Saima Desai

It’s a demand that’s easy to understand and easy to fight for, which is important because we’ll need a lot of people to help us win it.

Briarpatch began 49 years ago as a four-page newsletter produced by and for low-income earners, welfare recipients, and the unemployed. Today, as so many of my friends lose their jobs or have their shifts halved during the COVID-19 pandemic, I can see clearly the thread that connects Briarpatch to its origins half a century ago.

Exploring the anti-colonial, egalitarian roots of Sikhi, and tracking the extraordinary political power of the Sikh community in Canada today

As another recession looms, the left must be ready when it hits – with anti-capitalist theory that can tell people why we’ve had 12 economic crises in the last century alone, why the rich just get richer each time, and why it’s working class people who always lose. 

Since September, a wave of protests has swept across the globe. Inequality and its violent maintenance is at the heart of the discontent.

Teachers bargaining for the common good contains the seed of radical change – and I mean “radical” in the same way that Angela Davis uses it, meaning “grasping at the root.”

Briarpatch editor Saima Desai talks to two judges of our Writing in the Margins contest about Idle No More and MMIWG, ethical kinship, writing queer sex, and their forthcoming work.

The climate crisis is the biggest story of our time, but it’s a story that’s extremely difficult to tell. And as corporate owners shutter local newspapers, we’re losing our best tool in understanding what climate change looks like on the ground, and our best method to empower people to fight back.

In a recent article, Vijay Prashad argues that the challenge of the left is to be both present- and future-oriented at once. As the federal election looms, that’s what I’ve tried to do in this issue of Briarpatch.

Around us, we see fear and uncertainty about the world that is coming into being. This issue of Briarpatch came from a desire to articulate a hopeful vision of the future, and a plan for how to get there by addressing interwoven social and environmental crises.

Two hours east of the Unist’ot’en camp, Wet’suwet’en land defenders from the Likhts’amisyu clan are starting a new camp in the path of the Coastal GasLink pipeline

Faculty members and others at the University of Saskatchewan have launched a legal challenge to force the University to release information on its ties to agribusiness giant Monsanto, recently acquired by Bayer.

Do we use our mourning to install cops in our holy places? Or do we use it to galvanize us to rise up against occupation, against land theft, against the corporations that would profit from our destitution and death?

Cops may kill fewer people in Canada than in the U.S., but it’s clear that the same racism and lack of accountability underpins police shootings as in the U.S. The only difference is that, in Canada, it’s accompanied by less transparency and a paucity of data.

Many people believe that there is an unbridgeable rift between left labour activism and Indigenous struggles. But recent events have made clear that “reconciliation” screeches to a halt as soon as it stands in the way of the accumulation of capital.

An interview with Writing in the Margins judges Gwen Benaway, Alicia Elliott, and Jalani Morgan

Mainstream media is obsessed with figuring out who is really trans, forcing trans folks to prove their validity to cis people. The work of Briarpatch is to refocus the lens on trans issues that demand radical solidarity and action.

If you weren’t convinced before – simply by being an air-breathing, water-drinking human being – it’s now undeniable that we all have skin in this pipeline game. Trudeau has made us all potential shareholders in a leaky, aging piece of climate-cooking infrastructure.

Terra nullius is a lie. The Prairies have never been empty – they’ve always been teeming with anti-capitalist and anti-colonial resistance.

Colten Boushie. Tina Fontaine. Countless others. “Something’s gotta change. Something more than fake promises and words.”