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Calling all our superheroes
I am often conflicted as an educator. As a Native woman, I consider the current system of education in Canada to be inherently colonial, and I hate my role in perpetuating it.
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compass/check/pulse point
Cynthia Dewi Oka’s first collection of poetry, nomad of salt and hard water (Dinah Press), drops anchor in the transoceanic struggle of bodies against borders
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Letter from the editor
It’s been an enormous pleasure to return to Briarpatch to guest edit this issue. -
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No force more powerful
Nothing can really convey the power of moments where people come together to realize their collective strength, but we thought we’d try anyway
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Voices of resistance
Across the Americas, Indigenous women are working to restore values of harmony, co-operation, balance, and respect within their communities.
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A steady lens and a dangerous weapon
“Healing is a challenge in life. It is a victim’s sole obligation,” he says. “Forgotten wounds cannot be healed. So I film to heal.”
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Defining who is Métis
“I will never know exactly why and when my own family’s Métis history was buried; I only know that it was.”
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The olive grove
The annual olive harvest is a key economic, social, and cultural event for Palestinians. The olive oil produced makes up 14% of agricultural income in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and helps support 80,000 families.
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Conversations on ecological justice, healing, and decolonization
If those of us who care about the earth are to have a chance at actually stopping its destruction, we need to expand environmentalism way beyond its conventional boundaries.
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Trespassers on their own land?
Economic development based on resource extraction and other high- impact activities continues at the expense of traditional Indigenous land-based economies. While military, oil and gas, and uranium industry development in traditional Dene, Cree, and Métis territories offers some wage labour, it displaces traditional labour such as hunting, trapping, fishing, and gathering.
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Pipeline to prison
Canada’s education system, imposed upon Indigenous people for hundreds of years, plays a powerful role in constructing the notion of public enemies in need of discipline and containment.
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Hearing Two-Spirits
A combination of both the masculine and feminine, the Two-Spirited are a distinct gender with roles and responsibilities unique to their dual nature.
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A powerful medicine
Indian Horse illuminates Canada’s devastating past in an important contribution to the genre of sport fiction.
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Popular education lives
Interview with Anne Docherty, reflecting upon the formative influences on her understanding of popular education and how she uses popular education as a framework to advance decolonization and regional self-determination. -
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Boiling point
The lack of safe drinking water in First Nations communities is just one example of the long-standing underfunding and neglect that has led to the substandard living conditions that plague First Nations communities across Canada.
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Sabe
The house had a makeshift feeling she should have grown out of a long time ago, her scattered belongings littering the floor like residue. She liked to feel as though she could leave at any moment just by throwing a few things into a bag.
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The colony is unwilling to share fire
Two worlds overlap, drifting sullenly between clouds and shadows. Only one body desires to consume itself in darkness overnight.
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Architect of apartheid
As both Canada and Israel come under increasing scrutiny on the world stage for their crimes against Indigenous peoples, their fates are increasingly bound together.
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Attawapiskat, revisited
Our northern communities are rich because they know their languages. They are rich because they have strong connections to their land. They are rich because at least some of their lands exist in a natural state.
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experiments in freedom
There is a mass grave here. The broken skins of some of the fruit reveal eyes, nasal cartilage, thumbs.