from over.

There’s a lot more work to be done to engage people around the issue of contracting out and privatization, which is a major agenda of this administration. Most of the focus of discussion has been on cuts to services. It’s often easier to mobilize around the loss of a service, such as the closure of a community pool, which people can relate to directly, than it is around saving good public service jobs. It’s important for people to make the connection between good public services and good public service jobs.

O’Reilly: The amount of information that was made available to communities, outlining both the short-term and long-term implications of the budget, was invaluable in laying the foundation for change in this city.

One of the major weaknesses was the sheer number of issues that needed to be addressed and activities that needed support. This was a product of the scope of the attack levelled by the Ford administration, and I am sure it was an intended strategy on their part. There were several attempts to pit the various groups against one another and portray them as competitors, which were largely unsuccessful.

Both community and labour groups organized against this budget. How do you think community and labour groups worked well together?

Barnett: I think the important thing to note here is that labour is part of the community and the community is part of labour. We were all working together for a city that is livable, sustainable, and accommodating to all of its residents. Rob Ford and his allies were, and are, trying to take that away to please big businesses and to further enrich themselves. They tried to pit Toronto residents against labour groups, which is why it was so important for all of these groups to work together to take back the city that we want, where the needs of the residents are put before the bottom line.

Wilson: Local labour groups have done a lot of work to reach out to community and support community services under threat. Residents and community organizations are speaking out against the contracting out of public services, as labour groups take a strong stand against service cutbacks.

We have Rob Ford to thank for the opportunity to foster our solidarity and build connections between community and labour. The sheer breadth of the proposed cuts and the mass impact on a range of communities has brought us together and united us in common cause.

O’Reilly: I think there was a real coming together of labour and community groups fighting for a common good across the city. This was expressed at the most basic level of both sides coming together to share their stories. In the over 15 years that I have been involved in labour issues, this is the first time that I witnessed such a close collaboration.

What are the next steps for those opposed to service, public sector, and labour cuts?

Wilson: We have to keep organizing in our communities, and in key wards, coming together with individuals and groups with common cause to ensure that the momentum created does not die down. It would be exciting to return to a place where we are not protesting against threats to our city but rather engaging in city building where we are working toward the creation of an inclusive and equitable city for all.

Barnett: We have to continue with more outreach and more education. It’s time to make the structures we have now stronger by getting more people engaged in whichever way is most relevant to them, be it working on issues around housing, poverty, migrant justice, transit, the environment, labour, or anything else.

We need to continue building connections and building bridges across all of these issues in order to make our work more successful and to keep those in power on their toes. It’s this type of work that they don’t want us to do, and that’s why we have to keep doing it.

O’Reilly: The next immediate step for us is to oppose further labour cuts during the collective bargaining process. The loss of 107 full-time equivalency positions in the library during the budget process has been devastating. We were already facing a severe staffing shortage, and this has just added to the challenge.

We must continue our outreach in our communities and continue a dialogue focused on how to counter the austerity agenda and build the city we want to live in. We have to work hard to ensure that glib references to “gravy” don’t take hold in the future and undermine the quality of life here in the city.

“There is no better friend to Israel than Canada. We shall always be there for you, and in front of you.”
– Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, Jerusalem, January 2012

Canada’s support for Israel has a long history, dating back even before Israel was founded. In fact, it was Canada’s own Lester B. Pearson who chaired the United Nations committee that recommended the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel in 1947. Still, there is little question that the diplomatic, military, and economic ties between the two countries have deepened in recent years, coupled with a concerted campaign to stifle criticism of Israel.

The Canadian government’s unbending support for Israel is well known, especially within Palestine solidarity circles across Canada. What is less understood is the basis for this support. While economic and geopolitical ties are certainly important factors, the shared history of Canada and Israel as settler societies is crucial to understanding Canada’s ongoing support for Israel. Simply put, both countries were founded on the forced displacement of Indigenous peoples and the theft of their lands and resources. And in both cases, these colonial processes continue to the present day.

The similar nature of Canada and Israel as settler societies not only serves as a solid foundation for ideological affinity, but is also the basis for shared interests in the realm of international politics as both countries contend with ongoing attempts by their Indigenous populations to seek justice and redress on the world stage.

Providing a playbook

Canada’s support for Israel has taken many forms, but perhaps its greatest gift has been a real-life how-to guide for establishing and maintaining a settler society that includes an array of strategies, tactics, and programs for taking land, subjugating Indigenous populations, and weakening their resistance. It’s also worth noting that many of these tactics and strategies were used by the South African apartheid regime, including the Bantustan system and the use of the Dom Pass to restrict the movement of black South Africans.

The Indian Act of 1876 must be seen not only as the centrepiece of Canadian colonial policy towards Indigenous peoples, but also as a blueprint for apartheid. The Indian Act enshrined completely unequal rights, relations, and – over time – vastly disparate living conditions between Indigenous peoples and Canadian settlers. It also represented a policy of extermination as it facilitated the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples, and deprived Indigenous nations of their right to decide who was and was not “Indian.” This was a very gendered process as different standards for retaining “status” were applied to Indigenous women as compared to men, resulting in vast numbers of Indigenous women and their descendents losing not only their recognized status as Indigenous peoples, but also their ability to remain in their communities.

Israel has long engaged in attempts to regulate Palestinian identity, such as granting Palestinians within its borders Israeli citizenship while designating them “Arab Israelis,” issuing a complex array of different ID cards to Palestinians in the occupied territories restricting where they can reside and travel, or gradually stripping residency rights from hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with ties to the West Bank and Gaza.

Canada’s reservation system was also central to the displacement and containment of Indigenous peoples. In most of what is now Canada, the federal government can point to treaties as affirmation that the land was occupied with the ostensible consent of its Indigenous peoples, though there are also areas, including the majority of British Columbia, where colonization and the establishment of reserves took place with very few treaties. This process is one that continues to this day in a number of ways, most notably in B.C. with what’s referred to as the modern day treaty process, in which the only accepted framework for negotiating treaties is through permanent extinguishment of inherent land rights in exchange for fee-simple reserve lands.

Israel’s process of colonizing Palestine followed a similar strategy of forced displacement coupled with containment. Gradual settlement began in earnest during the first decades of the 20th century, culminating with the 1948 Nakba (the Arabic word for “catastrophe”) which saw the displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians from what then became the state of Israel. This process of land theft deepened after 1967 with the expansion of Jewish-only settlements in the occupied territories, a process that continues to the present.

Controlling the movement of Indigenous peoples has also been central to both Canadian and Israel colonialism. Canada’s pass system, enacted in 1885, dictated that Indigenous peoples required written permission, including their reasons for leaving, from the local Indian agent to leave their reserves. The pass system was put into place during the North-West Resistance and was justified by the Canadian government as a means of monitoring Indigenous peoples who were potentially participating in or supporting the resistance. Though initially described as a temporary measure, the pass system was used against Indigenous peoples at least until the 1940s.

This model of restricting the basic human right of Indigenous peoples to mobility within their own lands lives on today in Palestine. This includes an elaborate system of permits, checkpoints, and the apartheid wall, which together restrict and regulate the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This is accompanied by the hermetic siege of Gaza, the most extreme expression of controlling movement between and within Palestinian reserves.

A further strategy that Israel has borrowed from Canada is the use of seemingly endless negotiations as a deliberate stalling tactic and a means of further entrenching the control of Indigenous lands and resources. Negotiations also take place in a context of vast disparities in power and, to varying degrees, overt threats of violence. For example, when Treaty 7 was negotiated between the Canadian government and representatives from the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Tsuu T’ina nation, and a number of Nakoda and Assiniboine communities, the representatives of the Crown brought a sizable contingent of North West Mounted Police, who pointed their cannons directly at the Indigenous encampments and occasionally fired at them as a show of force. In an oral account of the signing of Treaty 7, Stoney Nakoda elder Morley Twoyoungmen recalls: “The chiefs said, ‘You talk of peace while there are guns pointing at me. This is not peace, please lay down your guns.’”
Israel has also employed the tactic of negotiations with similar success, at the expense of the Palestinian national movement. Throughout the Oslo Accords, the Road Map to peace, the Annapolis conference, and countless other “peace processes,” Israel has continued its expansion of illegal settlements and brutal wars against the Palestinian people. At the same time, the most basic demands articulated by the Palestinian movement (ending the occupation, allowing refugees to return to their homelands, and recognizing equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel) are invariably outside the parameters of negotiations.

Fates bound together

This shared colonial history is crucial to understanding Canada’s support for Israel. The similar nature of the two states creates a solid foundation for ideological affinity wherein, from the Canadian standpoint, there is nothing particularly problematic or controversial about a predomin-antly European population establishing a state on the lands of racialized people, displacing the original inhabitants, and settling the land as their own. In fact, Israel is often celebrated as an “outpost of civilization” in much the same way that the colonization of Turtle Island (North America) was justified as a “civilizing mission.”

Canada and Israel also have shared interests that are somewhat unique to settler societies. The legitimacy of both nation states is regularly challenged by the continued survival and resistance of the Indigenous inhabitants of the lands to which these states lay claim. With the perseverance of the Palestinian struggle and international growth of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, challenges to Israel’s “right to exist” as a colonial apartheid state have gained mainstream prominence, but it’s important to note that Canada also faces significant challenges from assertions of Indigenous sovereignty. The ongoing struggles in B.C., where the provincial government has had to acknowledge that the vast majority of the land is unceded, provide but one of the more clear examples of challenges to the very legitimacy of Canada’s territorial jurisdiction.

In the realm of international politics, Canada plays the role of a proud and uncritical defender of Israel against attempts to address any of its numerous human rights violations or war crimes. Canada has its own interest in ensuring that Israel maintains impunity as it has also come under scrutiny at the UN, which is increasingly used by Indigenous peoples as a forum through which to advance their struggles and seek redress for human rights abuses. Canada has also garnered international attention over its ongoing expansion of the tarsands in Alberta, its continued export of asbestos to the Global South, and the atrocious record of Canadian mining companies in regards to human rights abuses and displacement of (predominantly Indigenous) people in Latin America. If Israel is held accountable for its crimes against Indigenous people on the world stage, Canada has a greater risk of meeting the same fate. It can’t allow these precedents to be set, and thus it benefits from ensuring that the UN and its various bodies are kept weak and unable to uphold international law.

A recent example of this is Canada’s continued fear of being held accountable for the residential school system as a crime of genocide. According to a recent article in the Globe and Mail, the Conservative-appointed chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is conscious of this concern: “Justice Murray Sinclair says the United Nations defines genocide to include the removal of children based on race, then placing them with another race to indoctrinate them. He says Canada has been careful to ensure its residential school policy was not ‘caught up’ in the UN’s definition.” As Judge Sinclair explained to a group of students at the University of Manitoba in February, “That’s why the minister of Indian Affairs can say this was not an act of genocide … but the reality is that to take children away and to place them with another group in society for the purpose of racial indoctrination was – and is – an act of genocide and it occurs all around the world.’”

The Canadian government also benefits from its relationship with Israel by gaining access to Israel’s experience with tools of repression either for domestic use or, in the case of Israeli drones, in Afghanistan. Though Canada has developed its own vast experience in this regard through repeated police and military deployments to subdue Indigenous resistance, Israel has much to share in the way of high-tech means of policing and intelligence gathering developed over decades of repression and warfare against Palestinians. In addition to more overt forms of violent repression, this also includes the repeated use of the “terrorism” label to try to discredit the Palestinian movement, a label that is now increasingly used by the Canadian government in its propaganda wars against Indigenous peoples and, recently, to smear both Indigenous and non-Indigenous opposition to the tarsands and its associated pipeline projects.

Canada’s desire for Israel’s expertise in matters of repression underlies the 2008 Canada-Israel Declaration of Intent to enhance co-operation on public security issues, a document signed by representatives of both governments that outlines Canada and Israel’s “common threats” and details a “shared commitment to facilitate and enhance cooperation” in areas ranging from border security to correctional services and “terrorist financing.”

Unity and solidarity

For Indigenous peoples living in Canada, the principle of unity and solidarity between peoples has often been crucial in continuing their struggles as people of many nations all living on Turtle Island. This unity has been extended to include the Palestinian struggle since at least the 1970s when the American Indian Movement and the Palestine Liberation Organization issued a joint declaration affirming “united resistance to a common form of oppression.” These connections must continue and be deepened as our different experiences of resisting Israel and Canada help inform each other.
For Canadians working in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, it must never be forgotten that Indigenous people here are struggling every day to survive the numerous ways in which Canadian apartheid continues to damage the original peoples upon whose land this country was built. It is not simply a matter of moral consistency, though that is of course important. Struggles for Indigenous sovereignty are unique in that they directly challenge the hegemony of Canadian capitalism. For that reason, it is important to bear in mind how supporting Indigenous self-determination will benefit all struggles for social justice within Canada in the long term. Furthermore, coming to terms with what it means to be a part of a settler society in Canada, and the resulting ramifications for both Indigenous peoples and settlers, can only make our ability to support the Palestinian struggle stronger.

At the time of writing this, three months have passed since Attawapiskat became a household name in Canada. Three months, and the band-aid solution of 22 homes has not been delivered and the community remains virtually unchanged. Three months, and the issues this community brought to the consciousness of Canadians have been all but forgotten.

We all like to believe that things are shifting in Indigenous-state relationships. We like to believe that things are getting better, that we’ve moved on from the circumstances that created flashpoint events like the Oka Crisis, Ipperwash, and Caledonia. But exceptional circumstances show you your real friends, and the housing crisis in Attawapiskat showed me that Indigenous Peoples have precious few allies in this country.

Three months ago, I was too angry to write about this issue. I was too angry to articulate the very clear set of colonial circumstances that led to this imposed crisis. I was too angry at the familiar response of the mainstream media: recycling the same racist imagery of Indigenous Peoples as desperate, poor, dirty people unable to manage the taxpayer funds Canadians so generously give us. I was too angry at the responses of Canadians, from the outright hate in the comments sections of national and regional online newspapers to the so-called experts selected to comment on the crisis to the punishing, blame-the-victim response of the Conservative government.

Although I was overwhelmed with anger, I was not surprised. This is what history and experience have taught us to expect. But I didn’t just feel angry; I also felt very proud. I felt proud of the people of Attawapiskat and Chief Theresa Spence for standing so strong in the face of attack. I felt proud of Mi’kmaq lawyer Pam Palmater taking on the issue night after night on radio and television. I felt proud of Chelsea Vowel, a legally trained Métis writer, when she posted “Dealing with comments about Attawapiskat” on her blog âpihtawikosisân. Vowel clearly laid out the numbers for all to see that the people of Attawapiskat were not wasting taxpayers’ money, but that the system chronically underfunds First Nations in comparison to Canadians. Her blog post spread like wildfire over social networking sites, eventually getting picked up by rabble.ca and the National Post. I appreciated her work, and I wondered why the first assumption so many Canadians made in 2011 was that Attawapiskat was wasting taxpayers’ money. Why did Vowel have to generate and supply data to back up the fact that First Nations are not criminals before people could begin to see our perspective?

One of the most difficult parts of this story to watch was the heartbreaking photographs and video footage documenting the worst manifestations of poverty in the North, played over and over in the mainstream media. Indigenous Peoples are all too familiar with conditions like these, and while so many people might only see poverty, we see our relatives, our friends, our families, ourselves. We see that, primarily, the people in these videos are people, with names and histories and voices. They are not the poor, helpless victims of a forgotten culture as the images suggested. The people of Attawapiskat are much, much more than just poverty.

As many others have pointed out, the entire natural resource sector of Canada’s economy is built upon stolen resources – resources taken from Indigenous lands without fair compensation and without the consent of Indigenous Peoples. The poverty experienced in Indigenous communities is imposed poverty – poverty imposed by the Indian Act, poverty imposed by occupation, dispossession, theft, and two centuries of attack on Indigenous cultures, languages, world views, and ways of life. Canadians, with one of the highest standards of living in the world, are complicit in this because Canada’s richness is a direct result of Indigenous poverty.

While many of our communities are economically impoverished in a Western sense, they are far from poor. Our northern communities are rich because they know their languages. They are rich because they have strong connections to their land. They are rich because at least some of their lands exist in a natural state. They are rich because they live in the same community as their grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins, and extended families. They are rich because they do not rely on material wealth to bring them happiness. They are rich because, despite years of disrespect, they have survived and in many ways flourished.

The mainstream media does not see this richness, nor do they take a step back to examine the broader set of forces that has led to the crisis in Indigenous-state relations. And so, the well-meaning solution to Indigenous poverty becomes economic development, which to me is tremendously misguided.

Our people have repeatedly been shown that industrial development does not solve our economic development problems. The diamond mine hasn’t helped Attawapiskat. Yet over and over, settler governments, which are primarily concerned with opening up Indigenous territories to development, paint the choice as either protecting Indigenous territories and living in abject poverty, or sacrificing the territory to hyperdevelopment by multinational corporations in exchange for jobs. Community-controlled, local, sustainable, and small-scale economic development is almost never discussed. Indigenous economies, the ones that kept our nations strong for tens of thousands of years, are erased and deemed a relic of the past.

Education is the key to success for Indigenous children. But what kind of education? Education that reflects whose political, cultural, and intellectual traditions? Education in whose language? Curriculum in Canada is devastatingly absent of the perspectives of Indigenous Peoples. Students do not learn about our colonial history. They do not learn Indigenous perspectives on that history, our political traditions or systems of governance, or anything that would lead them to critically evaluate Canada’s relationship with Indigenous Peoples.

How is this preparing Canadian children to interact with our people on complex and difficult issues, or to deal responsibly with the disaster they are inheriting? How can we expect different outcomes in Indigenous-settler relations for the next generation when the education system is designed to create citizens who will uphold the very broken system we have right now?

And what does this do to Indigenous children? We know the answer to that one because virtually every Indigenous person in Canada knows what it is like to be educated in a system that silences, erases, belittles, and even demonizes anything Indigenous. We know that it is very difficult to maintain a positive Indigenous identity in that kind of environment. We know that we have to work very hard on behalf of our children to make sure that we provide an environment for them that is an antidote to public education. Indigenous parents spend an enormous amount of time undoing the damage that Canadian curricula, some teachers, and some students inflict on our kids. Those of us who want our children to have a profound connection to our territory and our knowledge, to know their own Indigenous language, philosophies, and histories, must do so on our own time, with our own resources.

Yes, the kids of Attawapiskat deserve to have a beautiful school that inspires their greatest creative potential. In that school, I want them to hear their language communicating their histories, their philosophies, their stories and songs from the hearts of their Elders. As part of their schooling, I want those Elders to take them out into their territory so they can feel what it means to be part of the land.

The colonial system works to obfuscate the way out of this mess. Colonialism likes us to believe that what happened between Indigenous peoples and Canada was inevitable – sad but inevitable. It was not. It was a series of choices. Colonialism likes us to believe that while what happened in the past is tragic, things are better now. They are not. We don’t have to uphold this system any longer. We can collectively make different choices.

So when nations come together like in the Yinka Dene Alliance and ban Enbridge Northern Gateway pipelines from their territories, Canada is presented with a tremendous opportunity to respect those Indigenous nations by supporting their decision. When Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug says no to mining or Grassy Narrows says no to deforestation, rather than fighting those communities legally, politically, and psychologically, Canada can choose to respect their decisions. Period. This is how we begin to make things better. This is how we make different decisions. This is what the start of a respectful relationship looks like. Yes, it is time for change, and the ball is in Canada’s court.

By 1968, the civil rights movement was well underway in cities across the United States. But despite the sustained organizing efforts of black activists and their allies, progress was slow. In the racially divided city of Houston, Texas, black communities continued to face regular violence and institutionalized discrimination. The Ku Klux Klan promoted hate rallies door to door, white children repeated the racist slurs spoken by their elders, and many whites viewed small gestures of cross-racial friendship as unforgivable transgressions.

The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell reflects on a brief moment during those tumultuous times. Mining his childhood memories, Long has written a work of graphic fiction that resonates with the honesty of memoir, refusing to sugar-coat the past.

The story is centred on Long’s father, Jack, and his family. While covering a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee rally as a TV reporter, Jack meets Larry Thompson, a fictional character based on the real-life Larry Thomas, a black anti-poverty activist from Houston’s Fifth Ward. They strike up a tentative friendship that eventually brings their families together.

When racist whites run down Larry’s daughter, he organizes a community protest. The march is attacked by the police, and in the melee, two officers are shot – one fatally.

Five black students are charged with manslaughter, and Jack holds key evidence that could save them. Thankfully, Long avoids the racist narrative of a noble white saviour that plagues many stories set in the same era. Jack falters at several points, and finally, Larry presses Jack to speak the truth.

The visual storytelling of Nate Powell, whose 2008 graphic novel Swallow Me Whole won an Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Novel, continues to shine. His pencil work is exuberant, striking the perfect balance between cartooning and realism. Powell makes brilliant use of a limited grey-scale colour palette and thoughtful layout choices to bring a stunning depth of feeling to the small but revelatory moments in the characters’ lives. When Larry lashes out at his son Daniel after being refused service at a white-owned gas station, and when Mark Long and his sister Michelle are left out of a game of catch by an epithet-spouting neighbourhood boy, their faces seem to swirl with a storm of emotions moving just beneath their skin.

The book falls short of addressing many of the key political discussions occurring in the movement at the time. Black Power is not adequately explained, and the relationship between racism, imperialism, and capitalism is never considered. The failure of the authors to mention the well-documented FBI COINTELPRO program, which attempted to systematically discredit and destroy black liberation movements, leaves readers lacking the contextual information necessary to understand the police violence and trial.

What The Silence of Our Friends does well is ask important questions. How are racist attitudes internalized or rejected by children? What does it take to earn the trust of others across boundary lines marked by race privilege? And, how can we make progress in the struggle against oppression?

The graphic novel ends with what can only be understood as a call to action in the form of a quote by Martin Luther King Jr.: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” The book’s power arises from the disparate and delicate moments in the lives of its characters, woven together like voices in a choir, reminding us that, while never easy, solidarity begins with a refusal to be silent when others are oppressed.

What you really really want: The smart girl’s shame-free guide to sex and safety
By Jaclyn Friedman
Seal Press, 2011

In the midst of conflicting and ubiquitous messages about women’s sexuality, it’s no wonder so many young women have a hard time determining and articulating their desires and boundaries when it comes to sex. The challenge of cultivating a healthy, satisfying, and self-directed sex life can feel next to impossible.

What You Really Really Want offers readers not only hope that a healthy sex life is possible but also practical guidance for reclaiming our sexuality. In this resolutely pragmatic, no-nonsense guide, Jaclyn Friedman expertly walks readers through the process of penetrating the layers of influence on our sexuality with the ultimate goal of taking our sex lives into our own hands.

Although written expressly for younger women and girls, the book is a valuable resource for anyone seeking to explore their sexual desires and boundaries, and is actively inclusive of all genders and sexual orientations.

Friedman is the co-editor with Jessica Valenti of the anthology Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape. After a reporter asked her to explain how we “figure out what we want to say ‘yes’ to in the first place,” she decided to write What You Really Really Want to help readers answer this question for themselves.

Beginning with an examination of the impact of family, media, peers, school, religious institutions, medical professionals, and partners on our sexuality, Friedman encourages readers to first determine where they currently stand when it comes to sex and sexuality before delving into what they want and, finally, how to get it.

The “terrible trio” – shame, blame, and fear – are introduced early on as major barriers to connecting with one’s sexuality. Their persistent reappearance throughout the book can feel repetitive at times, but given the pervasiveness of this “triple threat” in society and the depth of its damage, it’s hard to, well, blame Friedman for their prevalence in the book.

What You Really Really Want reads like a workbook, and Friedman encourages readers to take their time with it (a week or two per chapter, which works out to three to six months). Each chapter includes prompts for written reflection and points readers to lists of additional resources. Friedman brings in her own personal desires, boundaries, and experiences of sexuality only intermittently in order to illustrate her points. The emphasis throughout is on the reader, with Friedman guiding her along with the directness and compassion of an older sister.

Friedman’s frank yet intimate approach gives the reader a sense of being guided by competent, caring hands. The book asks a lot of its readers, challenging them to take a great deal of responsibility for their own sexual health and safety, asking them to rehash potentially painful experiences, and coaxing them through difficult but important conversations. Friedman balances this heaviness with friendly reassurances throughout, such as “This chapter may have stirred up uncomfortable memories,” and “Life is messy sometimes, and so is sex.”

The book falls short in addressing the systemic nature of sexual oppression and advocating for a society that nurtures, even celebrates, female sexuality. Friedman acknowledges that sexuality is socially constructed but only briefly touches on the structural barriers to sexual self-determination. While she guides readers through personal reflections on how systemic prejudices based on age, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation impact the way we experience sexuality as individuals, she stops short of suggesting any collective efforts to address the roots of sexual violence beyond a short section at the end that vaguely encourages us to advocate for a more “holistic, pleasure-based model” of sexual education within our schools.

Nevertheless, What You Really Really Want is a powerful tool for radically transforming how we understand and navigate the complexities of our own sexuality.

Residing at the Regional Treatment Centre, a federal penitentiary in Abbotsford, B.C., I am reminded daily of my social identity as a prisoner: living in a cell, interacting with prison staff, obeying the institution’s rules and routines. After a while, it is easy to fall into the motions of a mundane institutional life where I know myself simply as a number, and prison staff merely as uniforms.

In prison, inmates and staff alike are vulnerable to turning into pathological versions of ourselves.

In here, you’re either a prisoner or a guard. Social roles and labels dictate behaviours. That’s the power of the prison. Too often I have seen fellow inmates degenerate into passive victims or resentful system bashers. Too often I have seen correctional officers devolve into tyrants or sadists.

The Conservative Party’s “tough-on-crime” approach, I believe, supports this pathology. This past year, for example, Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews announced his government would be spending over $77 million in prison expansion projects in B.C. alone, and little emphasis is being put on rehabilitative programs. This will only increase the overcrowded prison population. As Minister Toews so toughly put it, “public safety first; rehabilitation second.”

Under this “transformation agenda,” if we can call it that, inmates will be made to feel as though they’re warehoused cattle, while prison guards will be required to exercise power over a greater number of inmates. Clearly, in this condition, humans deform into objects.

Contrary to this political approach, I believe the true source of positive and genuine transformation is relational. Transformation occurs in relationships built and maintained between prisoners and their families, friends, volunteers, and staff who are in the system, but not of it.

Transformation occurs when inmates treat each other and staff as people who belong to their own families and are trying their best under the circumstances. It occurs when each of us looks beyond our social roles and labels – be it “con” or “guard” – and respects the person. At the end of the day, when the final cell door shuts and the last count is done, we are all just people temporarily imprisoned.

And let us not forget that every morning we are capable of rising above the dark night of prison. We do this by reaffirming our unique selves and transforming our lives one day at a time, one relationship at a time.

After all, a smile and a respectful attitude are a lot cheaper than supersized prisons. The latter is costing us billions of dollars. The former will only cost us our biases and prejudices.

Illustration credit: Hanna Andersson via Flickr

The spring had been wet and the summer hot and it had been a bad year for mosquitoes. After the water dried up and the mosquitoes died off, the dragonflies appeared. So, as I sat with my wife at the admissions desk of the hospital for my upcoming operation, I was not surprised to see a large dragonfly come through the front entrance and land on the glass between the clerk and me. I was watching it flex its metallic green wings against its long abdomen, when I realized that the clerk was staring at me. It had been two hours since I had taken an Ativan to numb and relieve me of any anxieties over the procedure.

“His name is Oliver Adler,” said my wife Christine.

I looked at her, thankful she was there.

“Did you see the dragonfly?” I asked.

I pointed but it had already gone.

I turned back to the clerk and I had to squint my eyes to focus. He looked at his screen.

“Alder?”

“No, Adler. A-D-L-E-R.”

“Right. Do you know where you’re going?”

Evidently, the clerk had given up on me and had decided to speak only to my wife. I looked at her and saw that the dragonfly had landed on her head, like a viridescent bow that my daughter would use in her hair. Viridescent—I liked the sound of the word as it wobbled in my brain.

I reached out to pet the dragonfly but it moved around to the back of Christine’s head. My wife stared at me.

I mumbled, “Dragonfly.”

I think it was at that moment that she gave up on me as well.

“Go down that hall. Take the stairs to the third floor. Turn left and go in the door that says ‘vasectomies’.”

I tried to say thank you, to show the clerk that I was all right, but he had already moved on to the next admission.

I kept up with my wife all the way to the third floor and turned left, giving a little sprint to reach the door before her. I made sure to open it courteously and let her enter first. She didn’t seem to appreciate it. We seated ourselves in the middle of the room.

A woman near my wife was yelling into her cell phone at someone. I looked at my wife and whispered, “Whoever she’s talking to already had his balls cut off.” Judging by my wife’s reaction, I may not have been as quiet as I thought.

I tried to recover. “I don’t think this Ativan is affecting me too much.”

“You don’t?”

I chewed on my tongue. In my youth, I had discovered that this was the quickest way to know if I was drunk. I couldn’t feel it so I decided to cover.

“Well, I am definitely not like dad.” I felt the qualifier was important to emphasize. At nights, after the Alzheimer’s had taken his mind, my dad’s care nurses had tried to sedate him with Ativan but he’d had an adverse reaction to it. Instead of settling him down, it cranked his mind to high. One night in the middle of winter, he escaped, breaking a wheelchair and going out a back door. He set off the only alarm in the place but the nurses never caught him. It was a baker heading to work who found him on the other side of town, freezing, dressed only in his hospital gown, and brought him back.

“Are you sure you’re not like him?” Christine asked.

“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?” I knew I was supposed to take offense to her suggestion but I couldn’t figure out why.

A nurse looked up from her desk, “Oliver Alder?”

My wife answered, “Adler.”

The nurse looked at her sheet, “Oh, right. Come along.”

I followed the nurse into an airy hallway with two curtained-off areas. She waved to the one that was open, where a hospital bed sat with its upper back cranked to a 45-degree angle.

“You can put your pants on the chair, climb onto the bed, and pull the sheet over you.”

Before dad had been sick, Christine and I had backpacked with the kids through France, Italy, and Greece and I learned to appreciate the easygoing European attitude about the human body. I would later tell my wife that it was this appreciation and nothing else that prompted me to disrobe in front of the nurse. The nurse turned, unimpressed, and closed the curtain. I hoped that her disdain for me was for no other reason than she had seen enough naked patients to last a lifetime.

I was relaxing on the bed when the doctor entered the room. “Hello, Mr. Alder.”

I didn’t correct him.

“I have a resident helping me out today. We’ll prep you until he arrives.”

It is said that men who have vasectomies have a lower chance of prostate cancer, not because of the operation itself but because any problems are likely to be detected early, thanks to their willingness to let a doctor touch the family jewels. Lying there, half undressed, watching the doctor prepare his needle for freezing, I wondered how low the statistics for prostate cancer in European men were.

“All you are going to feel is a little tug.” I watched as the needle went under my skin. The lower part of my body felt very far away and my head was trying to remember a Bette Midler movie where the doctor gave a pregnant woman a needle and said, “All you’ll feel is a little prick” and the woman responded, “That’s what got me here in the first place.” Before I figured out the title, I realized the doctor had left the room.

“Mr. Alder?”

I opened my eyes to find the doctor staring at me. I had been dreaming of dragonflies, filling the brightening sky and stretching their wings in the early morning sun.

“I’d like you to meet Dr. Adler.” The resident stood behind the doctor, his humped back turned towards me. I laughed out loud at the similarity of our names but I couldn’t remember if I opened my mouth.

The resident turned and it was my father, looking like he did the night of his viewing at the funeral home. His hair was long and white and his cheeks had been filled in with cotton. His skin was waxy and he looked stiff and formal. He was wearing his suit under the scrubs. The life was back in his eyes and when he smiled, I could feel he recognized me.

The doctor punctured my scrotum with a hemostat. He drew the first tube out of the hole and clipped it off.

“Shit, I hate hospitals,” my father grouched. I couldn’t agree with him more.

The doctor sewed up the first tube. “It’s bleeding a little. Let’s clean it up.”

My dad handed the doctor what looked like a soldering iron. There was a little hiss and smell as the wound was cauterized. The doctor pulled out the second tube and he looked to my dad.

“I’ll get you to do this one.” He pinched off the tube and handed my dad the snips. My father took them in his hand and looked at me. He and I stared at each other. Before this operation, before the funeral, before the Alzheimer’s, life had been a steady course without change.

“There are some things we should never have to do.”

I was sure he said more but my mind fell backwards and by the time he had snipped and stitched and sutured me, I was looking up at him from the other side of a thick glass. On the ride home, Christine said I mumbled about not wanting my mouth sewn shut for telling a lie. She said I slept four hours. But I never did. I waited and I hid and I never told her what had happened, how I had seen my father, or when I had reached out for his hand, he had stepped away. Finally, I never told her that he had shed his doctor’s robe, and stretched out his four magnificent viridescent wings, flexing them and then, without a goodbye, he had flown up through the roof of the hospital and escaped into the warm morning sun.

Illustration credit: Marie A.-C. via Flickr

on the eighth day

Moon descends amongst the fruits and branches of the Tree of Knowledge. Her mouth carries the future in prayers, when all solid things have dissolved into blood and air, leaving young and old to live on words alone. Their dialects have collapsed into one galactic cry tunnelling backwards to what they believe is the beginning.

There is a mass grave here. The broken skins of some of the fruit reveal eyes, nasal cartilage, thumbs. Bones of all shapes and functions nest in the crooks of the rough bark, like small children playing hide-and-seek. Dangling femurs swordplay to the music in the leaves and half-grown ribs hang off branch tips, dream-catching. Deep in the Tree’s heart, Serpent is moderating a conference of branded skulls.

He is their loyal brother. His eyes have shed hills of salt to learn their names – these marked ones returned from the frontlines of time, with pain’s millennia seared in their calcium. When they arrive crushed, Serpent wraps himself tight around their pieces, absorbing their torture until they remember themselves whole.

Each skull speaks three distinct languages: one of birth, one of love, one of betrayal. They share memories of ships’ bowels, trenches and execution rooms. They whisper about the man in the garden who does not want to know, and the woman who does, because she is considering all possible endings to the lives she will bear. Every so often, they commemorate kisses.

Moon’s arms are full with the bones of a man from Georgia. A man undimmed by twenty years on death row, whose arteries pumped fifteen minutes of poison behind a glass window while he negotiated his killers’ redemption. Troy Davis does not look, taste or smell like prison. His eyes are twenty-one years old, holding the road to Atlanta mugged by an August sky and soft as his sister’s shoulder beside him.

Serpent and Moon lay his bones beside those engraved by Anna Mae Picton Aquash. The leaves still their song, tilting their lips to catch one thousand elegies raining like heartbeats on Savannah soil. He left behind a nation of hemlock fingers and children assassinated by their terror of light.

A tree of bones at the centre of Eden’s red earth drinks the dust of rivers, grass underneath the city, stars washed in kerosene. The woman in the garden eats of its fruit. Her babies spend their nights remembering and forgetting the murders corded in their bellies.

-tribute to Troy Davis (1968-2011)

postscript to Marx

here is my labour stripped off the shirt of a woman
her sweat and clumsy tears salting pavements of flesh

against the wind her head crooked, some hope it stays
that way so the world can go on happening

here is something she made the day she died and nobody came
for her unregistered body, her body outside the temple of language.
all there was was her abused uterus,

a tight cursing pellet for the people to swallow.

nobody came to see her shot-up heart. my labour
that is not being done on a slant. it is just here, without a crown,
flat with unsightly bumps where tripwires are buried – her

myriad uninteresting explosions that made continuing possible.

she was never really here, never above her skin
or the way her life was taken by a pen.

here is my labour ready to be polished into desire’s fingernail
but she was too goddamn poor to fix.

she left the house that day with her eyes in her hands
the mouth of a gun between her legs wearing
nothing but the smell of children and burnt soup

she found there was not a roof

to meet her naked labour: my heart
shot up still wanting to beat

here

— n
1. Queen of the Olympian gods, sister and wife of Zeus: I watch her stumble to her vow, sea-filled kneecaps, finger she unfolds a manicured thorn for Hera’s chin; behind applause, I catch perfect technique of her teeth, gnashing bits of ventricle.

2. the here and now: he wakes up to moonlit, half-digested chunks of beef stew beside the heater, re-collecting drafty joints knocking wet wood, Pacific salt in nostrils, spreading rash around his mother’s eyes; after the second Bacardi Silver, here is always the boat.

3. this place: they stare past each other’s hair at peeling walls, skin stung by after-sex, soles wandering each collateral wrinkle on cheap flowered sheets; regret rain’s beat spider-crawling back of knees with nowhere to go from here.

— adv
1. in, at, or to this place, point, case, or respect: they come here to watch planes take off when their syntaxes fail to meet in the middle; here the moon edgy enough to penetrate smoke curtains huffed at manic pace; sunk deep, they miss the heavy crunch of cop until here is nothing but bleach light and lungs lurching.

2. at several places in or throughout an area: I sit next to her tension the way I would approach a wasp; he is explaining again why she shouldn’t worry – because he only sells the dope here and there, only sniffs it time to time, eventually he will diploma himself into rickety livelihood of the working underclass.

3. indication that one is about to perform an action: Nina Simone is pounding ivory keys when her water breaks; ain’t got no friends, ain’t got no schoolin’, ain’t got no love, ain’t got no name, but her bags are packed and here goes anyway.

4. formula to propose a toast: dilapidated Christmas lights blink-barb her hand as she cuts, out of season, the wedding-frosted vanilla cake; here’s to her write to dream, whipped cream smug on the priest’s upper lip.

5. short-lived; transitory: shadowing in at 4 a.m., the room spinning, his thighs turbo engines; drags a numb finger across her warm cheek, slips rubber-bound cash under the pillow before pocketing her cell phone; love obliges a circus, here today, gone tomorrow.

6. an event or process is about to repeat itself: I study maps with her, overdue bills staining carpet, phone accumulating messages; here we go again, staking indefensible claims to water, to movement, in the method of ancestors.

7. of no relevance or importance: her open belly, napkin poems under bed, broken script of her eye, neither here nor there inside a baby’s cry; the clock elongates, bent elbows a basket for tiny, quivering ribs.

8. an emphatic form of this: we stay within distance of a breath, self ticking into soil, organs corrupting imperceptibly like the sudden yellow of an album; before the line scatters, only this here, a part kissing time into place.

citizen apocalypse

for the 492 Tamil refugees who arrived on the shore of British Columbia, unceded Coast Salish Territory, on August 13, 2010, and were subsequently detained by the Canadian Border Services Agency

terror on surface open / sea
premonition’s children / chest bullet

proof / glass / kiss smoke sing / life
numbered shoulders / august / wheel

light / air blood / earn mask
write uniform death / strike

turn / tread / whisper / gauze
pale hearts / first world citizen-

ship / cage / loved ones pearl
river bottoms / brown

will to live / splendid
biological weapon

(unsubmitted) prospectus of a native informant

[subject/object construction]

through skin of pearl my hip billows
pliant pink in mouth of day. I offer
insolvent body, the negated form –
a flower’s fanatic hope for sunrise
as it chokes on the city,
as I cut the lines.

time to realign bone in the text
of my spine, first and only barricade
against siege of loans, sleep
hesitating along paths of clear
stung blackness, the tidal wave of rent.

my body’s ship resolute as photograph
the page inters whites of my eyes –
they say, pray to the yawning gods
of oily hair and coffee-rust teeth.
either way let’s be methodical about the gutting.

[ontological premise]

postcolony is nomad’s avenging oath before legs are removed in a single stroke. it is believed the oath’s fulfilment carries within it the World’s end.

migration is the ocean’s response to coal’s aggression. multidirectional retreat. a scatter. postal codes replace shrines.

inheritance is a parent’s humiliation. albums of mysterious cousins. spoons.
propensity to lower eyes. threadbare pillow cases. a psychology
of exit doors. distrust of own name in another’s mouth.

palimpsest is my back broken of insolence and ironed for mercury to engrave
any alphabet, any thought at all.

thesis is (coiled enough, the neck will bow in agreement) Yes, These Renegade Questions and Half-Open Eyes Will Keep Us from Dying.

appendix a
legs can fade like stamps, paper, italicized fonts, or twenty years of someone’s life in an outlaw tongue. easily overlooked in taxi cabs, public bathrooms, food banks.

appendix b
when I dream grass sprouts from my body. worms dig tunnels in my frontal lobe. birds drink crimson milk from my navel.

[canon]

the bone is a ghost inside you that lingers
just long enough to sketch permanence.

it grieves like no union, army or bureaucrat.
it does not renegotiate terms of labour.
it derives no prestige from ivory.

the bone loves you, and gives you up
remembering you shroud the earth.

[preliminary findings]

nomads know a thousand and seven ways
to hide inside your glance:

recant the moons in my name,
trade your compass for mine,
spool breath into a nuclear annotation.
I know what it costs to beg
for time and calcium, my roving light
shaved down to gristle. memory’s crust
imploded, churns tiny hammers
into a guerrilla heart.

Illustration credit: padlaversusmoij via Flickr

For whatever reason, city hall gives Kelly’s department four months’ notice before the layoffs. It’s probably the union that’s responsible for that. Endless days of morose chatter. Everyone has an opinion. No one can be bothered to work, standing in wilted clumps around the office, turning heads like deer at passersby. The departmental mood swings adolescently from anger to depression and back, taking everyone with it. The people who are staying are, on average, angrier than those who will be leaving. Kelly will be leaving. After she gets her official letter, she has to go to meetings where counselors give out leaflets on grief. Kelly scowls through them. She dead-eyes the HR reps from her seat at the front, too pissed off to listen, then sends emails hours later requesting clarification about what the hell she’s supposed to do about her pension. Is she vested, or what?

She’s so angry that it doesn’t really sink in until the last three days, when there’s cake and retirement speeches, that her work buddies will be gossiping without her from now on. And it’s while she’s standing there beside the veggie platter, listening to her boss’ boss laud the team he just gutted, that she counts some faces and realizes that in the end, really, she’s the only one going. A few others will fade into early retirement, where their pensions will supplement some part-time work. And some of the clerical staff will move to the mailroom. But considering that the budget got axed by 30 per cent, the fact that she’s the only one who will be applying for EI strikes her as ludicrous. She’s the only one whose ties – pay, pension, and benefits – will be entirely severed.

Her boss’ boss gives them all a self-help book as a parting gift. To the half of the people in the room who haven’t been retired, relocated, or outright canned, he says a cheery, “Well, have a great summer.” He likes to take his six weeks of vacation all at once, she’s heard. She leaves the book beside the dip, but takes the $10 gift card inside.

The meeting’s over. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. Tomorrow she’ll come in and collect the last of her plants from her desk, and that’ll be it. She’ll be done.

Kelly walks out of city hall and down the street to a lingerie boutique. It’s the kind of place where the staff come into the change room to tuck cool fingers under the straps to ensure a good fit. And it’s good-looking lingerie – spiky black, lacy white, hot pink, burlesque red – which is important because it’s an investment. Like her master’s degree, but cheaper and less time-consuming. She pays $900 in cash. She’s such a high roller they throw in a free pair of black panties at the till.

If she caught her boss’ boss alone in the parking lot right now, she’d say something to him. She might be shaking. Her voice might pitch funny. She’d say, “You did this to me.” It’s not true. No one’s done this to her; she made the decision alone in her bedroom on a sunny Tuesday morning a month ago. But still. She’d like to see the look on his face if he knew.

As of her termination date, she’s had sex with six guys who aren’t her boyfriend and netted about $1,900. The count doubles her previous number of sexual partners. She knows because she’s always kept careful track; she’s a natural bureaucrat.

Pretty quickly she got used to how old men kiss – each one different and already locked deep in his ways. And how they all tell her she’s beautiful and special and not like a hooker at all. She is entertained by these assertions, but not flattered. She aims to treat all her clients with the same level of friendly customer service for which she was valued for at city hall, which means she’s often too honest about her real life. She tries to stop being so open, but can’t; she likes making them know her. She shoves the most boring, regular parts of herself right in their faces: gardening, mortgage, layoff, skiing, dog. She’s also maybe a little too honest with her boyfriend, who didn’t really believe in this career transition until she walked out the door in a short skirt and lace tank top that first night.

“Just don’t make me drive you anywhere,” he stipulated later. His one rule.

“Alright,” she said. And her rule: condoms always, from now on. With him, with everyone.

It’s important to her that this doesn’t affect him or their relationship in any major way. And that’s actually pretty easy. Half the time she forgets about it. Sex work is just work.

She finds another day job – something clerical that is a little below her – because she can’t stand the thought of her in-laws thinking she’s leeching off her boyfriend. Yes, he’s paying the mortgage and the property taxes and whatever balance is on the credit card every month. But her crisp fifties and twenties and hundreds are paying for groceries, gas, dog food, and their whole summer vacation. She buys clothes, gifts, movie tickets, beer. Every time she goes out on a call he gets a twenty off the top to spend on whatever he wants. Pizza, video games. It’s the first time in a long time that they are profligate.

She keeps a detailed spreadsheet to track all her clients, her income, and the fees she pays to her agency. Eight hours at the day job doesn’t equal what she makes in one hour with a client. But those eight hours are guaranteed, and there are nights the clients don’t call.

She buys a dress that she wears on dates with new clients. It’s grey, short, and sleeveless, but not busty. She wears it to visit her grandpa in August. She wears it to the community health clinic for her monthly tests. She washes it twice a week. Clients can’t figure out how to take it off her, which means she gets to undress herself. She prefers that, which is maybe a little petty. The other way she gets back at them is on her blog, where she writes about them as carelessly as they’ll write about her, later. The other girls she meets online are her favourite part of the job. The reviews that clients write, her least favourite.

She goes back to city hall a few times over the summer. To visit. She drifts into the office wearing the grey dress and innocuous canvas espadrilles. Her hair is cut. Her skin is waxed. She works out five times a week and she’s more pensive about what she eats than she used to be. She looks good, and they say so. She rolls her eyes, flattered. She’s always been the youngest one there; they’ve always flattered her.

Her old work buddies talk about minute procedural changes under the new boss. Same old boss’ boss, though. Half the desks in the department are empty. Kelly’s desk has been co-opted for storage. Her filing cabinet is so old it qualifies as vintage, and she wishes she’d loaded it up on a dolly and taken it with her on her last day. She looks at her desk and wants it back.

Her boss at the agency is a Czech with shaggy puppy-dog hair and an iPhone addiction. His accent is so thick that she had his name wrong for the first two weeks she worked for him. He tells her he does all this for fun. He has a real business too, but he’s a workaholic and likes the late hours. He says he barely makes any money, pumping his cut back into online advertising and paying for the two-bedroom apartment they use for incalls. She believes him. He likes to drive the girls to dates, pick up fees in person, go out for dinner in loud groups.

Mostly, Kelly tries to avoid him. She is terse when text messaging. She drives herself around, ducks around the pressure tactics he uses to try to get more photos for the website. She believes him, and she likes him, but she doesn’t trust him. The many pictures he has of her naked don’t bother her. But the ones he has of her face make her anxious. Some days, thinking about those pictures and the things she’s said to clients, she feels like she’s leaving parts of herself splayed out everywhere. All of these strange men holding bits of her that she can’t get back.

He wants her to get a municipal escort license. It’s a photo ID with her working name and her face, issued by the city. She can’t imagine going into city hall and applying for it. She puts it off. Every week she makes a promise to get it, then an excuse as to why she can’t. That kind of lying is unlike her, but all the girls are doing it. No one wants to pay the 200 bucks. And everyone’s afraid of giving their name, birth date and address to city hall. Honest to god, the clerks get the cops to do a criminal record check before they’ll issue the license. What kind of idiot would announce to the police she’s a hooker?

Moreover, even though those databases are supposed to be separate and protected, they’re not. Working for the city, she saw plenty of instances where information bled out through the cracks. She can just imagine it: the house across the street from hers will apply for rezoning and suddenly all of her old colleagues will know that she’s licensed to work as an escort within city limits through March 2013.

So she procrastinates. Keeps putting her boss off. And because he is lenient and he likes her, he lets it slide. Though he continually reminds her that the fine, if bylaw catches her, will come out of her cut, not his.

In September the city sends her the last of her termination documents. A letter about her rights, descriptions of her pension options. It also says she owes them $565 because they overpaid her vacation time. She can send the city clerk a cheque, it says. Like hell, she thinks.

She puts all of it aside, files it away with three years of pay stubs and her T4s. Part of her doesn’t believe they’ll have the gall to come after her for that money when they’re the ones that laid her off and screwed up her pay in the same week. Still, she puts the money they say she owes in a mason jar on her dresser for safekeeping.

In October, her boss calls a staff meeting. It’s at the agency’s apartment, and she and seven other girls sit around on the couches in the living room listening to shitty dance music on satellite radio waiting for him to show up with pizza. It’s been slow lately, and no one’s got a good reason why. Consensus seems to be it’s the boss’ fault for not advertising enough. He claims it’s the economy. At three months, Kelly thought she’d be one of the newest girls there, but she’s one of the oldest, both in experience and age. Some of the girls don’t even have pictures up on the website yet. The newest one is fielding outlandish suggestions for her working name.

Their boss comes in with the pizza and the middle-aged woman who works the phones, and they all jostle into the kitchen to get plates and warm cans of pop. Someone asks the phone woman if there have been many calls yet today, and then someone else starts in on how slow it’s been lately, and the boss goes, “It’s not that slow. The calls are coming in. You know what it is? It’s that you aren’t available when you say you’ll be and we are turning guys away and we look unprofessional and they call someone else and we lose business.”

Kelly frowns and chews while he lectures. It doesn’t apply to her. She answers her phone. She’s basically chained to the thing. It’s just how she works: she had 200 hours of unused sick time built up when the city laid her off. She’s tragically reliable.

She blinks when he says her name and reads her mind. “This doesn’t apply to Kelly. She always answers her phone. She treats this like a real business. She’s a pro.”

Then he starts nagging them about the licenses they’re all supposed to have. Which does apply. But she’s too busy watching everyone else’s feet on the carpet to listen. Bare painted toes. Some of the girls live together in other apartments in this building; they’re tangled over each other in ratty pajamas. The ones who aren’t working tonight have dirty hair and puffy faces. They look like hungover undergrads. As far as she can tell, only a few are students. And she’s the only one with a day job.

The phone woman, who’s also new, keeps getting up to answer her cell as if to prove that it’s not slow at all. But Kelly is unimpressed. The woman squawks like a deaf duck. If Kelly were a nervous client calling for the first time, she’d probably hang up. It’s not helping with the agency’s general lack of professionalism. She almost feels for her boss. The girls are constantly interrupting him – snippy comments followed by showers of laughter – and he’s fighting a losing battle trying to keep their attention.

In her grey dress with her knees together, Kelly listens more politely than she ever did to the HR reps. When the meeting’s over, she’ll take a call with a guy at the Delta downtown, and after he’s come on her face she’ll gently disagree with him about government funding for the arts, and then she’ll go home and watch a movie with her boyfriend before they go to bed.

And the next day she’ll go to city hall, and she’ll do three things: visit her old coworkers, hand over the cash for her vacation overpayment, and apply for her license. And when she sees her boss’ boss in the hall, he won’t recognize her, and she won’t say anything to him. As it turns out, she’s not angry anymore.

The Dirt Chronicles
By Kristyn Dunnion
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011

Toronto-based author Kristyn Dunnion dubs herself a “Lady Punk Warrior.” Reading The Dirt Chronicles, her most recent book, one easily grasps the aptness of the moniker. Dunnion’s sympathies are with those living on the jagged edge; outcasts whose hearts burn with love and rage. It is these outcasts and outlaws who are the focus of The Dirt Chronicles: queer youth establishing a collective enclave in the ruins of a factory, a migrant worker flouting unjust immigration laws to play in a punk band, and kids struggling with addictions and hustling on the street.

Dunnion divides her book into 13 sections, each narrated by one of her well-crafted characters. Only a handful of the sections can be understood or properly appreciated as short stories on their own, and in that sense they might be best thought of as chapters in a novel. Read in sequence, it is easier to appreciate the dark and dangerous world that Dunnion has illuminated.

The book begins with three pieces that burn with the flickering heat of newly awakened desire. In “Two Ton: An Opera in Three Acts,” an introverted young man starts to follow a handsome, gregarious bike courier he meets while working as a clerk in an accounting firm. In “Stargazing at Eddie’s,” two teenagers discover some tender truths while drinking beer on the roof of a small-town home. “Migrant,” which opens the book, pulses with a heavy metal heart: an aging rocker-turned-mini-golf-course-operator develops a bond with a young Mexican farm worker after he sees the teen wearing a Black Sabbath t-shirt. These coming-of-age tales are carried along on the hard, loud chords of punk and the tender winds of whispered secrets.

The book takes a hard turn toward the rough side of the literary tracks with “Seven Dollar Blow,” a touching story in which two young sex workers seek refuge in the empty apartment of a client. It is here that we first glimpse the force that conspires against the outcasts of The Dirt Chronicles – a violent and corrupt police officer known as the King.

In the shadow of police violence and poverty, Dunnion’s characters search for home, for family, and for love. Some of the youth find them all while squatting in the Factory, an abandoned warehouse on the edges of a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood in Toronto’s west end.

When the King and other officers disrupt a gathering at the squat, with tragic results, the book barrels into the realm of page-turning thrillers such as Steig Larrson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Dunnion is adept at building tension and suspense, and the book races toward a somewhat jarring finale rife with acts of brutal violence.

As harrowing as the story is, the harm and indignities that Dunnion’s characters suffer are all too real for street-involved youth. In a 2007 study of homeless youth in Toronto, 40 per cent of women and 30 per cent of queer men reported being the targets of physical violence. 28 per cent of queer women on the street reported being the victims of some form of sexual assault. Homeless queer women were almost twice as likely to experience discriminatory treatment at the hands of police when compared with heterosexual women.

The King is a horrifying man who abuses his power as a police officer to assault women and street kids. Unfortunately, he teeters on the edge of becoming a cartoon-like villain. Dunnion’s portrayal of characters who hold some measure of privilege or authority feels two-dimensional and deflated, which threatens to weaken the power of the book. Thankfully, she breathes life into her young protagonists; we feel intimately their heartbreak, fury and hope.

Dunnion’s book is a collection of tender stories of queer desire on the margins. But it is also an unsettling and pulse-pounding queer-feminist revenge-thriller, set to a loud and rebellious punk-rock soundtrack. Whether it is read as a short story collection or a novel, The Dirt Chronicles pulls no punches.

As speculators have been saying for years, Saskatchewan is the new Alberta. With the province now leading the country in economic growth and predicted to do so through at least 2013, the moment has definitively arrived. “We don’t use the word boom, because it is immediately followed by that other word,” said conservative Premier Brad Wall shortly after ousting the long-standing NDP government in 2007.

Whether it’s spoken or not, the boom has been a bust for many, with a soaring cost of living and growing housing crisis. As Rachel Penner de Waal describes in this issue, the “amazing opportunities” vaunted by Saskatchewan’s enterprise minister exist for an increasingly select few. Still, promises of unbridled opportunity and fast fortunes have breathed renewed life into old constructs of the “Last Best West,” spurring a new wave of westward migration. Census numbers released in February by Statistics Canada indicate that after decades of sustained decline, Saskatchewan’s population has topped one million residents for the first time since 1986. It’s just “another development in a remarkable comeback story,” claims Premier Wall.

The Prairies have in many respects always remained a distinctly frontier society, though its borders have changed shape and multiplied. When the North-West Mounted Police was established here in 1873, it was intended as a temporary institution to be phased out once the nascent Canadian state had established sovereignty over its western hinterlands and progressed beyond the frontier stage of its history. But the task of confining the Prairies’ Indigenous population to reserves and securing territory for settlement expansion soon proved considerably more difficult than anticipated. Rather than disbanding the civilian paramilitary it was instead expanded into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which remains today as a permanent national paramilitary force, fulfilling much the same role of repressing resistance to the ongoing and incomplete colonial project.

No longer strictly confined to reserves, Indigenous people in the Prairies are increasingly forced into the slums of de facto segregated cities like Winnipeg, Saskatoon, or Regina in search of work and housing, where they are over-policed and over-incarcerated at rates that are among the highest in the world. Prairie cities have a higher Aboriginal population per capita than anywhere else in Canada, as do their prisons and foster homes.

In Briarpatch’s hometown of Regina, where Indigenous people are pushed quite literally to the “wrong side” of the train tracks, upwards of 80 per cent of Aboriginal households live in poverty. Racism here is of a more honest and brutal nature, stripped to its barest component parts in a way that unnervingly mirrors the stark austerity of the surrounding landscape. Saskatchewan is, after all, the home of the “starlight tour,” a strangely celestial term for picking up young, Indigenous men in police cruisers and abandoning them on the edge of town in the dead of a Prairie winter. In the lead-up to a 2003 inquiry into the death of Cree teenager Neil Stonechild, whose frozen body was found in a remote field on the outskirts of Saskatoon in 1990, then-Police Chief Russell Sabo admitted that the practice was nothing new, with the first recorded case dating back as early as 1976.

But it’s not just lawmen and women who police these boundaries, old and new. One needn’t look further than the drowning of Daryl Johns in Regina’s Wascana Lake last summer for a harsh reminder of that fact. The calls for help of Johns’ distraught friend, also Indigenous, were ignored for half an hour by those out for a stroll on the hot and busy afternoon in the park. It took an Indigenous woman, Lani Elliot, to finally answer his pleas to phone 911. “My question is this,” she asked city residents: “If he had been clean-shaven, if he had been well-dressed, if he had been non-Aboriginal and he had come up to them and said, ‘My friend just went under in the water,’ would they have believed him then?”

Those living on Prairie reserves contend with battlegrounds of a different sort. As Melina Laboucan-Massimo makes clear in this issue’s photo essay on the struggle against oil and gas development on unceded Lubicon territory in northern Alberta, centuries-old efforts to wrest land from its original inhabitants for resource extraction are by no means over. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers testifies to similar encroachments by the oil and gas industry, and to the community’s resistance, in her article on hydrofracking on the Blood reserve.

As André Magnan and Melanie Sommerville write in the cover story of this issue, it’s not only the Prairies’ subsurface resources that investors are staking claim to. At a time of skyrocketing food prices, climate-related instability, and economic crisis, Saskatchewan farmland is fast becoming a star commodity and the target of a 21st-century land rush by global speculators.

With the country’s largest reserves of oil, natural gas, uranium, and potash, much of which is found on Indigenous land, the Prairies will continue to be at the front lines of capitalist expansion for years to come, and are poised to become a hub of resistance. It’s time for us to imagine the West as a different kind of “land of opportunity.”

My name is Elle-Máijá Apiniskim Tailfeathers, and I am both Blackfoot from Kainai, also known as the Blood reserve in Alberta, and Sámi from Arctic Norway. I do not claim to speak on behalf of my people, but rather as a member of a community that has the health of our people and land as our top priority.

On September 9, 2011, Blood Tribe Police arrested me along with two other unarmed women from the Blood Tribe during a peaceful blockade on the Blood reserve. We were kept in a holding cell overnight and charged with intimidation under Section 423 (1)(g) of the Criminal Code. However, we have yet to be convicted of anything as our court case is ongoing.

Our actions were not done in haste. In fact, this was only the most recent action taken after nearly a year’s worth of attempts to prevent new oil and gas development from happening on our land.

The Blood reserve is a part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Spanning approximately 884 square kilometres in southern Alberta, it is the largest reserve in Canada. The Blood Tribe comprises over 10,000 members, half of whom live on reserve.

In the fall of 2010, the Blood Tribe chief and council, along with their company, Kainai Resources Inc., signed one of the largest oil and gas deals in First Nations’ history, netting the Blood Tribe over $50 million. Prior to negotiating and signing the deal with Murphy Oil and Bowood Energy, the Blood Tribe chief and council did not fulfill their obligation to obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of members of the Blood Tribe. There were no referendums, no letters, and no phone calls to members that would constitute legitimate forms of open and transparent consultation.

The deal itself involves a five-year lease, during which time oil and gas companies have access to over 50 per cent of Blood Tribe land, where they intend to build over 200 oil and gas wells.

The extraction method being used is known as hydraulic fracturing, other-wise known as fracking. Fracking involves pumping between one and eight million gallons of water, proprietary chemicals, and sand under high pressure into a well. This causes the shale or coal bed to fracture, releasing the desired natural gas from the well. Between 80 and 300 tons of chemicals may be used each time a well is fracked, which can happen up to 18 times during its lifetime.

The proprietary nature of fracking chemicals keeps them largely hidden from the public; however, it is known that chemicals such as benzene, lead, boric acid, and toluene are often used in the process. It is estimated that only 30 to 50 per cent of fracking fluids are recovered after the process, leaving toxic waste to seep into the groundwater and soil surrounding the well. Given the incredibly toxic nature of this form of extraction, fracking has been banned in numerous countries and states around the world. Unfortunately, it remains unregulated in Canada.

In early December 2011, the movement against fracking had a minor win when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stated for the first time that it found chemicals used to extract natural gas through fracking in a drinking water aquifer in west-central Wyoming. In other words, EPA experts and scientists have made a clear link between water contamination and fracking.

The first question asked when the issue of fracking on Kainai territory is presented to new ears is often, “How could this happen?” It is a difficult question to answer, but there are four major players: the gas and oil companies; government, both provincial and federal; the Blood Tribe chief and council; and the Blood Tribe member population. The issue also fits into a larger narrative of power, oppression, and colonialism. Although our prime minister professes otherwise, Canada was founded on the systemic colonial exploitation of Indigenous peoples and our land. Our story is nothing new; history is simply repeating itself. Only this time around, it is not a case of Red versus White.

Indigenous peoples are in a unique position as a population living on the margins of Canadian society, faced with a long list of social issues due to a violent history of colonialism. Because of our resource-rich lands and our unique relationship with the Crown, we find ourselves targets for resource development companies. This is manifested in the rhetoric of “economic development,” which is the ideology that purports to solve today’s “Indian Problem” by extracting resources from our land and, in theory, generating employment and sustainable futures for Indigenous peoples. However, economic development rarely plays out this way in real life. Instead, resource development companies bring in their own trained staff for the short-term period of development contracts, typically leaving Indigenous communities with the task of cleaning up the mess.

Indigenous peoples are not the same as other Canadians in the eyes of the law – nor should we be. However, as long as the issue of Aboriginal rights and title to land and resources remains unresolved, resource development companies can essentially do as they wish with Indigenous lands and resources without being held accountable to provincial and federal governments. These governments in turn benefit from the exploitation of resources on Indigenous land.

Perhaps the most contentious player in this game is the Blood Tribe chief and council. The band council system is itself deeply flawed and in no way represents traditional Indigenous self-governance. In fact, many would argue that band councils are inherently designed to fail. After all, how could the federal government continue to benefit from the exploitation of Indigenous lands and resources if they had to negotiate on an even playing field with First Nations? This might mean that they would have to actually honour and uphold the original nation-to-nation relationship established in our historic treaties.

This system can lead to a plethora of problems such as corruption and nepotism, as in the case of the Blood Tribe, and to other crises such as what we are currently seeing in Attawapiskat. Due to a severe lack of housing, Chief Theresa Spence declared a state of emergency in her remote northern community in October 2011. Rather than take into account the human lives were, and are, at stake, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan sent in an accountant to get to the root of the purported “mismanagement” of approximately $90 million.

What both Harper and Duncan failed to mention was that this $90 million was intended to cover every expense for the entire community, ranging from health care to education, over a five-year period, which was not enough to meet the community’s needs. Furthermore, these funds were not simply thrown at the Attawapiskat chief and council; instead, a federal accountant had to approve them at some point along the way.

Attawapiskat is also no stranger to the toxic effects of resource development on its land and water. In 2002, Attawapiskat signed a feasibility partnering agreement with De Beers mining company. Seven years later, Chief Spence publicly voiced serious concerns about the probability that the De Beers Victor open-pit diamond mine was polluting the Attawapiskat River. Residents began to experience sewage backups in their homes shortly after De Beers decided to dispose of their sewage sludge in the community’s lift station, contributing, say residents, to the current housing crisis.

In the case of the Blood Tribe chief and council, Aboriginal Affairs and the federal government have ignored the chief and council’s blatant violation of our member population’s basic rights. Ultimately, this perpetuates the vicious cycle of nepotism and corruption within the band council.

This corruption is by no means some sort of inherent trait of Indigenous peoples; rather, it is a symptom of colonialism. It is no secret that Indigenous peoples are faced with the daily reality of lateral violence; however, it is critical to recognize that the root of this violence stems from deeply internalized oppression. Essentially, we have been hated for so damn long that some of us have succumbed to turning that very same hate on our own people. In truth, the Blood Tribe chief and council’s choice to blatantly ignore the health and well-being of our people and our land was an act of violence.

Finally, we have the member population of the Blood Tribe. As I mentioned, the large majority of us were left in the dark about the negotiations between chief and council and the oil companies until after the deal was signed. In fact, many of us found out about it through the media. Following the release of this news, chief and council, along with reps from the oil companies, held information sessions telling tribal members what was going to happen to our land, regardless of what we had to say about it. In the information brochures handed out at these community meetings, Murphy Oil proudly claimed to have done assessments with tribal “elders” over the cultural and archaeological significance of desired well sites. It seems as though Murphy simply found elderly members of the Blood Tribe to take part in these consultations. However, it takes more than old age to be considered a respected elder within our community. To add insult to injury, Murphy Oil also proudly claims to perform “ceremonial offerings” to the land before and after a well is built.

Like many, I would like to believe that chief and council had our best interests in mind when they signed the deal. I am sure that they hoped this deal would somehow remedy the astonishingly high rate of unemployment on reserve. However, their actions speak otherwise. Over the last year, a number of distribution cheques were doled out, supposedly from revenue generated by this deal. But, just as before, chief and council failed to consult with the member population as to where the funds from the deal should be allocated.

Interestingly enough, the first distribution cheques, approximately $800, were handed out 10 days before Christmas 2010. I don’t know too many people who are broke and have mouths to feed who would turn down $800 before Christmas. This has put many of our members in a difficult situation because they feel they no longer have the right to speak out now that they have accepted the cheques.

Most of the jobs that do exist on reserve are through the tribe chief and council. Many of those employed by the tribe who spoke out received threats that they would lose their jobs, and some actually did. That being said, it is not as though our community is simply keeping silent and doing nothing. Instead, there has been a small and growing resistance consisting of both non-members and members of the Blood Tribe who have taken various forms of non-violent direct action, including writing letters to every level of government, contacting the oil companies and the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board, voicing our concerns to chief and council, and raising awareness both on and off reserve.

Despite our efforts, fracking went ahead on Blood land. Ultimately, this is what led a small group of peaceful protesters to gather and establish a blockade on September 9, 2011. Since then, Kainai residents have begun to witness the effects of fracking first-hand. So far, two earthquakes have been recorded on Blood land, and the distinct fume of sour gas is seemingly always present near the well sites. On a particularly windy day in early December 2011, a number of students at the Kainai middle school became physically ill, experiencing vomiting and dizziness after exposure to the sour gas fumes from a nearby well site. This is all deeply troubling, and the situation will likely only get worse as long as fracking continues on Blood land.

Where do we go from here? I do not have the means to prescribe a solution, but here are some thoughts. As the Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief Shawn Atleo has stated, “We must move beyond the Indian Act, and we must affirm our Crown-First Nation relationship.” We must also continue to urge every level of government to make ser­ious reforms in climate action and energy policies. Apathy is our largest adversary, so if we wish to see change, it is critical that we recognize our own complicity within the global dependency on gas and oil. Furthermore, we must also recognize that resource development on Indigenous land is not just an Indigenous issue; it is a global issue.

An earlier version of this article was first published in Redwire Magazine.

For more information on fracking in Kainai territory, visit protectbloodland.ca and the Kainai Lethbridge Earthwatch at KLEW.

A 21st-century land rush is sweeping the globe. Amid skyrocketing food prices, climate-related instability, and declining soil and water resources, wealthy investors have begun to size up the world’s farmland as both an investment opportunity and a hedge against food crises and political turbulence. Players in this global land grab include individual, institutional, and corporate investors, as well as governments. And although estimates vary widely, large-scale land deals have seen at least 71 million hectares change hands since 2000.

For many investors, farmland acquisition – either through purchase or lease – offers a chance to profit from rising agricultural commodity prices. Such investors take a direct hand in farm production, typically on large plantation-like operations, with an eye to profiting from high prices for food, fibre, and biofuel crops. Rising food prices have also encouraged governments of countries such as Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Egypt to lease huge tracts of land, mostly in Africa, as a means of securing food for their own populations. Producing food offshore allows capital-rich but land-poor countries to bypass volatile global food markets and guard against food riots and related political instability.

Still other investors buy farmland as a form of speculative investment in rising global land prices. By renting the land to individual or corporate farmers, investors gain a regular income stream on top of appreciating land values. These investors also acquire farmland as a low-risk hedge against inflation and other side effects of the global financial crisis. As with the rush to buy gold, farmland investment is seen as a safe harbour in stormy financial seas.

The global land rush has attracted considerable attention from the media, civil society, international development agencies, and governments. While some welcome these developments as a source of much-needed investment in global agriculture and a way to bring new infrastructure, technological improvements, and jobs to target countries, critics have denounced the deals as resource grabs that dispossess small-scale farmers and Indigenous peoples, threaten food sovereignty, and further degrade agro-ecosystems. These concerns are compounded by the fact that the mechanisms by which these deals are negotiated, monitored, and enforced have been murky at best.

To date, debates around farmland acquisition have focused mostly on how the phenomenon is playing out in the Global South. Much less attention has been paid to large-scale acquisitions of farmland in wealthier countries like Canada. Yet investment analysts have highlighted Canadian farmland as a prime investment opportunity given the country’s huge arable land base, high-quality soil and water resources, well-developed infrastructure, and political stability. Saskatchewan’s farmland has gained a particularly noteworthy reputation, making the province a global hot spot for farmland investment.

Saskatchewan farmland in the crosshairs

With more than 64 million acres of arable land, Saskatchewan contains almost 40 per cent of the farmland in Canada – more than any other province. Yet it is not only the quantity of farmland in Saskatchewan that attracts investors but also its quality. Investment analysts stress that the province contains some of the world’s finest grain lands, with productive soils and reliable access to water. Under the mild climate-warming scenario predicted for the Prairie region, Saskatchewan’s agricultural productivity is expected to rise.

Saskatchewan’s proximity to major North American markets, together with its strong processing and transportation infrastructure, are also key considerations for farmland investors. Stable political and legal systems at both the provincial and federal level offer more security than many of the other countries that have attracted significant investment dollars.

On top of these factors, many analysts consider Saskatchewan farmland to be undervalued, making it all the more appealing. Saskatchewan farmland is not only cheaper than similarly productive land in neighbouring provinces and states, it also compares well with farmland costs overseas. The Knight Frank International Farmland Index, which measures farmland values around the world, recently pegged the average cost of farmland in Saskatchewan at $526 per acre, a bargain compared to prices in places like Brazil, the U.S., and the U.K.

Saskatchewan farmland prices are rising, however. Farm Credit Canada reports that farmland values in the province have risen steadily since 2002, increasing a total of 81 per cent over the past decade. The largest gains occurred in the latter half of 2008 and first half of 2011 when peak global commodity prices spurred increased demand for farmland and led to average value increases of 8.8 per cent and 11.6 per cent, respectively.

Some see the recent appreciation of Saskatchewan farmland as the market “catching up” after having been artificially depressed by restrictive ownership laws. In 2002, the NDP government lifted restrictions on farmland ownership by non-Saskatchewan residents, opening up ownership to any Canadian citizen or business with all-Canadian investors (except for publicly traded corporations) and harmonizing Saskatchewan’s landownership laws with those of Alberta and Manitoba. All three provinces still prohibit foreign ownership of all but small tracts of farmland, and Saskatchewan and Manitoba also prohibit leasing by foreign interests, but many farmland investors would like to see these regulations changed. Indeed, many investors may be counting on further liberalization of farmland markets in their investment forecasts.

But if strong returns on Saskatchewan farmland have helped to fuel its rising status as a star commodity, this is only half of the equation. The other half is the low volatility associated with farmland investments, something that is particularly attractive given the recent turmoil in Canadian and global financial markets. A recent analysis showed that, compared to a fall of 37 per cent in the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) composite index during the 2007 to 2008 subprime crisis, Canadian farmland values rose by 10 per cent during the same period. Similarly, while the current European debt crisis has pushed markets off by as much as 13 per cent, Canadian farmland continues to appreciate at seven per cent. These figures highlight the superior hedging power of Canadian farmland and demonstrate a risk-return profile unmatched by other investments.

High food prices and forecasts of future food crises have made Saskatchewan farmland all the more appealing. Farmland investors point out that with a growing population and a fixed amount of farmland, arable land per capita is in decline. In the meantime, growing global demand for meat and dairy is exacerbating pressure on food-producing resources. These conditions help to explain both the keen interest in Saskatchewan farmland and the emergence of two new mechanisms through which investors can gain access to it: farmland investment funds and One Earth Farms.

Farmland investment funds

Farmland investment funds (or trusts) are specialized funds that pool investors’ money to acquire a large portfolio of farmland across a wide geographic region that is diversified by soil type, climate, and type of production, among other factors.

Farmland investment funds and the firms that administer them are relatively new to the Prairies. The past decade has seen the emergence of three main firms. Two of these – Regina-based Assiniboia Farmland Limited Partnership and Calgary-based Agcapita – were started in 2005, and each focuses exclusively on Prairie farmland, mostly in Saskatchewan. The third – Bonnefield, a 2010 start-up based in Toronto – is developing a broader Canada-wide portfolio that includes Prairie farmland.

Farmland investment funds raise their capital by selling units to participating investors based on a minimum investment ranging from $10,000 to $150,000. The fund managers then acquire farmland that meets their criteria with respect to price, yield potential, location, and other factors. In order to comply with provincial landownership regulations, the funds are structured as private partnerships, as opposed to public companies whose shares could be sold on a stock market, and participants must be Canadian citizens or permanent residents.

To date, Assiniboia, Agcapita, and Bonnefield have acquired about 157,000 acres (64,000 hectares) of Prairie farmland. In the fall of 2011, Assiniboia and Agcapita were each raising money for a new round of land acquisition, worth $20 million apiece. This will bring the total invested by these specialized funds to somewhere in the neighbourhood of $200 million over the last five or six years.

To date, farmland investment funds have shown little interest in directly participating in farm production. Instead, they rent the land they acquire to existing farmers – in some cases, the very farmers who sold them the land in the first place.

Part of the appeal of the funds is that the rent payments provide a regular revenue stream, even while the portfolios increase in value as farmland prices rise. Assiniboia, for instance, reported a 30 per cent increase in the net asset value of its units for 2011. Farmland investment funds may also have other income streams such as oil and gas surface leases, the sale of carbon credits, and sales or shares of the crops produced by contract farmers.

All of the farmland investment funds take great care to select tenants with a shared farming philosophy: a desire to maximize production with the most advanced agrotechnologies and a propensity for very large-scale operations. Each company also reinforces this philosophy through a farmland management side of their business, which is variably responsible for selecting tenants, managing leases, monitoring farming practices, and providing production advice to tenant farmers.

One Earth Farms

One Earth Farms is a new corporate farming venture launched in 2009 by Sprott Resource Corp., a publicly traded natural resource sector investment firm. Headquartered in Toronto and traded on the TSX, Sprott has a diversified portfolio of mining, oil and gas, and agricultural development projects, as well as sizable gold bullion holdings.

One Earth Farms believes that its unique business model – a large-scale, integrated farming operation spread across the Prairie provinces – will produce healthy financial returns. Unlike the farmland investment funds profiled above, One Earth Farms is directly involved in food production, growing grains, oilseeds, and specialty crops, and raising range-fed cattle.

The company has grown rapidly over its first three years to encompass more than 190,000 acres (76,900 hectares) of cropland and pasture in southern Saskatchewan and Alberta. Sprott suggests that One Earth Farms is now the largest farm in Canada, and is well on the way to its goal of farming 1 million acres by 2015.

The capital for One Earth Farms’ dramatic expansion has come from Sprott itself and from outside investors. To date, Sprott has invested a total of $57.5 million in the venture and retains 58 per cent ownership of One Earth Farms. Outside investors, including agribusiness firms Viterra, Ag Growth International, and Alliance Grain Traders, have contributed $54.5 million to the project.

One Earth Farms differs from the farmland investment funds in that the company relies on leased land for its operation. Currently, most of the company’s farmland is leased from First Nations. Farming on First Nations’ reserves, which are federally regulated, allows Sprott to circumvent provincial landownership restrictions prohibiting publicly traded companies from establishing large-scale farming operations on the Prairies.

One Earth Farms describes its relationship with First Nations as a “true partnership,” in which the company provides bands with lease revenues, training and employment opportunities, and equity in company subsidiaries. These benefits have led to agreements with 11 First Nations to date, including the Blood Tribe in Alberta and the Muskowekwan, Little Black Bear, Thunderchild, Star Blanket, Yellow Quill, Cote, Keesekoose, Fishing Lake, Kawacatoose, and Chacachas First Nations in Saskatchewan.

Despite its ambitious goals, One Earth Farms has yet to turn a profit. Sprott’s audited financial statements indicate that the company lost $11.9 million on One Earth Farms’ operations in 2010 and $3.2 million in 2009. This can in part be explained by the venture’s significant start-up costs as well as the excess moisture conditions on the Prairies in 2010 and 2011, which limited production.

Whether One Earth Farms will recoup these early losses remains an open question. The company’s unique scale and business model is virtually untested on the Prairies, and it is unclear whether it will be able to generate significant profits – especially in the event that high commodity prices begin to fall.

For Sprott and its co-investors, the ultimate profit will be determined at the company’s exit from the venture. Sprott plans to eventually take One Earth Farms public or sell it to another investor, such as a pension fund or sovereign wealth fund. The price that One Earth Farms garners at that point will depend partly on the value investors place on the company’s access to farmland.

A new paradigm for Prairie farming

Together, the new farmland investment funds and One Earth Farms point to important changes to the face of farming on the Prairies. Most obviously, these investments contribute to the accelerating concentration of the ownership and utilization of farming resources. Although the trend towards ever-bigger farms is a long-standing one, the landholdings involved in the farmland investment funds and One Earth Farms are on another order of magnitude altogether.

Quite apart from their scale, farmland investment funds and One Earth Farms also represent new instruments by which outside investment capital is applied to Saskatchewan farmland and farming. While banks have long played a central role in the farming sector through the provision of credit, farmland investment funds and One Earth Farms demonstrate the growing interest in farmland and farming among individual and corporate investors.

In this sense, the emergence of these new initiatives represents something of a paradigm shift for farming on the Prairies. The growing influence of more socially and spatially distant actors in the sector raises the question of who will reap the rewards and who will bear the risks associated with the transformation of the global agri-food economy. Although agricultural commodity prices are high and farmland values are rising, Prairie farmers know that the good times rarely last. These new models may well prove less resilient than traditional family farming when it comes to surviving the lean years and coping with constant change.

These new forms of investment also have special implications for the link between landownership and farming. For one, landownership has always been a central part of our understanding of family farming. To be sure, farmers have always borrowed from banks and other lenders to buy land, and many have rented land from other private owners. But with farmland investment funds, the link between landownership and farming is becoming more tenuous. Indeed, investment analysts, agricultural commentators, and some farmers increasingly see no necessary connection between the two. As tenants for distant landlords, independent farm operators still assume all of the production risks but without the security of having their names on the deed.

One Earth Farms, where investors are entering directly into agricultural production, raises additional issues. First, it represents the establishment of a publicly traded corporation in a sector that has hitherto been dominated by family farms. While farmland ownership and leasing laws currently prevent the further development of this trend, this could change if laws are liberalized in the future. Second, while First Nations retain ownership of the land enrolled in One Earth Farms, their involvement in the venture must be contextualized within colonial policies that dispossessed First Nations of their lands and which, as historian Sarah Carter puts it, “deliberately discouraged” Aboriginal agriculture. More recently, difficulty accessing agricultural credits and subsidies mean that First Nations have continued to struggle to engage in the agricultural economy in a way that meets their social and economic needs.

Finally, if farmland investment funds and One Earth Farms redefine both the scale and social relationships of farming on the Prairies, they may also advance a model of agriculture with negative ecological and social effects. Each of these initiatives seems committed to a type of very large-scale, capital-intensive, and fossil fuel- and technology-dependent agriculture. Prairie farms have been heading in this direction for decades, but the new investments in Prairie farmland and farming could be speeding up the trend.

Ecologically, the convergence on a model of giant, industrial-style farming may leave the sector more vulnerable to climate change and peak oil. Many civil society groups, academics, and international agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN suggest that diversified, small-scale agriculture is better suited to dealing with these shocks.

On the social side, the new farmland investments promote a form of rural development that replaces labour with machinery, erodes farm numbers, and extracts capital that could otherwise circulate in local economies. Such effects will be felt beyond the farm, illustrating the potential impacts of farmland investment funds and One Earth Farms on the weakening fabric of Saskatchewan’s rural communities.

The grey claw of a backhoe lumbers toward the east side of the historic Plains Hotel in downtown Regina, groping at the building’s outer wrapping of bricks. Under the hoe’s touch, the walls crumble, exposing layers of concrete, rebar, drywall, and wiring to the sub-zero temperatures of December 2011. A $100-million condo and adjoining hotel is scheduled to rise up in its place over the corner of Albert Street and Victoria Avenue by 2013.

This is the new Saskatchewan, a province of economic growth and prosperity, a place of “amazing opportunities” according to the province’s Enterprise Minister Jeremy Harrison.

RBC Economics Research predicts that population growth, increasing investment in the extraction of natural resources like potash and oil, and rising manufacturing sales will cause Saskatchewan to “lead the country in economic growth throughout 2013.”

These factors also mean more houses are being built, with 1,374 residential projects started in Regina in the first 11 months of 2011, outpacing the same period in 2010 by 30 per cent, says the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).

Despite this, the province’s housing situation is one Alaina Harrison (no relation to the minister) “would absolutely call … a crisis.” She’s the housing support coordinator with Carmichael Outreach, a non-profit serving the marginalized in Regina. The Queen City’s vacancy rate is the lowest in the country at 0.6 per cent, according to the CMHC. Saskatoon’s is 2.6 per cent, and the average of all Saskatchewan urban centres is 1.9 per cent, still less than the national average of 2.2 per cent.

And since landlords can afford to be choosy about whom they rent to, minimum-wage earners or those on social assistance have to contend with the stigma of being low income in addition to the barriers of availability and affordability. “In Regina, [homelessness] is a huge problem and a growing problem,” says Alaina.

A recent City of Regina fact sheet claims the municipality needs 200 to 300 more units per year. The CMHC found that 194 rental units were created in Regina between October 2010 and September 2011, compared to the previous year where no completions were recorded. However, the net result in the rental market for that period was a decrease of 126 units due to 196 condo conversions and buildings being demolished, boarded up, or sold.

The Saskatchewan Party government, which gained 11 seats from the NDP in the November election, made several promises in its fall throne speech to address the lack of affordable housing. One of these initiatives would require property owners who don’t belong to the Saskatchewan Rental Housing Industry Association to give tenants one year’s notice before raising the rent. The association also recently introduced a process to aid tenants faced with destabilizing rent increases.

While Alaina is pleased that affordable housing is on the province’s radar, she isn’t convinced this measure will help people in Regina. “I’m very happy that they are putting a lot of thought into it and trying to do something, but until they put significant investment into social housing, I don’t know that anything’s going to really get fixed.”

Other strategies, some of which were announced in spring and summer last year, include providing forgivable loans for eligible projects that create secondary suites or affordable rental units.

The following photos illustrate both the prosperity and the hardship coexisting in Regina today.

After Roy Romanow’s NDP government eliminated rent controls in Saskatchewan in 1992, Boardwalk Corporation bought 25 to 30 per cent of Regina’s privately owned rental housing, plus this Gladmer Park social housing project. Boardwalk made cosmetic improvements to properties before raising rents dramatically, significantly reducing the supply of affordable housing in Regina.

Tenants living in the 46 apartments of the Black Building were issued eviction notices in October 2011, four months prior to a scheduled demolition in February 2012 and a couple of months after the property owners failed to meet a city deadline to complete repairs to the structure. Residents were paying approximately $400 per month in what was one of Regina’s most affordable apartment blocks for low-income people.

The Plains Hotel, home to the famed Good Time Charlie’s pub, was demolished in December 2011. It will soon be replaced by Capital Pointe, a condo tower boasting “Regina’s new standard in luxury living.” Condo prices will range from $200,000 to over $800,000.

In 2008, the average price for a single-detached dwelling in the new Harbour Landing development was $359,795, but the CMHC predicts that figure will hit $490,000 this year.

The $100 million Hill Centre Tower III is the first office highrise to be built in Regina’s downtown in almost 20 years.

Regina’s North Central community became infamous after a 2007 Maclean’s magazine article called it “Canada’s worst neighbourhood.” Overcrowded and substandard housing dominates the area characterized by high mobility and low home ownership rates. The median household income in North Central – $25,000 – is half the city average, and one-third of its 12,000 residents are on social assistance.

Last year, Mayor Pat Fiacco announced a $1 billion revitalization plan that included building 700 residential units on the site of the current Mosaic Stadium in North Central while building a new stadium, together with commercial and retail units, just north of downtown.

2007

November: Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party government is sworn in.

December: An Act respecting Enterprise Saskatchewan is introduced in the Legislature; proclaimed July 2008.

2008

June: SaskPower accepts the offer of a feasibility study by Bruce Power from Ontario to explore the possibility of bringing nuclear energy to the province as part of the Saskatchewan 2020 initiative.

October: Saskatchewan government creates the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP), chaired by University of Saskatchewan vice-president Richard Florizone.

November: Bruce Power and SaskPower jointly release Bruce Power’s feasibility report, “Saskatchewan 2020: Clean energy, new opportunity,” proposing a nuclear power plant in Saskatchewan.

2009

March: The UDP report, “Capturing the full potential of the uranium value chain in Saskatchewan,” is released with recommendations aimed at an integrated uranium development strategy for the province.

April: Provincial government announces “The future of uranium in Saskatchewan public consultation process,” with Dan Perrins as Chair, directed to lead an independent process focused on the recommendations made by the UDP.

July: Provincial government and the University of Saskatchewan announce a partnership to pursue a nuclear reactor that will produce medical isotopes in Saskatoon. Application for federal government approval is unsuccessful.

September: Perrins’ final report on the future of uranium industry development consultations is released. Fully 88 per cent of the 2263 responses reject the overall strategy of the UDP report. Energy and Resources Minister Bill Boyd responds that “. . . it’s neither a green light nor a red light for future uranium development. It’s more like a yellow light – take any next steps with caution.”

2011

March: Saskatchewan government announces $30 million grant over seven years to establish the Canadian Centre for Nuclear Innovation (CCNI) at University of Saskatchewan.

August: Provincial government and Japan’s GE Hitachi announce grants of $5 million each to the University for “a research partnership focusing on nuclear medicine, materials science, nuclear safety and small reactor design.”

September: University Council (representing faculty) accepts recommendation for the establishment of CCNI.

October: University Board of Governors gives formal approval to proceed with incorporation of CCNI. The proposal is not submitted to University Senate for consideration.

Photo credit: Greenpeace

For over a century now, the Lubicon Cree’s rights have not been protected or respected. For decades the Lubicon have led local, national, and international lobbying efforts to fight for what is inherently theirs and to protect their right to their land and to clean air and good water. But despite years of raising awareness and increasing exposure, the Lubicon people still wait for justice.

1899/1900: Living in an isolated and inaccessible area, the Lubicon are missed by treaty commissioners and therefore do not sign Treaty 8. No treaty has been signed with the Lubicon to date.

1939/1940: The Lubicon are visited by Indian Affairs officials who recognize them as a separate, distinct Indigenous society and who promise them a reserve on the shores of Lubicon Lake.

1952: The discovery of oil on Lubicon territory motivates the Government of Alberta to question the federal government about the reserve.

1971: To facilitate resource extraction, Alberta begins building an all-weather road into Lubicon territory without Lubicon consent. The federal government claims the Lubicon are “merely squatters on Provincial crown land with no land rights to negotiate.”

1975: The Lubicon attempt to file a caveat – a notice that land title is contested – but Alberta refuses to accept it. The matter goes to court.

1977: A court ruling in a similar case indicates the law is clearly in favour of the Lubicon. Premier Lougheed’s government responds by passing a bill that rewrites the law governing caveats and makes it retroactive to a time before the Lubicon attempted to file the caveat. The Lubicon case is dismissed.

1979: The all-weather road is completed. Resource exploitation activity explodes.

1980/1981: The Lubicon take federal court action requesting a declaratory judgment regarding Lubicon land rights. Alberta declares the community to be “an official provincial hamlet and therefore no longer available for purposes of establishing an Indian reserve.” The province fraudulently solicits people for a land tenure program. Residents face fines and demolition orders if they don’t comply.

1982: The Lubicon apply for an emergency court injunction to prevent further resource extraction in their area pending resolution of their 1980 land rights court case.

1983: A fact-finding mission by the World Council of Churches concludes that “government & multinational oil companies have taken actions that could have genocidal consequences.”

1985/1986: Out of 21 Lubicon pregnancies, 19 result in stillbirths or miscarriages.

1986: The Lubicon announce a boycott of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. In support, 30 museums worldwide refuse to lend artifacts to the game’s Indian art exhibit sponsored by Shell Oil.

1987: After three years of study, a UN Human Rights Committee states that the Lubicon cannot achieve effective legal or political redress in Canada and instructs Canada to do no further irreparable damage to the Lubicon pending a hearing of human rights violations. Canada ignores the ruling.

1988: After 14 years, the Lubicon withdraw from court action and assert sovereignty over their territory. A peaceful blockade stops all oil activity for six days, but armed RCMP officers forcibly remove the barricades. Alberta Premier Don Getty meets with Chief Ominayak, which leads to the “Grimshaw Accord,” an agreement for a 243-square kilometre reserve.

1990: The UN charges Canada with a human rights violation under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, stating that “recent developments threaten the way of life and culture of the Lubicon Lake Cree.”

1994: A boycott of Daishowa gains the support of 47 companies representing over 4,300 retailers, who commit to cease buying Daishowa paper products. Daishowa does not clear cut on Lubicon land while the boycott is in effect. Four years later, Daishowa agrees not to log or buy wood cut on Lubicon land until the land rights are settled. The Lubicon and supporters call off the boycott.

2012: The Lubicon’s land claim remains outstanding. The Government of Alberta continues to lease out Lubicon territory to multinational corporations that exploit and contaminate the land.

Source: “A chronology of the Lubicon Lake Cree land rights struggle” (abridged) tao.ca/~fol/pa/luback.htm#chronology