An Onkwehonwe in Kanata

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Christie Blatchford is writing a whole series on the issue of aboriginal suicide… “Lifting the Veil on Native (there’s that N word again!) suicide” is the name of today’s atrocity I mean column. That she has the audacity to do this is amazing to me. It is so loaded with her smug, white privilege and consequently that hand-wringing – “Oh look, those poor NATIVES are so despondent, the white people have to rescue them” thing, which is pretty much the tenor of this article. It centers around some benevolent white policemen – her favourite fucking subject – who are trying to work in suicide prevention in the Nishnabe Aski Nation. More power to them if they can make a difference, but we have been working on this terrible issue ourselves and need to develop more of our own culturally-relevant ways, thank you very much. But since this new series comes in the wake of her so-called “expose” of the poor white folks’ problems in Caledonia, I’m feeling a tad s...

Yesterday I was waiting in line at Shoppers Drug Mart and an elderly Caribbean lady, perhaps in her mid-70’s, was at the lone cashier and fumbling a little with her bag and her purse and her wallet – basically taking some time to get through the check-out process. The woman behind her, a white woman maybe a few years older than me, marched up to the cashier, put all her purchases on the counter and basically stood there tapping her foot and frowning and muttering at the elderly lady and the cashier, who was also a young black woman. She essentially pushed the older black woman aside and was acting extremely put-upon that the other woman was taking a bit of time to finish her transaction. The older woman looked at the white woman with this expression of – damn, it was heartbreaking. Resignation and a touch of humiliation and sadness. Defeat even. The guy behind me was a young black man and I turned to him and muttered, “White privilege in action.” He looked at me with the same kind of l...

I’m a huge science fiction fan. One of my greatest pleasures in life is reading and thinking about science fiction. Some of the more amazing books have planted ideas and concepts in my head and I love chewing over these ideas, thinking about them and dwelling on different scenarios so different than this reality. From the time I discovered the genre at around eleven I have been a fan, gobbling these books down at lightspeed and spending an inordinate amount of time lurking in Bakka and the science fiction section in bookstores. Being a science fiction fan is kind of like being in the closet in a way – you don’t really want to out yourself in certain social settings, but once you do, it’s extremely liberating. So I’m coming out now – yep, I’m a geeky science fiction freak! Soon I suppose I’ll be attending conventions and wearing a Princess Leia get-up… but I digress. The reason I mention this is that one of my favourite writers, marine biologist, amazing storyteller and fellow Torontoni...