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Letters to the Editor
Demasduit’s Museum
by Barbara Barker & Tyler McCreary
Grade Two students petition to honour the Beothuk in their own language
Hung Out to Dry?
by Angela Regnier
Academic research “partnerships” and the Wiarton water experiment
By Barbara Barker
and Tyler McCreary
Briarpatch Magazine
August 2006
Every school child knows that you should respect a person’s name. And in accordance with this simple maxim, Grade 2 students in the town of Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland are petitioning to change the name of the Mary March Museum — named after a Beothuk woman captured by European settlers in 1819 — to her real name: Demasduit.
![[image from presentsandlaw.com]](http://www.briarpatchmagazine.com/batches/aug06/clotheslinephoto.jpg)
Photo: YiLing Chen-Josephson, Presents & Law, www.presentsandlaw.com
By Angela Regnier
Briarpatch Magazine
August 2006
“I would like to be able to drink my water without fear and wash my clothes with no further damage.”
-LETTER TO THE EDITOR, WIARTON ECHO, SEP. 20, 2000.
Six years ago, a drinking water experiment in small town Ontario resulted in residents complaining of damage to laundered clothes, taste and odour, and illness. Although the complaints attracted national media attention and resulted in the early termination of the study, the subsequent academic write-ups of the experiment declared it a success. The chemical company sponsoring the experiment and the university hosting it received a national award, and the study is now being cited in recommended revisions to federal drinking water guidelines and provincial standards. Requests by the Canadian Federation of Students to initiate an investigation into the Wiarton experiment publications have been dismissed repeatedly by the university and the relevant federal granting council.
![[image]](http://www.briarpatchmagazine.com/batches/aug06/and_flowers_bled.jpg)
By Andrew Kennis
Briarpatch Magazine
August 2006
On May 3 of this year, at about 7 a.m., Mexican state police in the city of Texcoco blocked some five dozen flower vendors from setting up their stalls in the local market. Police authorities had reportedly alerted the vendors days beforehand that their space would be blocked by officers. A handful of activists accompanied the vendors to work, determined to force the police to let the vendors carry on with their business. When the police violently stood their ground, additional supporters were called and a confrontation ensued.
Resistance quickly spread, as protesters blockaded the Lecher’a-Texcoco highway that joins the two towns and lies about fourteen miles northeast of Mexico City. Protesters initially thwarted police efforts to break up the blockade, but the police response intensified until about 3,500 officers swept through Atenco in an indiscriminate wave of brutality, beating and arresting hundreds of protesters and bystanders.
By Roger Annis
Briarpatch Magazine
August 2006
Haiti�s occupiers and elites badly needed the legitimacy of a �democratic� election. Unfortunately for them, the poor majority took them at their word….
Sometimes even the best-laid plans of the powerful go astray. Such was the case in Haiti in February of this year when Haitians turned out in overwhelming numbers to elect Rene Preval as president. Preval, who first served as president from 1996 to 2001, is an ally of the deposed President Jean Bertrand Aristide, and thus his election was a powerful rebuke to the foreign powers, including Canada, that conspired to overthrow Aristide’s government in February 2004.
The US, France, and Canada drove Aristide from office because his government sought to protect Haiti’s poor majority from the worst ravages of the world economic order. Aristide’s foreign policy measures, including the forging of diplomatic and economic ties with Cuba, were deemed equally unacceptable. This placed Aristide and his popular, mass-based movement, Lavalas, at odds with the economic powers in the Caribbean region, for whom he and his government served as a dangerous example.
