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It's Canada Day, this year dubbed Canada 150, with its own  corporate brand  and a carefully worded story of that number 150. We also have Canada 150+ , which acknowledges that human cultures and societies have been living in what is now Canada for thousands of years. I have mixed feelings about Canada Day. First, I despise nationalism of all kinds, including the kind called patriotism. I used to make a distinction between the two (something I learned from my mother), but have come to feel that it is all the same: I am better than you because I live on this piece of land and you don't. In Canada, patriotism mostly translates into complacency, as if "we're much better than our neighbours to the south!" is good enough. But more importantly, when it comes to Canada 150, are indigenous people. The very concept of Canada 150 excludes and erases the original inhabitants of this land. From an indigenous point of view, Canada 150 marks the beginning of colonialism, occupa...

Many people have been discussing my recent post about cultural appropriation  on Facebook. I'm not surprised that many people disagree (that's why I wrote it, to put my countering opinion out there), but I have been surprised by how many progressive people do agree. From the negative comments, I can see that I wasn't clear on a few important points. 1. The entire post refers to white , first-world people calling out other first-worlders with accusations of cultural appropriation -- not  aboriginal people. I would not pass judgment or venture an opinion about a native person's judgment of appropriation of their own culture. I have no right to do so -- and I would not do so. I was referring what I see as a quite a large bandwagon, pointing self-righteous fingers at others -- by white people, and at white people. 2. The above might explain why I feel the words shaming  and bullying  are fair game. I wasn't suggesting that aboriginal people are bullying white people abo...

I'm increasingly dismayed by accusations of cultural appropriation that are used as weapons, rather than as a tool for raising awareness and educating. Accusations of appropriation have become a form of bullying, a weapon wielded to police and enforce a superficial obeisance to a behavioural code -- while doing nothing to address the underlying issues. Cultural appropriation is real. It's a valid issue. I'm not saying that cultural appropriation is not real. It is. I'm not saying claims of appropriation don't have merit. They do. When I was a child in the 1960s, parents might dress their children as "Indians" for Halloween, without a second thought. Kids played "Cowboys and Indians," dressing up in hats or feathers, with toy guns or tomahawks. Can you imagine if someone had played "Nazis and Jews"? It's completely inappropriate to turn a history of genocide and oppression into costumes and games. That in the 21st century, people are...

I've had a longstanding interest in prison libraries, and was happy to meet another librarian-friend who shares this. But I was very pleasantly surprised at the large turnout for the talk Prisons and Libraries: A Relationship Worth Incubating   at the 2016 OLA Super Conference.   A panel of three librarians who serve incarcerated people in different capacities gave the presentation. Why prison libraries? From a rehabilitation perspective, there is a high correlation between illiteracy and crime, and illiteracy and recidivism. Certainly education can only help inmates successfully re-enter society. From a social justice perspective, most people in prison are there because their life circumstances led inexorably to criminality. Access to information can help change the odds. And from a human rights perspective, access to information is a basic human right - but prisons are environments of severe information poverty. Contrary to popular belief, inmates have no access to televisio...

I attended OLA * for only one day this year, partly because I'm already missing so much work for bargaining and other union business, and partly because one day is often enough. There's a huge lineup of presentations, poster sessions, book signings, vendors, keynote speakers, tours, receptions, etc. - lots of etc. - but the presentations are the meat of the conference. Four presentations a day for three days is just too much. As it happened, three of the four talks I attended shared a theme: bringing library services to underserved, marginalized, and socially excluded communities. My first of the day was Choosing to Walk a Path: Library Services with Indigenous Peoples on Purpose . Monique Woroniak, from Winnipeg, a city with a significant indigenous population, first set the social and political context. It was a bit like being at our annual socialist conference: the presenter using the expression the Canadian state , as opposed to Canada , and speaking about settler colonial...

I see a lot of excitement online, in places like Common Dreams and The Nation , and in my Facebook feed, about Bernie Sanders, supposedly remaking US politics, and Pope Francis, supposedly remaking the Roman Catholic Church. About Sanders, I shake my head and wonder why long-time Democrat voters do not see him and his candidacy for what it is. About the Pope, I wonder why progressive people allow themselves to care. Sanders is the new Dean Bernie Sanders has been praised as a maverick, an independent, and a socialist. All of which may have been true at various points in his political career. Right now Sanders is running for President  as a Democrat . He is not spearheading a movement to build a new alternative. He is not refusing corporate funding and appealing to the grassroots. He is not "challenging politics as usual," as headlines in progressive news sites often say. He is seeking the Democratic nomination, which means he will play within the boundaries of that game. And...

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has just completed its week-long closing event in Ottawa. The Commission was part of the historic settlement between the Canadian Government and the survivors of the former Indian Residential Schools. Its mandate is to inform all Canadians about what happened in Indian Residential Schools (IRS). The Commission will document the truth of survivors, families, communities and anyone personally affected by the IRS experience. This includes First Nations, Inuit and Métis former Indian Residential School students, their families, communities, the Churches, former school employees, Government and other Canadians. I don't know if this is well known outside of Canada, or outside of people who take a special interest in indigenous issues. The divide between natives and non-natives in Canada is vast. Environmental activism - opposition to the tar sands, pipelines, fracking, and Canadian mining globally - offers prime opportunity for cooperat...

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate , by Naomi Klein, is incredibly difficult to write about. I've been putting sticky notes beside important paragraphs as I read, and my copy now looks like an art project, bristling with coloured paper squares. I can say without exaggeration that this is one of the most important books you'll ever read. In her clear, readable prose, Klein demonstrates exactly what is destroying our planet: unregulated, unchecked capitalism, brought to you by the scourge of our era: neoliberalism. (US readers may be more familiar with the term neoconservatism.) In her 2007 book  The Shock Doctrine , Klein showed us how corporate interests exploit crises to enact policies that enrich a small elite, using the holy trinity of neoliberalism: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending. Now Klein widens her lens to demonstrate how that same orientation a...

Indian Horse , by Richard Wagamese, is a hauntingly beautiful novel about an Ojibway boy's journey into manhood. It was the Readers' Choice winner of the 2013  Canada Reads , CBC Radio's book promotion program. But if you're like me and don't listen to the radio, you may have missed it. Don't miss it. Indian Horse should be widely read - by everyone, but especially by Canadians. In a slim, spare volume, drawing vivid pictures with very few words, Wagamese brings you into the Ojibway family. They are struggling to hold onto their culture - and indeed, to keep their family physically together, as children are being abducted and forced into the so-called residential schools. Saul Indian Horse, the hero and narrator of the novel, survives the residential school by finding solace and joy in an unlikely place: hockey. Hockey is an integral part of Indian Horse , and Wagamese has written some of the best description of sport I've read in a novel, seamlessly knitti...

My grandmother had always referred to the universe as the Great Mystery. "What does it mean?" I asked her once. "It means all things." "I don't understand." She took my hand and sat me down on a rock at the water's edge. "We need mystery," she said, "Creator in her wisdom knew this. Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. They are the foundations of humility, and humility, grandson, is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel this. We honour it by letting it be that way forever." Richard Wagamese,  Indian Horse (2013)

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures by Anne Fadiman contains dozens of passages that I'd like to share. My library copy is shamefully dog-eared, and I intend to buy a copy of the book for my bookshelf. But I'll restrain myself and will share only a single anecdote, related in the early pages, which drew me in. In an intermediate French class at Merced College a few years ago, the students were assigned a five-minute oral report, to be delivered in French. The second student to stand up in front of the class was a young Hmong man. His chosen topic was a recipe for la soupe de poisson : Fish Soup. To prepare Fish Soup, he said, you must have a fish, and in order to have a fish, you have to go fishing. In order to go fishing, you need a hook, and in order to choose the right hook, you need to know whether the fish you are fishing for lives in fresh or salt water, how big it is, and what shape its mouth i...

Flight  is a thought-provoking short novel by one of my favourite youth writers, Sherman Alexie. The main character in Flight , a Native American boy who goes by the derisive nickname Zits, is a troubled soul with a long history of abuse, neglect, and abandonment. He seems to be on the brink of a major transition, either going off the deep end or beginning the long climb back. I don't know how to write about this book without spoiling it. So if you're like me, and you don't like to know  anything  about a book before you begin, and you like a book to reveal itself exactly as the author intended,  skip to the next book right now . Zits finds himself inexplicably inhabiting the bodies and minds of different people in the history of his family and his people. He doesn't choose this, and he has no control of it, but Zits finds himself quite literally walking in the shoes of his fellow man. The boy's journey into other people's lives takes him to some watershed momen...

I am always astonished to see stories such as these. A tree-dwelling animal with a teddy-bear-like face and rust-coloured fur has become the newest mammal species discovered by scientists. The olinguito, the smallest known member of the raccoon family, lives in the cloud forests high in the Andes Mountains of Colombia and Ecuador, reported a team of scientists from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., which described it in the journal ZooKeys Thursday. The animal has actually been displayed in museums and zoos over the past 100 years, but was mistakenly identified as a different, known species among its close relatives, the olingo. "It's been kind of hiding in plain sight for a long time," Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and lead author of the new report, told The Associated Press. And this. Giant Maya Carvings Found in Guatemala Archaeologist Anya Shetler cleans an inscription below an ancient...

Here's a chance to preserve Canadian history - the real history, not the government-approved kind - and to preserve art and creativity and alternative media, all at the same time. Please consider giving $7.00 - or any amount - and sharing this excellent campaign with your friends and on social media. More info: Hi! My name is Nicole Marie Guiniling and I’m the founder of Ad Astra Comix . Ad Astra is a website that promotes political and historical comic books, and has recently stepped, albeit with shakey legs, into production, distribution, and publishing. Over the next 40 days, I'm here on IndieGoGo to promote the re-mastering of "100 Year Rip-Off: The Real History of British Columbia." It’s a graphic history of the province that was first published in 1971. That makes it the oldest "Graphic History" on record in Canada. 100 Year Rip-Off In July 1971, 100 Year Rip-Off was printed as an 8-page tabloid-sized insert in the counter-culture newspaper, Socialis...

Here is the definitive piece on why the NFL team in Washington DC must change its name, written by - who else - Dave Zirin: Enough: An Open Letter to Enough Dan Snyder , at Grantland . Please go and read it .

On January 16, 2013, six young Cree men and an experienced guide left their community on Hudson's Bay, in the far north, on foot. Their destination: Parliament Hill, Ottawa. Along their route, other aboriginal youth joined them, and together, now almost 200 strong, they are still walking. This is the Journey of Nishiyuu, or, the Quest For Unity. The walkers will reach Ottawa on March 25, having walked more than 1500 kilometres in sub-zero temperatures. These impressive young people stand in solidarity with Idle No More, and seek to protect their land and their heritage, and to build unity among the indigenous peoples of Canada, and of the world. From their media release: As our ancestors did before them , the youths will encounter a lot of challenges and hardships along their journey that will attempt to stop them from completing their objectives, including having to confront the elements during the coldest and harshest months in our region. By facing these challenges that our peop...