Canada

Brief account celebrating victory after years of campaigning by Indigenous Climate Action against Teck Resources, the company pressing for permission to build the tar sands Frontier Mine in Canada, which would have produced 3.2 billion barrels of oil over 40 years. Teck withdrew early in 2020, after 12 years of lobbying (indigenousclimateaction.com). The journal also reports very briefly that the Great Australian Bight Alliance, led by Aboriginal elders and local activists has in succession prevented Chevron, BP and (most recently) Equinor to abandon plans to drill for oil in the Bight (fightforthebight.org.au.)

Account of resistance to the TransCanada Corporation's Keystone XL oil pipeline to protect ancestral lands and the environment against oil spillage. President Obama halted the project in 2015, but President Trump gave TransCanada the go-ahead in March 2017. In response two Native American communities launched a lawsuit against the Administration in 2018.

See: 'Native American Tribes File Lawsuit Seeking to Invalidate Keystone XL Pipeline Permit', npr, 10 Sept. 2018.

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/10/646523140/native-american-tribes-file-lawsuit-seeking-to-invalidate-keystone-xl-pipeline-p?t=1595266018021

This book draws on a range of theoretical traditions emerging from feminism, criminology, and sociology, to challenge the narrow idea that domestic violence and sexual assault are phenomena of interpersonal violence perpetrated by men. The authors highlight the diversity of women’s experience, discuss the role social structures play, and include discussions of workplace and state violence. The first section develops the conceptual and contextual framework, and the following three sections focus on types of victimization: interpersonal, in the workplace, and by the state. Accounts of individual experiences are used throughout to personalize the issues discussed.

Covers cultural protests relating to presentation in museums, returning sacred objects and naming of national days in both USA and Canada. Includes discussion of call by Lubicon Lake Band of Cree in Northern Alberta for a boycott of the 1998 Winter Olympics in Canada over land claim and related boycott of exhibition on Canada’s First People.

Chapters include: ‘Kent State: How the War in Vietnam became a War at Home’; ‘Congress and the Anti-War Movement’; ‘US Presidential Campaigns in the Vietnamese Era’; ‘Opposing the War in Vietnam – the Australian Experience’; ‘Vietnam War Resisters in Quebec’; ‘Anger and After – Britain’s CND and the Vietnam War’.

Webcast sponsored by the Iving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by alumni UBC with Equity and Inclusion. #MeToo. #IWill. Awareness is important, but how do we move beyond hashtags and words to making real change for women in the workplace? New accusations of harassment keep coming to the fore – from Hollywood to Wall Street to Commercial Drive. In response, thousands of women have posted “#MeToo” on social media. Men have since responded with #IWill, signaling their individual commitment to take action in order to prevent harassment in their midst. But what next? How do we go beyond awareness to actual – and more permanent – change? This video includes a panel discussion that examines this issue and explore options for moving forward.

Covers Canada, New Zealand and the USA.

Covers resistance by Cree and Inuit, supported by Kayapo Indians in Brazil and transnational green groups, to major hydro-electric project in Quebec.

In the last decade of the Cold War, during the 1980s, the Peace Movement in Vancouver, BC, gained an unprecedented amount of traction. However, was short-lived as peace activists dwindled in the 1990s and beyond. In this article Christine Kim explores what were the factors that caused the peace movement in Vancouver to fail and whether its legacy is one that supports the value of political activism as a powerful agent for change. The author interviews students, professors, and activists from the Vancouver Peace Movement of the 1980s in an hour-long radio documentary.

Reports on wave of rail blockades across Canada in February/March 2020 in solidarity with the Wet-suwet-en indigenous nation in British Columbia, who had been obstructing work on the 670 kilometre Coastal Gaslink project. A military style police raid in British Columbia sparked solidarity from Mohawks in Ontario and Quebec, and other indigenous and non-indigenous people. Greenpeace gave their support. There were also street marches in towns and cities.

See also: Rizvi, Husna, 'Wet"suwet'en Gas Pipeline Battle', New Internationalist, May-June 2020, p. 10.

Campaign on Vancouver Island, Canada, against corporate loggers trying to take over indigenous land. Protesters blocked roads against logging. Both men and women took part, but cited as a protest organized on feminist principles.

Theatre administrators, artistic directors, and heads of programmes from across Canada discuss about how institutional policies and cultures have shifted in the wake of #MeToo. The participants reflect on the challenges of assessing the impacts and effects of a cultural movement that is still unfolding and how #MeToo has changed the relationship between training institutions and the performing arts industry.

Reports on a new app, created by the Sydney-based National Justice Project, that enables Aboriginal people to record police discrimination and violence against them. It is being adopted across Australia. The author sets this Australian initiative in the context of disproportionate jailing of Aborigines and frequent police discrimination, as well as the wider global movement to use film to highlight police injustice, with examples from the USA and Canada.                            

This article examines how the changing external environment faced by the Canadian feminist movement, and its internal situation, are reflected in the beliefs and strategies of recruits to the movement at a given point in time. Using a large sample data set, the author provides evidence that the changes experienced by the Canadian feminist movement from the 1980s onwards have resulted in noticeable shifts in the collective identity and activist strategies of subsequent waves of feminist recruits. The findings suggest that further research into cohort recruitment and replacement is essential for understanding the forces at play in shaping the contemporary Canadian feminist movement.

The author examines the decades of enforced sterilization of Indigenous women in North America in the 20^th century and the influence of eugenics ideologies on this policy.  Use of sterilization was most common from the 1940s to the 1970s, when the Indigenous populations began (after centuries of decline) to increase in numbers. This trend alarmed both eugenicists anxious to maintain racial ‘purity’, and corporations seeking to exploit resources on indigenous lands. 

See also: Howard-Hassmann, Rhoda, ‘Forced sterilizations of Indigenous women: One more act of genocide’, The Conversation, 4 March 2019.

https://theconversation.com/forced-sterilizations-of-indigenous-women-one-more-act-of-genocide-109603

See also: Virdi, Jaipreet, ‘The coerced sterilization of Indigenous women’, New Internationalist, 30 November 2018.

https://newint.org/features/2018/11/29/canadas-shame-coerced-sterilization-indigenous-women

Both links expose the forced sterilization of Canadian Indigenous women for several decades, up to the 2000s.

This book addresses a major problem of rape and rape culture on campus, revealed by media coverage of ‘rape chants’ at Saint Mary’s University, misogynistic Facebook posts from Dalhousie University’s dental school, and high-profile incidents of sexual violence at other Canadian universities. University administrations were called to account for their cover-ups and misguided responses. Quinlan explores the causes and consequences of sexual violence on campus as well as strategies for its elimination, drawing together original case studies, empirical research, and theoretical writings by scholars and community and campus activists. Topics covered are the costs of campus sexual violence on students and university communities, the efficacy of existing university sexual assault policies and institutional responses, and historical and contemporary forms of activism associated with campus sexual violence.

This article examines how students organize and use media to address sexual violence, the problem of faculty/student relationships, and the failures of some institutional response. It notes, in particular, how students make sexual violence public through the use of open letters; how they create anonymous and informal online reporting platforms for students to disclose sexual violence; and how they model practices of accountability and survivor-centred care.

Account of life on four reservations, the impact of government and emergence of new more radical leaders. Includes material on a protest march and ‘drink-in’ in 1960s.

Study of the reformist groups which were active in Scandinavia, West Germany, France, the UK, Canada and USA, primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, which joined in the International Committee for Sexual Equality (1951-1963) founded by the Dutch COC (the first ‘homophile’ group).

On New Brunswick protest blockade by Elsipogtog First Nation and supporters.

A political history of the Inuit Circumpolar Council.

The book notes the long history of pro-choice activism, and explores new limits on abortion in the United States under the Trump/Pence Administration, as well as the global impact of US policy. The author then charts the pro-choice movements led by women in Canada, Ireland, and Poland; the interconnection between diversity and abortion; and the fight against abortion stigma. It also includes testimonies of women who have had abortions.

Toupin, who is Canadian, writes initially from that perspective in her history of a feminist campaign that started from the reality that a majority of women worked unpaid in the home. Wages for Housework asserted that domestic work and child rearing and caring for the elderly did have specific economic value. The aim was partly to make women's contribution to society visible and also to increase the independence of housewives - and the campaign mobilized to prevent cuts to family allowances in Canada and the UK, a financial source controlled by women. Wages for Housework ran counter, however, to the predominant feminist pressure to open up job opportunities for all women, and take them out of the home. The book includes an 'Afterword' on the current situation, in which care and domestic work is often outsourced to migrant workers.

Provides snapshots of struggles by local people against chromite, bauxite, copper, silver and gold mining in Canada, Guinea, Burma, Mexico, Papua New Guinea and Mozambique, and notes movement in northern Peru, beginning 2008 and erupting into mass blockades in 2009, against logging and oil drilling.

In 2017, two students at St. Francis Xavier University were arrested on charges of sexual violence. In support of student survivors, Theatre Antigonish staged the feminist collective piece ‘This is For You, Anna’ in 2018. This article focuses on how the on-campus production and audience responded to acts of gender-based violence. In examining the St. Francis Xavier University production and creation process, this article asks, what can theatre do for student survivors? How can theatre enact change on campus?