Briarpatch Articles

Exploring the anti-colonial, egalitarian roots of Sikhi, and tracking the extraordinary political power of the Sikh community in Canada today

“you bear their names like heavy robes. say it. / bind your waist in white ribbon. history’s seams / are tearing. you learned violence as the sweetest love / but you learned from the wrong people.“ Poetry winner of the Writing in the Margins contest.

As another recession looms, the left must be ready when it hits – with anti-capitalist theory that can tell people why we’ve had 12 economic crises in the last century alone, why the rich just get richer each time, and why it’s working class people who always lose. 

150 years ago, Karl Marx observed that crisis is encoded in capitalism’s DNA. Today, Canadian capitalism has entered another period of serious volatility – one that may culminate in a crisis even deeper than that of 2008.

The Yukon is caught between millennia of geological change and the accelerated effects of climate change. These photos capture the natural chaos, change, and destruction of an ever-shifting landscape.

Through handshakes behind closed doors, with refugees as commodities and borders as bargaining chips, our migration system is crumbling

Unearthing Justice is the handbook Canada’s environmental movement needs. Anna Bianca Roach reviews Joan Kuyek’s new book about the mining industry and its discontents.

How can immigrant settlers – weighted by our own racial memory of land and its loss – cultivate ethical relationships with the land here?

Resource Movement asks – earnestly – how can a group of rich kids help advance social justice movements?

Since September, a wave of protests has swept across the globe. Inequality and its violent maintenance is at the heart of the discontent.

After two months on strike, CUPE 3903 members were feeling worn out. That changed when, one night – armed with a Rototiller, under cover of darkness – they decided to plant a community garden on the picket line.

In the Yukon’s northernmost community, the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation is reckoning with how to preserve their land and culture, amid a warming climate and an influx of tourists

Digital platforms boast that they’ve “democratized” cultural production. But getting to use something and having a meaningful say in its operation are two different things – and only one is really democratic. But what would truly democratic platforms and cultural production look like in Canada?

The story of climate justice organizing in Alberta, at the heart of the tarsands, is the story of a group of young activists learning what it means to lose, and keep on fighting

On August 5, 2019, the Indian government issued a constitutional order stripping the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir of its semi-autonomous status. These emails between two friends in Pakistan and Kashmir present the international crisis as it unfolds in real time through the eyes of two young women.

What does it mean when “choosing love” isn’t an individual act, but a collective effort of building a world in which all of our material needs are met? estefania alfonso falcon reviews Kai Cheng Thom’s I Hope We Choose Love.

There’s no rulebook for transformative justice work. What we have and are being given are principles, beliefs, guidelines, and personal experiences. We must use these offerings iteratively, as tools to grapple with our own spaces and our positions within them.

The argument for a reduced work week asks: why do we work to produce so much more than we can possibly use? Why not work less, waste less, distribute better, and enjoy the age of abundance that we’ve been promised?

Teachers bargaining for the common good contains the seed of radical change – and I mean “radical” in the same way that Angela Davis uses it, meaning “grasping at the root.”

Briarpatch editor Saima Desai talks to two judges of our Writing in the Margins contest about Idle No More and MMIWG, ethical kinship, writing queer sex, and their forthcoming work.