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Toronto-based photographer Ian Willms captured some very compelling images from the G20 protests — full of raw emotion, ugly contradiction and creative beauty. These photos offer a much richer and more textured perspective of the protests than you’ll get from any mainstream news source.
Check them out here:
Tags: canadian politics, capitalism, crime & punishment, direct action, human rights, media, protest
photo by Sandra Cuffe
The line that runs through Akwesasne territory divides the United States from Canada, and cuts the Mohawk nation in half.
At midnight on May 31, 2009, the guards who manned the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) station on the Mohawk (Kahnienkehaka) reserve of Akwesasne, near Cornwall, Ontario, abandoned the Canadian side of the U.S.-Canada border and went home. The guards were to be issued 9-mm Beretta pistols on the following day as part of Canada’s border security policy, but had been warned by Akwesasne community groups that armed agents of the Canadian government would not be tolerated on their land. Despite appeals from the CBSA, Cornwall mayor Bob Kilger and the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne for third party intervention, the federal government ignored the issue and pressed ahead with the policy. The Border Service agents, not wishing to be put in the middle of a major crisis, chose to walk off the job.
A year later, the border station, for all intents and purposes, remains abandoned.
An ad hoc Montreal-based support group for Honuran-born Quebecer Dany Villanueva, whose permanent residency is under threat of revocation for a crime he committed and served time for four years ago, demonstrate outside of his Immigration and Refugee Board hearing.
Imagine you were born in Honduras and spent your childhood days on the dusty streets of Tegucigalpa. When you’re 12, you and your parents emigrate to Canada. You’re granted permanent residency and the stability it offers. By the time you’re 20, Canada is home and Honduras a distant memory.
But permanent residency in Canada is not necessarily permanent. According to the current Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which came into effect in 2002, if permanent residents are implicated in “serious criminality” or sentenced to six months or more in prison, they may be deported to their country of origin, regardless of the length of time they’ve lived in Canada.
Jaggi Singh, a Montreal-based migrant rights organizer, says that this measure amounts to “double punishment,” since a permanent resident convicted of a crime is penalized once through the justice system and then again through the immigration system, with immigration officials weighing in on issues of criminality that have already been addressed within the judicial system. But whereas the courts dictate that a person cannot be tried twice for the same crime - a legal concept known as double jeopardy - no such principle protects immigrants from similar double punishment.
Tags: canadian politics, human rights, immigration, justice
The Mixed Media gallery
Two downtown neighbourhoods in Hamilton, Ontario - James St. North and Landsdale - have recently been the site of several skirmishes in a gentrification war waged in the media, art galleries and on the streets themselves.
James St. North is the vibrant hub of a burgeoning arts community. Busy cafés and bars owned by Portuguese and Italian immigrants who have called the neighbourhood home for decades sit next to swanky new art galleries showcasing the work of local artists. Just east lies the Landsdale neighbourhood, home to some of Hamilton’s poorest residents, including sex workers and other people living or working on the streets. These two neighbourhoods have become focal points of a fiery debate on surveillance, gentrification and the division of public space within Hamilton’s downtown core.
James Street North
Exemplified by two art exhibits and the media coverage that surrounds them, the debate over the right to space in Hamilton reflects similar gentrification struggles being waged in cities across the country in pursuit of sanitized downtown cores pandering to a “creative class” of young urban professionals (for more info on the “creative class, click here).
Tags: activism, art, capitalism, class, human rights, poverty, sexuality
Nandita Sharma is an activist, scholar, and the author of Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006), and “Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid” (NWSA #17, 2005). In this interview, she addresses the effects of anti-trafficking on migrant women doing sex work. She critiques the notion of “trafficking” in the context of the increasing necessity of global migration and the tightening of borders in the global North. According to Sharma, border restrictions, rather than “trafficking,” are the biggest impediment to the self-determination of (im)migrant women in Canada.
Jessica Yee is the director of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network. In this interview, she describes the conditions of ongoing and under-reported exploitation of Indigenous women in Canada, critiques the conflation of “trafficking” and sex work, and explains the oppressive effects of the anti-trafficking movement on Indigenous women’s self-determination.
Tags: Aboriginal/settler relations, capitalism, human rights, migration, sexuality
illustration by TJ Vogan
Authman and Zidan Mushtaak are Pakistani nationals who moved to the United States 15 years ago, as children. Because their family was forced to go underground to stay in the country, they’ve lived more than half their lives as undocumented immigrants.
After being deported from the U.S. in 2007, Authman, now 25, moved to Kingston, Ontario on a student visa and is working toward his Canadian citizenship. Zidan, 21, still lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his parents - all three without legal status.
Though they live less than 800 kilometres apart, Authman and Zidan have been separated for the past three years by an impenetrable, invisible line created by Canadian and U.S. immigration laws. The following is a series of emails exchanged between the brothers. For their and their family’s protection, they have chosen pseudonyms.
Authman: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our first few years in the U.S. Do you remember moving there after Dad lost his job in Saudi Arabia? You were so young.
Tags: family, human rights, migration, U.S. politics
July/August 2010
“Ultimately, the only way that migration is going to be safe for anyone is to decriminalize it. We need to ensure that people have the autonomous right to move whenever they decide it is in their own best interest.“
-Nandita Sharma, “Sex work, migration & anti-trafficking”
I’ve undergone 19 years of schooling, but I’d say my real education came the summer after I finished my graduate degree. I spent that growing season, and the next, as part of a frontline literacy program in Ontario, working and living on farms alongside migrant workers from Mexico and the Caribbean, picking tomatoes and sweet corn, priming tobacco, harvesting ginseng. I got a brief glimpse, in those months, of how even in Canada what we generally think of as fundamental human rights apply only to citizens, if at all; how denying someone the legal protections of citizenship opens them to all manner of abuse, indignity, coercion and exploitation. I saw how much economic prosperity is built on that exploitation.
Tags: class, food politics, human rights, labour, migration
This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the Sisters in Spirit vigil in Regina, SK, October 6, 2009.
Some things defy articulation. How can a community conceptualize the vicious, racist misogyny that leaves scores of Aboriginal women missing and murdered? We try, because silence really is complicity – because we are all affected, we are all related and we do not accept the loss of these women. I say to the families of missing and murdered women: we are humbled by your courage in the face of such pain.
The women’s movement has a saying: the personal is political. We share our personal experiences, and in that way, we make them political. This is what Sisters in Spirit is doing. This is what the Native Women’s Association of Canada is doing. This is what the families of the missing and murdered women are doing.
Our personal conditions are not just private – they are the result of structures, processes, policies, laws, misogyny and racism. Once we understand that, we find solidarity, begin to analyze our situation and then take political action. In our solidarity and action we have power; we are not only victims.
There are so many names, too many for me to recite. But I remember in particular the girl whose name was the first branded into the national consciousness – Helen Betty Osborne, a 16-year-old high school student who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by four white boys, protected by their community for decades. She would be my age had she lived. Closer to home, I remember Pamela George, a young mother, kidnapped, raped and murdered by two young white men in Regina. I remember Amber, and Daleen, and Tara-Lyn, and all the sisters who are no longer with us. I am enraged that the loss of these women is a regular occurrence.
Generations apart, they have all been taken from us by an evil that has not gone away. And while racism and sexism come together in the lives of Aboriginal women, we know that not only white men have preyed on these women.
Aboriginal women and men have suffered from the violence of colonialism, but they have not suffered in the same way. Many women are victimized by assault, rape and murder. But indigenous women are especially vulnerable to male violence because of the convergence of sexism and racism. According to Amnesty International and the Native Women’s Association of Canada, Aboriginal women are five times more likely to be murdered than other women in Canada.
“It’s a good place to raise a family,” people said when I moved to Regina in 1998. But not for my girl, who is visibly Aboriginal. I raised my daughter in fear – always fearing she would become a victim, would go missing, would be killed. She came close to it. I am lucky. She is alive. It could so easily have been otherwise.
Racism is an ideology that justifies the oppression and thefts of colonialism. Racism allows the settler population to see themselves as deserving, while the Other, the indigenous, is seen as deviant and deficient. Racism gives rise to white privilege, enjoyed by those who can choose not to know about colonialism or indigenous peoples, but who nonetheless benefit from being white in a racist settler society. Those with privilege receive quality education and good jobs, and are genuinely distressed at the suffering of indigenous peoples, while being blind to the ways in which their privilege arises from the historical and ongoing oppression of indigenous peoples.
The racism that I’m describing leads predominantly white politicians, police and media to pay less attention to missing Aboriginal women, and to ignore the factors that make them so vulnerable. They prefer to talk about “cultural differences” instead of oppression, about “risk factors” instead of colonialism. By focusing only on individuals and ignoring history, they can be blind to the fact that this awful problem of missing and murdered Aboriginal women is a consequence of our social, economic and political relationships.
Together, we remember these women and commit to working to build a society where women are not under such threats; where we will not always have to be afraid; where we need not meet to name the missing and share our pain; where such atrocities do not happen; where colonialism will be a thing of the past and we can finally work together for justice for all.
Blessed be, all my relations.
Tags: aboriginal women, Aboriginal/settler relations, Canada, human rights, indigenous women, racism
Illustration by Kim Sokol
By Erum Hasan
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2010
I was 14 years old, riding a Parisian metro on a Friday evening, no doubt bound for some teenage mischief. The peace of my journey was interrupted when a woman wearing a burqa entered the compartment, accompanied by her husband and young son. The three of them, visibly tourists, looked at the metro maps in clear view of everyone else in the car.
This is a scene that occurs many times a day in Paris: tourist families mapping out their routes in the web of the metro underworld. But this family was different; the protagonists were atypical. I remember my horror at the whisperings, the looks, the nudges, and even some finger pointing at the woman in the burqa. A woman sitting across from me sighed exasperatedly and mumbled something about “these Arabs” and how they treat their women.
I was embarrassed and angry at this family for having entered this very public realm of which I was a part. I didn’t want my co-commuters to be judging all Muslim women relative to this one with her covered face. It was challenging enough to be a Muslim teen in Paris without having to take on this iconic image of the burqa-clad woman that had disturbed the cultural uniformity on that metro car. Feeling resentment for her and the response she was eliciting, I looked away, hoping she would disappear quickly.
Tags: burqa, feminism, gender, human rights, Islam, marginalization, religion
Marilyn Waring’s decades-long career has been as varied as it has been influential. She was the youngest woman elected to the New Zealand Parliament, is a long-time activist for lesbian and gay rights, and has tended her own goat farm for many years. In the wake of the global financial crisis, the revered feminist economist’s perspective on the changing relations between the Global North and South and the changing face of feminism are particularly salient.
Waring’s groundbreaking 1988 book, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth, is among the most authoritative books for advocates of women’s economic rights around the world. Her most recent collection, 1 Way 2 C the World: Writings 1984-2006, is a compilation of essays from her years travelling and working in Canada, South America, Africa and Asia.
Waring recently spoke with Briarpatch about the state of women’s rights in the Global South and how women in the North can support southern resistance to economic inequality.
Tags: activism, economics, feminism, human rights, indigenous women, politics, women's rights
