Critical Perspectives and Reflections

The controversy about Buffy Sainte-Marie has, at this date, been going on for a month. Yet discussion and argument continue with little end in sighti. As a white guy with over fifty years of work and friendships with Indigenous people (community organization and teaching) and being the father of an Indigenous son, I tend to generally steer clear of commenting on contentious issues within and among Indigenous people, at least in public. However, the fractious issue concerning whether Buffy Sainte-Marie has any right to call herself “Indigenous” has gone well beyond the boundaries of Indigenous communities. Not only was it the CBC program, 5th Estate, which made it a public topic in Canada, but many Whitestream, European diaspora, colonial beneficiaries, like me, have written articles and opined on social media. I still want to be careful, however, I obviously don’t have the frustrating experience of colonial oppression which every single Indigenous person in this country, since it was f...

War of course. is a form of madness. It’s hardly a civilized pursuit. It’s amazing that we spend so much time inventing devices to kill each other and so little time working on ways to achieve peace.                                                                               -  Walter Cronkite   Wars and rumors of wars are once more (if they have ever ceased) dominating the public discourse. Our own conversations and of course the regular, and social media, are full of reports, verbal and visual, interviews not only updating us but inflaming us with propaganda on the many fronts. We are informed of military conflicts from Africa to the Middle East to Europe, the clash of our brothers and sisters, of weaponry: guns to sophisticated missiles and electronic devices that produce the...

  Last week Hamas really managed to surprise the vaunted army, protective technology (The Iron Dome) and intelligence apparatus of the State of Israel, and politicians, as well as the rest of the world, when its militant fighters stormed from the blockaded Gaza into Israel in at least 20 locations, while firing thousands of rockets into the rest of the country. Hamas, during what was an extremely vicious and bloody rampage, was even able to take over a fortress, Erez, as its fighters barged through and over checkpoints and invaded Israeli communities for the first time. While they will no doubt be driven back, they have caused havoc and made things miserable for a time, for the people and the government of the State of Israel. Around 150 Israeli citizens and dual citizens were kidnapped and “taken hostage” and hundreds of Israelis have been killed, soldiers and civilians included. The Hamas invaders had also sustained huge casualties, wounded and killed. Seven issues are becoming v...

The infernos of this summer have yet to be quenched. Commentaries that outline the enlarging scope of the challenges we face, the resultant inadequacy of many systems and the need to design and implement appropriate strategies, crowd our media. Dr Courtney Howard and colleagues, in a recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, highlight the impact of wildfires in Yellowknife and the hope that the lessons learned will lead to the implementation of changes that will allow us do better. These are important observations. We are learning that the climate crisis is more advanced than is commonly perceived. Forecasts will be revised in light of recent experience. But forecasts are only that. The ferocity of this fire season has surprised us, over 1% of the surface area of Canada has burned. We have produced over 4 times our annual emissions of carbon already. Can it get worse? How much worse? What will next year bring? It will be important that we do all that is possible to mitigate the ongoi...

So, the Green Belt is no longer slated to be sacrifices as a field of gold for the enrichment of Doug Ford’s ego and his best friends, avaricious developers. The Premier has been forced to walk back his insane plan to hand over precious land that is badly needed for food production and as an important part of any strategy to avoid the worst disasters of climate crisis we are facing. While Ford’s news conference, with his cabinet arrayed behind him, was a text book example of grovelling, fake penitence and a reluctant admission of only the smallest of wrong doings, the Premier has announced that he is eating crow and is surrendering to the overwhelming public anger at this outrage. On the face of it, it all looks good. Chock up one for a badly battered democracy showing signs of working as it should. The press, social media and general discourse has been full of, first shock that he so blatantly broke his promise to keep his sweaty hands of the Greenbelt, then, very quickly anger and ra...

There is a picture recently circulating on the internet which provides an accurate, though rather depressing, rendering of a pair of contemporary right wing Canadian politicians. One, Danielle Smith, is presently infesting the Office of Premier in Alberta. She looks dower and displeased, as if she has just missed out on being allowed to pull wings off some flies. The other one, is the leader of the Loyal (using the term loosely) Opposition in the House of Commons, Pierre Poilievre. How he has somehow managed to finagle, or barge (probably both), his way into the leadership of the (highly) Conservative Party is puzzling, but not germane to this article. He also looks unhappy. He also appears dower but seems more like a man who has just finished sucking a very unpalatable lemon. Both of these specimens of present-day conservative leadership look as if they are miserable. In action they are miserable. They are me-first toxic individualists (think Ayn Rand); neither is possessed of, or eve...

What with all the illegal shenanigans of the former president of the USA seeming to be coming to some moment of truth (at least, most of us hope that is what’s happening) and getting huge coverage, we should not let some of our own Canadian stories of vile leadership be forgotten. I’ve been musing on the disappointing, but hardly unexpected, results of the recent election in the Province of Alberta. For what it is worth, there is one thing I think we have learned (or should have learned) in the months that have gone by since the alt-right of conservative minded politicos in the UCP got rid of the already cynical, right-wing Premier, Jason Kenny.i Smith and her UCP, true believing adherents have demonstrated that they are among those arrogant ignoramuses who think they can create their own truth, like climate change is a hoax aimed at beggaring, specifically, the whole population of Alberta, for example. They neither understand, nor show the slightest interest, in learning about the pro...

The right wing of the right wing (mostly in the USA but in Canada to a certain extent) has recently developed a new issue to feed their anger and sense of being a persecuted band of right-thinking moralists. We speak of course about the existence of Drag. This is the practice of some of the male persuasion (mostly men but not always) donning clothing typically worn by women and, usually, applying lots of makeup and glitter and then going “on stage” to sing, dance and generally entertain groups of people who enjoy this kind of show. Full disclosure, first, one of my grandkids identifies as, to quote, “I'm gender fluid and bisexual, but not biromantic), but often just refer to myself as queer to save time ”. Second, I have never been to a drag show and have no plan on, or interest in, taking one in. So, I’m far from an expert. My experience of drag and drag queens is limited to seeing movies like, Priscilla Queen of the Desert ”, “La Cage aux Folles” and its American version “T...

It is not farfetched to say that the country of Iran has a long history of protests which lead to revolution, the second of which, in 1979 brought the present religious Islamic rule into being1. However, in the present Iranian protests we may be seeing, for the first time in history, that it is women who have been both the spark and engine for a movement that has as its aim the change of government of a country. The trigger was ignited by the torture and death (continually denied by the authorities) of a young woman, Mahsa Amini. She was the twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman who, after her arrest by the regime’s morality police, was sent to a re-education center for “inappropriate attire” - too much hair showing from a head scarf - in Tehran. It was quickly known that she ended up in a coma and died three days later, on September 16, 2022. Very soon protests began with participants voicing anger at her death. In rather short order they evolved into calls to oust the regime: “Death to t...

It is interesting that since time immemorial people have developed rituals. Sometimes we forget the initial meaning of the ritual. Take Christmas. It was originally “the Mass being celebrated at the time of Christ's birth”. That is literally what the word means. What I found helpful is an idea I came across in my studies at McGill University years ago. One professor shared with us the difference between a sign and a symbol. A sign is literally what it says. So, when one comes to a stop sign there is only one meaning. Stop. No rolling stops allowed. The meaning of a symbol on the other hand, is the meaning that a community embraces. This can change over time as the community's values and belief systems undergo changes. In the Netherlands they celebrate Sinter Klaas-Santa Claus, on December 5. The celebration takes on much of the meaning of what Christmas is in Canada. There is goodwill, exchanges of gifts, celebrations, etc. Then Christmas is a quiet day for reflection and for C...