Wednesday, 4 September 2024

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Letter to the Halifax mayor and councillors: We are all treaty people

Retired school teacher Carolyn van Gurp offers up a brief and powerful lesson to Halifax mayor and councillors. “You have a chance on Tuesday evening to begin to right years of wrong by placing the symbol of this treaty violation and subsequent atrocity where it belongs, in history books and a museum, not on a pedestal in a public park. Please make the decision to remove or relocate this statue in time for us all to truly celebrate Treaty Day together in October.”

Removing Cornwallis, it’s been a long time coming

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Tony Seed reminds us that the movement to get rid of the repulsive Cornwallis statue goes back quite a while. Read the speech delivered by then 93 years young Halifax activist Betty Peterson in 2010 at the Peace and Freedom Park, and find out more about Betty and other organizers in the biographical notes Tony provides. See you at the Peace and Freedom Park this Saturday!

History of Halifax, a Mi’kmaw perspective

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Michael McDonald, a Mi’kmaq of Sipekne’katik First Nations, offers up a fascinating version of the history of Kjipuktuk, or Halifax, that is quite different from the one we usually hear. For one thing, it starts way before Cornwallis arrived.

It takes a village: Kendall Worth with good news for woman going in for surgery

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Earlier Kendall Worth wrote about how even a short hospitalization and surgery can throw a poor person’s live into a stressful chaos. Who’s going to drive you home if you have nobody? How are you going to get to the Food Bank if you need to stay in bed for weeks? How are you going to keep your apartment clean and tidy? And what about the social isolation? Well, turns out that in this case at least lots of people are willing to step up to the plate.

Still no expert hired for Halifax carding analysis

Six months after members of the Black community in Halifax requested a suspension of the practice of carding, as well as an investigation, the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission still has not hired the data expert it suggests is necessary. That expert is required to determine whether racial profiling explains why Black people in HRM are three times more likely to be stopped than white people, says the Commission. Meanwhile the racist practice of carding continues, and the deadline for completion of the investigation is a moving target.