May/June 2018

Terra nullius is a lie. The Prairies have never been empty – they’ve always been teeming with anti-capitalist and anti-colonial resistance.

Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) are used to silence, impoverish, and intimidate protesters. Now, with a lawsuit filed against the alleged participants of Winnipeg’s Rooster Town Blockade, we may be seeing one of the first SLAPPs on the Prairies.

“Hell’s Hole,” “the Devil’s Row,” and “the Western Front” – these were the nicknames for the coal mines of the Drumheller valley. In 1919, around 6,500 Drumheller coal miners walked off the job after voting to join the radical and militant One Big Union. Nearly a hundred years later, the 1919 Drumheller strike remains one of the most famous examples of workers’ power on the Prairies.

Could a new crown corporation – SaskOil – allow us to wind down the industry, get off oil, keep people employed, and repatriate land, resources, and decision-making to Indigenous peoples?

Through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, the Canadian government took thousands of First Nations children from their families and placed them in white foster homes. I was one of them. Alienated from my language, culture, and community, I was taught to hate my people.

Amid neoliberal government policies, rampant climate change, and corporate land grabbing, the National Farmers Union continues to fight for sustainability, income security, and farmers’ dignity.

The history of the harm reduction movement is one of direct action and protest – an “act first, ask second” attitude that was the only reasonable response to an outbreak of preventable disease and a crisis of premature deaths. Nicholas Olson reviews Fighting for Space, by Travis Lupick.

The fossil fuel industry has the Canadian government by the throat – but it’s been a long time coming. Joseph Laforest reviews Oil’s Deep State, by Kevin Taft.

Years with so little social struggle on the Prairies have left us without much of what Alan Sears calls the “infrastructure of dissent.”

Most days during Gerald Stanley’s trial, the courtroom could be cut in half: the white half – family and supporters of the accused – and the brown half – family and supporters of the victim.