March/April 2019

Do we use our mourning to install cops in our holy places? Or do we use it to galvanize us to rise up against occupation, against land theft, against the corporations that would profit from our destitution and death?

“In the palm of my hand, I delicately finger a pair of unfamiliar ID cards printed on worn pieces of coloured paper, yellow and salmon pink. The faded type reveals they were issued in the spring of 1941 with approval from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.” Creative non-fiction winner of the Writing in the Margins contest.

I often wondered how many other young folks of Japanese ancestry had their history torn from them because of Canada’s history of Japanese internment – a pondering that eventually turned into this photography series, The Suitcase Project. Photography winner of of the Writing in the Margins contest.

Developers are building condos on top of sacred Algonquin Anishinabeg islands. Why are Indigenous sacred sites not given the same legal protections as settler ones?

Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline replacement slices through the southern half of Saskatchewan, but there’s little Indigenous opposition in the province. To mount our own fight, we’ll have to learn from other Indigenous resistance efforts along the pipeline’s route.

NAFTA 2.0 is chipping away at hard-won policies that guard Canadian farmers from price volatility and ensure high labour and environmental standards. The National Farmers Union is fighting back – at the level of both grassroots and policy.

Official laws and social norms are wielded as tools of control to preserve urban parks as spaces for middle-class white settlers. Jessica DeWitt reviews On this Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land by Matt Hern, Selena Couture, Daisy Couture, and Sadie Couture.

“there is a scene in smoke signals where the sad native boy cries as he pours his father over bridge into / roaring angry always been there river / and i could not help but picture myself entangling in the meander.” Poetry winner of the Writing in the Margins contest.

71 years ago, India promised to let the people of Kashmir choose to join India or Pakistan. In the absence of the referendum, protestors in Indian-occupied Kashmir are voicing their desire for freedom by showing up in the thousands to the funerals of separatist militants. But 2018 has been the bloodiest year in a decade inside Indian-occupied Kashmir.

While antisemitic hate crimes increase in Canada, there’s been a resurgence of the Jewish left – led by young people, rooted in solidarity with other marginalized communities, focused on ending the Israeli occupation, and held together by new articulations of Jewish community and ritual.