As a white person in Canada, especially one writing about a topic that intersects with Indigenous issues, I have found Métis writer Chelsea Vowel’s blog âpihtawikosisân invaluable. Vowel is a legal researcher who somehow explains complex issues with total clarity without ever being anything less than gripping or undercutting her politics.

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Here’s yet another condo development framed as a modern repeat of Canada’s 19th C colonial pioneer era. It’s called “Venue” and it’s in Whalley, a small town centre within Surrey, a large, racially mixed Vancouver suburb mostly known for farming.

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Happy National Aboriginal Day everyone!

Wab Kinew, always concise, does 500 years of ‘Canadian’ history in 2 minutes.

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In a direct line from my earlier post on the heritage hipster style as a settler colonial aesthetic, here is another exhibit in the colonial museum of fashion: Ralph Lauren using genocide-era vintage photographs of native men in western dress as part of its recent marketing campaign.

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An abridged version of this essay has been published in the May/June 2015 issue of Briarpatch Magazine

I am probably as bored of casual hipster-slagging as you are.

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I am in full support of Idle No More and Chief Theresa Spence’s now perilous hunger strike in a tipi across from Canada’s Parliament buildings in Ottawa. Chief of the beleaguered town on Attawapiskat in Ontario, where inadequate housing has led to a level of misery that attracted even UN censure, Spence is engaged in a desperate gambit to force PM Harper to speak with her.

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Great video from CBC’s George Stromboulopoulos show and its Soap Box series. It’s “5 First Nations Stereotypes” by the entertaining Wab Kinew.

Wab, host of the Doc Zone series 8th Fire, is also a CBC News Winnipeg reporter on CBC Television, and a hip-hop artist, named by the Winnipeg Free Press as one of the top artists to watch from Manitoba.

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Roy Henry Vickers‘ gallery in Tofino, BC. The face of the building, similar to the style of a First Nations longhouse or “plank house,” was painted and handcarved by the artist, whose background is Haida, Heiltsuk and Tsimshian.

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Storm sewer cover by Coast Salish (Musqueam) artist Susan Point and her daughter Kelly Cannell, depicting four small eggs in the centre, spinning out to tadpoles that become frogs radiating out to the edges. Point is a Vancouver-based Coast Salish artist and master carver whose work has been commissioned for the Vancouver International Airport, the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology and the Smithsonian in Washington.

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Above is an example of the Cowichan sweater (photo courtesy Cowichan Tribes).

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