Critical Perspectives and Reflections

 Author: Bill Lee May 14, 2016 A while ago I read my colleague Jim Ward's piece ( http://criticalperspectivesblog.blogspot.ca/2015/01/towards-concrete-strategy-for_26.html ) in Critical Perspectives and found it interesting and provocative. It is a brave person, particularly for a non-Native person like Jim or I to put forward a strategy on such a sensitive, complex and long standing issue. I would like to make a few comments taking issue with this well written piece however . First, I didn't get the sense that Saul was saying that Aboriginal people were, "finally getting their act together" a statement which would imply that Indigenous folks had just been sitting around being dysfunctional. While I think Saul gets a bunch of stuff wrong in The Come Back, he at least understands how the colonial historical and ongoing, onslaught has undercut Indigenous efforts to live whole and meaningful lives. Indigenous people have been attempting to heal and resist the par...

 Author: Cecelia Lee May 24th 2016 We all have rights and responsibilities as citizens of Canada. For some of us as members of the Catholic Church we also have particular rights and responsibilities relative to our faith. These include a moral responsibility to own up to and follow through on our obligations to those whom we have wronged. I recently wrote a blog about people in the trades particularly, who were behaving in a way that suggested they were trying to avoid paying taxes, a responsibility of us all. Now we are hearing of the Catholic Church, or more properly organizations (orders and nuns, priests and brothers) trying to weasel out of paying their negotiated share in recompense for the abuse done to residential school survivors. It appears this has had the effect of lessening the commitments from other Christian denominations. Those commitments were based on the amount promised by the largest offender, the Catholic Church. Is recompense not a moral responsibilit...

Author: Bill Lee                                                                         May 2, 2016 There has been a great deal of comment and discussion regarding how Canada has failed in terms of dealing effectively with Indigenous people. We, rightly, hear talk of racism, and of a "past"  injustice of the residential school system and many other issues. There is one issue however that rarely is addressed and which many Canadians do not seem to see. The land of Canada was occupied and lived in when the first Europeans landed here. Subsequent to landing and being assisted in many ways by the existing inhabitants, European pop...