Critical Perspectives and Reflections

                                                                                                                                         William Okemow1                                                                        August 15, 2018  I think the serious teaching of Indigenous history should be implemented in the school curriculums all across Canada. The true story, not what the colonial white man decides to write. It is an essential part of the hi...

John Clarke July 24, 2018 Some time ago, an especially dogmatic and thus ultimately unendurable Facebook friend, made a testy response to something I put up on the refugee crisis. This person denounced me for even speaking of a 'refugee crisis'. The person believed that it was because it was, they asserted, really a crisis of capitalism. That struck me as rather like condemning someone for saying they were eating an orange on the grounds that what they were actually eating was fruit. What I unfortunately see all the time among dogmatic and narrow thinkers on the left, is a stubborn refusal to consider engaging in discussion of incredibly important particular issues and developments out of a fear that this might contaminate previously established general concepts. By doing this, however, those fundamentally correct concepts are reduced to mere lifeless abstractions. Thus, rather than test previously established conclusions against a developing reality, that reality mu...

                                            Pedro Cabezas2                                               July 5, 2018 The fight for the defence of water in El Salvador and the recent conflicts that have arisen between legislators and the movement for the defence of water are nothing new in this country. Since 2006, environmental organizations in El Salvador have demanded the approval of the General Water Law, a bill that recognizes water as a human right and a common good that must be managed publicly with a focus on sustainability, priority and affordabi...

THE CONTEMPRARY COLONIAL PROJECT IN CANADA  Bill Lee June 12, 2018 In 1992 I published an article, on how colonization had been particularly focused and injurious to Indigenous communities2. At that time I believed that it was very important that we come to grips with the absolutely purposeful genocide and the effects of what Euro-Canadian policies and practice had done to the First People of this land. At this point in our history there is a sense, or more accurately it is better to call it a narrative, that in Canada today we are a nation of two peoples who are on the verge of, or at least are working seriously on, developing a path of reconciliation between the decedents of European settlers and Indigenous people. It is believed that our government and our two peoples we are working toward righting the wrongs and healing the wounds of the historical (first) colonialism. This view is founded on the belief that colonialism is a thing of the past. The evidence ho...

                                                                           Bill Lee                                                                       May 11, 2018 The writ has recently been dropped for the Ontario election of 2018. Soon we will be trudging to the polls (in June). A...

                                                                                         John Clark                                                                       May, 11, 2018 A short while ago, a Facebook friend ...

Is there hope For Canada's Relationship with Indigenous People? Author: Bill Lee, may 10. 2017 About a year ago around this time, I wrote a blog, in Critical Perspectives about what appeared to be, then, some legitimate glimmerings of hope that the Canadian state would act with a more fair minded and just political strategy in terms of addressing the colonial injustices (past and present) perpetrated against Indigenous people ( CANADA’S "TROUBLED" RELATIONSHIP WITH INDIGENOUS PEOPLE , May 2, 2016). The Harper Con government had seemed to be intent on not only ignoring the colonial injustices but of rolling back any movement in a progressive direction. But during and after the 2015 election, the Libers under Justin Trudeau were making the right kind of noises and had actually done a few things, at least of symbolic import, appointments of Indigenous people to apparently powerful ministries, like Attorney General and the appointment of a seemingly solid ...