Danny Cavanagh: Let’s be clear that September 30 is more than a question of becoming a paid holiday. It’s a day to commemorate Truth and Reconciliation. Making it paid will give it much more weight and meaning. What we see in Nova Scotia is a half measure…
New contributor Sydney Keyama on the election issues that matter to students and young people.
Media release: Weather permitting, we’re going to mark Canada Day by getting together to read selections from the Truth and Reconciliation Report “What We Have Learned”.
Media release: Wellness Within: An Organization for Health and Justice is calling on the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services to follow British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario, PEI and most recently, Newfoundland and Labrador, in ending the discriminatory and racist practice of issuing birth alerts for “at risk” parents and their babies.
Judy Haiven on working and getting paid on this somber Canada Day.
What started out as $70 million in reparations for the suffering caused by Catholic residential schools was whittled down to $16 million by the Catholic Church. Michael William McDonald, a lawyer from Sipekne’katik explains how that happened. “Compensation must be sufficient to provide healing,” he writes, “perhaps then we can find the right path to reconciliation.”
Open Letter: Women’s Wellness Within is calling on the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services to follow British Columbia and Manitoba in ending the discriminatory and racist practice of issuing birth alerts for “at risk” mothers and their babies.
Historian Martha Walls takes a closer look at the establishment of the Shubenacadie Residential School as an effort by the state to deflate Indigenous People’s resistance in the region.
“I know racial prejudice persists in our time. I encounter racism often. Yet, it still shakes me. It catches me by surprise, particularly when it comes from spaces least expected.” María José Yax-Fraser describes such an encounter, and considers how colonial stereotypes continue to be invoked in the present.
Judy Haiven attended a talk by Mi’kmaq lawyer and activist Pam Palmater on the topic of reconciliation. “We are running to do ‘good stuff’ but we haven’t done the hard stuff,” she told the audience.