On July 1st, 2021 the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) — which represents some 650 professional historians across the country — released a statement saying that Canada’s “long history of violence and dispossession” directed at indigenous peoples “fully warrants our use of the word genocide.” It was an unusual step for an institution representing an academic discipline that has long shied away from using language that might be deemed “controversial,” particularly when the lens of analysis is directed, not at faraway …
Category: Short Rants
Tha Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) followed the corporate media newswire framing for its headline on May 11, 2021: Israelis are “killed” with the active voice; Palestinians “die” with the passive voice. Even the headlines are colonial. …
Hard to believe 20 years has passed since this little festival in Quebec City against the FTAA. We had a fairly large contingent of Winnipeggers, lots of folks from the Mondragon and G7 Welcoming Committee collectives, …
I’ve heard a lot of Canadians get indignant over the years about charges that this has always been, and continues to be, a fundamentally racist and colonial society. They were indignant when Maclean’s published a piece …
Musings in the wake of Joseph Boyden’s fall from grace, 2016. One of the things I remember most from my first creative writing class with David Arnason at the U of Manitoba (way back in 1985-86) …