Radio: Demanding a just peace in Ukraine and the abolition of all war

Posted on March 29, 2022 by Scott

Sakura Saunders and Rachel Small are long-time organizers with experience in a range of movements. Both are active with World Beyond War, a decentralized global network with the goal not just of opposing the war of the day but of abolishing the institution of war. Scott Neigh interviews them about the organization’s work globally and in Canada, about their war abolitionist politics, and about what their members and supporters have been doing to demand peace in Ukraine.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has horrified people around the world and has, quite rightly, been widely condemned. But in the inevitably polarized and propaganda-laden wartime media environment, it has been remarkably difficult to go beyond that. Far too often, the justified revulsion at the invasion and the admirable compassion for its victims displayed by so many people are being used by Western states and elites to justify actions that risk further escalation. There is little space to ask what Western governments, corporations, and elites have done to contribute to this crisis; little space to talk about the need for de-escalation and about what a just and peaceful resolution might look like; and little space to go from there to larger questions about what it might look like to abolish war, militarism, and empire, and to move towards – as the name of the organization that is the focus of today’s episode suggests – a world beyond war.

Founded in 2014 out of conversations among long-time anti-war organizers in the United States and globally, the organization currently has 22 chapters in a dozen countries, with hundreds of affiliate organizations as well as many thousands of individual members and supporters across more than 190 countries. It really started to grow in the Canadian context after it held its annual global conference in Toronto a few years ago. Saunders, based in Mi’kmaw territory in Halifax, is a board member of World Beyond War. Small lives in Toronto, in the Dish with One Spoon territory, and is the Canada organizer for World Beyond War.

Globally, the organization operates as a decentralized network with a focus on building power at the local level, though with three overarching priorities. One of these priorities is a commitment to political education related to war and militarism. This includes the organization’s resource-rich website, as well as all kinds of events and activities, including book clubs, teach-ins, webinars, and even multi-week courses. With the knowledge and skills thus gained, they actively encourage people to get active around issues of war and militarism in whatever ways and with whatever focus fits their local situation. As well, the organization has a global campaign working with communities impacted by militarism for the closure of particularly US military bases, which can be found in so many countries around the world. And they work to defund war – that is, to shift spending by governments away from weapons and other aspects of militarism.

In Canada, along with its education work and support for autonomous local action by chapters and individuals, World Beyond War is very involved in working with other local and national organizations on a couple of campaigns. One is the opposition to the proposals by the federal government to spend billions and billions of dollars purchasing new fighter jets and new naval frigates for the Canadian military. Another works against Canada’s role as an arms exporter – particularly the sale of billions of dollars worth of light-armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia, given their ultimate use in the devastating Saudi-led war on Yemen. They have also been involved in solidarity with Indigenous peoples like the Wet’suwet’en in opposition to ongoing violent colonization by the Canadian state, in opposition to Canada’s membership in NATO, and in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

As for the current war in Ukraine, there have been dozens of anti-war actions organized across Canada since the invasion, some involving World Beyond War chapters and members. The organization unequivocally opposes the Russian invasion. They also oppose NATO expansion, and seek to understand how the government of Canada and others in the West have been complicit in escalating the crisis. Small said, “If the last, I don’t know, 60 [or] 70 years of history demonstrates anything, it’s that literally the last thing that’s likely to minimize suffering and bloodshed is military action by NATO.”

Small is very aware of the way that the desire to help people who are facing invasion can be used to draw people at a distance from the conflict into supporting actions that will ultimately do more harm. She said, “When people are really seeing the devastating impacts of war on the ground and wanting to respond in solidarity and with compassion, it’s very easy to fall into imperialist tropes or to really want to simplify the situation. But I think this is really such a critical time for the anti-war movement to continue to oppose imperialism, and to challenge that propaganda that’s trying to legitimize it.”

For Saunders, the key point is evaluating any potential intervention, into this war or any war, “in terms of escalation or de-escalation.” Once we do that, “it becomes more clear how we should engage. And we need to engage – we need to actively engage. Because, of course, we need to force Russia into, you know, stopping. But how can we do that in ways that are simultaneously de-escalating the conflict?” World Beyond War is calling for a diplomatic solution. They oppose supplying arms to either side and they are against the use of sanctions that would predictably cause harm to ordinary people, though they support highly targeted sanctions against powerful individuals. As well, they are calling for support for refugees from this conflict and from all other wars around the world.

Small continued, “We can show solidarity with people suffering from this war in Ukraine without also being nationalist … We don’t have to rely on holding, expressing our solidarity with, the flag of a state, of any state. It shouldn’t be the Ukrainian flag, it shouldn’t be the Canadian flag. But how do we do this work in a way that’s based on real internationalism, on real global solidarity?”

In addition, they encourage everyone horrified by events in Ukraine to make the connections to the broader institutions of war, militarism, and empire, and to work for their abolition. Small said, “We definitely welcome everyone to join us in the struggle for abolition, whether this is something you’ve been thinking about and organizing around for a long time, or whether this is something that’s coming up for you just now. So that’s the struggle against all wars, all militarism, the whole military industrial complex. And right now is such a key moment, of course, to be standing in solidarity with all of the people in Ukraine who are facing imperialist invasion and enormous violence. But next week, we’ll continue to be organizing alongside Palestinians, Yemenis, Tigrayans, Afghans – alongside everyone facing war and military and violence. And to hold that broader context in their mind, to hold in solidarity everyone who’s who’s facing war right now, I think is is a really important re-framing for people to do right now.”

Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Wikimedia.

Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

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Radio: How grassroots community-based initiatives changed due to COVID-19

Posted on March 22, 2022 by Scott

Sarah Switzer, Andrea Vela Alarcón, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez, and Casey Burkholder all have long histories of involvement in a range of grassroots, community-based work, and they are also researchers in academic and professional settings. Scott Neigh interviews them about Beyond the Toolkit, a research project in which they worked with people involved in community facilitation, community arts, community-based participatory research, and related work to understand how they were adapting to the drastic changes imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and to develop tools to support them.

People do grassroots, community-based work with a lot of different ends in mind – organizing, research, arts, community development, education, and lots of other things. All of these involve bringing people together to do things collectively, whether that is about sharing ideas, making decisions, creating something, planning something, taking action, or something else. People who are not involved in grassroots activities, and unfortunately even lots of people who are, sometimes fail to recognize how much skilled, deliberate, people-focused labour is required to make it successful – it may or may not be done by someone in some sort of formal role, like a designated organizer or facilitator or educator, but it is always part of what happens. As you can imagine, this kind of work has its own challenges and obstacles at the best of times. But as with so much else, it suddenly had to be completely re-thought when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020 and gathering in person became too dangerous.

Sarah Switzer is currently a senior researcher with the Centre for Community Based Research, and at the time of the work discussed in today’s episode she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Youth Research Lab at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in Toronto. At that point, Andrea Vela Alarcón was a grad student in the Youth Research Lab. Casey Burkholder is an associate professor at the University of New Brunswick. And Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez is a professor at OISE and director of the Youth Research Lab.

Switzer started her postdoc at OISE just before the pandemic. Her plan had been to create a project that would bring together grassroots facilitators and other community-based practitioners to have nuanced conversations about their work and social justice. With the chaos caused by COVID, however, there were suddenly a whole host of newly urgent questions that people doing grassroots work were scrambling to answer. So Switzer changed gears, and she, the rest of today’s interview participants, and a number of other people created Beyond the Toolkit.

They brought together people doing a range of grassroots, community-focused work to talk about how they were adapting their practices to the circumstances of the pandemic in the context of having to do everything in online or remote ways. Though technically focus groups, according to Switzer, these gatherings “were really kind of like interactive workshops, which were equal measure discussion, troubleshooting, [and] sharing ideas.” People talked about both the challenges they were facing and what they had come up with to navigate them. The conversations ranged across the logistical, ethical, political, and pedagogical issues involved.

Then the project team transcribed the recordings of the sessions and analyzed them. They used the collective insight those conversations generated to produce resources that could in turn support grassroots work in these new and difficult circumstances.

A primary aim for the project team was making sure that their findings and the tools they created based on those findings would be useful to people actually doing grassroots work on the ground. That meant, for one thing, working quickly – community need was urgent in the early pandemic period, and there was not time to wait for the much slower pace at which academic work often happens. It meant making sure that the findings and tools were easily accessible. And it meant making sure they were framed in open ways, so it would be easy for people to take up, interpret, and adapt them to a wide range of circumstances. One way that they did this was by using visual elements as both a tool of analysis and a way of sharing their findings, in the form of illustrations done by Vela Alarcón. According to Gaztambide-Fernandez, they really want “to invite people to interact with the images and to make their own meaning” from them and the accompanying text.

Both the findings and the tools are available on the Beyond the Toolkit website.

Though the pandemic continues, circumstances have shifted from the abrupt changes and rigid restrictions of its early months. But today’s guests are clear that there is no going back – online and remote work will continue to play a much larger role in grassroots community settings than they did before COVID.

According to Gaztambide-Fernandez, “I don’t think that the end of the pandemic, if we arrive at that moment, is going to make these tools irrelevant. My sense from talking to people is that online interaction is here to stay.” Switzer agreed, saying, “The context has shifted so much, but I think the the considerations are absolutely still relevant.” And they hope that the findings and resources of Beyond the Toolkit will continue to be useful for years to come.

Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Pixabay / Alexandra_Koch.

Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

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Radio: Indigenous-led water protection in the North

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Scott

Jesse Cardinal is a Métis woman who lives in Treaty 6 territory and is the executive director of Keepers of the Water, an Indigenous-led organization with a mission of protecting the water in the Arctic drainage basin. Scott Neigh interviews her about the threat posed by the Alberta tar sands and other resource extraction, and about the organization’s work.

Cardinal grew up in a Métis settlement in Alberta. Her upbringing was very land-based, from what her family ate to how they lived to the values they instilled in her. She said, “We grew up on the land. So when I was a kid, we didn’t have running water, we didn’t have gas to heat our home, it was a wood stove. We got our water from a well or from the streams. … I will never forget the taste of that water. Never. Because it was so cold and clean and fresh tasting. There wasn’t any chemicals in it. So I know that, I’ve lived that, I know what it tastes like. Maybe that impacted me at that age.”

Keepers of the Water was founded in 2006. The territory its work covers – the Arctic drainage basin – is a truly massive expanse of land, spanning parts of all three territories as well as perhaps half of Alberta and northern areas in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. The most significant threats to the watersheds in this territory involve resource extraction. That takes many forms, and certainly includes the many different kinds of mining scattered across the north as well as logging. But the single largest threat is the resource extraction taking place in the context of the Alberta tar sands.

The majority of the tar sands are located in areas that drain into the Athabasca and Peace Rivers, which flow through the Slave River and Great Slave Lake, into the Mackenzie River – also called the Deh-Cho by the Dene people – and ultimately the Arctic Ocean. The drainage system that flows through the Deh-Cho is the longest in Canada, and it is the second largest drainage basin in North America after the Mississippi. Because of the threat posed by the tar sands and by other resource extraction in this territory, it is this part of the overall Arctic drainage basin that has been the greatest focus for Keepers of the Water.

Back in 2006, the boom-and-bust cycles inherent to extraction-based economies were in a boom phase in Alberta and the Northwest Territories. As Cardinal put it, “There was massive resource extraction happening … and the people on the land were feeling it.” People who live in land-based ways on these territories were seeing things like declines in animal populations, changed and confused animal behaviours, and changes in berries, medicines, and other plants as well.

Of particular significance was the reduced water level of the Athabasca River, related to the diversion of water by the tar sands industry. Indigenous communities downstream on the Athabasca depend on it for transportation, and the levels were low enough that their ability to get to where they needed to go during the fall hunting and harvesting season were significantly impacted.

In response to all of these concerns, an initiative led by Dene people in 2006 brought together elders and community members from a number of northern peoples to discuss them. They ended up issuing what has become known as the Keepers of the Water Declaration: “Water is a Sacred gift, an essential element that sustains and connects all life. It is not a commodity to be bought or sold. All people share an obligation to cooperate in ensuring that Water, in all its forms, is protected and conserved with regard to the needs of all living things today and for the generations yet to come.” This was the start of a process involving a series of meetings and conversations that ultimately resulted in the founding of Keepers of the Water.

According to Cardinal, there was an initial impulse to avoid creating a formal organization, but those guiding the process eventually decided that it was a necessary compromise to be able to bring to bear the right kinds of resources to do the kinds of consistent work that the situation requires.

That work has spanned a broad range over the years. Raising awareness of the environmental impacts of the tar sands – from the wholesale destruction of wetlands during the bitumen mining itself to the many risks posed to downstream communities and ecosystems – has been an important element of that work all along. The organization was, for instance, centrally involved in the tar sands healing walks that took place several times in the early 2010s. Today, a key priority for them is stopping the proposal to dump the contents of tar sands tailings ponds into the Athabasca River. Companies claim the tailings will be treated, but Carindal said, “Even when treated, they’re still toxic. They are not safe to be anywhere near the Athabasca River.”

Keepers of the Water also organizes regular educational events, gatherings, and conferences. Their recent work includes attention to food security, which is tightly bound up with questions of water quality and quantity, and they have put considerable effort into exploring alternative economies. They have been pushing for Indigenous involvement in the Canada Water Agency, proposed by the federal government in late 2020. And their longer term goals include following examples from other parts of the world to get legal recognition of personhood for the Deh-Cho from the settler legal system.

When it comes to addressing the multiple, overlapping ecological crises that the world faces, Cardinal said, “There is no sustainable future without land-based practices. … Indigenous people have these answers, they have these solutions, they’re still living on the land, they’re still living the way we were intended to live.”

And she added, “We want to be able to continue living our land-based life. We want our land. And when we say ‘landback’, we’re not trying to kick everybody off and, you know, send them away. It’s like, we only have 2% of all of the land in Canada, and we’re helping protect the entire planet. And in order for us to do that, we need more landback.”

Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Flickr / sf-dvs.

Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

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Radio: Feminist organizing by high school students

Posted on March 8, 2022 by Scott

Emma Clark and Hayley Bryant are grade 12 students at Western Canada High School in Calgary, Alberta. Scott Neigh interviews them about the feminist organizing they do as members of a group at their school called the Committee on the Status of Women and Girls (CSWAG).

The experiences of high school among young women and other gender-oppressed people today are both very different and sadly similar to those a generation or two in the past. On the one hand, there has been remarkable technological, cultural, and political change over the last 50 years – at least some of which has been driven by feminist and other justice-oriented struggles from at least the late 1960s. On the other hand, as important as those past victories were, a lot of the challenges that young women face in high school are still very related to what their mothers and grandmothers faced, even if the details differ.

Bryant identified, for instance, a “general level of misogyny that’s accepted” and a kind of broad questioning of women’s accounts of their own experiences. Today’s guests also talk about a lack of representation of material by and about women, especially racialized women, in curriculum, and a lack of discussion of ideas central to naming the experiences and struggles of women in all of their diversity. Perhaps most crucially, is the ongoing, pervasive reality of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault – in lots of gendered configurations, yes, but most often experienced by women and girls and most often perpetrated by cisgender men – and a lack of adequate educational and institutional resources to respond to that.

For Clark, as a young girl she derived a lot of her confidence from her knowledge and intelligence. Then, in her early teens, she started to be treated very differently – to be given the message from all manner of sources that really what mattered was her appearance and her ability to fulfill certain narrow scripts expected of young women. And when the #MeToo movement began to receive mainstream attention in 2017, with its public revelation of pervasive sexual harassment and abuse faced by women in Hollywood and in so many other industries, it “really upset” Clark and made her even more conscious of gendered injustices.

On the first day of school in September 2020, Clark asked one of her friends where she needed to go to sign up for the feminist club at their school, and was shocked to discover that there was no such thing – nor did such a thing exist in any other high school in Calgary, either. So the two of them set out to found one. “It was kind of a no-brainer for us to get it started,” Clark said.

That process involved pitching the idea to their school administration, which was very supportive, and setting up a process for interested students to apply to be part of the group.

They received a lot of applications, including one from Bryant. She comes from a very politically active family, and one of her grandmothers had a high-profile career in government, which helped Bryant appreciate the barriers women face in public life. And she, too, at a certain point became very aware of issues of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault, and the lack of space to discuss them. She had been working as an individual since she was in junior high to try to get consent education included as part of the curriculum in Alberta, and she jumped at the chance to do feminist work in a collective context.

In founding CSWAG, they very deliberately decided that it would not just be a student club, but a formal committee with by-laws, subcommittees, and all the rest. There were a number of reasons for this, including wanting to have an organization that would endure after the current leaders graduate. Most importantly, though, it was a strategic choice “trying to make the committee sound as formal as possible so people would take us seriously,” according to Clark, to push back against the ways in which both feminist concerns and the voices of young women are so often trivialized and dismissed.

Addressing sexual harassment and assault has been the group’s main focus so far. According to Bryant, “There had been protests all around Calgary regarding the lack of support for sexual assault survivors and the lack of consent education, [so] CSWAG knew that we had to do something about it.”

One of the subcommittees leads this effort. The other subcommittees – which engage in education, research, outreach, and communication respectively – coordinate their work in the context of this focus, while producing broader materials as well. They write articles and produce their own social media resources on feminist topics like intersectionality, rape culture, and consent. They have compiled a list of local resources for sexual assault survivors. They have created a website. And they worked with the administration to get the school to offer a Gender Studies course next year.

Currently, they are raising funds for a local women’s shelter and have been doing an educational campaign around sexual assault. In March, they are bringing a speaker from a local feminist organization to the school to speak about consent, which they hope will be a prelude to mandatory consent education for all students in the school in future years. Over the longer term, they want to see a broader effort to get consent into the provincial curriculum, and they are keen to support the founding of feminist student groups at other high schools.

They remain very aware of the possibility for negative responses to their work, including of a dangerous sort. Bryant said, “With the nature of our committee, respect was something that was difficult to get sometimes, we felt.” In practice, they have been the focus of some online hostility from a handful of people in the broader Calgary community. But when it comes to the student body, according to Bryant, the response to their work has been “very positive.” Clark agreed, saying, “I’ve felt through the whole process really supported by the school community.”

Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Pixabay / elizabethferry.

Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

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Radio: Grassroots Secwépemc resistance to the Trans Mountain pipeline

Posted on March 1, 2022 by Scott

April Thomas is a land defender and member of the Secwépemc Nation, from the Canim Lake Band in the central interior of what is colonially known as British Columbia. Scott Neigh interviews her about the trajectory of her work defending the land, about grassroots opposition to the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline expansion project, and about Secwépemc Say No TMX and the ongoing court battle in the wake of the arrest of land defenders at the Secwépemc Unity Camp.

In the BC context, the vast majority of the land is unceded, unsurrendered, and not covered by any treaties – of course most treaties didn’t do so either, but in BC it is even clearer than in the rest of the country that nothing has extinguished the right of traditional Indigenous governance systems over their own lands. In contrast, the governance imposed and funded by the Canadian state in the form of band councils have, at most, authority over reserve lands, which are a miniscule fraction of nations’ historic land base. Because of that, Thomas argues, “the bands have absolutely no authority to sign away our rights the way they do” when it comes to resource extraction and consequent environmental destruction on those lands.

Thomas’ early involvement included grassroots opposition to the modern day treaty process in BC and working with other grassroots Secwépemc people in a land defence camp in response to the Mount Polley mine disaster of 2014. One of the worst such disasters in Canadian history, it involved the rupture of a mine tailings pond and resulted in the release of around 25 billion litres of toxic effluent into the surrounding watershed. Thomas said, “That had huge impacts on our community, and … has really affected the health and wellbeing of our people.” She also spoke about these issues (and others) at the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva in 2016.

In the years since then, perhaps the highest profile land defense struggle in Secwépemc territory is around the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline expansion project. The original pipeline was constructed in the 1950s, long before the Canadian state even pretended to seek genuine consent from Indigenous peoples. In 2012, then-owner Kinder Morgan proposed to build a new pipeline along roughly the same path, with almost triple the capacity. It was approved by the Liberals in 2016, and after Kinder Morgan hinted that they were considering scrapping the project, the Trudeau government bought it in 2018. Projected costs have ballooned to $21.4 billion. The federal government recently announced it will provide the project with no more public funding, but they are still determined to go ahead with it despite vigorous grassroots opposition from Secwépemc and other Indigenous peoples, and from the broader environmental and climate movements.

Thomas says there are “so many concerns [with Trans Mountain that] I don’t even know where to begin. But for me personally, it’s for our people.” For one thing, pipelines leak, and that represents a serious risk to the people, land, water, and creatures in Secwépemc territory. That has always been true, but in recent years the growing impacts of the climate crisis on British Columbia, including the growing frequency of intense fires as well as flooding, makes damage to the pipeline even more likely. Thomas said, “I own a forestry company, so I know firsthand and have seen firsthand all the damage that’s been done by the wildfires. And it’s hit almost every one of our communities in the Shuswap Nation.” As well, the fact that the project does not have the consent of the Secwépemc people and traditional governance structures is a fundamental problem.

Thomas has been involved in opposing the pipeline in multiple ways, most recently in relation to Secwépemc Say No TMX and the Secwépemc Unity Camp. The camp was brought together in 2020 by Secwépemc hereditary chief Sawses (also known as Henry Sauls), and his daughter, Secwépemc matriarch Miranda Dick. The goal was to monitor the project and engage in ceremony near where the pipeline would go underneath the Thompson River. Thomas said, “We were doing this all under Secwépemc laws and authority to protect the land.”

On two separate days in October 2020, as the company was about to commence drilling, people involved with the unity camp engaged in ceremony, blocked the drilling, and were arrested. Though Thomas was originally present intending to act as a legal observer, she ended up being arrested as well.

The resulting court process has been long and arduous. Thomas said that it has been difficult at times to get clear answers about the charges and about how the Crown intends to proceed. Her hypothesis is that they were “trying to manipulate the whole system, and confuse us and force us into pleading guilty.” In addition, she said the judge does not seem to understand the role of Aboriginal rights and title, even within the constrained, colonial context of the settler legal system. She added, “And the judge and the prosecutor have been rude to us at times. And I would even say racist.”

The trials for the two groups of arrestees are coming up in March and April, respectively. Thomas encourages people from elsewhere in the Canadian state who want to show support to both continue acting in whatever ways they can to oppose Trans Mountain, and also to donate at Secwepemc Say No to TMX Trial Support on GoFundMe to cover the land defenders’ legal expenses.

Thomas said, “I’m really happy and proud that I got arrested with these other seven land defenders, because they’re very resourceful and instrumental and smart and strong. And together, all eight of us make a really excellent team and standing up against this corrupt, oppressive, genocidal system that we’re being forced under, especially in the criminal courts.”

Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Wikimedia / Andrew Bowden.

Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

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Radio: Talking politics, arts, and social justice with BIPOC youth

Posted on February 22, 2022 by Scott

Hanen Nanaa works in research and policy development in the federal political context and as an outreach coordinator for the Syrian Canadian Foundation, but today Scott Neigh interviews her in her role as director of the BAM Collective. The acronym “BAM” stands for “Books Art Music,” and the group is a youth-led collective based in Ontario that seeks to empower equity-seeking groups through community engagement and the arts.

Nanaa arrived in Canada with her family in 2016 as refugees fleeing the war in Syria. As appreciative as she was of the opportunity to build a life for herself in a new context, of course the first couple of years were very difficult, including barriers in education and employment, and more generally. She knew that once she was able to, she wanted to get involved in creating ways for other youth like herself to share their stories, to build opportunities for themselves, and to address the many issues that they were facing.

A few years later, while she was studying politics at the Toronto university that is in the process of changing its name from that of an architect of the residential school system, she met another student and newcomer from Syria, Hani Moulia. They realized that they shared a similar vision for responding to the needs of youth – particularly newcomer and refugee, Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ youth – and they decided to try and figure out a way to act on it.

Their first step was to actually talk with other young people about what they were facing. It became clear very quickly that while there are some resources out there focused on what variously oppressed young people face, youth themselves are almost never able to play a role in designing and orienting those resources. So they decided that would be a priority for them. And they decided that however they moved forward, their work would combine their respective approaches – given her background, Nanaa tended to respond to issues with politics and policy in mind, while Moulia, as a photographer, had more of an arts perspective. The prominent inclusion of the arts in their work would, they hoped, be a way to draw in a much wider cross-section of youth, to open difficult conversations, to make connections, and to provide more accessible ways for youth to express themselves.

Their first event was in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election. It combined various sorts of youth-focused, non-partisan content related to the political system and to voting, along with youth of colour both sharing stories of their own political engagement and also offering a wide range of musical and artistic performances.

After the success of that event, Nanaa and Moulia set out to grow their team as a prelude to taking on more projects. They were aware of the gaps in their own experiences and knowledge, and reached out particularly to Black and Indigenous youth, and to various specific communities. Again after plenty of consultation with youth themselves, the expanded group – now a proper collective – put on a series of what Nanaa describes as “engagement events” on particular topics.

Overall, the majority of both those early events and what they have done since have involved creating public spaces organized around youth priorities and interests, focused on both issues and various modes of artistic engagement, to give youth from equity-seeking groups an opportunity to share their experiences, their analyses of the world, and their creativity, to build relationships, and at least sometimes to collectively articulate visions for a better world.

One strand of this work that has been particularly important to Nanaa is a number of events bringing newcomer and Indigenous youth together. This has included events focused on mental health, on Indigenous history, and on other things. In her experience, both groups of youth are keen for such encounters, and in the various dialogues that have resulted, “multiple similarities” in their experiences have become clear. Of course their experiences of racism and discrimination are not the same, but a number of the barriers that they face are related, such as lack of access to opportunities and frequently only being offered resources that are not grounded in their own cultures or attuned to the actual barriers they face.

Nanaa said, “One of the things that I feel contributes so much to … my passion to work with Indigenous community, is my refugee journey. At one point in my life, I had to be displaced and forced to leave my land because of the war. So I feel I relate to that piece, where if you are forced to leave your land, it hurts. And I feel like we’ve been exposed to violence, we’ve been exposed to those harsh personal experiences. … And it’s our full responsibility as young newcomers and new Canadians to educate ourselves and educate our parents and other newcomer communities [about Indigenous histories and issues]. … We have to work together to achieve that. And we need to ensure that past injustices are not repeated.”

The BAM Collective’s work has ranged across issues like climate change, mental health, and gun violence. It has taken many forms. This includes conferences. It includes a series of social justice and arts cafes on topics like Black Lives Matter, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, refugees and the crisis in Afghanistan, and more. It includes publication projects, like their collaboration on the Our Climate, Our Stories collection of essays, stories, and poems related to the climate crisis written by BIPOC youth from across Canada, and Growth Virtual Magazine tackling things like anti-Asian racism in the context of the pandemic. And it has involved plenty of community conversations, recently including a significant focus on hosting such events in Toronto neighbourhoods impacted by gun violence.

In considering the group’s work as a whole, Nanaa said, “I always question myself that question, how are we contributing to a bigger form of change, and are we actually doing it? And I always come up to a conclusion which is when I see young people come with this energy and this passion and working together, this is the change itself. … Because we will not be silent and this will lead us to impact other groups and other larger institutions, and tell them here we are, we need to be included, and just give us the opportunity or give us a seat at the table and and together we can make change possible.”

Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Used with permission of the BAM Collective.

Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

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Radio: High school students organizing for greater COVID safety in schools

Posted on February 15, 2022 by Scott

Brie Villeneuve is a Grade 12 student at Grant Park High School in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Piper Lockhart is a Grade 11 student at Collège Louis-Riel, a French-language high school in Winnipeg. Both are core organizers with Manitoba Students for COVID Safety, a student-led group advocating for safer schools in light of inadequate action from the Manitoba provincial government to keep educators, staff, and students safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Scott Neigh interviews them about the pandemic, about the problems with the Manitoba government’s response, about the student walkout their group organized in January, and about what needs to happen to make schools safe.

Most of us are familiar with at least the broad outline of how the pandemic has unfolded in Canada. At the onset of the crisis in March 2020, most governments responded with significant initial restrictions enabled by never-quite-adequate but still substantial emergency supports from the federal government, in some places augmented provincially in various ways. Though that initial response suggested at least hints of a logic of prioritizing people’s lives and wellbeing, since then, in most jurisdictions, it is clear that within the hard limit of keeping the health care system from collapsing, governments have completely reverted to the logic of prioritizing corporate profits above all else.

Exactly what that has looked like has varied considerably in different places, in its details and in the magnitude of governmental indifference to death and suffering from COVID-19. But some basic facts are broadly true. One, lots of people have died and ended up with significant long-term impairments that did not need to happen. And two, government measures have been confusing and exhausting, and have put far too much emphasis on individual choices and punitive or carceral responses, and not nearly enough on using public resources to directly keep us safe and to support us in keeping each other safe. Lockhart said of the situation in Manitoba, “It seemed during the pandemic that our provincial government was more about keeping the economy going than actual safety for the population.”

In the interview – which was conducted before the most recent announcement by the Manitoba government that they would be massively reducing public health and safety measures across the board – Villeneuve and Lockhart talk about the COVID response from the Manitoba government, and specifically how it has played out in schools.

After the start of the pandemic, the balance of that school year in the spring of 2020 was online. In the fall of 2020, most schools were back in person, with students divided into cohorts so not everyone was physically present at the same time, and mandatory masks and basic distancing and sanitizing measures. According to Villeneuve and Lockhart, during that summer and through the school year there were lots of confusing changes to the rules, and far too little was done to support teachers, staff, and students. Villeneuve said, “Our provincial government has really been, you know, ‘We want you to stay open because it’s important, but we’re going to give you practically nothing to make sure you can stay like this.'” There was also a lack of transparency from the province in terms of case counts in schools, closures, and so on.

Lockhart said of the 2020/2021 school year, “It was just an all-out stressful time.” They said that even having the summer of 2021 off was not enough for a lot of students to get rid of the burnout they were experiencing. And in the current school year, things have been much the same – inadequate safety measures and supports, lots of confusion and stress – except this year, the baseline has gone back to schools at 100% capacity.

MB Students for COVID Safety started as a social media page launched by a single student. From there, it grew to a small group of core organizers, including today’s guests, located in a handful of schools. And then the callout for a student walkout to demand safer schools spread far and wide. More than 90 schools across Manitoba saw at least a few students walk out of class on January 17, and many more just stayed home. Villeneuve said, “It was really about just trying to get our provincial government to hear our voice and see that we’re not giving up, and that if they don’t want to help us, they need to resign and let someone else help us.”

The group’s demands are that the provincial government provide all students, teachers, and staff with medical or KN-95 masks; that they reinstate contact tracing for schools; that they make rapid tests freely available for students at all grade levels; that they invest the necessary resources to substantially improve ventilation in schools; and that they make the option of online learning available for all students who want it.

After their successful action in January, they are currently engaged in a broad consultation via social media to determine next steps. And in light of the province’s recent announcement of reductions in public health measures, the group is holding protests at MLA offices throughout the province on February 15. They describe the latest reduction in COVID safety measures as “an ignorant and unprofessional decision” and say “further supports NEED to be implemented in schools to even think of this as an option.”

Lockhart said, “We just want to be safe in a place where we’re told we should be safe.” They continued, “In schools, we’re told that everyone has a voice, everyone deserves to be heard. But as soon as we speak out, we are often told that … we’re just teenagers and we’ve never experienced real life, and we don’t know what it’s really like in the real world and all that. But what they don’t realize is that we’re living in the real world. From a young age, we’ve experienced things that, you know, maybe we shouldn’t have. … We’ve experienced things or we’ve been taught about … the horrors of life from a really young age. … Sure, we may not have, you know, experience in a job environment and all that. But we’re also at a point in our life where we haven’t been defeated. We don’t feel like we can’t do anything. I mean, we do, but that doesn’t stop us. We’re not at a point where we’re too busy with our lives to do anything about it.”

Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Flickr / Don Harder

Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

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