Topics – Politics
The way we organize and allocate power — in government, institutions, movements and communities — is at the root of all injustice. From foreign policy to crime and punishment, politics are central to the exercise of authority and oppression, but also to resistance, freedom and self-determination. Here you’ll find stories on imperialism, colonization, sovereignty, migration, electoral politics, law, and the political questions being asked by movements confronting these issues.
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Letter from the editor
A fond farewell
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.
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Sabe
Creative writing contest winner (short fiction)
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.
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The colony is unwilling to share fire
Creative writing contest winner (non-fiction)
Two worlds overlap, drifting sullenly between clouds and shadows. Only one body desires to consume itself in darkness overnight.
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Vigilante nation
On guard against Canada’s ‘most-wanted’ list
Evidently, the Conservatives’ “most-wanted” list has become a permanent and ongoing means of enlisting public support in the burgeoning business of deportation.
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Architect of apartheid
Canada’s support for Israel has taken many forms, but perhaps its greatest gift has been its example
As both Canada and Israel come under increasing scrutiny on the world stage for their crimes against Indigenous peoples, their fates are increasingly bound together.
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Attawapiskat, revisited
While many Indigenous communities are economically impoverished, 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.
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Toward sexual self-determination
Book review
What You Really Really Want is a powerful tool for radically transforming how we understand and navigate the complexities of our own sexuality.
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Rising above the dark night of prison
Power, pathology, and the “tough-on-crime” agenda
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.
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Tales of heartbreak, fury and hope
Book review
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.
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Letter from the editor
Frontiers, new and old
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.”
