October 2, 2016
by Cynthia
Friends: what a party we had on Friday. I am still in bed. Thank you for all your support. It’s overwhelming and so very much appreciated, as always. Here are the links.
- Meet Christine Smith-Martin, a Lax Kw’alaams First Nations band member, who carried a jar of salmon when she crashed Catherine McKenna’s approval of the Petronas-led LNG project in Richmond, B.C
- Grand Chief Stewart Phillip turned down his invitation to participate in a ceremony with the Royal Family this week, refusing to partake in a symbolic act of reconciliation when faced with “the deepening poverty of our communities, remembering the missing and murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and the ongoing negligence of Indigenous Child Welfare policies across this country.”
- “Her images de-exoticized the Arctic. Yet, at the same time, they highlighted how truly great the distance is between the lives of southern Canadians and their neighbours in Inuit Nunangat, and how little the South truly knows about the experience of life in the North.” Heather Igloliorte on Annie Pootoogook
- This week’s episode of The Imposter also remembers Pootoogook’s work, and it’s excellent.
- Danya Danger on masks, BDSM, and her work as a 2spirit Metis/Saulteaux/Polish hard femme
- “I don’t know how many more funerals we can hold without dying ourselves. Because if it’s not the cop with the gun anymore, it’s the constant grief and fear—or maybe one day we’ll just break and won’t feel anything anymore. No matter what, there’s a death.” After the death of Alfred Olango, (re)read last week’s important and painful piece by Ijeoma Oluo.
- “The President has Never Said the Word Black” A poem by Morgan Parker.
- “It’s important for us to talk about the ways in which black people have asked the wider world to bear witness to their pain over time…There is no tape of Trayvon Martin, there is no tape of Michael Brown, of the actual acts against them. All you have are images of the bodies, prone and gone. But it’s not just the body—it’s the life taken from the body. So those images need to be balanced with images of black humanity not in distress and chaos.” A conversation with Ava DuVernay about film, representation, and the American prison system.
- Doreen St. Felix on the appeal and limitations of the “Carefree” Black Boy
- Serena Williams speaks out about police violence against Black men.
- Next week, women in Poland are planning an all-out strike to protest the country’s plan to effectively ban abortions.
- Fall is my favourite time to make ambitious reading lists, and here’s a great starting point: 50 books by 50 Canadian women of colour
- Have you told your parents? An essay by Vivek Shraya on the burden of parental disclosure for trans and queer people.
The work of feminism will not be completed until we are all given free black hair elastics to wear on our right wrists “just in case.”
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) September 28, 2016
- I’m going to spend the rest of the day listening to A Seat at the Table on repeat and thinking about the Solange outfit that changed my life
