North America

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The isolation, loss, and uncertainty of the pandemic have caused a sharp spike in demand for mental health care, but the system is not providing the help people need.





Chelsea, a 33-year-old part-time CrossFit coach, managed her lifelong anxiety by keeping herself busy and physically active, but the pandemic lockdowns and social distancing measures deprived her of those essential coping mechanisms. Suddenly she found herself alone at home and her anxiety, which had been acting up since 2018, became a serious problem. A resident of Edmonton, Canada, Chelsea tried to find a therapist within the public health-care system who could see her for free or on a sliding scale. But the waiting lists were long, and she was unable to afford a private therapist. She tried BetterHelp, a company that provides web-based therapy, but stopped when she realized she had to pay extra to speak with a therapist via video camera. She also tried a free phone service through the Edmonton municipality, but she needed long-term therapy—not a one-time chat.





Chelsea was on two separate wait lists for over two years but did not receive any updates so, to her frustration, she had no idea when her turn would be. Recently, thanks to a new job with improved benefits, she was finally able to find a therapist in the private system.





Canada’s national health-care system, which, for the most part, is publicly available and funded through contributions from the federal and provincial governments, has been stretched to its limits by the pandemic. But even in better times, before COVID, mental health care was difficult to obtain. The national health-care system places a priority on physical health, with a particular focus on critical and emergency medicine. But now, after two years of extreme stress caused by isolation, unemployment, uncertainty, loss, and increased family responsibilities, the demand for mental health care has spiked.





A recent survey by the Canadian Mental Health Association found that the number of Ontario residents currently seeking mental health care has risen to 24 percent, up from 9 percent in 2020. According to another survey conducted in the fall, about one in five Canadians rated their mental health as “poor,” while half the respondents said they were worried about a lack of access to care.





Dr. Simon Sherry, a clinical psychologist and professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said his waiting list has risen from 150 pre-pandemic to about 450 people today. “In Nova Scotia, poor mental health has become statistically normal,” he said, adding that people with pre-existing conditions are having “an especially rough time.” The pandemic has left them with physical and psychological scars.Dr. Karen Hetherington, a faculty lecturer at McGill’s School of Social Work, agreed with Dr. Sherry, pointing out that “it’s no surprise” to see a decline in the mental health of a person who might have spent months in lockdown in a small apartment during Montreal’s long, dark, frigid winter.





Lyla* is a mental health-care specialist in a Montreal hospital’s outpatient clinic, working with patients suffering from schizophrenia. She has seen many cases of people with severe pre-existing issues experiencing a complete breakdown during the pandemic. “I know some patients that just couldn’t function anymore because everything they had in terms of socialization was taken away from them,” she said.





A global calamity of this scale is a natural vector for a mental health crisis, but those who have worked in mental health care for years are grimly unsurprised that the system failed to respond to the sharp increase in demand. They have been asking for extra support for years, but felt as though they were screaming into a void.





“It’s simply been the case that both the health-care field and public health have focused overwhelmingly on physical health,” said Dr. Nicholas King, a professor at McGill University who is an expert in public health ethics and policy. “So, when you have a major, large-scale event that has a huge impact on mental health, that system for dealing with mental health is obviously going to come under strain.”





Dr. Javeed Sukhera is a pediatric and adolescent psychiatrist and Chair and Chief of Psychiatry at the Institute of Living at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. Previously, he lived and worked for a decade in Ontario. Dr. Sukhera trained in New York State, which, he believes “has a pretty decent” mental health care system. “Where I trained, if a young person needs support, regardless of whether they were poor or not, they usually got fairly timely intervention,” he said.  In Canada, by contrast, he encountered “huge obstacles in accessing basic evidence-based psychotherapies” for his patients.





Canadians believe that their system is inherently fairer and more accessible than the one south of the border. But while this is true for physical health care, it is simply not the case for mental health care. In fact, Dr. Sukhera said, “There are many jurisdictions in the U.S. where access to basic evidence-based mental health support is way better than in many parts of Canada. And that’s a difficult piece of truth to recognize and reconcile for Canadians who idealize our system. But my lived experience would say that’s the truth.”





Like health workers more broadly, mental health-care providers have burnt out during the pandemic, with many choosing to quit. Lyla cited a combination of overwork, low pay, and a lack of acknowledgment as the factors driving the resignation among her colleagues in mental health. Now, newly vacant positions are going to inexperienced recent graduates. Lyla said that mental health-care jobs were once desirable and difficult to obtain. But these days she and her colleagues are constantly begging for extra support and left feeling that “the benefits [of staying in the profession] don’t outweigh the risks.”





Noelle* works in youth mental health care at a public clinic in Montreal. She, too, has seen many of her colleagues choosing to leave. The vacant positions are going unfilled, which increases the strain on those who stay, which in turn leads to more burnout and more departures. The problem with the public sector, she said, is the way it’s structured. In the type of clinic in which she works, psychologists are told they have “four months to help the patient and then you have to close the file and move on to somebody else,” she said, adding: “In a private setting, you don’t get that.” The government, she says, “treats people like numbers, like employees. Like the way overtime was mandatory for nurses for a long time. How is someone with children supposed to be working 18 hours in a row?”





Although everyone I spoke with agreed that additional funding for the public system was much needed, Noelle also recommends more funding go into community organizations, such as AMI-Quebec, a non-profit that helps the families of those with mental illness, or Cyprès, which provides direct mental health services to individuals in their community. Dr. Hetherington agrees. In her view, the culture in the public sector is simply too “top down. It has no understanding of the real needs of the population, the clientele. It’s so bureaucratic.”





She also does not believe the public sector can be adequately transformed to meet the needs of those suffering. “You can’t change a culture when it’s such an elephant. Then you need to build new structures that integrate a different culture,” she said. She’d like to see the Quebec government fund new non-profit mental health centers with public money. These centers could then contract directly with community organizations. She hopes that this would allow a new culture to flourish in mental health care.





When we last spoke, however, Dr. Hetherington was feeling newly optimistic about mental health care in Quebec, with the provincial government having recently announced that it would invest $1.2 billion in mental health services. “This is the first time the money is attached to a vision,” she said, with funding for both school and refugee mental health. The plan is also focused on bringing mental health services into the community and sensitizing the community. She confirmed that the pandemic “was a facilitator.”





“What we need,” said Dr. Sherry, “is a fundamental kind of courage from decision-makers and government to actually center people who are suffering when making decisions because they’re politically convenient or politically popular.” Many are still waiting for a public system that is failing to provide care for them. Private therapy “is really not affordable unless you’re making a lot of money,” said Chelsea. Without her new job, she’d still be waiting—along with thousands of others.





*Names have been changed upon request.


    [post_title] => A spike in pandemic-related mental illness has overwhelmed Canada's health care system
    [post_excerpt] => Canadians believe that their system is inherently fairer and more accessible than the one south of the border. But while this is true for physical health care, it is simply not the case for mental health care.
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A spike in pandemic-related mental illness has overwhelmed Canada’s health care system

by Sophia Crabbe-Field

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Canadians tend to see the extremism expressed by the truckers and their supporters as a fringe movement imported from the U.S., but that is a gross oversimplification.





The so-called “Freedom Convoy,” a highly disruptive protest organized and led by Canadian truckers who oppose vaccine mandates and other pandemic-related restrictions, is now entering its third week. Protesting truckers drove their rigs into downtown Ottawa and set up camp, blowing their horns at eardrum-shattering decibels for hours each day and holding tailgate parties, making the downtown area of Canada’s usually placid small capital city unlivable. City residents are incensed by the noise and disruption, while the chief of police has resigned under fire for his failure to disperse the demonstrators.





The protesters are deeply unpopular in Canada, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world with 90 percent of the population overall—including truckers— having received at least two doses. And yet, the Freedom Convoy has managed to dominate the news cycle and paralyze Canada’s capital city, forcing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act, which gives law enforcement expanded powers to arrest protesters and break up demonstrations.





The angry, anti-vax truckers have harassed residents to the point that older people are afraid to leave their homes; they have committed multiple acts of vandalism and violence, some targeting journalists; and in one egregious incident were spotted lighting a fire in the lobby of a residential apartment building. They have blockaded roads, and not only in Ottawa. The freedom convoy participants have also shut down multiple border crossings as the protest has spread west, with particularly large presences elsewhere in Ontario and in Alberta, an oil-rich province known for cattle ranching and the prevalence of strong right-wing views, including secessionism—a combination that often elicits comparisons with Texas.





On Sunday police cleared and reopened the Ambassador Bridge, where protesters had for a week choked off a critical commercial route that connects Detroit, Michigan, to Windsor, Ontario. But the authorities have not yet found the stomach to forcibly break up the protest in Ottawa. As the siege drags on, journalists, pundits, and the public have been digging into the ideological motivations, funding sources, and cross-border networks of the protesters.





Protesters have displayed swastikas, Canadian flags, Confederate flags, Gadsen flags, Trump flags, U.S. flags, and QAnon messaging. Observers have also reported conservative Christian messaging and symbols that were likewise present at the U.S. protests against the 2020 election results that culminated in the January 6 insurrection. The elements clearly inspired by American right-wing Christians include “Jericho marches” around the parliamentary precinct in Ottawa, in a symbolic reenactment of the Hebrew Bible tale about God causing the city of Jericho’s walls to collapse after the Israelites marched while blowing ram’s horns, or shofars. Right-wing Christians have in recent years appropriated these Jewish ritual instruments, blowing them during church services and at “Jericho marches” in both the U.S. and Canada. The organizer of the Canadian “Jericho marches” is Benita Pedersen, an Albertan.





As Jorge Barrera reports for the CBC, “Christian faith — with an overtly evangelical feel — flows like an undercurrent through the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa.” But how much of this represents the direct influence of the American Christian Right, as opposed to an expression of homegrown, if fringe, Canadian extremism and majoritarian grievance?





Catherine Porter, the New York Times’s Canada bureau chief, observed that “many believe the unrest is essentially a U.S. import,” but this is an oversimplification. The discourse reminds me of how, when I first began researching networks involving U.S. Christian Right actors and right-wing, pro-Putin Russians (many associated with the Russian Orthodox Church) in 2013, the spread of illiberal, socially conservative policies in the global South, Eastern Europe, and Russia was often framed in terms of the exportation of America’s culture wars. A few years later, when the connections between Donald Trump’s campaign for president and various Russian actors became apparent, many liberals embraced the simplistic and frankly absurd notion that the U.S.’s right-wing extremism and deep social and political divisions had been essentially manufactured by Russian disinformation. The reality is that Russian influence operations managed to exploit and exacerbate problems that already existed.





Throughout those years, while monitoring the various networks and connections between American, western European, and Russian right-wing extremists, eventually in my capacity as a senior research associate with the Postsecular Conflicts project based at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, I stressed agency among actors from all factions and rejected temptations to view the efforts of organizations like the World Congress of Families (now known as the International Organization for the Family) as sites of unidirectional influence.





By the same token, the international ties between Canada’s right-wing extremists and those from other countries, primarily the U.S., must be seen in terms of multidirectional influence and feedback loops. The U.S. Christian Right does have ties to Canadian extremist groups, and at least a diffuse connection to the convoy wreaking havoc in Ottawa. Whereas transatlantic connections are usually limited to elite, higher-level actors, Canada and the U.S. share the world’s longest undefended border, making it easy for less well-funded, less sophisticated, less easily monitored actors to connect with one another—people who are ready to engage in street violence, or ideologues and agitators who are happy to appear alongside street brawlers.





Proud Boys Canada may have officially dissolved itself after Ottawa declared it a terrorist organization last spring, but the organization was founded by a Canadian. And, while the Proud Boys have become mainly an American group, some Canadians have been involved in violent right-wing protests on the U.S. side of the border. These include the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, D.C., where at least one Canadian flag was spotted, and where a group of Proud Boys knelt in an unmistakably evangelical prayer that was captured on video before playing a prominent role in the violence. Canadian actors have also been present at right-wing protests and incidents of street violence in Portland, Oregon—a city frequently targeted by the Proud Boys and similar far-right group Patriot Prayer.





The most well-known Canadian who has frequented Oregon is the notorious Artur Pawlowski, a Polish-born evangelical pastor based in Calgary, Alberta, who has led raucous protests and direct actions against public health mandates in Canada throughout the coronavirus pandemic, claiming that public health protections violate his “religious freedom.” In one such protest, Pawlowski and other participants carried tiki torches in a clear nod to the August, 2017 white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia. Pawlowski was recently arrested in Coutts, Alberta, in connection with his support for the protesters blockading the border crossing there.





As for the American Christian Right’s connections to the trucker protest in Canada, major figures such as Franklin Graham—world-famous evangelist Billy Graham’s son and head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association—have spoken out in support of it. Although they are not household names, prominent “prophets” and “apostles” associated with the radical charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation—the kind of Christianity espoused by former Trump spiritual advisor Paula White—are also broadcasting their support, as researcher Bruce Wilson, who has published numerous articles documenting Christian Right and NAR activities and networks, confirmed when asked for comment.





The man holding the sign told 'The Catholic Register' that Pope Francis is a heretic and that the government is forcing people to take vaccines.





But perhaps the most significant U.S. Christian Right connection to the so-called “Freedom Convoy” is represented by the explicitly Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, which has become infamous in recent years for funding white supremacist causes, including the legal defense of Kyle Rittenhouse, who gunned down supporters of Black Lives Matter at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Crowdfunding has allowed massive amounts of dark money to flow to the Canadian extremists behind the protest at a rate that dwarfs typical Canadian political fundraising, a worrisome development that could continue to undermine the country's civil society and democracy after the current protests are over.





Last week hackers broke into GiveSendGo’s network, releasing donor names, email addresses, and other information to journalists and researchers. One scholar looking into where the money originates is Dr. Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University. Lecaque posted a Twitter thread of messages from donors (without disclosing their names or other personally identifying information), as well as the countries (and in some cases states/provinces and cities) they come from. Eight of these messages “explicitly discuss Jericho,” Lecaque tweeted. The donations referenced in his thread mostly stemmed from the United States and Canada, but one came from the UK and another from France.





Lecaque told The Conversationalist that while the donors came from a broad geographic range, a high proportion were from the U.S. His keyword search of the messages donors posted brought up “a lot of religious themed entries, some more extreme than others.” Most of them were of the anodyne “God bless” variety, but there were some violent ones as well, with “themes of spiritual warfare or QAnon.” Lecaque acknowledged that explicitly religious messages were in the minority, but their presence nevertheless stood out.





The mostly white, racially aggrieved, conspiracy-theory believing crowd in the U.S. and Canada espouse unpopular views and support unpopular policies, but by using technology to connect and crowdfund internationally, they have managed to punch politically above their weight. Both countries have homegrown extremists and their own respective racist and colonialist realities to confront, but right-wingers from either side of the border are also influencing each other, probably more through media (including social media) than through direct cross-border interactions.





But what is it exactly that facilitates the mutual admiration and networking? That factor seems to be affiliation with conservative Christianity—especially, although not exclusively, evangelical Protestantism. This tracks with what I’ve observed in my own research both with respect to the domestic Christian Right and international right-wing networks. We are living through a moment of surging right-wing populism in North America, Europe, Australia, and some other parts of the world—a massive backlash against civil rights gains and the rise of multicultural democracy by the heirs of European colonialism and genocide.





A sense that they are outnumbered has contributed both to these individuals’ radicalization, and to the easing of traditional theological, cultural, and geopolitical enmities between various Christian and ethnic groups, paving the way for aggrieved (and mostly white) hardline Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and Orthodox Christians to band together in attempts to assert dominance through the promotion of a “traditional values” agenda—whether in the European Court of Human Rights, the U.S. Supreme Court, or the streets of Portland and Ottawa. While most American, Canadian, and European Christians are not right-wing extremists, most American, Canadian, and European right-wing extremists identify with Christianity, and find in it a justification for their bigotry and anti-social, anti-government, and anti-democratic actions. For democracy to prevail, we must find more effective ways to counter the diffuse international threat of Christian extremism.


    [post_title] => Conservative Christianity's influence on the 'Freedom Convoy' indicates global spread of authoritarianism
    [post_excerpt] => The protesters are deeply unpopular in Canada, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world with 90 percent of the population overall—including truckers— having received at least two doses. And yet, the Freedom Convoy has managed to dominate the news cycle and paralyze Canada’s capital city.
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Conservative Christianity’s influence on the ‘Freedom Convoy’ indicates global spread of authoritarianism

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => For corporate loggers, millennia-old forests are just land that should be exploited and trees that can be replanted.

Holly Friesen has spent most of her life documenting nature’s beauty. The Montreal-based landscape artist recently spent some time in British Columbia as the Artist in Residence at Eden Grove on Vancouver Island, and was awe-struck by the stunning ancient forest.

“The air was thick with moisture and dense silence and the forest was dripping with a thousand shades of green,” she said. “Giant cedars, Douglas fir and Sitka spruce were thrumming with life, some of them 1,000 years old and more.”

The Eden Grove protection camp, established in 2020 to prevent road building by the Teal-Jones logging corporation, is five minutes from the residency. The corporation is currently locked in a months-long dispute with forest protectors at Fairy Creek, a nearby old-growth watershed.

Moved by the forest’s beauty, Friesen auctioned off a large painting she made of Eden Grove, with all the money going toward the Fairy Creek blockades. “These forests help us to remember who we are and where we come from,” she says. “Their protection for future generations is essential. This is sacred land.”

[caption id="attachment_2829" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Amy Iredale dwarfed by one of the ancient trees at Fairy Creek.[/caption]

Some, however, don’t see anything holy here. For them, millennia-old forests are just land that should be exploited and trees that can be replanted.

A growing environmental movement

At the heart of the Fairy Creek dispute is, on one hand, a logging company that wants to exploit the land in what it claims is a sustainable way and, on the other, environmental protectors who don’t believe that profit should come at the expense of these precious ecosystems. A group that calls themselves the Rainforest Flying Squad has blockaded the watershed on unceded Pacheedaht First Nation’s territory for the past 10 months. Their goal is simple: to stop Teal-Jones from cutting down rare intact old-growth forest. Protesters have been camped here since last summer, demanding that the provincial government put an immediate end to old-growth logging and transition to an ecologically responsible forest economy.

The movement to protect these ancient forests is not new, but it was the widely shared photo of a massive, ancient spruce tree being hauled down Vancouver Island on a flatbed truck that garnered international publicity. Even those least inclined to label themselves tree-hugging environmentalists knew there was something wrong with a tree older than many of the world’s most famous historic landmarks being reduced to a lifeless stump in order to supply lumber for someone’s deck. Lorna Beecroft, the woman who took the photo and posted it on her Facebook wall, said: “It’s like watching someone shoot the last dodo.”

The international outrage attracted the support of Hollywood celebrities and activists. Marc Ruffalo and Leonardo di Caprio recently used their online platforms and considerable media clout to raise awareness. Margaret Atwood, Bryan Adams, Jane Fonda, and Greta Thunberg were among the 100 prominent people who signed a letter calling on John Horgan, the premier of British Columbia, to stop old-growth logging. The letter begins: “Some things can’t be replaced.”

The crux of the dispute

Renowned for its natural, untamed beauty, British Columbia is home to 60 million hectares of temperate coastal rainforest. The provincial government claims that 25 percent of the province’s forests are composed of old-growth trees; but the Old Growth Strategic Review, an independent study commissioned by the government in 2020, found that only 3 percent of the province is capable of supporting large trees. Within that small portion, old trees represent only 2.7 percent. Logging has cannibalized the ancient forests.

“These ecosystems are effectively the white rhino of old-growth forests. They are almost extinguished and will not recover from logging,” concluded the authors of the report from Veridian Ecological Consulting.

[caption id="attachment_2821" align="alignleft" width="400"] Freshly cut old growth trees in the Caycuse River Valley.[/caption]

Old-growth forests cannot be replaced because replanted forests—referred to as second growth—do not recreate the rich conditions and biodiversity of the ancient trees. The study urged the government to “immediately place a moratorium on logging in ecosystems and landscapes with very little old forest.” The Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs also passed a resolution last year calling on the government to do the same.

Fairy Creek’s 12.8 hectares of unlogged ancient old-growth forests are in fact extremely rare, making up less than 1 percent of what remains in the province. And yet, despite their importance and rarity, these ancient trees are still being cut down. Teal-Jones still has government approval to log in mostly old-growth forests.

The Supreme Court of British Columbia granted an injunction in April for the RCMP to come in and remove protesters and tree-sitters at a string of blockades on logging roads in the area. Over 185 people have so far been arrested, but Canada’s legacy media has given the story little coverage. Independent media outlets Ricochet and The Narwhal have filled the vacuum.

Teal-Jones has set up a roadblock of its own to block media and public access to Waterfall Camp. Reports from the frontlines and from independent media outlets confirm that the RCMP are preventing access to accredited media and legal observers, as well as Indigenous leaders on their own lands. The Canadian Association of Journalists, along with a coalition of news organizations and press freedom groups, announced last week that it’s taking the RCMP to court over its decision to restrict media access.

Chainsaw massacre

Fairy Creek is near Port Renfrew, a tiny community that touts itself as the “Tall Tree Capital of Canada.” The area includes the world’s largest Douglas fir and Canada’s largest Sitka spruce, as well as endangered animal species like Western screech owls, Northern Goshawk, and Northern Red-legged frogs. The residents have built up a recreational tourism brand with its tree tourism, a reminder that conservation and commerce can coexist successfully. With proper infrastructure and policies in place, these beautiful trees can be worth more to the local economy standing than cut down.

“I moved to BC after taking one of these big-tree tours and I live here because of their beauty,” says Michael Simkin, a lawyer originally from Montreal. “I can understand the intellectual tension between the access provided to these areas because of logging, and the consequences of logging. I understand that many people’s livelihoods depend on this industry.” Simkin insists the issue is complex and involves many angles: economic, cultural, environmental, employment, social, and climate change, as well as Indigenous land claims. “But factually speaking,” he said, “There just aren’t many of these trees left, and once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

It’s not hard to see why so many people are invested in protecting them. Pictures of old-growth forests are mesmerizing. The soaring height of these trees gives visitors some perspective on the tiny importance humans have on this planet. Images of massive tree trunks chopped down, with humans looking like tiny Lilliputians next to them, only add to the looming sense of devastation.

Growing resistance 

Premier Horgan promised to implement the Old Growth Strategic Review Panel’s 14 recommendations to work with Indigenous leaders and environmental organizations during his electoral campaign. More than a year later, none of those proposed changes have been fully implemented.

“In fact,” says Simkin, “old-growth logging permits have increased by close to 50 percent in the past few years.”

The government’s failure to act has sparked widespread resistance by long-standing local environmental protection agencies. Among them, the Ancient Forest Alliance, a non-profit that aims to enact province-wide legislation ending the logging of endangered old-growth trees, and Stand.earth, a Vancouver-based environmental advocacy organization. Tzeporah Berman—Stand.earth’s International Programs Director—was among the people recently arrested for defending old-growth forests near Fairy Creek headquarters.

In early June, tired of the inaction, the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht, and Huu-ay-aht First Nations formally gave notice to the province to defer old-growth logging for two years in the Fairy Creek and Central Walbran areas while the nations prepare resource management plans.

“For more than 150 years they have watched as others decided what was best for their lands, water, and people,” they wrote in their statement. The BC government, under increasing pressure, agreed on June 9 to a two-year moratorium on logging in the Fairy Creek watershed and Central Walbran areas. Land protectors see this as a good first step, but they are pushing for more permanent solutions.

We’ve lost our connection to nature 

Amy Iredale is a kindergarten teacher in Cumberland on Vancouver Island. She teaches nature kindergarten, which means that her students do at least 50 percent of their learning and growing outside in the forests surrounding the schools. She has spent time at the blockades and has also raised awareness and funds for those on the front lines.

Seeing the area through the eyes of children has given her a newfound appreciation for the forests. “Children have this innate connection to the natural world around them that so many of us adults have lost,” she says. “Spend a day in the forest with a five-year-old and you will notice and learn more than you have in a long time. This connection, for whatever reason, is severed as we grow up.”

Iredale and her class spend most of their time in their Cumberland second-growth community forest, a forest that was protected after millions of dollars of fundraising and decades of community love and support.

“This is a community that was built on coal mining and logging,” she explains, “but they also understand that forests provide much more value standing, they are not anti-logging, they’re pro-balance.”

This great, big, interconnected world

Ross Reid, an outdoor adventure sports filmmaker, runs a popular website, Nerdy About Nature, where he combines his passion for nature with his storytelling skills. In his videos, Reid educates and motivates people to protect their surroundings. He believes that it’s possible to be both pro-logging and pro-environment. The fight isn’t “loggers vs. environmentalists” but “people versus systemic wealth, power and greed.” The goal, he says, should be to create sustainable forest management with Indigenous and local communities for the long-term benefit of everyone.

Reid emphasizes that, beyond their beauty, old-growth forests are vital for mitigating climate-related disasters like flooding, droughts, fires, and heatwaves. Clearcutting exacerbates heatwaves and increases the number and size of forest fires. It also increases the risk of flooding, erosion, and landslides. By protecting endangered old-growth forests, restoring intact forests, and reforming forest management, the government can support the health and safety of communities by mitigating climate-related disasters before the climate crisis worsens.

“I'd say the most crucial thing we all need to understand about these forests is that they are so much more than just the trees,” he says, when I ask what his most vital message is about Fairy Creek.

“They are complex, intricate, integrated and interconnected ecosystems that have evolved over millions and existed for thousands of years, whose functions are so far beyond the scope of our comprehension that we're only just now beginning to scratch the surface of understanding their role in the grand scheme of life on this planet. We can't even begin to understand the way that our actions will impact the rivers, the waters, the hydrological flows across both micro and macro climates for the next few thousand years to come.”

He worries that many can’t see the forest for the trees.

“Considering that our 'modern society' is only a couple hundred years old and that our calendar alone is only 2021 years old, when we cut these ecosystems down, we are literally erasing them from the planet forever, in human time-scale terms, and replacing them with tree plantations that we expect to grow back on 70-year rotations, essentially creating a cornfield where a forest used to be.”

“This,” he says, “jeopardizes the ability for life on this planet to survive— including ours.”

If you would like to add your voice to those calling for a stop to old-growth logging, Greenpeace Canada has compiled a handy list of 12 ways you can do so. You can find it here. 
    [post_title] => 'Irreplaceable': The battle to save the last ancient trees of Canada's temperate rain forest
    [post_excerpt] => At the heart of the Fairy Creek dispute is, on one hand, a logging company that wants to exploit the land in what it claims is a sustainable way and, on the other, environmental protectors who don’t believe that profit should come at the expense of these precious ecosystems.
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https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/47068/saving-fairy-creek-and-why-ancient-forests-are-worth-more-standing/#action
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‘Irreplaceable’: The battle to save the last ancient trees of Canada’s temperate rain forest

by Toula Drimonis

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    [post_content] => Government inquiries have exposed Canada's systemic racism toward Indigenous people.

In September 2020, Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw woman from Quebec’s Manawan community, livestreamed a Facebook video that showed her screaming in pain while hospital healthcare workers openly mocked her. “You’re a fucking idiot,” “only good for sleeping around,” and “you are better off dead,” were just some of the comments recorded. Joyce passed away shortly after posting the video, which was shared widely online; the collective shock and shame at her death galvanized a movement to force Canadians to come to terms with the racism and colonialism in their medical system.

During the public inquiry that followed, witnesses and hospital staff testified to long-standing prejudice from healthcare workers and hospital administrators who neither knew nor cared that Indigenous patients were receiving inadequate care. Advocates for First Nations communities pointed to this incident not as an isolated tragedy, but as one more example of a medical system that continues to see Indigenous peoples as less deserving of equal treatment and respect.

A culture of anti-Indigenous racism

Among those testifying at the inquiry was Dr. Samir Shaheen-Hussain, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University and a Montreal pediatric emergency physician, who spoke about medical colonialism as "a culture or ideology, rooted in systemic anti-Indigenous racism, that uses medical practices and policies to establish, maintain or advance a genocidal colonial project.”

While not many people are familiar with the term, Dr. Shaheen-Hussain has written a book on the subject. Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada (2020, McGill-Queens University Press) shines a light on the decades-long cruel practice of separating children from their families during emergency medevacs from northern and remote regions of Quebec.



Working as a pediatric emergency physician, Dr. Shaheen-Hussain saw the cruel consequences of the non-accompaniment practice first-hand in 2017, when he treated two young patients who were undergoing stressful medical procedures without their loved ones by their side. Quebec pediatricians had been demanding the end of this heartless practice for decades, but successive governments refused to change the policy, making Quebec an outlier in Canada. When a citizen confronted him about the matter at a public event in 2018 , Quebec’s then-Health Minister, Gaétan Barrette, made comments that basically amounted to propagating “drunken Indian” and “freeloader” tropes. Calls for his resignation went unheeded, but the practice of preventing parents from accompanying their children on medevac flights was finally discontinued later that year, on the back of a campaign called #aHand2Hold.

Confronting the truth of past horrors

The same week that Dr. Shaheen-Hussain testified at the Quebec inquiry on Echaquan’s death a grim discovery on the other side of the country, in Kamloops, British Columbia, stopped Canadians in their tracks. A mass grave containing the remains of 215 Indigenous children at the site of a former residential school provided physical confirmation of what thousands of survivors of these forced-assimilation centres had been saying for years.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) a nationwide commission on the evils of these government-sponsored, church-run schools that operated between 1831 and 1996, concluded that thousands of children had been mistreated, physically and sexually abused, and knowingly left vulnerable to outbreaks of disease, resulting in thousands of deaths.

[caption id="attachment_2749" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Kamloops Indian Residential School in 1937.[/caption]

In addition, highly unethical nutrition experiments under the care of two physicians (one of them was a former president of the Canadian Paediatric Society and one of three inventors of Pablum infant cereal) working for the Department of Indian Affairs of Canada had been conducted on many of these children without their knowledge or consent. They were purposefully denied adequate nutrition or dental care, as part of these experiments, eerily reminiscent of the Syphilis Study conducted on Black men by the U.S. Public Health Service at Tuskegee and the medical experiments Nazi doctors performed on concentration camp survivors during World War II. Even when children died, the experiments continued.

[caption id="attachment_2741" align="alignleft" width="300"] A Black man is tested during the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.[/caption]

The TRC commission made a number of recommendations, among them a request for the federal government to “acknowledge that the current state of Aboriginal health in Canada is a direct result of previous Canadian government policies, including residential schools” and to “establish measurable goals to identify and close the health outcomes between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginal communities […] via efforts [that] would focus on indicators such as: infant mortality, maternal health, suicide, mental health, addictions, life expectancy, birth rates, infant and child health issues, chronic diseases, illness and injury incidence, and the availability of appropriate health services.” Out of a total of 94 recommendations or calls to action made in 2105, only eight have since been implemented.

A lack of compassion and respect

Dr. Arlene Laliberté, a psychologist  who is Algonquin from the Timiskaming First Nation, completed her PhD on suicide in Indigenous communities. She sees the effects of medical colonialism and the intergenerational and multigenerational trauma caused by the residential school and child welfare systems (often manifesting as structural violence and self harm) daily in her work. She also sees the indifference to it.

“Collaboration and communication are always difficult with hospitals and healthcare institutions,” she says. “When I accompany patients of mine who are going through crises or mental health issues, I often observe a lack of compassion, a lack of understanding, an unwillingness to follow up with the patient or the patients’ family. They aren’t taken seriously or believed when they disclose symptoms, and their pain is minimized or dismissed.”

Dr. Laliberté says that Indigenous patients are often treated as second-class citizens, with no respect for their own traditional healing methods, not being seen beyond the stigma or cliches of being “a bunch of drunks” and “savages.” As a result they tend to mistrust the system or delay treatment for serious physical or mental health issues, often until it’s too late.

Attempting to bridge this ignorance gap, the TRC commission called upon medical and nursing schools in Canada to require all students take a course dealing with Aboriginal health issues, including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, and Indigenous teachings and practices. According to the commission, this would require “skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and anti-racism.”

“As far as I know, this still isn’t part of the curriculum,” says Dr. Laliberté. “While I was teaching at the university, I thought of how overrepresented Indigenous children are in the foster care system (a whopping 52.2 per cent of children in foster care in Canada are Indigenous, although they account for only 7.7 percent of the child population), and I took it upon myself to educate future psycho-educators who will be working in the DPJ (Quebec’s Youth Protection system). Some of my peers voiced strong opposition to this and weren’t interested in anything that wasn’t part of the status quo.”

Forced sterilization of Indigenous women

Unwanted medical procedures are not only part of our colonial history –they continue to be part of the present. This past May, a local Métis (person of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry) lawyer in British Columbia alleged that he knew of Indigenous girls— some younger than 10 years old—who had been forced by social workers to have IUDs inserted by doctors because they were at risk of being raped in foster care.

These disturbing allegations came on the heels of the final report of the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), which included a section on the forced sterilization of Indigenous Women in Canada. It reminds us that commonplace medical procedures are often used without consent to decrease or limit the Indigenous population.

There are parallels here with similar coercive sterilization tactics implemented in the United States. The Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 enabled the mass sterilization (some say more than 25 percent) of Native American women of child-bearing age. Back in Canada, the province of Saskatchewan is currently facing a class-action lawsuit from women alleging they were coerced into getting tubal ligation as recently as 2014. A similar lawsuit has since been launched in Alberta.

“Medical colonialism killed Joyce”

This colonial mindset and the systemic discrimination that deeply affects issues regarding standards of care, ethics, caregiver policies and practices is often a straight line from the past to today’s medical system, with healthcare staff often making fast and damaging assumptions about Indigenous patients and why they’re seeking medical help. During the inquiry for Echaquan, who died of pulmonary edema, witnesses testified that healthcare staff mistook her debilitating pain and severe myocardiopathy for drug withdrawal symptoms. As a result, they disregarded her cries of pain and left her unmonitored, which was against healthcare protocol. According to the testimony of Dr. Alain Vadeboncoeur, an emergency physician at the Montreal Heart Institute, who examined her autopsy report, the 37-year-old mother of seven “could have been saved with proper care.”

Dr. Shaheen-Hussain shared similar conclusions at the inquiry, stating categorically that “medical colonialism killed Joyce Echaquan and that her death was avoidable.”

Medicine isn’t always healing

Dr. Shaheen-Hussain’s book is a powerful condemnation of medical colonialism, which continues to affect Indigenous communities. The descriptions of forced sterilization, skin grafting, Indian Hospitals (sanatoriums), medical nutritional experiments, and medical disappearances speak loudly to deeply embedded racism in medical culture. No wonder Indigenous communities are suspicious of the Canadian healthcare system and the people who work within it.

“How the government responded to the #AHand2Hold campaign is telling, because if denial stems from the top, one can only imagine what it’s often like on the frontlines,” says Dr. Shaheen-Hussain. “Medical colonialism is rooted in the long-held belief that medicine is benevolent and neutral, but it’s often not, and we need to come to terms with that reality.”

Unconscious bias also manifests in how Indigenous health professionals are perceived by the medical establishment. “We are often seen as less competent,” Dr. Laliberté says. “I didn’t get my PhD in a cracker box, and yet, despite my credentials, I am often seen as less respectable. I have also seen the services offered on a reserve deemed less valuable, even though the registered professionals working there have the same education as everyone else.” The Indian Act and the infantilization of Indigenous peoples as “wards of the state” still unconsciously resonates today with many who should know better.

Joyce’s Principle

After Echaquan’s tragic death, the Atikamekw community drafted Joyce’s Principle, which aims to guarantee all Indigenous people the right of equitable access, without any discrimination, to all social and health services, as well as the right to enjoy the best possible physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. The brief constitutes a reminder and a formal request for a commitment by the governments of Quebec and Canada (and their institutions) to respect and protect Indigenous rights relative to healthcare and social services rights that are recognized internationally. The federal government adopted Joyce’s Principle, but the Quebec government refused because the document makes explicit mention of systemic racism, which the provincial government insists does not exist.

Indigenous academics, advocates, physicians, and the Quebec Nurses' Association (QNA) immediately blasted the government for its stubborn refusal. In a published statement, the QNA said, “Without explicit confirmation of the presence of such problems, little changes or actions will lead to positive results.”

The government’s refusal to adopt Joyce’s Principle is, according to Dr. Shaheen-Hussain, “a slap in the face, unconscionable, insulting, and destructive to Indigenous communities’ idea of working together for a better future.”

He finds the government’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge systemic racism “jarring.” “It’s like trying to provide treatment for a diagnosis you refuse to name,” he says. “This refusal is so perplexing to me, because, contrary to accusations that it puts ‘all Quebecers on trial,’ if you accept systemic racism, you’re actually doing the exact opposite. You’re in fact acknowledging that you’ve inherited a system that you’re simply part of and should be actively working to dismantle.”

Gaslighting government

The minister responsible for Indigenous Affairs in Quebec insists he doesn’t want to get tangled up in semantic debates and prefers to take concrete action. But advocates insist that a government denying precisely what those it seeks to re-establish trust with are asking for is, once again, gaslighting their concerns.

Dr. Shaheen-Hussain makes it clear this isn’t a semantic debate to those affected. “Systemic racism and medical colonialism are why infant mortality is four times higher for Inuit children than average childhood mortality rates in Quebec. It’s why it’s twice as high for Indigenous children ages 10-19 than the Canadian average and five times as high for Indigenous teenage girls living on a reserve. It’s because of an entire system, not because of a few racist people.”

He insists that throwing money at a problem the government isn’t even willing to recognize in any meaningful way is pointless. “There’s no tangible commitment to eradicate systemic racism at its root.”

Quebec’s response is to casually point to the federal government and blame the Indian Act of 1876 for all the ills that have befallen Indigenous communities over the years. This is convenient deflection and denial, according to Dr. Shaheen-Hussain. “There is a fair amount of historical proof that proves the contrary,” he says. “Quebec is complicit in systemic racism and colonialism too.”

First Nations and their best interests are often caught in the middle of a power struggle between both of Canada’s colonizing forces (the English and the French) as the Quebec and federal governments often engage in a push and pull over jurisdictions and territory. When much-needed federal legislation was finally adopted in 2019, allowing Indigenous groups to take over their own child welfare systems, which would prioritize the placement of Indigenous children within their own communities, the Quebec government challenged it because it saw the new legislation as a threat to its provincial jurisdiction. The move understandably angered the Indigenous community, which called it “shameful.”

A complicit medical system

Chronic underfunding of health services and social services and the unwillingness to relinquish power as a way of redressing social inequities is also medical colonialism. Canadian medical anthropologist John O’Neil, who’s briefly mentioned in Dr. Shaheen-Hussain’s book, writes that “the system of medicine that we now rely on not only assisted that [colonial] expansion, but it was assisted in its development and domination by the colonial process of subjugation and resource exploitation.”

In the book’s afterword, Kanesatake activist Ellen Gabriel reveals that in the Mohawk language, the word for “hospital” is Tsi Iakehnheiontahionàhkhwa, which equates to “the place where people go to die.” It’s quite telling that the medical institutions most of us think of as sources of healing and help are seen as a place of death by those who have suffered—and continue to suffer—under them.

For her part, Dr. Laliberté defines medical colonialism as “living in fear and frustration.” She witnesses the daily struggle by Indigenous communities across Canada for respect and empathy, engaged in reclaiming traditional measures that support their peoples' mental health and wellness, being challenged by a colonial mindset that presumes to know better.

“Living my life as a First Nations professional woman, I am livid most of the time,” she says.
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‘A lack of compassion’: Canada’s shameful history of medical colonialism

by Toula Drimonis

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    [post_content] => Thousands of U.S. residents who were undocumented or on non-permanent visas fled to Canada during the Trump years.

Rodney* (not his real name) works as a machine operator at Canada Bread’s assembly line. To get to work each day he travels an hour by public transportation from his home in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood to a production plant on the other side of town. He alternates day and night shifts, bagging bread products for the city’s major supermarkets; barring a three-week mandatory furlough, he’s worked through the pandemic without a break. Rodney is both an essential frontline worker and an asylum seeker.

The 36-year-old former police officer left his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica in February of 2015 when he learned that someone had put out a hit on him and his family due to his work in a special anti-corruption unit. Someone shot his younger sister, who lives with their elderly parents.

She survived, but Rodney knew he had to leave the country in order to protect his family. He fled to Florida, and then moved to New York City, where an aunt lived. But refugee claimants faced an uncertain future in the United States; he wanted something better and more permanent. So, in March of 2018, he crossed the border to Canada.

“My aunt lives in Queens, so I took a Greyhound bus to upstate New York and then a taxi to Roxham Road,” he told me.

Roxham Road: the trickle that became a tsunami

Before 2017, Roxham Road was just a quiet street in the small town of Plattsburgh, N.Y., which is right on the Canadian border. In February of that year the Trump administration began implementing its cruel immigration policies and people who had been in the U.S. for years, either as undocumented immigrants or on non-permanent visas, began to flee—many of them to Canada. It was then that the Roxham Road border crossing gained international attention.

This is the spot where many asylum seekers have crossed from the U.S. to Canada on foot, because a loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement, signed by both countries, exempts asylum claimants who cross at unofficial entry points from being turned back. People who enter Canada from the U.S. at an official port of entry are ineligible to make a refugee claim and will be returned to the U.S.; the bilateral agreement presupposes the U.S. is a safe country for asylum seekers. In 2017, the Canadian Council for Refugees joined in a legal challenge against the Canadian government, asserting that the U.S. was no longer a safe haven for asylum seekers. Canada’s Federal Court agreed, ruling that the agreement breaches constitutional guarantees of life, liberty and security.

Prior to February 2017, says the Refugee Board of Canada, the number of asylum seekers coming from the States was in the hundreds. By September 2020, it skyrocketed to 58,625. As of this writing, roughly 16,000 claims have been accepted, 13,000 rejected, and slightly more than 27,000 cases are still pending. Research conducted by the Migration Policy Institute suggests around 40 percent of people who crossed that border left the U.S. “for reasons directly tied to U.S. immigration policies.”

The Trump administration implemented policies that made thousands of desperate people feel they faced the kind of harm Amnesty International qualified as “catastrophic.” Illegal family separations; massive pushbacks of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border; cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of detainees; and indefinite detention in deliberately cruel conditions, often bordering on torture, of people who were treated like criminals only because they sought a better life.

But while Canada’s immigration system looks better than its southern neighbor’s, it is still deeply flawed. For asylum seekers, the policies can seem capricious and even cruel. Rodney feels that the treatment he received at the hands of Canadian officials has been unjust.

“When I crossed, they arrested me, searched me, looked at my documentation, and put me in a room where I waited,” he said. Hours passed until a bus transported him to a holding area, where he waited until 1 a.m. to be interviewed.

The Canadian Border Services agent who interviewed him, he said, adopted a confrontational tone and made him feel that she was not assessing his request fairly.

Rodney told the agent about documentation that included sworn affidavits from his family and newspaper articles about his undercover work with the police, but the agent didn’t seem to believe him. “She kept inferring that my sister being shot was an accident and not a deliberate attempt on her life,” he said.

Non-recorded interviews pose a problem

That interview is now being used to undermine Rodney’s claim for asylum.

In the crucial Basis of Claim (BOC) document, upon which the Refugee Board decides whether or not to grant the applicant asylum, the agent wrote that Rodney had been instructed to destroy evidence during the course of his work as a police officer. Rodney denies having told the agent anything of the kind. But because the interview was not recorded, he is locked in a "he said/she said" situation.

He did not even learn what the agent had written on the form until his hearing in September of 2020. “When the judge started asking me why I hadn’t disclosed this so-called information, I explained that I couldn’t omit something that I had never said.” He added that the judge also asked why the newspaper articles didn’t report his name, “when it should have been obvious that it had been omitted to protect me and my family.”

Rodney does not understand why he was not allowed to see the original document at the time the agent took his statement. “It’s a statement that is essentially attributed to me, so why didn’t I get the opportunity to see what’s disclosed? I never saw it, I never signed it, and yet the contradiction between the Canada Border Services agent’s statement and my testimonial at the hearing is why my asylum request was basically denied, according to the judge.”

Jacqueline Callin, a spokesperson for the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), confirmed that it was not the agency’s practice to record refugee claimants’ statements at ports of entry. But she did maintain that, while she could not comment on Rodney’s case specifically, CBSA rules stipulated that refugee claimants and their representatives should, in general, receive copies of the statement in advance of the hearing.

But Rodney insists the CBSA never gave him a copy of his file. “I was only given certified copies of my birth certificate and my passport from the same CBSA officer who interviewed me at the port of entry,” he said. His original birth certificate and passport are still with the border agency.

Long-standing issues persist

Rodney’s lawyer, Perla Abou-Jaoude, said that the CBSA often ignores routine requests for access to applicants’ files. This “puts the applicant at a disadvantage,” she said “and could be rectified so easily”— if the government agency would simply make a routine practice of providing a copy of the applicant’s file simultaneously to their lawyer and the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB). Recording the interviews, she said, would also be an effective way of ensuring transparency and accountability.

Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR), a national non-profit umbrella organization, said that the absence of recorded interviews was a “long-standing issue” and one that the council has been trying to rectify for a long time.

“You call a simple help line these days and you’re immediately informed that you’re being recorded,” she said. “Yet we’re not recording these important interviews when people’s lives are on the line, when [doing so] would allow the government to monitor the conduct of their agents? I don’t understand why they’re so resistant to it.”

Responding to complex questions under duress

Dench said the CCR’s position is that the task of asking these important questions and filling out the BOC should not be carried out by CBSA agents. “Asking such complex questions when people are tired, confused, and scared is questionable. We have repeatedly asked the IRB not to put too much weight on these initial testimonials, and for the most part, they don’t, but every case is different. Bottom line, the CBSA should not be conducting these assessments, and if they are, they should be recorded.”

Abou-Jaoude also questioned a practice that has refugee claimants filling out complicated forms when they’re exhausted, frightened, confused, and sometimes unaware of what they’re signing because of language barriers. Mistakes during the initial declaration can potentially affect their credibility and chances. Rodney and his lawyer have filed an appeal and he’s now waiting to hear back. The process could take up to a year.

Working as a frontline worker in a foreign country

In the meantime, Rodney works. He has no family in Canada, and he tells me that he leads a rather solitary life. When I tell him that it sounds lonely, there’s a long pause on the other end of the line. His older sister, who was severely handicapped, passed away this past October. Rodney was not able to attend her funeral or be with his family in mourning. He worries about his parents who have health problems, and he sends what money he can afford back home. “I don’t make much, but I make sacrifices so I can help them.”

When I ask him if he likes what he does, I can “hear” the shrug through the telephone. “I’m indifferent,” he said. “I work hard, and I always try to be professional. But I’m working to survive, so I can help my family.”

When the pandemic hit Rodney was working the night shift at Canada Bread. Workers have been equipped with surgical masks and face shields, so he feels safe at the plant. And his company has provided him with a letter explaining his presence outside during Quebec’s 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew.

“The very first night the curfew was implemented I was stopped,” he said. “I was waiting for the bus early in the morning and a police car going in the opposite direction immediately made a U-turn and came straight at me. I showed them the letter.”

I ask him what his first impression of Montreal was. “It’s a lot more French than I expected before coming here,” he said, laughing. “I’m slowly learning the language and I wish I could take classes and improve it, but work exhausts me. I often finish my shift at 1 a.m. and at that hour the bus doesn’t pass by too often, so I routinely wait an additional 45 minutes just to board it. Then, another hour to get home,” he trails off.

With the hearing coming up, Rodney wants to share what happened to him. He wants people to understand that the system needs improving.

Canadian border agents under investigation

He’s not the only one who thinks so. In 2019, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians launched a review into the actions of the CBSA, following multiple reports of flaws within the agency, as well as multiple harassment allegations. CBC News reported that the agency had investigated 1,200 allegations against its own staff over a two-and-a-half-year period.

“CBSA agents have a lot of discretionary power, but there’s no outside oversight of staff conduct, which can occasionally be problematic,” said Abou-Jaoude.  Dench confirmed that the CCR was very aware of the lack of accountability and transparency.

Considering the power and scope border policing agents have, combined with allegations of serious misconduct that include unnecessary force, conflict of interest, and sexual harassment, one would think the government would welcome recorded interview sessions, since they would protect both the applicants and the agency’s reputation.

“So much is at stake here— for me and my family,” Rodney says. “I have no recourse now. There’s a contradiction between [the CBSA agent’s] statement and my story and naturally the judge will take her word as being neutral and accurate. But what she wrote was inaccurate and there’s no way for me to prove it.”
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For asylum seekers, Canada’s immigration policies can seem capricious and even cruel

by Toula Drimonis

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    [post_content] => The search for home can sometimes clash with the need for security.

Like many Canadians, I grew up with my nose pressed to the window of American life.

This was especially true in my case, because my mother was born in New York City and her mother in Chicago; my great-grandfather was a Chicago developer who built one of the city’s first skyscrapers. My American cousins intimidated me: they included an ambassador, a Harvard archeologist, even a bullfighter. One of them was married to a woman who flew her own small aircraft.

I wanted to be like them — bold, adventurous, successful — and to understand what made them tick; I wanted to flee the quiet, polite country I was born and raised in, where ambition and strong opinions were frowned upon.

Canadian newsstands offered 80 percent American content and I knew the names of Buffalo’s suburbs, Lackawanna and Cheektowaga, because their television broadcasts reached Toronto. I caught deeper glimpses of American contradictions while attending University of Toronto, during a life-changing exchange week at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We attended a black Baptist church service where the preacher inveighed against abortion and the ladies waved paper fans. We listened to a black UNC administrator describe his life there…and begin to weep.

As someone from a multicultural city, Toronto, and a country where abortion isn’t demonized, both were shocking. Nor had I before imagined the daily toll that racism could play. It all deepened my curiosity about the U.S. even further, making me more determined to find a way to live there.

At 25, I won a fellowship to Paris, traveling Europe for eight months, then was a newspaper reporter in Toronto and Montreal, where I fell in love with a McGill medical student from New Jersey, soon to graduate and return south for residency.

I was able to follow him to the United States, although we were not married, because I was the daughter of a U.S. citizen, applying for “better work opportunities.” After I had taken an AIDS test, undergone a security check and been fingerprinted, an official at the consulate in Montreal interviewed me. I wrote, for a column in the national daily, The Globe and Mail, in 1988:

“The vice-consul asked me surprisingly little. When she approved my visa, after a brief but lively conversation, her enthusiasm and warmth were infectious. Even the guard wished me luck. I felt I’d been invited to a terrific party. I was handed a brown envelope, stamped, signed and sealed. My future was in my hands.”

And so I left behind a perfectly good country, one with excellent and heavily subsidized university education, cradle-to-grave healthcare, a wide, deep social safety net, and a Constitution that promised “peace, order and good government” rather than “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

For years, Canadians had often guessed I was American, which is a veiled insult that means too bossy, too direct, too nakedly ambitious. I wanted faster decisions and a wider playing field, not the endless foot-shuffling of risk-averse fellow Canadians and a career limited to a handful of major cities.

I’d thought American was more egalitarian than it is, but that turned out to be silly idealism. When I dared suggest to someone at Dartmouth that I audit classes there, since we were in the middle of nowhere for the next four years, pre-Internet, the university administration refused. How about part-time study? Also no.

As I began to try to make sense of my new home, I read two seminal works of the early 1990s that explained the shadowed side of John Winthrop’s 1630 vision of America as a much-admired “city on a hill”: the first was Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, about two boys growing up in a decrepit Chicago housing project during the 1980s; the second was Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, a study of two school districts, divided by wealth and class, which were allotted wildly unequal resources by the American way of funding education through housing taxes. This was a key difference between my experiences in Toronto and Montreal.

In Hanover, a local social worker told me about the grinding poverty she saw on muddy backroads, the battered trailers with plastic on the windows, while Dartmouth’s most privileged students raced their shiny sports cars through town and dropped enormous sums in its few stores. There is poverty in Canada; this is particularly true for the shamefully neglected Indigenous people. But the shocking inequality of the United States, where the three wealthiest Americans collectively own more wealth than the bottom half of the population (while the middle class struggles to pay for healthcare and university tuition), is absent; Canada has its billionaires and millionaires, but they tend to be more discreet about their good fortune.

First American lesson: Prove you’re rich! Income inequality be damned.

I wanted my career back, so we moved to suburban New York, where I’ve lived ever since. After two years of marriage, my husband left and I started my American life yet again, without children. I’d insisted on a pre-nuptial agreement, which enabled me to survive financially and keep my home.

Second American lesson: Know your legal rights and be ready to fight hard for them.


Third American lesson: A tough lawyer is often your new best friend.

Single and lonely, in 1998 I answered a personals ad in a local alternative weekly — which brought a convicted con man into my life, who wreaked emotional havoc and cost me several thousand dollars.

Fourth American lesson: In a country so diverse, re-invention is easier. In a huge and mobile country, less fussy about one’s origins, he simply traveled east and started victimizing anew.


Fifth American lesson: Some Americans are wildly impressed with self-confidence and happily defer to material signs of success; before he was caught in Chicago, the conman had posed as a doctor and as a lawyer.

In the decades since, I’ve often wondered about my “ghost life.” What if I’d stayed in Canada? When I visit, I find that I miss the civil conversation, the more generous public policies and, most of all, a national culture that is not poisoned by right-wing terrorism.

In 2002 and 2003, while researching my first book, I traveled to Ohio, New Orleans, Massachusetts and Texas to interview 104 men, women and teens about women and gun use, asking whether they owned a firearm or whether one had shattered their life. I spent three days learning how to fire a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol, which gave me the street cred to speak with suspicious gun owners; their first question to me was always the same: Do you believe in the Second Amendment?

Sixth American lesson: It’s as if the Constitution’s ink were still wet, so often is it cited. And every time I ask someone about their concomitant responsibility to the common good I might as well be speaking Greek, so hollow does the phrase ring in a nation addicted to the primacy of individual rights.

I survived the financial crash of 2008, thanks to my second husband’s secure job and my work in a part-time retail position for $11/hour, an experience that was the subject of my second book. In two-and-a-half years, while selling $600 ski jackets, my hourly wage was raised by only 30 cents. The store’s wealthy customers recoiled in shock if I replied to them in French or Spanish. They automatically assumed anyone working at a low-level job couldn’t possibly be as well educated or well-traveled as they.

Seventh American lesson: A low-wage job de facto signals low status. One customer tossed a quarter at us, barking: ‘Go to college!” Every one of our 15-member staff had done so, and two were military veterans. I saw firsthand what $11/ hour could buy. Almost nothing. With college costs so high, how could anyone flee? 


Eighth American lesson: The stunning cost of American post-secondary education breaks as many as it helps. Two of our friends in their early 30s, both from blue-collar families, are crippled by their college debts of $60,000 and $100,000. My annual tuition in mid-1970s Canada was $660 a year; today, it would be $6,000.

In a country professing such deep allegiance to “liberty,” American workers have no right to paid vacation, sick leave or paid maternity leave. Union membership is low, and the federal minimum wage has been stagnant for decades.

Since Donald Trump’s election, our Canadian friends have shifted from asking: “Will you come home?” to “When will you come home?”

I struggle to find a response, even as I realize that most of my reasons for staying are predicated on privilege. I am an educated white woman, in good health; I have work, savings in the bank, and a gainfully employed husband who is also in good health. If I were poor and lived in a rural area, Canada’s social safety net might appear much more appealing than it does from a pretty and prosperous town within easy distance of New York City.

Until we can afford to retire we need well-paid work, which, even in the worst of times, is more plentiful for us where we live now. My experience of trying to do business with Canadians has been frustrating: often they murmur encouragingly and then disappear, true to an aspect of the national character that places value on avoiding potential conflict.

The U.S. feels more foreign now than it did when I first made it my home, nearly 30 years ago. It is tainted by mass incarceration, racism and daily violence. Shooters armed with automatic weapons have massacred thousands and schoolchildren practice “active shooter drills.” In a nation that never shuts up about “productivity,” retailers sell us scented candles to relax. No one seems to notice the contradiction.

Soon, there will be more than 100,000 dead from COVID-19; meanwhile, the White House administration’s chaotic responses are a deadly roulette wheel.

I love our historic, lovely Hudson River town and its ready access to the pleasures of Manhattan --- although they are temporarily off limits during the pandemic. The fact remains; unless we move to a rural, isolated area with poor medical access, we can’t afford comparable Canadian housing and my home city, Toronto, has become both violent and expensive, with tiny teardown houses selling for $1 million.

I loathe Trump and fear four more years of this nightmare.

I enjoy our life here— while knowing how deeply its systems punish so many others.

It’s a moral thorn.

Stay?

Go?

I still don’t know.
    [post_title] => America is home but Canada is safer: after 30 years, and despite a fulfilling personal life, is it time to leave?
    [post_excerpt] => In the decades since, I’ve often wondered about my “ghost life.” What if I’d stayed in Canada? When I visit, I find that I miss the civil conversation, the more generous public policies and, most of all, a national culture that is not poisoned by right-wing terrorism.
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America is home but Canada is safer: after 30 years, and despite a fulfilling personal life, is it time to leave?

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_content] => In northern British Columbia, a female chef draws on her native heritage and introduces diners to local, pre-European cuisine.

Generations ago, Indigenous communities living in harsh environments found comfort and sustenance in a basic bread recipe. 

For many remote First Nations communities throughout North America, flour wasn’t available, so bread was made with ground-up roots, bear fat and berries to sweeten, it was then cooked in an open fire or wrapped around a stick to bake.

This bread, called bannock, changed over the years incorporating ingredients like flour, fat, and sugar that were rationed to people after the government forcibly removed them from their land. It was then fried and became an important staple at powwows. Indigenous people took the scraps of oppression and made something delicious with it.

Powwows are a meeting, a chance for Indigenous people to get together and showcase dancing, singing, artisan creations and spend time in cultural appreciation and celebration. They have also served as an act of powerful resistance against continuous attempts to destroy, legislate and remove Indigenous culture. They are a demonstration of pride.

Sharon Bond, who is from the Nooaitch Indian Band in Merritt, British Columbia, has made her “bannock and butter” from bringing this ancient food to modern diners and the public can’t get enough.

“Bannock was a survival bread that really brought communities together through celebrations and gatherings. And it was one of the roots of keeping people alive,” she says.

Bond owns Kekuli Cafe, which has become the first Indigenous-owned restaurant franchise in Canada. With two locations and a third set to open in the near future, Bond’s long-held desire to run her own restaurant has come to fruition. But it doesn’t stop there; by offering franchising opportunities, Bond is helping to empower another generation of Indigenous entrepreneurs to taste success with bannock too.

“Indigenous youth can be supported from the time they are in high school. We need to bring entrepreneurs and business people into schools to teach and inspire youth, to bring out their ideas and to be creative and know that they can make their dream into a business. Mentors are needed,” she says.

She herself guides and empowers youth and aspiring business owners through an initiative called Futurpreneur and through monthly Indigenous Women Networking Sessions. She also sees mentorship as a cycle and continues to benefit from her own mentor, a successful restaurant owner, who she can talk to about any industry-specific questions she may have.

Her journey to becoming a restaurant owner was a long process, in part because she wanted the endeavor to be a success and took her time to design a winning product.

“It took a few years to do the business plan, we took our time to make sure that everything was going to be just right, the colors, the logo, the slogan. We just wanted to have a very strong business. It took time to get to that point and then when we finally opened our doors people thought we were a franchise which was pretty cool. So, I said, Well, we're not, but we will be now!”

One of the decisions she grappled with was the name for the cafe, she eventually found the word “Kekuli” in a book by James Teit, a Scottish anthropologist who wrote extensively about the people of the Interior Salish First Nations.

It’s the name for a winter dwelling, found across the Okanagan region, a house built into the ground to provide shelter and warmth. Pronounced ke-koo-lee, it seemed like the perfect moniker for the type of space she wanted to create, she registered the business name the very same day.

Even though the process of launching the business was a slow burn, Bond has been interested in cooking since she was a child, when she was making a mess in her mom’s kitchen and watching her bake cinnamon buns and bread. She remembers enjoying the smell of spices and recently found an old recipe book with a missing cover, the pages of which were decorated with her childish doodles and colorings.

One of her mom’s regular recipes was chili, which also features on Kekuli Cafe’s menu, although Bond says its quite a different recipe. A staple offered at powwows; chili is traditionally served atop a piece of bannock to catch all of the meaty juices.

Bread forms a part of almost every human culinary culture across the globe and Bond has often been told that her bannock reminds customers of other fry bread that they remember from their childhood, whether that was in China, Scotland or anywhere else across the world.

Different Indigenous communities across North America make their bannock to their own unique recipes, in fact, at Kekuli they have their own ancient and secret recipe.

Bannock fans will find that the familiar frybread taste replicated perfectly at Kekuli Cafe with regulars often praising the softness of the bannock. But you can also find a number of innovative menu items like dessert topped bannocks, BLTs and bannock-wich sandwiches.

“Time has evolved so now we've got flour and oil and cast iron pans and fryers. It’s bannock with a twist, you know a little bit more contemporary bannock,” she says.

That contemporary bannock topped with sweet treats remains very popular but the traditional bannock is favored by purists as are some of the sweet yet naturally Canadian flavors from the land like Saskatoon Berry, Maple Glaze, and Maple Walnut.

The restaurant’s slogan “Don’t Panic... We Have Bannock!” came about from one of the first customers who ran up to the counter worried that they may have sold out. Sharon reassured them by stating the now-famous line and they all broke into laughter.

Bond is an incredibly warm person who makes people feel at ease, no doubt due to her genuine care and concern for how others are feeling. One of the philosophies that Kekuli Cafe is built upon is that all her customers should feel acknowledged when they arrive.

“I wanted to open a restaurant for 20 years and I always thought ‘Oh I'm going to do this with my restaurant,’ I'm going to make sure everyone smiles and is acknowledged, you're not just someone who comes in and orders and sits down and that's it. You know, I engage with all my customers and I really felt that there wasn't enough compassion or empathy, it's important to make someone's day,” she says.

Bond is also humble and credits her success to the whole team. In fact, she was recently awarded the Indigenous Woman-Business Award of Excellence from The National Aboriginal Capital Corporation but was almost too shy to tell me. She admitted that she sometimes finds it difficult to enjoy her success without feeling like she’s bragging.

Where she excels, however, is in empowering other women to proudly and confidently promote themselves. A culture she is trying to develop in her local community through her Indigenous Women Networking Sessions. 

“I can see it becoming a very important networking group. I've been to other networking groups for women and sometimes I just feel out of place,  it doesn't seem to be me, I'm not a high heel wearing type person and everyone's all decked right out and I am more of a Doc Martens person!” she says.

Through mentorship, encouragement, and plenty of bannock, Bond is building a culture of shared success.
    [post_title] => In Canada, a female Indigenous chef popularizes local, pre-European cuisine
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In Canada, a female Indigenous chef popularizes local, pre-European cuisine

by Fiona Tapp

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    [post_content] => A band of First Nations people have won national and international support for their refusal to allow a pipeline through their land.

Until cross-country rail blockades by Indigenous activists and their allies made front-page news earlier this month, few Canadians noticed the protests against a pipeline in We’tsuewet’en territory. Opposition to the project from First Nations people in northwestern British Columbia has, however, been consistent—and years in the making. The dam that had been holding back a slow and steady bubbling of resistance burst late last month when heavily armed militarized police moved to enforce a court injunction and tear down a blockade against Coastal GasLink, the company that wants to run its 670-kilometre gas pipeline through unceded native land.

Hereditary chiefs of We’tsuewet’en territory maintain they have jurisdiction over this unceded land and that both Coastal GasLink/TC Energy and the government are in violation of a Supreme Court ruling. Complicating matters: under the Indigenous system of governance, hereditary chiefs from each clan are title holders of the land; meanwhile the band councils (created through the government-imposed Indian Act) have control over the land that the government allotted to reserves. The issue of who controls the land has never been settled legally, nor resolved by negotiation or litigation.

This is not the first time a confrontation between Canadian authorities and Indigenous people has made international news. In 1990, Mohawk people in Quebec held off for 78 days against a golf club developer who wanted to construct condos on traditional burial grounds. The confrontation led to the Oka Crisis, with the provincial and federal governments, in a rare show of unanimity, working together to deploy the military against the barricaded Mohawk. Like the current We’tsuwet’en standoff, it sparked a global solidarity movement in support of Indigenous communities fighting a centuries-old battle against colonialism.

This, however, is the first time Indigenous protests over land rights has garnered popular support among non-Indigenous Canadians.

    
 	
  • The Idle No More protest movement, founded in 2012 to honour Indigenous sovereignty and protect the water and land, sensitized non-Indigenous Canadians to the grievances and concerns of Indigenous communities.
    • 
 	
  • The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls demonstrated the direct connection between the violation of Indigenous rights and Canada’s staggering rates of violence against women and girls of the First Nations.
    • 
 	
  • The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada opened the nation’s eyes to the horrific and lasting impacts of the residential school system on Indigenous students and their families.
    • 


Add to all of the above a rising global awareness about the effect of climate change and the need to move away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy systems and it’s easy to see why popular support for the protests has grown—despite the economic cost of forcing the railway to shut down.

We’tsuwet’en advocates and hereditary leaders have been warning for years about the possibility of a showdown. Critics of the train blockades, however, are now saying that few Indigenous groups are involved in the protests. They point the finger instead at white eco lobbyists, allegedly funded by foreign groups with nefarious intentions. John Ivison, a columnist for the right-wing National Post, went so far as to claim “millennial eco-activists are the new colonialists.” This is a bold take, given that land protectors have for decades been defending the environment from corporations intent on ramming pipelines through unceded land.

Activists for Indigenous rights and for environmental protection rights have allies in Canada and around the world because they are intrinsically connected through shared goals. Shale gas development, pipelines transporting oil, the polluting effects of extraction for a country’s biodiversity, water and land, are issues that are not limited to Indigenous communities. Nor is opposition to pipelines uniquely Canadian: TC Energy has faced major opposition in Mexico and the United States. As long as the industrialized world refuses to transition to renewable sources, they will continue to expropriate Indigenous land and exploit the natural world for fuel.

This is why Indigenous activists around the world —Mexico, Honduras, Brazil, the Philippines, Colombia — are fighting against mining, logging, and other exploitation of community lands, often at the cost of their own lives.

The UN has warned of a “drastic increase” in violence against Indigenous people because of their resistance. According to UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, “67 percent of the 312 human rights defenders murdered in 2017 were defending their lands, the environment, or Indigenous rights, nearly always in the context of private sector projects.”

But there are success stories, too. Just last week, the Indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico, won a ruling against a Canadian-owning mining company operating in the town. The company had obtained permits to exploit local mineral and precious metal deposits without first consulting the community and, as a result, the environmental protection agency ordered the mine closed.

Political activism raises awareness, which in turn inspires conversations, and helps public sentiment turn in favour of the marginalized— and this is when the vilification begins. Smear campaigns and hate speech painting Indigenous people as obstacles to economic development, lawless “thugs” and “paid protesters” have already commenced, with some of these comments coming directly from the House of Commons in Ottawa.

Outgoing Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who has repeatedly referred to the democratic protests as illegal, instructed Indigenous protesters—many of whom still live with boil-water advisories in communities that lack basic amenities—to “check their privilege.”

Scheer recently stood up in the House of Commons to demand the protestors be removed by police force if necessary. Peter MacKay, the man currently vying for Scheer’s job, chimed in by posting a video declaring Indigenous protesters and their supporters “a small gang of professional protesters” and “thugs” holding “innocent Canadians hostage.”

The Post Millennial, a pro-Conservative media platform, blamed CN Rail’s recent layoffs on Indigenous activists— ignoring both the fact that the company had announced upcoming layoffs in late 2019 and that unions and workers have expressed solidarity for We’tsuwet’en protests.

“Rail blockades could see cities run out of chlorine for water treatment,” read another headline. But the article itself attributes the claim to a lobbyist for chemical distribution companies. Most cities in fact have their chlorine trucked in; and The Post Millennial did not mention that 60 Indigenous communities have been living with boil-water advisories for decades.

In Canada, as in many other countries with significant Indigenous populations, the policy for decades has been to deny or ignore their legitimate rights and titles. Now, once again, a private company wants to invade unceded territory and exploit its land for economic gain at the expense of the people who live on it. Because those people have little legal or economic power, they are engaging in peaceful civil disobedience as a means to be heard. But instead of listening, the authorities are treating them like criminals.

Faced with escalating pressure from the blockades and the people outraged by them, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cancelled a trip to Barbados, where he was expected to pitch Caribbean leaders on why Canada should be granted a seat on the United Nations Security Council. Instead, he held an emergency meeting of cabinet ministers Monday in Ottawa. To his credit, he denounced the calls for force, making it clear that a solution could only be found through discussions. Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller reiterated that sentiment, stating that “the pathway to de-escalation is a painful one, and it’s an hour-by-hour conversation that involves engagement at the highest levels.” Violence and suppression are easy and respectful dialogue is tedious and long, but it’s the latter that is required now.

Canada has yet to engage fully with its grim colonial legacy. This is a country founded on the often-violent seizure of Indigenous land; the displacement of communities via  state-sponsored residential schools; and the banning and hoped-for extinction of Indigenous culture, languages, and culture. This legacy is responsible for countless deaths and for generational trauma that manifests in high rates of suicide, incarceration, and substance abuse; it has also played an instrumental role in settler privilege and prosperity.

Canada can no longer afford to prop up polluting industries that threaten our biodiversity and the viability of our land and water. It’s unconscionable to do so. Indigenous concerns should be our concerns also. They are one and the same.

The discourse and increasing support around the We’tsuewet’en protests and train blockades is evolving rapidly because public awareness is rising. Canadian attitudes toward environmental issues are evolving. We’re now starting to realize as a global community that Indigenous people are leading the way in a battle we must wage together.

 
    [post_title] => A standoff over a gas pipeline has become an international call for environmental action
    [post_excerpt] => Activists for indigenous rights and for environmental protection rights have allies in Canada and around the world because they are intrinsically connected through shared goals.
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A standoff over a gas pipeline has become an international call for environmental action

by Toula Drimonis

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    [post_content] => What did you talk about at your Thanksgiving dinner?

A week after the celebration of the most American holiday, many people are still digesting dinner table conversations that might have wandered into current events. Whether they were contentious, or affirming, the Thanksgiving dinner table conversation as a reflection of our cultural moment has become a motif in popular culture. A survey of some of the most iconic enactments of the holiday meal in film and in television go some way toward putting last week's conversations in context.

Unlike any other religious or secular American celebration, Thanksgiving offers a motif that resonates with nearly all American audiences, as Norman Rockwell shows in his iconic 1943 portrait of a family celebrating the holiday. The title of the painting is Freedom From Want; it is one in a series inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, Four Freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear), which he delivered shortly after the United States entered World War Two. Rockwell’s all-American family would, one hopes, look quite different today; but the propaganda potential is the same – almost everyone celebrates Thanksgiving, in similar ways, with similar cultural cues and breaks from the workweek.

Over the years, film directors have used Thanksgiving scenes as an instantly recognizable tableau for the foibles of the extended family. Many of those Thanksgiving scenes have become iconic — offering a peek into less-familiar narratives. They are also remarkably powerful reflections of the political climate of their time. Viewed years later, they offer salutary insights into whether and how things have changed.

In Avalon, the third of Barry Levinson’s semi-autobiographical Baltimore movies —of which Diner is perhaps the best known —Thanksgiving makes the director’s Jewish Baltimore deeply and undeniably American. Even for people who haven’t seen it, “You cut the turkey without me?!” has become one of the most-quoted lines about Thanksgiving.



Each Thanksgiving meal in Avalon marks the evolution and assimilation of the Jewish-immigrant Krichinsky family, presided over by the benevolent, mustachioed patriarch Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller-Stahl). As the children gather at their feet and listen raptly, the older generation — Sam, his brothers, their wives and offspring — regale them with oft-repeated stories about the old world, which the younger ones imbue with fresh ideas bred by the new world. The opening scene of Avalon shows Sam arriving in Baltimore as a young man, before World War One, a new immigrant landing on the Fourth of July amid the fireworks and fairy lights. The sense of splendor and 1950’s nostalgia are a constant in this deeply sentimental film; at times Levinson’s Americana schmaltz is almost too much to bear. Yet it reflects the sentiments of its time: the film was released in 1990, just as the Communist bloc was collapsing — a historical event that many (perhaps most) Americans viewed as a validation of their values. This feeling is reflected in Barry Levinson’s nostalgic film about growing up in post-war Baltimore as the grandson of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe.

This American exuberance at the Thanksgiving table can be found in the films of two less likely candidates — Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters,  and Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It. Both films were released in 1986; they channel a Reagan-era sense of carefree consumption, the ability to recreate oneself, and endless second chances.  Hannah and Her Sisters, one of Woody Allen’s best-known films, is framed and punctuated by three Thanksgiving meals. Given the director’s reputation for cynicism, “Hannah” is surprisingly optimistic, even as it explores the destructive potential of love and human frailty. The film begins with a Thanksgiving gathering at the sprawling Central Park West apartment of Hannah (Mia Farrow) and Elliot (Michael Caine). The camera take us through rooms that are suffused with warm light and happy children playing while clusters of adults drink, eat hors d’oeuvres, and converse. Hannah’s mother, a retired Broadway performer, sings while her husband accompanies her at the piano, and uniformed catering staff serve the food. Rather quickly, however, this scene of familial happiness morphs into something altogether different, with all the characters seemingly on the brink of ruinous heartbreak and professional failure. And yet, in tandem with the anguish over illicit love affairs, money problems, career frustration, and sibling rivalry, the city continues to sparkle and entice; the failures are minor and redeemed by success; death is defied; and most of the hearts not only survive intact, but seem to grow. The whimsy, humor, and celebration of New York City, with a closing Thanksgiving meal, full of heart and warmth, are what remain. Even Woody Allen and Dianne Wiest are happy at the end, which seems to make the film a veritable fairy tale.

She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee’s first (and arguably best) film, is a similarly overflowing package of whimsy and a sense of plenty. This includes its charmingly odd Thanksgiving meal. Nola, the female protagonist, is a free spirit whose enjoyment of love, sex, art, and the people around her are intoxicating, to both the characters and the viewers. For Thanksgiving dinner, the first she has ever cooked, Nola invites her three lovers — Jamie, Mars, and Greer. Over dinner the men joust for her affection, with their competitiveness extending to a post-dessert game of Scrabble. At the end of the evening each suitor is understandably reluctant to leave, hoping he will be the one Nola chooses to spend the night with her. The final scene is a beautiful overhead composition of Nola and Jamie lying in one another’s arms on her bed, with Mars and Greer hanging on nearby as the music plays — until they finally give up and leave. Like Hannah and Her Sisters, the film feels suffused with a late-1980’s American intoxication with itself – even when it’s pushing the margins or making them visible. Spike Lee provides a portrait of black Americans that doesn’t use white America as a reference point. This world exists regardless of whether or not white people are aware of it or understand it; just as Nola offers herself without apology or excuse, so does Spike Lee present black America.



While less celebratory Thanksgiving films exist — Parker Posey offers two examples of unhappy Thanksgiving gatherings in her cult classics The Day Trippers and House of Yes — television has more space to dig into broader conversations. The Thanksgiving episodes in some older television series feel shockingly political in a way that seems inconceivable today. In a 1994 episode of Roseanne, abortion is the predominant theme: four generations of women sit at the holiday table sharing their views and experiences, with Roseanne expressing views that are stridently pro-choice. When she and Dan discover their unborn child may not be healthy, however, Roseanne suddenly realizes she might not be so certain about her own choice. It is a remarkably thoughtful conversation —one of many salutary episodes in a series that gave white working-class Americans a nuanced, complex voice.

That other avatar of the white working man, Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), famously served as a foil for the preoccupations of the 1970s. In the 1974 Thanksgiving episode of All In The Family, he and Edith are invited to the new home of their daughter Gloria, and son-in-law Mike  (a.k.a Meathead). Since Gloria is pregnant, the subject of whether or not the child will be raised with religion arises, with Archie and Edith expressing hurt and dismay that their grandson might be raised a liberal atheist.



All in the Family is one of the few shows premised entirely on the culture wars of the 1970s; viewed today, it holds up a sobering mirror to our contemporary political moment — i.e., we’ve regressed to a place where those inter-generational conflicts of 45 years ago now feel acutely relevant.  Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, adds an additional insight in her brilliant essay about All in the Family, titled “The Great Divide:  Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the Rise of the Bad Fan.” The show, observes Nussbaum, attracted many “bad fans” who watched because they identified with Archie Bunker and his bigoted views. He was meant to be the old racist uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table, an anachronistic buffoon, but many of his fans loved him because they shared his worldview. This is one of the dangers posed by using anti-heroes to explode cultural stereotypes and advance conversations.

The new canvas created by the so-called Golden Age of television has endowed the Thanksgiving episode with even greater potential. Friday Night Lights, one of the best twenty-first century portraits of very key elements of American culture, provided a perfectly fraught Thanksgiving episode in 2010, very much under the shadow of the culture wars and the polarized national debate on abortion. Tami Taylor, one of the main characters, is a principal of a high school in this a small, conservative, Texas town of churchgoers. After she is discovered to have advised a pregnant student to explore her options, guiding her with empathy and a total lack of judgment, Tami is publicly criticized and nearly fired from her job. At Thanksgiving dinner she is in the midst of dealing with the fallout from this incident, which makes the holiday a brief and not completely relaxed respite.  While the subject itself is not discussed at the dinner table, her anxiety over it permeates the evening and she is visibly distracted. This Thanksgiving dinner, as is so often the case in real life, represents a short respite from the battles of the workweek. The next day she is essentially told she is fired, and so decides to leave and work as a counselor at another school, where she is needed and wanted. When she returns home, her husband and daughters are putting up the Christmas lights, in a perfect exhalation and sense of relief.

One of the most touching Thanksgiving episodes in recent years is Denise’s coming out story in a 2017 episode of Master of None, Aziz Ansari’s scripted show on Netflix. The show ran for two seasons, took on some very big issues with humor and insight that showed one can be woke and sensitive and remain funny; its demise is a real loss — it was a cathartic corrective to the Trump presidency, an advancement of so many important conversations. The Thanksgiving episode shows Denise and Dev, who are childhood friends, at the former’s  home over several holiday celebrations, starting when they are about 6 years old. Successive scenes in the episode show the same tableau when they are 12 and 16 years old; it then jumps forward to 2015, 2016, and 2017. Dev is the only male, and the only non African-American at these Thanksgiving tables, over which Denise’s single mother, aunt and grandmother preside. It is a beautiful extended family that gradually, by the very end, grows to include Denise’s partner Michelle. The path there is lovingly charted – and the specific challenges of coming out as gay in the African American community are explored. The “non-conventional” family debunks the notion that they lack anything a traditional nuclear family might offer.



It seems odd that the cultural currency of Thanksgiving is underestimated or unrecognized– it has as captive an audience as is still possible and offers a trope that is so universally familiar. It also sets lower expectations for denouement, as Christmas might, which makes it a better canvas for experimentation or unintended projections. This is why Thanksgiving, the ultimate American holiday, has often been the best means for getting a real sense of the country’s political pulse via popular culture. We are all tuned in, and not because we are preoccupied with impeachment hearings. We just happen to be watching.
    [post_title] => How film and television put last week's Thanksgiving celebration in cultural context
    [post_excerpt] => It's a tradition as old as Hollywood: every year, Thanksgiving scenes are presented on television and in film as a metaphor and an analysis of our cultural moment. 
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How film and television put last week’s Thanksgiving celebration in cultural context

by Yael Friedman

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-28 16:16:18
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    [post_content] => Even peaceful, prosperous Canada is not immune from the populism that thrives on tribal anxiety and prejudice. 

Last week Quebec, Canada’s second most populous province, passed a law that bans public employees from wearing religious symbols at work. Known as Bill 21, the law would force public school teachers, police officers, Crown attorneys, and judges who wear hijabs, turbans, or yarmulkes, to choose between their religion and their profession.

Quebec is not the only democracy to enforce this type of ban in the name of separation of religion and state: France bans Muslim women from wearing a burqini to the beach or a headscarf to teach in public schools; and Turkish law prevented women who wore the hijab from working as public servants or even attending university until 2013.

But Canada’s international reputation is, not unjustifiably, one of tolerance and acceptance. The federal government has pursued a policy of multiculturalism since 1971, and more recently Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set a widely lauded example when he opened Canada’s doors to over 25,000 Syrian refugees.

Across Canada, Quebec’s new law is controversial at best. Legal scholars have suggested that it violates Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, while the city of Brampton in the neighboring province of Ontario has voted to support a legal challenge against the law. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Quebecois — beyond the multicultural city of Montreal — approve of the new law. 

Why do Quebec attitudes toward multiculturalism and religious practice differ so starkly from those held in the rest of Canada? The complex answer is found in Quebec’s post-World War Two history.

During the 1960s Quebec underwent a radical social transformation known as the Quiet Revolution. In a single decade, the once impoverished and largely agrarian province transformed itself from a society dominated and controlled by the Catholic church, which overwhelmingly dictated public mores and laws, to a modern, staunchly secular province that rejected religion and its institutional power. Between 1960 and 1970, Quebec’s birth rate declined from Canada’s highest to its lowest; and its once heavily attended churches are now used as restaurants, gyms, and performance spaces.

The process of secularization applied to all of the province’s public institutions, from its schools and universities to its hospitals and welfare system. It was accompanied by a resurgent national identity that rested on the twin pillars of the French language and secularism. Quebec is today a prosperous middle class society with a comprehensive social welfare system administered by the province rather than by the Church.

Sixty years later, many in Quebec see Bill 21 as the next necessary step in that evolution and an extension of that same social project. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The Quiet Revolution was a peaceful social movement that forever altered Quebec’s political and social landscape. It allowed the French-speaking majority to establish its primacy on the political, social, economic and cultural stage at both the provincial and the federal level. But the current movement is not about promoting the rights of the majority. Rather, by seeking to establish secularism as part of Quebec’s national identity, the provincial government is sacrificing the rights of the province’s minorities. A movement that was once about positive self-affirmation is now simply a reactionary rejection of others.

Ignoring its critics and refusing to debate, the government’s center-right Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), led by Premier François Legault, rammed Bill 21 through the legislature by preemptively invoking Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is a rarely-used override power often referred to as the “notwithstanding” clause. In other words, the CAQ circumvented both the Quebec and Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, thus preventing the new law from being struck down in court for the next five years. It also shut down debate by invoking closure, and by introducing last-minute amendments that outline surveillance powers for the ministry and rules of enforcement.

The secularism championed by Quebec’s Quiet Revolution stemmed from a deep-rooted and understandable desire by the French-speaking majority to rid itself of the Catholic Church’s asphyxiating control over the government and reaffirm its proud transformation into a modern, secular French-speaking state. In sharp contrast, Bill 21, a far more restrictive form of secularism imported from France, is primarily motivated by Quebecers’ antipathy for religion — primarily non-Christian faiths. This is not religious neutrality: it is religious persecution. The overwhelmingly white French speakers of Quebec are succumbing to anti-Muslim prejudice.

The populist CAQ tapped into this prejudice during the November 2018 election campaign; it now bases many of its legislative decisions on people’s fears rather than on facts.

Bill 21 is a response to the zeitgeist. The fear of Muslims that started with 9/11 spread to Quebec, bringing with it the impression that the government was making too many concessions to religious minorities. In 2006, Quebec created a special commission to study the “reasonable accommodation” of cultural minorities’ religious practices, in response to the perception that religion was making a comeback in the public sphere. In 2013, the Parti Quebecois, the nationalist party that ascended to power on the back of the Quiet Revolution in the mid-1970s, attempted to implement their questionably named Charter of Quebec Values, which sought to ban “ostentatious” religious symbols. The initiative failed miserably and the party was defeated by the Liberals. In 2015, Quebec’s Liberal government introduced their own version of secularism in Bill 62, which would prevent Muslim women wearing a burqa or a niqab from receiving government services. That, too, failed.

In 2019, Premier Legault’s government decided to circumvent the democratic process and put an end to long-standing debates on how to accommodate cultural minorities, by basically not bothering to accommodate them at all. His party’s goal is a homogeneous public face.

Legault, who denies that systemic racism or Islamophobia exist in Quebec, readily admitted in an interview with Radio Canada, Canada’s French-language public broadcaster, that Bill 21 “was a concession to people who are a little racist and don’t want to see religious symbols anywhere in public.” In a follow-up televised interview with the English-language CBC, Legault side-stepped the question of whether he felt empathy for a public school teacher who would have to remove her hijab if she wanted to keep her job. 

Exclusionary populism is defined by pandering to irrational fears and “solving” non-existent problems. Quebec has seen no incidents of religious proselytism or registered any complaint of bias by a public servant wearing a visible religious symbol. And yet hate crimes against Muslims have increased. Only three years ago, Alexandre Bissonnette entered a Quebec City mosque and gunned down six worshippers. 

In a brazen display of hypocrisy, the same Quebec government that demands concessions from people who wear visible religious signs has decided that schools and hospitals will not have to remove the crucifixes from their walls because they’re classified as “heritage” items. Private schools, most of which are Christian, are also exempt from Bill 21. In the meantime, a crucifix still hangs on the walls of the National Assembly and most schools and city streets are still named after Christian saints. 

Despite the CAQ’s insistence that the new law is meant to further Quebec’s commitment to secularism, a recent poll clearly points to prejudice against Muslims as the main motivator. Numerous French-language columnists and TV shows routinely discuss the “Muslim invasion” and a need for Quebecers to reassert themselves “before its too late.”

Meanwhile, Quebec’s largest French-language school board has announced that it will not apply the religious symbols law until it studies it further. The English School Board of Montreal has also said it will not comply with the law, although the government insists that it will not accept any delays. Civil liberties and Muslim groups have already vowed to challenge the bill and have filed an injunction in Quebec Superior Court, where a hearing is scheduled for July.

Bill 21 might feel like a win for the Legault government and its supporters, but it has created a divisive and contentious social climate. The legislation has been met with many legal challenges and by stinging criticism around the world. It could lead to a brain drain, as people who feel unwelcome in Quebec decide to live elsewhere. The CAQ might soon discover this “win” is more akin to a smugly defiant Pyrrhic victory.

In many ways, the legislation is an unfortunate manifestation of increasing concerns over immigration and its impact on Quebec’s national identity. But populism, which often seeks to provide simplistic solutions to complex problems and encroaching fears, is all the rage these days and certainly not unique to Quebec. From Brexit in the U.K., to The League in Italy, to Trumpism in the U.S., to Marine Le Pen in France, homogenous majorities struggle to come to terms with increasing diversity and religious plurality. In a 2005 opinion piece for The Times, Salman Rushdie writes:

In the age of mass migration and the internet, cultural plurality is an irreversible fact. Like it or dislike it, it’s where we live, and the dream of a pure monoculture is at best an unattainable, nostalgic fantasy and at worst a life-threatening menace.

The shifting relationship between nationalism, religion, and secularism continues to inform current debates about Quebec’s identity. Unfortunately, the deep-seated anxiety French-speaking Quebecers feel about their demographic future has caused it to justify exercising the same dogmatic social control on people’s appearance and way of life that, ironically, the Church once held.
    [post_title] => In Quebec, a new law forces minorities to choose between their religion and their profession
    [post_excerpt] => Despite the government' insistence that the new law is meant to further Quebec’s commitment to secularism, a recent poll clearly points to prejudice against Muslims as the main motivator. 
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In Quebec, a new law forces minorities to choose between their religion and their profession

by Toula Drimonis

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-21 17:23:28
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    [post_content] => America's foreign policy and international image would be improved if the foreign policy community were more diverse.

I am a black man in America, which means I am physically vulnerable all the time. The United States leads the world in police killings of its own black and brown citizens, and ranks first in incarcerating them. Its education system disproportionately funnels black children through the school to prison pipeline. Millions of people  — many of them black — are disenfranchised from voting because they served time in jail for felonies. In many cases they never regain their right to participate  in American democracy. Despite all these obvious and well-documented injustices, the white majority believes America has the moral pedigree to tell the rest of the world how to handle its own internal affairs. 

This attitude among white Americans speaks to an astonishing lack of self-awareness. The people who dominate and shape global conversations in the western and English-speaking world — think tank presidents, diplomats, foreign correspondents, and business executives  — are almost exclusively white men. They have no experience of the America I grew up in, and this limits their ability to understand the world. 

 As a black man who grew up in Detroit and then spent a good part of his adult life traveling and reporting in Eastern Europe, I have learned that white supremacy and imperialism are the same. The difference is that one is global while the other is domestic. Africa is least responsible for global warming but suffers most of its consequences, which are caused by the world’s leading powers. This is the type of visceral understanding gained from lived experience that the white men who dominate and shape the foreign policy conversation do not have. Their understanding of the world is thus limited, and the consequences are becoming increasingly clear: the American conversation about the world lacks nuance and insight; this undermines our ability to engage effectively — which, in turn, weakens both our own society and our place in the world.

I welcome the conversations about the need for more ethnic diversity in foreign policy conversations. I am glad that people are beginning to understand that with more diverse voices, America could develop a foreign policy that was less expansionist in its global engagement. Unfortunately, however, these conversations are predicated on inaccurate beliefs.

A flawed democracy

America is not the world’s most successful democracy; nor is it an example for the world to follow. Its own legal system has kept black people from gaining any real electoral power at the local and national levels. In Florida alone, more than a million people convicted of felonies were disenfranchised from voting before a November referendum restored their rights; the current governor is trying to slow the restoration process. This is not a system to export. It is a system that must be changed.

If America’s white majority were truly interested in making sure that non-white voices were included in foreign policy discussions, they would first work to stop the disenfranchisement of people of color. Nor are teachers with unchecked racial biases qualified to shape the minds of the next generation of foreign policy thinkers.

Besides its many misguided military interventions, such as the now widely-reviled Second Iraq War, the U.S. also has a long-documented history of allowing its intelligence service to carry out assassinations against world leaders whose policies deviate from the administration’s. In the twentieth century the CIA backed the assassination of elected leaders like Chile’s Salvador Allende because he was a socialist, and helped engineer the coup that deposed Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh because he wanted to nationalize his country’s oil reserves. 

The United States is accustomed to implementing its foreign policy via the barrel of a gun, which makes a twisted kind of sense for the most gun-toting country on earth with the second-highest number of gun-related murders of any industrialized nation. But if the United States wants to be an example to the world it must change its gun laws and change its ways. It must ban the sale and distribution of military grade weapons to law enforcement agencies that treat the communities they are supposed to serve like enemy combatants. 

There is a saying in journalism that all politics is local. I’d argue that international politics is local and it's impossible to deploy a diverse diplomatic corps if so many potential non-white recruits are disenfranchised or jailed.

I write for The Root, the largest black news site in America. I have the rare opportunity of covering national politics from the perspective of a black person with a black editor. I do not have to deal with a white male editor who might try to change my voice or question my using personal experiences to inform my reporting. I love working at The Root, but my ambition is to be a foreign correspondent. I have two graduate degrees in journalism and another in Russia area studies; I speak two Eastern European languages and can point to many other achievements. But I have never been invited to an interview for any foreign reporting job. 

An editor at a mainstream newspaper once told me that I wasn’t qualified to write about U.S.-Russia/Ukraine relations because I was not a diplomat. This same publication has hired white people without any relevant credentials for foreign reporting positions. One of the recurring claims one hears in foreign policy circles is there aren’t enough qualified people of color to fill open positions. And yet, despite my qualifications, I cannot find a job as a foreign correspondent.

Hypocrisy won't win hearts and minds

The lack of diverse voices in international news has a profound  impact on the coverage of countries like Russia, China, Nigeria and Ukraine. The foreign press corps in Moscow and Kiev are almost exclusively white. I am quite confident that the reporting from those regions would be richer and more nuanced if half the press corps were composed of black and brown reporters who had personal experiences of immigration and of police abuse.

In the United States the coverage of Russia over the past two years has been weak. Analysts have focused on Putin, at the expense of nuanced reporting about ordinary Russians. Our media has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to blame the Kremlin for the fact that millions of Americans decided to vote a white supremacist into the White House, even as they have refused to engage in a serious conversation about the white supremacy that played a far greater role in getting Donald Trump elected than Putin could have done.

Incorporating more ethnically diverse people into foreign policy spaces goes well beyond cherry picking brown faces that seem non-threatening to sit at the table. If the U.S. is to pursue an honest, effective foreign policy, it needs to recruit people who are willing to break from the neo-liberalism that underlies the racism in contemporary American society.

There is transparent hypocrisy in insisting that Russia remove its troops from Ukraine while threatening military intervention in Iran. America regularly condemns Russia and other nations over their abuse of LGBTQ people, even as black trans women in America are murdered at alarming rates. 

Why diversity is important

Too many of our white diplomats are blind to this hypocrisy, because they are the products of an America that was built by and for them. There are too few people like me representing the United States at the table of global affairs, and this undermines the effectiveness of its foreign policy. Take Haiti, for example. Under the expansionist Monroe Doctrine, the United States deployed Marines to the island in 1915 to fend off German influence during World War I. But instead of helping to protect Haiti’s independence, the U.S. occupied the Caribbean country until 1934, exacerbating the theft of resources and political instability caused by French colonization. More recent U.S. policy towards Haiti hasn’t been much better. During the 1970s and 1980s successive administrations supported the violent  regime of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, while Donald Trump stripped Haitians in the United States of their Temporary Protected Status and made them vulnerable to deportation. 

House Democrats have held hearings on reparations for the descendants of slaves who were brought to America from Africa. The conversation needs to go global in the case of Haiti, with a hearing to address reparations for that country — or, better yet, a Marshall Plan.

What is good for Europe is good for Haiti. 

Americans see their country as a global cop enforcing democracy around the world, but Putin, Kim Jong-un, China’s President Xi and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei see a state with dubious motives and a narcissistic worldview.

I am working to diversify the international affairs conversation through my fellowship at Global Strategists Association, a non-profit organization that helps people from the black diaspora to engage in foreign policy spaces. Most of our events are held in spaces that are majority people of color, and look at domestic and global issues through the lens of blackness. Founder Apprecia Faulkner created the organization after encountering obstacles that prevented her from persuading white-dominated organizations to open up for black participants. I and other fellows are benefiting from her efforts, but the fact that she had to build that space illustrates the problem: America’s foreign policy circles are not interested in being as diverse as the image of America they sell to the world. 

The United States needs to carry out a major makeover of its domestic politics so that it is committed to all of its citizens, and not just the white ones. Only then can America truly promote an honest foreign policy that is not predicated on exploiting the world’s most vulnerable people — which is precisely what it does to its own minority groups at home. 
    [post_title] => America's foreign policy is undermined by the dominance of white men
    [post_excerpt] => There is a saying in journalism that all politics is local. I’d argue that international politics is local and it's impossible to deploy a diverse diplomatic corps if so many potential non-white recruits are disenfranchised or jailed.
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America’s foreign policy is undermined by the dominance of white men

by Terrell J. Starr

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    [post_date] => 2019-05-24 16:42:49
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    [post_content] => "The past is never dead. It is not even past."
—William Faulkner

Did you ever wonder why the American education system only gets serious about foreign languages in high school, while the rest of the world seems to start sometime before kindergarten? It’s not by accident, of course. In America, the attitude toward bilingualism has historically been uneasy at best. The tremendous cultural pressure on immigrants to assimilate and to speak English, presents a problem for ethnic and national groups committed to maintaining their own languages and cultural identity beyond the first and second generations.

When a growing Yiddish after school program asked the Milwaukee public school system for use of one of its buildings, it was a local rabbi who went on the record to protest the Yiddish program. “There is altogether too much hyphenism in our present Americanism…” said Rabbi Samuel Hirschberg. He added that foreign language education was wrong because “A foreign language as a household language tends to perpetuate foreignism…” Hirschberg insisted that foreign languages were so corrosive to the American national spirit that no foreign language should be taught before high school.

That was in 1916. Rabbi Hirschberg’s curious campaign to discourage Jewish literacy points to two important facts that tend to be in tension. First, bi- and even tri-lingualism has always been tied to American Jewish identity, both as an immigrant group and a diasporic people. Second, the discourse around bilingualism in America is in large part a function of attitudes toward immigrants. Between 1881 and 1924 some 2.5 million Jews immigrated from Eastern and Central Europe. By the time Rabbi Hirschberg went on the record, the popular conversation around immigrants, especially Jews, had reached unprecedented heights of ugly xenophobia. Less than a decade later, in 1924, Congress passed legislation that would essentially cut off all immigration from Europe, including Jewish immigration.

The persistence of bilingual culture

The case of Rabbi Hirschberg shows that the question of bilingualism was a complicated one, and that the conversations happening in the mainstream were also happening within the Jewish community.

But bilingual (Yiddish-English) Jewish communal life did persist in the United States, and well past its expected life span. In 1933, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, Hillel Rogoff, the managing editor of the most widely-read Yiddish newspaper in the United States, the Jewish Daily Forward, was asked about the future of the Yiddish press in America. Despite widely-held views that Yiddish was a dying language, Rogoff was optimistic. “There is no reason,” he said, “why the Yiddish press in America should not go on for many, many years…”

Today, at 122 years of continuous publishing, the Yiddish language Forverts newspaper has already outlived the traditional Yiddish blessing, “may you live until 120.” The history of Forverts reflects a mixture of enormous communal investment, dumb luck and, in the end, the overwhelming power of monolingualism. In that sense, for newer diasporic groups hoping to maintain an identity tied to a heritage language, the Forverts provides an important case study.

In the United States, maintaining an immigrant language and cultural tradition requires an act of tremendous will and coordinated community action. What’s so unique about the persistence of Forverts — which is still published to this day, albeit in a very diminished format — is not just that it defied the two-generation life span for immigrant media, but that it did so in spite of itself. The Forverts was itself a force for Americanization.

Established in 1897 at the peak of mass Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, Forverts’s most famous sections were aimed at helping new immigrants assimilate. A Bintl Brif (A Bundle of Letters) was one of the first American newspaper advice columns. It provided guidance on many of the dilemmas of Americanization, including, most poignantly, the cultural gap that inevitably arose between Yiddish speaking parents and bilingual American children, many of whom were ashamed of their foreign parents.

The Yiddish of Forverts was also highly ‘Americanized,’ employing many transliterated English words. Perhaps most importantly, given American political attitudes, while The Forverts was a proudly socialist publication, it was vigorously anti-Communist. The Yiddish paper of record managed to thread the needle of politically acceptable cultural autonomy.

The Forverts was always more than a newspaper. It was part of a wide-ranging, interconnected network of Yiddish flavored, socialist and labor oriented institutions that included WEVD radio, Amalgamated Bank, the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx, a mutual aid society called the Workmen’s Circle, and a summer camp and after school education system that still exist today. 

At its height, the Forverts parent entity, the Forward Association, was a political machine, an organization with a constitution that spelled out expectations for members to vote along party lines, or risk disciplinary action that included expulsion.

Taken together, the Forverts was a symbol of an urban, all-encompassing model of Jewish life in America. It was explicitly built by and for its members and readers, and that sense of ownership continued to reverberate through later generations, even if in a diminished, distanced way.  

Xenophobia redux

Coordinated anti-immigrant hysteria brought an end to the great era of Jewish mass migration, with the passing of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. Unfortunately, we are now seeing a resurgence of the ugly xenophobia that was such a salient feature of American life during the 1920s and 1930s. According to a recent Pew Foundation survey, almost one third of Americans feel uncomfortable merely hearing a language other than English in public. The irony is, for all the outrage about immigrants and their supposed resistance to assimilation, the process of Americanization is absolutely relentless and no group is immune to the inevitability of language loss.  

First generation immigrants to the United States generally learn English slowly. They depend on media in their native language, which they continue to speak at home. Second generation Americans are bilingual and may or may not be attached to the immigrant language and its institutions. Third generation Americans are, almost without exception, monolingual.

Many of the institutions created by the first generation of Yiddish-speaking immigrants still exist. While the WEVD radio station was sold to Disney, Amalgamated Bank and the Amalgamated Houses still stand. The Workmen’s Circle has created a new identity for itself in the twenty-first century, one that is different from its origins as a mutual aid society, but still centered on an understanding of American Jews as immigrants and descendants of immigrants. 

But those institutions, for all their longevity, did not create a legacy of contemporary Yiddish speakers. While the Workmen’s Circle offers superb and innovative Yiddish language classes for adults, it faces nearly insurmountable challenges in monolingual America. Providing systematic Yiddish language education for children was an exceedingly difficult proposition, given both the financial cost and the pull of assimilation. The Holocaust decimated Yiddish culture in Europe, reducing its native-speaking population by 85%. Today, outside of the Hasidic communities, Yiddish is spoken by only a small number of Jewish Americans. Many of them are people like me and my friends, residents of what we affectionately call Yiddishland.

The will to preserve a culture

So what are the twenty-first century strategies for creating fluent second and third generation heritage language speakers? According to my Yiddishland friends who are now parents, supplementary and all-day schools (which also exist for Russian, Chinese and Hungarian) have proven highly effective — if extremely expensive — for language transmission, especially where a first generation parent speaks the language at home. But it remains to be seen whether those schools alone can inspire the second generation to transmit to the third, the true challenge in monolingual America.

On this question of the third generation I turned to a young friend of mine, Shifra Whiteman. As a child in the 1990s, Whiteman was part of a small Yiddish-language playgroup called Pripetshik.  The group was created by a dedicated group of second-generation parents invested in Yiddish continuity. Pripetshik met in the Workmen’s Circle building in New York and lasted for years, morphing into a Yiddish chorus and producing lifelong friendships. As adults Whiteman, and the other members of the playgroup, have gone on to become activists and leaders in the Yiddish world.

The playgroup wasn’t just about teaching a language. It included cooking sessions, movies and history lessons. Pripetshik was about transmitting a very specific diasporic Jewish identity. Its location in the Workmen’s Circle building, a few floors down from the Forverts, was an important part of the lesson, showing the kids that they existed within an ongoing cultural project.  

In addition to her Yiddish playgroup, Whiteman also received a conventional Jewish day school education as well as many summers at Zionist summer camp. She recently started teaching Yiddish classes in cooperation with her city’s YIVO and Workmen’s Circle branches. Her students are almost entirely young people hungry for connection to an alternative kind of Jewish identity, one that is not rooted in nationalism or political ideology. At 30, she is ready to start thinking about children of her own, and plans to speak Yiddish with them, just as her parents spoke to her. As she put it to me, among the many Jewish worlds she inhabited as a young person, “the Yiddish stuck.”  

There are no easy answers to the question of how to preserve immigrant cultures and languages in the face of America’s fierce devotion to monolingualism. However, it’s clear that the success of multi-generational cultural transmission will depend on the durability of institutions, and whether the language and culture express values that the following generations find useful, and essential, to their sense of self. The Forverts was a newspaper for immigrants who wanted to become American. Today, many of its readers are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants, people who want to expand the definition of American and once again redefine Jewish life in the diaspora.
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Make bilingualism great

by Rokhl Kafrissen

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