Briarpatch Articles

In rural Saskatchewan, a network of settler landholders and Indigenous people are finding a new way to share land.

Coverage of Indigenous land defence reveals journalism’s symbiotic relationship with settler colonialism. Can we chart a path forward for decolonial and anti-colonial journalism?

From live-in caregivers to meat packers, Filipino workers have been at the front lines of COVID – but have received little protection or recognition.

From March 2020 to March 2021 there were more than 21 hunger strikes in Canadian prisons. Briarpatch looks back on a year of prisoner rebellions during COVID and what they won.

The Land Back issue’s National Magazine Award is a testament to the activists behind the Land Back movement, who have worked tirelessly to force the Canadian state and Canadian media to reckon with the literal and figurative foundations of this country.

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of CUPW’s 1981 strike, which won postal workers paid maternity leave, and raised the floor for maternal benefits throughout Canada.

When Canada boasted about its foreign aid while repeatedly blocking a proposal to waive the intellectual property rights to the COVID vaccines, it revealed a 150-year-old pattern of empty generosity.

In her new book, Allyson Stevenson studies Saskatchewan’s child apprehension program at “the heart of Canada’s colonial enterprise.”

But not before they pay reparations to the descendants of the victims of the transatlantic trade in Africans.

Though 80 per cent of Canada’s COVID deaths have happened in long-term care homes, Saskatchewan has fared better than the Canadian average. It was thanks, in part, to its relatively robust system of publicly owned homes. But in recent decades, cracks have begun showing in that system.

For over 30 years, Canadian employers have turned to a private security firm called AFIMAC to help surveil picket lines, provide scab labour, and break strikes.

A new digital pill that tracks whether it has been ingested is poised to enter the Canadian market. But for people who are incarcerated and medicated, it threatens to expand surveillance both inside and outside prisons.

Migrants are now a central part of the local working class in virtually every town and city. Organizing against capitalism involves treating migrants not as objects of charity, but as revolutionary subjects.

Under the peatland and permafrost of northern Ontario lies some $60–$120 billion worth of copper, nickel, and chromite. The Ontario government is hell-bent on passing the Far North Act and mining the so-called Ring of Fire, but the Anishinaabayg have a sacred responsibility to protect the land, and with it, their language.

Defeat happens all the time in leftist campaigns, but very few leftists (including leftist media) have developed honest, helpful ways of talking about it.

How do we build a transformative mass movement against pandemic-era injustice?

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.