Briarpatch Articles

Deeper than oceans, channels twice removed / from their native basins. This blood is thicker / than the St. Lawrence, quicker / than the Demerara, sicker / than the Ganges.

This year, I read Maria Campbell’s foundational memoir in a book club of Métis women. Nearly 50 years since it was published, “Halfbreed” still holds important teachings for those of us on the journey of understanding what it means to be Métis.

What does it mean for Indigenous people to be good guests on each other’s land?

Amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and Chinese governments, a troubling campist discourse has been growing in the Canadian left. Socialists should side with neither the American nor the Chinese state – instead, we need to build internationalism from below.

A note from Briarpatch’s editor, clarifying four factual inaccuracies that existed in the baby book, and how they came to be published. 

The largest freshwater delta in North America is under threat from a charity whose goal is seemingly to generate more ducks, no matter the cost to local Indigenous residents and wildlife.

Portraits of the Indigenous people and settlers of O:se Kenhionhata:tie, the camp that reclaimed land in Victoria Park and Waterloo Park for six months of 2020.

Without the war, we would still be the boat’s people, Má. We try to find land, where the joyful people are, but we only surround ourselves with water. 

At its best, Briarpatch stitches together the fragments of a progressive community across so-called Canada, quilting a powerful movement for collective liberation.

As Lorna Poplak’s new book “The Don: The Story of Toronto’s Infamous Jail” shows, it’s impossible for a history of a prison to disappear the continuity between one institution and the carceral whole.

For the Anishinabe people of the Ottawa River Watershed, preserving the species is intertwined with food sovereignty and land rights. Land defenders promise to be back at the blockades in September 2021, enforcing the moose-hunting moratorium if the government won’t. 

Unions are meant to defend their working-class members against unfair criticism and wrongful termination. But in Winnipeg, the police union is working to obstruct accountability for police officers who kill and abuse people.

The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation was created with a colonial mandate that was meant to keep Indigenous Peoples in the North from being sovereign nations. Nearly half a century later, not much has changed.

When humans degrade the land, Indigenous women, girls, and trans and Two-Spirit people are the most severely affected. This isn’t an accident; it’s an integral part of settler-colonialism.

As COVID fanned the flames of Toronto’s preexisting housing crisis, the Keep Your Rent posters on every block were a reminder that, all around me, there were people fighting for the soul of the city I grew up in. 

A six-page comic about Keep Your Rent’s tenant organizing in Toronto during eight months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When we imagine rural Canada as white, we erase the history, present, and future of rural Black life – from Black Loyalist settlers to justice for modern migrant farm workers.

When the pandemic took hold in March, the nature of my work as a doctor in remote communities in northern Quebec and Ontario changed drastically. The practice of medicine is defined by coping with uncertainty, but few had experienced the scope of the ambiguity through which we lurched. 

Amazon has become lodged in our society. The only way to exorcise it is to organize it. The Amazon Workers Collective needs your help: sign up to join the fight to organize the workers of Amazon.

In her new book, Nora Loreto tracks the rise and fall of Canada’s organized feminist movement, and observes how formal organizations were replaced with a mix of online personalities, bloggers, and service organizations. How do we once again build a feminist movement that can pose a serious challenge to neoliberal austerity and misogyny?