Briarpatch Articles

The land has always been here and Indigenous Peoples have always been reclaiming parts of it. So Canada’s challenge is how to keep us off of it, and how to keep us from holding onto the idea that it’s right for us to reclaim it.

A timeline of Land Back events from the past century

Settlers have a lot of questions about Land Back: What does it mean? Who will the land be given back to? How will it be governed? Will settlers be forced to leave the continent? Brooks Arcand-Paul and Nickita Longman help clear up some of the frequently asked questions about the Land Back movement.

An interview with Elder Jo-Ann Saddleback about Land Back, matriarchy, democracy, and decolonization.

When we say “Land Back” we want the system that is land to be alive so that it can perpetuate itself, and perpetuate us as an extension of itself. That’s what we want back: our place in keeping land alive and spiritually connected. 

Molly Swain and Chelsea Vowel of Métis in Space discuss Métis futurisms and how they started their Land Back project.

Pension funds control billions of dollars of workers’ money. But when pension funds are invested in real estate, are they really working for workers?

From traditional fishing technologies to bringing back the bison, Indigenous ecological practices are our best bet to save the planet – and ourselves

How a public-sector union became the leading advocate of jail-building in Manitoba – and laid the foundation for the province’s incarceration disaster.

#AidToo is exposing abuses of power at aid organizations. Two stories from Canadian NGOs show what it takes to blow the whistle, and how the industry responds to accusations.

To avoid police and prisons, more leftists are turning to accountability processes to repair harm. But fractious accountability processes are tearing communities apart. How might returning to transformative justice’s Black feminist roots help break the cycle?

Is the idea of Indigenous sovereignty really in conflict with the well-being of migrant communities? A review of “Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants.”

By remaining silent during the invasion of Wet’suwet’en land, settler feminists in Canada have risked both complicity in this violence and irrelevance in a women’s movement that is global in scope.

It’s a demand that’s easy to understand and easy to fight for, which is important because we’ll need a lot of people to help us win it.

Free speech isn’t a cause the left can afford to leave to liberals or the right. And when “no platform” is called for, we shouldn’t appeal to authorities to do it.  

“A Planet to Win” does not call for a utopian adoption of yet-to-be-invented technologies to fix things, but contends that we can build using the technology we have now to both address people’s real needs and decarbonize.

Today, Tamil people are Toronto’s working class as well as, increasingly, its elite – but behind the Canadian Tamil community’s historic struggles and resistance lies the fact that most of us arrived in Toronto fleeing a genocide

The Democratic Socialists of America Canada Twitter account was fake – but its popularity was not. What’s the power of socialist branding to shape a movement?

The massive fraud at The Pas is a modest entry in the annals of Canadian racial capitalism. In light of the town’s history of Cree and Métis political action, it could be said that a quarter-billion dollars were stolen out of the mouths of children, from over the heads of families, from people seeking meaningful work in the prime of life.

In Guatemala, traditional Indigenous governments are battling municipalities and transnational corporations for control of their land