Monday, 15 July 2024
Sadie Beaton: Staying with the trouble – Some thoughts on white supremacy, entanglement and the Mi’kmaq right to fish

Sadie Beaton: I’ve been struck lately by one of white supremacy’s more insidious mechanisms- the illusion of disentanglement. How whiteness allows some of us to opt out of the recognition that we are fully enmeshed in and with this world. It’s a dangerous kind of privilege for those of us who benefit (on the surface), as Ross Gay describes, to ”pretend the possibility of disentanglement.” This pretending, it seems to me, is the very opposite of Peace and Friendship.

Kill the regs to save the fish (video)

1 Comment

Last week Mi’kmaw Water Protectors traveled to Antigonish to confront politicians attending the annual meeting of the provincial Liberals about federal efforts to accommodate the Alton Gas Project. Sadie Beaton explains what is going on. Video by Eliza Knockwood included

Shades of Green podcast, episode 5: Justice in public – Reconciliation, reparations and the decolonized future

In this episode of the Shades of Green podcast on environmental justice Sadie Beaton challenges us to reflect on a future without environmental racism and colonialism. It’s not just about the absence of these things, it’s also very much about what would replace it.Lots of voices will help you articulate an answer to that question. I am sorry to say that this is the final podcast in this excellent series, I don’t really want it to end quite yet.

Shades of Green podcast: Anti-Black racism in Nova Scotia: A #CBCFacingRace town hall

Thursday is Shades of Green day, but Shades of Green has a case of laryngitis and needs to rest her voice this week. There will be no new podcast episode until next week. Fortunately, CBC’s The Current has just released a special edition from a town hall exploring anti-black racism in Nova Scotia, including environmental racism,  gentrification, and violence against women.

Shades of Green podcast, episode 3: Peace, friendship and environmental justice – The Alton Gas resistance

Episode 3 of Sadie Beaton’s wonderful Shades of Green podcast focuses on the work of the Alton Gas water protectors. “Join us at the Treaty Camp to get a taste of what it’s like on the front lines of a movement that is so much bigger than stopping a single project. Let’s listen and reflect on what what stopping a natural gas storage project has to do with Indigenous self-determination, how the Peace and Friendship treaties might help us understand how to build just relationships with the land and each other, and what it means to be a treaty person.”

Shades of Green podcast, episode 2: Toxic legacy – setting a context for environmental racism in Nova Scotia

1 Comment

Episode 2 of the Shades of Green podcast looks at the 500-year old roots of environmental racism in Nova Scotia, and features Dr. Wanda Thomas Bernard, James Desmond, Jaden Dixon, El Jones, Lynn Jones, Roger Lewis, Barbara Low, Catherine Martin, and Dr. Ingrid Waldron. Join us as we pull back and take a bit of a long view, exploring some of the histories of colonization on these lands and how these severed relationships with the land connect to the environmental racism we see today.

Shades of Green podcast, episode 1: What is the environment and where is the justice?

2 Comments

Check out the excellent first episode of the Shades of Green podcast, featuring Barabara Low, El Jones, Ingrid Waldron, Carolyn Phinney, Catherine Martin, and many more. What is environmentalism? What do we mean when we talk about “the environment” here on unceded Mi’kmaq territory? Who defines what’s included in that meaning, and what’s left out?  At Shades of Green, these juicy questions have led to… well, more questions.

‘Surely we don’t need any more studies,’ a letter to Mayor Mike Savage on the Cornwallis statue

1 Comment

Sadie Beaton, Community Conservation Research Coordinator at the Ecology Action Centre, asks Mayor Mike Savage that no more precious time be wasted in getting rid of the Cornwallis statue. “Reconciliation can only begin when settlers and their governments and institutions truthfully reckon with the sometimes painful history of these lands. This history has allowed settlers to be the main beneficiaries of both the care with which Mi’kmaq communities have cared for these lands and waters, and the genocide that Cornwallis and others perpetuated.”