Category: media

On Joseph Boyden and “Ethnic Fraud”

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Cheval_de_Troie_d'après_le_Virgile_du_Vatican
Trojan Horse after Virgilius Vaticanus
(Note a working paper in progress – expanding & editing apr 18, 2017…pardon errors) 

At what point should Boyden’s identity quest have been identified as no more than a desiring machine?

I pose this question to myself as someone who has been teaching and writing about Canadian literature and culture over more than thirty years. Joseph Boyden perpetually posed as part Indigenous, an improvised status that afforded him access to advice, teachings, prestige and awards reserved for Indigenous persons. This is misguided and wrong.

I take little pleasure in part of this public debate. The talented and accomplished writer Joseph Boyden is suffering a serious and damaging and humiliating public critique. But I remain unflaggingly sympathetic to those who write about the losses within the Indigenous community when someone inauthentically takes up their space in the public sphere. To those writers and thinkers who already suffer the perils of a colonizing and racist nation state, the marginalization and the damage endures. And I understand the intensity of these critiques especially by those whose community identities or personal influence were particularly exploited. (The list of those active in this debate include Marilyn Dumont, Daniel Justice Heath,

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Did He Lie, Mom? by Fiona Tinwei Lam

janice williamson3 Comments

“Talking to my son about the scandal over Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea” TheTyee.ca

Greg Mortenson, author

Like the four million others who had purchased Three Cups of Tea, I was moved by Greg Mortenson’s story of how he came to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Back in 2007, the book’s focus on cross-cultural understanding and forging strong grassroots relationships with local communities seemed to provide a much-needed counterweight to news stories about the Taliban, suicide bombers, and realpolitik manoeuvring by western states in the Middle East and central Asia. In view of increasing troop deployments to Afghanistan, and mounting combat and civilian mortalities with no end in sight, Mortenson seemed to offer a higher-minded, peaceful and effective strategy to address the roots of terrorism.

I read the kids’ version of the book, Listen to the Wind, to my son several times while he was in kindergarten. The picture book version depicts Mortenson’s journey to the impoverished community of Korphe, where he is nursed back to health after a failed mountain-climbing venture, and where he decides to build his first school. My son had heard about the war in Afghanistan and had asked about the reasons behind the conflict and the casualties. I wanted him to have a more balanced, complex view of the situation that would go beyond media stereotypes of intolerant hostile religious fanatics or passive, hapless victims. The book showed him that there were children just like him living in that part of the world, who had parents and leaders that deeply valued what education could bring to their communities.

Continue reading “Did He Lie, Mom? by Fiona Tinwei Lam” →

Rita Wong on Courageously Speaking Against the Politics of Fear: Thank You to Brigette dePape

janice williamson7 Comments

 A Fresh Page in an Old Story

Rita Wong is a poet, blogger, teacher, cultural critic, and contributor to the pomegranate

You may not agree with Brigette dePape’s protest – she displayed a “Stop Harper” sign during the throne speech in the Senate – but dePape acts from a place of genuine concern for Canadians. She feels that we are in danger, and this justifies stepping outside the mode of business-as-usual into creatively thinking about how to best warn her fellow citizens. Living through a year with the highest greenhouse gas emissions on record, I take her warning seriously.

Interviewers in the mass media seem to miss or avoid engaging with dePape’s point that our government’s parliamentary system will not protect the peace and the environment that most Canadians value. They take a superficial definition of democracy that begins and ends with an election, whereas dePape asserts that democracy is much wider and deeper than an election where three quarters of the Canadian population did not vote for Harper. The Conservatives got 40% of the votes from the 61% of Canadians who participated in the election, translating into one quarter of the population. Ms. dePape’s math turns out to be more accurate than her media interviewers’ calculations that accept the conventional definition of a majority government and disregard the many people who did not vote.

Math aside, it is very important to consider DePape’s argument—broadcast on CTV news June 4, 2011—that millions of Canadians will not see their concerns adequately addressed within the Canadian parliamentary system for the next four years. A quarter of the country helped to elect a government that will build enormous, expensive prisons, buy fighter jets, and speed up the destruction of our planet through increased global warming. The 75% of Canadians who did not vote for this violent, fearful agenda are nonetheless held hostage to it, and the sooner they realize this, the better. It is our children and grandchildren who will pay for our mistakes, as they inherit a more polluted, degraded planet with acidifying oceans, as well as a more violent society with greater extremes of inequality. The Tory agenda is a corporate agenda, specifically a tar sands agenda where the rich will increasingly rule, at least temporarily, before leaving an enormous toxic mess for everyone else to clean up. Continue reading “Rita Wong on Courageously Speaking Against the Politics of Fear: Thank You to Brigette dePape” →

Sheila Pratt on “The Rule of Law” and Omar Khadr’s lawyers

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The Rule of Law

Sheila Pratt is a contributor to the pomegranate, senior feature writer at the Edmonton Journal and co-author of Running on Empty: Alberta after the Boom. This is the first third of an article that appears in Alberta Views (June 2011) – available at your local newstand!

The jury of seven military officers filed back into the courtroom in Guantánamo Bay at the end of eight long hours deliberating the fate of Omar Khadr. Sitting next to Khadr, watching tensely, were two Edmonton lawyers, Nate Whitling and Dennis Edney. For the past seven years, the two Albertans had waged a determined battle for legal rights for Khadr. They had been to the Supreme Court twice, with some success, in their effort to bring the rule of law to bear on the case. They’d travelled a dozen times since June 2007 to visit their client at this notorious US military prison and to help his American military lawyer, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, prepare the defence. This day, October 31, 2010, was a critical point in their journey—the fate of their client would finally be decided.

“Make no mistake, the world is watching,” the military prosecutor told the jury. “Your sentence will send a message.” Indeed. The court had accepted Khadr’s guilty plea (part of a plea bargain) the week before. Today it would recommend a sentence—and signal of the kind of justice to be had from the contentious and deeply flawed US military justice system.

Whitling and Edney knew the legal deck was stacked against their client in the military commission system, which violated the rule of law and other fundamental principles of justice. For instance, in the military court, evidence obtained under torture was admissible—unthinkable in regular courts.The prosecution was not required to disclose its evidence, as required in regular courts. The military commission system, devised post 9/11 and modified by the Obama administration, was so stacked against the accused that the US government ruled its own citizens could not be sent to trial there. This was justice suitable for foreigners only.

But the US government was not the only one to ignore its own traditions concerning the rule of law. Months before the trial, the Canadian government ignored the recommendation of its own courts, which ruled Khadr’s Charter rights had been violated when Canadian security officials participated in illegal interrogations of Khadr. To remedy that wrong, the government should bring Khadr home, the courts said. Instead, the Harper government played to the politics of the day by leaving him in Guantánamo, argues Edney. By failing to uphold the rights of one citizen, he adds—however unpopular the citizen—the government undermined the legal rights that protect all Canadians.

The defence of Omar, second youngest son of Canada’s notorious al Qaeda-linked Khadr family, was not a popular cause. The family’s ties to terrorist Osama bin Laden were a shocking betrayal of national values and an affront to Canadians. For Whitling and Edney, however, a greater principle was at stake: the rule of law, so fundamental to democracy. Every Canadian citizen is entitled to the right to counsel, protection from torture and to a fair trial. Khadr had none of that in Guantánamo. Continue reading “Sheila Pratt on “The Rule of Law” and Omar Khadr’s lawyers” →

Janice Williamson writes Dear Brigette DePape (a message from Nellie McLung)

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STOP HARPER!

Never retract, never explain, never apologize –

get the thing done and let them howl!

Nellie McLung, 1915

Brigette DePape recently graduated from her studies in international development and globalization at the University of Ottawa. She is also a young performance artist.  On Friday June 3, she demonstrated the fine art of nonviolent civil disobedience during the reading of the speech from the throne in the Canadian Senate. She had a press release ready when she was escorted from the Senate. In her interviews, she demonstrated how to stay on message:

Harper’s agenda is disastrous for this country and for my generation. …We have to stop him from wasting billions on fighter jets, military bases, and corporate tax cuts while cutting social programs and destroying the climate. Most people in this country know what we need are green jobs, better medicare, and a healthy environment for future generations.

Contrary to Harper’s rhetoric, Conservative values are not in fact Canadian values. How could they be when 3 out of 4 eligible voters didn’t even give their support to the Conservatives? But we will only be able to stop Harper’s agenda if people of all ages and from all walks of life engage in creative actions and civil disobedience. …This country needs a Canadian version of an Arab Spring, a flowering of popular movements that demonstrate that real power to change things lies not with Harper but in the hands of the people, when we act together in our streets, neighbourhoods and workplaces.

Continue reading “Janice Williamson writes Dear Brigette DePape (a message from Nellie McLung)” →

Rachel Giese writes on Canadian myths about crime & immigration

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Rachel Giese 

writes in The Walrus June 2011

“Arrival of the Fittest”

Canada’s crime rate is dropping as immigration increases. Is there a connection?

Late last summer, the MV Sun Sea, a small Thai cargo ship, entered Canadian waters off the British Columbia coast, where it was intercepted by the navy and the RCMP. Crowded on board were 492 Tamils, including women and children. The vessel’s arrival was not unexpected; in fact, the government had been monitoring its journey for months and had intelligence that it was smuggling refugees from Sri Lanka. Canada has been a popular destination for people fleeing the ravages of the twenty-six-year civil war and a 2004 tsunami: there are now 20,000 Sri Lankans here, and more coming all the time.

A few days before the Sun Sea reached the coast, public safety minister Vic Toews was in Toronto giving a luncheon speech on national security to the Economic Club of Canada and announced, “I can assure you that we are concerned about who is on that ship and why they might be coming to Canada.” He was referring to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, known as the Tamil Tigers, which has been banned in Canada as a terrorist organization. The previous year, when a rusty ship called the Ocean Lady carrying seventy-six Tamil men arrived off the coast of Vancouver Island, the government arrested the passengers and held them for months, alleging that a third of them were Tamil Tigers sent to infiltrate Canada and set up operations here. (No evidence was ever found to support that claim, and they’ve since been released. All are pursuing refugee claims.)

That the point person was Toews, and not Jason Kenney, the minister of citizenship, immigration, and multiculturalism, was telling. It framed the Sun Sea situation as a potential danger to the public, and prompted a swift response. The passengers were put into detention (nearly sixty of them remain there, and in March two were ordered to be deported because of ties to the Tigers). The government also introduced Bill C-49, which would allow officials to detain smuggled migrants for one year, and bar them from applying for permanent residence and sponsoring family members for five years.

The public was unsympathetic…

Read the rest of the article at The Walrus

For an audio interview with Rachel Giese about this essay, see: