Jen Powley. a tireless advocate for disability rights and housing for people with disabilities, has been presented with the 2019 James McGregor Stewart Award. Jen is a tireless activist for the right of persons with severe physical disabilities to live independently, rather than in nursing homes
Historian Nolan Reily chronicles how one hundred years ago workers in Amherst, Nova Scotia, —women and men, union and non-union—shutdown the town’s industries. Even the mechanics in the local garage went on strike. It was a community strike, just like the one that had started four days earlier in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Historian Daniel Joseph Samson recently spent a day going through the private library of the early-20th-century Cape Breton labour leader J. B. McLachlan at the Beaton Institute. Turns out McLachlan didn’t just read Lenin and Engels, Samson encountered some books he didn’t expect to see there.
PSA: Wednesday, May 22, Sisters In The Struggle, a Black Feminist Panel Discussion about the yet-to-be-heard story of Black Women in the Feminist Movement in Nova Scotia during the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.
“In the end I can say that what I have learned about myself is how incredibly strong I am, because I have to be,” said disability rights advocate Joanne Larade in February at a panel on the lack of suitable housing for people with severe disabilities. At the panel she explained what it is like to find yourself, at the age of 42, living among people with dementia, many twice your age. Joanne passed away early last week.
May First, international working class day, also happens to be the 100th anniversary of the Halifax General Strike of 1919 against war profiteering and super-exploitation of the construction trades in the wake of the Halifax Explosion of 6 December 1917. Tony Seed looks at the circumstances that triggered this strike, and many others like it in Nova Scotia and all across Canada.
Tuma Young: Tonight, February 15, I learned that my old friend Mary Ann Mancini has died. Mary Ann was one of the early 2SLGBTQ+ activists and her contribution to the movement was immense.
Join us at Saint Mary’s University Halifax for this #AfricanHeritageMonth panel discussion. Speakers Dr. Lynn Jones, Delvina Bernard and Francesca Ekwuyasi will look at Nova Scotia and South Africa to explore overlaps, intersections and variations in Black freedom struggles, apartheid and institutionalized racism
Professor Archie Kaiser’s moving tribute to Dave Kent, one-time People First Nova Scotia president and tireless activist on behalf of people labelled with intellectual disabilities and others who have been marginalized and stigmatized.
Scott Neigh’s weekly podcast is a wonderful thing, and Scott is a kind man who always allows us to share an interview whenever the topic has a Nova Scotia relevance. Here he speaks with North Preston and Nort End community activist LaMeia Reddick, and Ted Rutland, author of Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax, a must-read for anybody interested in urban planning and / or the history of the struggle against racism in Halifax. It’s a book I simply can’t recommend enough.