Valerie Zink

Philip Brass of Peepeekisis First Nation explains the impact of Saskatchewan Party’s decision to auction off Crown land.

Briarpatch has always been a labour of love, the key to its unlikely success, as past editor Dave Mitchell notes. “It consistently leads with the heart, and so it’s able to produce quality journalism with a tragic fraction of the masthead depth of most publications.”

The shift in modern warfare toward counterinsurgency carried out by states against diffuse populations, rather than organized armies, calls for new instruments of domination.

At a time when post-secondary education is a minimal requirement for obtaining an average income, much the same as a high school diploma was for the parents of striking students, demands for free tuition hardly betray inordinate entitlement or fanciful utopianism.

With the country’s largest reserves of oil, natural gas, uranium, and potash, much of which is found on Indigenous land, the Prairies will continue to be at the front lines of capitalist expansion for years to come, and are poised to become a hub of resistance. It’s time for us to imagine the West as a different kind of “land of opportunity.”

As the Occupy movement continues to gather momentum, this moment presents an opportunity to re-evaluate the role of unions in social transformation and look beyond the reactive task of simply defending the working conditions of their members within the capitalist system, to which much of the labour movement has become resigned.

While the Conservative government continues to fortify our borders and tighten restrictions on immigration, our culpability in the unprecedented levels of migration worldwide has never been clearer. From Canadian mining companies in Latin America to the occupation of Afghanistan, our overseas adventures continue to violently dispossess people around the globe.

Mimi Kim is a second-generation Korean American and long-time organizer against domestic and sexual violence, racism and imperialism. Her pragmatic approach to defending the safety and integrity of women stems from years of work on the ground with women of colour and others who have been marginalized from the mainstream anti-violence movement. We caught up with her to learn more about her perspective on the relationship between interpersonal and state violence, the criminal justice system, and community accountability.

It wasn’t until 1996 that Canada’s last residential school was shuttered on the Gordon First Nation reserve 100 kilometres north of Regina, marking the end of one of the most sordid chapters in Canada’s colonial history.

This summer marked the 75th anniversary of the Regina Riot, a landmark in the history of Briarpatch’s hometown and an event with political reverberations well beyond the city itself. On June 3, 1935, at the height of the greatest crisis of capitalism in the country’s history, 1,200 striking workers departed relief camps in British Columbia aboard eastbound boxcars to deliver demands for employment and fair wages to the federal government of R.B. Bennett