#Canadian resources

[lighthousedann]

Canada Does Not Need American Automobiles

We have the technology,  the factories and the skilled workers to build our own cars.

[narrative-theory]

Is Economic Confrontation with Canada Prudent?

[animalphotorefs]

#creaturecomfortqueue - Canadian Geese

Artists creating derivative or transformative works (without AI) have blanket permission to use this and all photos in the repository as references, including works that will/may be sold. The Exotic Animal Photo Reference Repository is an independent, permanently open-access project.

[irldenji]

Can u do lynx graphics!! Specially Canadian lynx??

Haiii tried my best hope you like

[liviz223]

Resources for Fighting Antisemitism*

*With a focus on Canada since I haven't seen much on here. There may have been a post or two but I don't remember seeing one so have this.

Below are some resources for staying up to date on antisemitic incidents and combatting them. They have email actions, petitions, information on antisemitism, etc. Feel free to reblog with additions if you know any.

You don't have to be Jewish to combat jew-hate and remind leaders to take action.

General:

Jew Hate Database:

Anti-Defamation League:

https://www.adl.org/

Canada Specific:

B'nai Brith Canada:

CIJA:

[dontforgetukraine]

Valentina Kuryliw’s latest book on human rights and the Holodomor titled "The Historian’s Craft Lesson on Human Rights and the Holodomor" will be available for free until the end of November on the Ukrainian World Congress' website. The PDF is available in both English and Ukrainian as well as an English powerpoint.

The book offers innovative methods for teaching high school students about the Holodomor and human rights, using a variety of historical sources and interactive tasks.  In the book, students take on the role of “young detectives,” investigating, analyzing, and synthesizing the information provided during the lesson. This approach promotes student engagement in the learning process, develops critical and historical thinking skills, helps express thoughts and ideas clearly, and encourages further exploration of the topic. In this lesson plan, teachers become facilitators in dialogue with students to help them arrive at their own conclusions, according to Kuryliw’s description.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Alberta is taking the federal government to court, saying Ottawa has failed to follow through on what Premier Danielle Smith calls necessary changes to a law governing resource development.

The federal Impact Assessment Act, enacted in 2019, determines whether certain major resource projects should be approved based on the environmental, economic or social impact each project might have.

Smith said Thursday the province has asked the Alberta Court of Appeal to rule on the constitutionality of the act, which was amended by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government earlier this year.

Continue reading

Tagging: @abpoli @newsfromstolenland

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"In these circumstances, the commercial economy of the fur trade soon yielded to industrial economies focused on mining, forestry, and fishing. The first industrial mining (for coal) began on Vancouver Island in the early 1850s, the first sizeable industrial sawmill opened a few years later, and fish canning began on the Fraser River in 1870. From these beginnings, industrial economies reached into the interstices of British Columbia, establishing work camps close to the resource, and processing centers (canneries, sawmills, concentrating mills) at points of intersection of external and local transportation systems. As the years went by, these transportation systems expanded, bringing ever more land (resources) within reach of industrial capital. Each of these developments was a local instance of David Harvey's general point that the pace of time-space compressions after 1850 accelerated capital's "massive, long-term investment in the conquest of space" (Harvey 1989, 264) and its commodifications of nature. The very soil, Marx said in another context, was becoming "part and parcel of capital" (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

As Marx and, subsequently, others have noted, the spatial energy of capitalism works to deterritorialize people (that is, to detach them from prior bonds between people and place) and to reterritorialize them in relation to the requirements of capital (that is, to land conceived as resources and freed from the constraints of custom and to labor detached from land). For Marx the

wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil... created for the town industries the necessary supply of a 'free' and outlawed proletariat (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977) - drawing on insights from psychoanalysis - capitalism may be thought of as a desiring machine, as a sort of territorial writing machine that functions to inscribe "the flows of desire upon the surface or body of the earth" (Thomas 1994, 171-72). In Henri Lefebvre's terms, it produces space in the image of its own relations of production (1991; Smith 1990, 90). For David Harvey it entails the "restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes," and postpones the effects of its inherent contradictions by the conquest of space-capitalism's "spatial fix" (1982, ch. 13; 1985, 150, 156). In detail, positions differ; in general, it can hardly be doubted that in British Columbia industrial capitalism introduced new relationships between people and with land and that at the interface of the native and the nonnative, these relationships created total misunderstandings and powerful new axes of power that quickly detached native people from former lands. When a Tlingit chief was asked by a reserve commissioner about the work he did, he replied

I don't know how to work at anything. My father, grandfather, and uncle just taught me how to live, and I have always done what they told me-we learned this from our fathers and grandfathers and our uncles how to do the things among ourselves and we teach our children in the same way.

Two different worlds were facing each other, and one of them was fashioning very deliberate plans for the reallocation of land and the reordering of social relations. In 1875 the premier of British Columbia argued that the way to civilize native people was to bring them into the industrial workplace, there to learn the habits of thrift, time discipline, and materialism. Schools were secondary. The workplace was held to be the crucible of cultural change and, as such, the locus of what the premier depicted as a politics of altruism intended to bring native people up to the point where they could enter society as full, participating citizens. To draw them into the workplace, they had to be separated from land. Hence, in the premier's scheme of things, the small reserve, a space that could not yield a livelihood and would eject native labor toward the industrial workplace and, hence, toward civilization. Marx would have had no illusions about what was going on: native lives, he would have said, were being detached from their own means of production (from the land and the use value of their own labor on it) and were being transformed into free (unencumbered) wage laborers dependent on the social relations of capital. The social means of production and of subsistence were being converted into capital. Capital was benefiting doubly, acquiring access to land freed by small reserves and to cheap labor detached from land.

The reorientation of land and labor away from older customary uses had happened many times before, not only in earlier settler societies, but also in the British Isles and, somewhat later, in continental Europe. There, the centuries-long struggles over enclosure had been waged between many ordinary folk who sought to protect customary use rights to land and landlords who wanted to replace custom with private property rights and market economies. In the western highlands, tenants without formal contracts (the great majority) could be evicted "at will." Their former lands came to be managed by a few sheep farmers; their intricate local land uses were replaced by sheep pasture (Hunter 1976; Hornsby 1992, ch. 2). In Windsor Forest, a practical vernacular economy that had used the forest in innumerable local ways was slowly eaten away as the law increasingly favored notions of absolute property ownership, backed them up with hangings, and left less and less space for what E.P. Thompson calls "the messy complexities of coincident use-right" (1975, 241). Such developments were approximately reproduced in British Columbia, as a regime of exclusive property rights overrode a fisher-hunter-gatherer version of, in historian Jeanette Neeson's phrase, an "economy of multiple occupations" (1984, 138; Huitema, Osborne, and Ripmeester 2002). Even the rhetoric of dispossession - about lazy, filthy, improvident people who did not know how to use land properly - often sounded remarkably similar in locations thousands of miles apart (Pratt 1992, ch. 7). There was this difference: The argument against custom, multiple occupations, and the constraints of life worlds on the rights of property and the free play of the market became, in British Columbia, not an argument between different economies and classes (as it had been in Britain) but the more polarized, and characteristically racialized juxtaposition of civilization and savagery...

Moreover, in British Columbia, capital was far more attracted to the opportunities of native land than to the surplus value of native labor. In the early years, when labor was scarce, it sought native workers, but in the longer run, with its labor needs supplied otherwise (by Chinese workers contracted through labor brokers, by itinerant white loggers or miners), it was far more interested in unfettered access to resources. A bonanza of new resources awaited capital, and if native people who had always lived amid these resources could not be shipped away, they could be-indeed, had to be-detached from them. Their labor was useful for a time, but land in the form of fish, forests, and minerals was the prize, one not to be cluttered with native-use rights. From the perspective of capital, therefore, native people had to be dispossessed of their land. Otherwise, nature could hardly be developed. An industrial primary resource economy could hardly function.

In settler colonies, as Marx knew, the availability of agricultural land could turn wage laborers back into independent producers who worked for themselves instead of for capital (they vanished, Marx said, "from the labor market, but not into the workhouse") (1967, pt. 8, ch. 33). As such, they were unavailable to capital, and resisted its incursions, the source, Marx thought, of the prosperity and vitality of colonial societies. In British Columbia, where agricultural land was severely limited, many settlers were closely implicated with capital, although the objectives of the two were different and frequently antagonistic. Without the ready alternative of pioneer farming, many of them were wage laborers dependent on employment in the industrial labor market, yet often contending with capital in bitter strikes. Some of them sought to become capitalists. In M. A. Grainger's Woodsmen of the West, a short, vivid novel set in early modern British Columbia, the central character, Carter, wrestles with this opportunity. Carter had grown up on a rock farm in Nova Scotia, worked at various jobs across the continent, and fetched up in British Columbia at a time when, for a nominal fee, the government leased standing timber to small operators. He acquired a lease in a remote fjord and there, with a few men under towering glaciers at the edge of the world economy, attacked the forest. His chances were slight, but the land was his opportunity, his labor his means, and he threw himself at the forest with the intensity of Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale. There were many Carters.

But other immigrants did become something like Marx's independent producers. They had found a little land on the basis of which they hoped to get by, avoid the work relations of industrial capitalism, and leave their progeny more than they had known themselves. Their stories are poignant. A Czech peasant family, forced from home for want of land, finding its way to one of the coaltowns of southeastern British Columbia, and then, having accumulated a little cash from mining, homesteading in the province's arid interior. The homestead would consume a family's work while yielding a living of sorts from intermittent sales from a dry wheat farm and a large measure of domestic self-sufficiency-a farm just sustaining a family, providing a toe-hold in a new society, and a site of adaptation to it. Or, a young woman from a brick, working-class street in Derby, England, coming to British Columbia during the depression years before World War I, finding work up the coast in a railway hotel in Prince Rupert, quitting with five dollars to her name after a manager's amorous advances, traveling east as far as five dollars would take her on the second train out of Prince Rupert, working in a small frontier hotel, and eventually marrying a French Canadian farmer. There, in a northern British Columbian valley, in a context unlike any she could have imagined as a girl, she would raise a family and become a stalwart of a diverse local society in which no one was particularly well off. Such stories are at the heart of settler colonialism (Harris 1997, ch. 8).

The lives reflected in these stories, like the productions of capital, were sustained by land. Older regimes of custom had been broken, in most cases by enclosures or other displacements in the homeland several generations before emigration. Many settlers became property owners, holders of land in fee simple, beneficiaries of a landed opportunity that, previously, had been unobtainable. But use values had not given way entirely to exchange values, nor was labor entirely detached from land. Indeed, for all the work associated with it, the pioneer farm offered a temporary haven from capital. The family would be relatively autonomous (it would exploit itself). There would be no outside boss. Cultural assumptions about land as a source of security and family-centered independence; assumptions rooted in centuries of lives lived elsewhere seemed to have found a place of fulfillment. Often this was an illusion - the valleys of British Columbia are strewn with failed pioneer farms - but even illusions drew immigrants and occupied them with the land.

In short, and in a great variety of ways, British Columbia offered modest opportunities to ordinary people of limited means, opportunities that depended, directly or indirectly, on access to land. The wage laborer in the resource camp, as much as the pioneer farmer, depended on such access, as, indirectly, did the shopkeeper who relied on their custom.

In this respect, the interests of capital and settlers converged. For both, land was the opportunity at hand, an opportunity that gave settler colonialism its energy. Measured in relation to this opportunity, native people were superfluous. Worse, they were in the way, and, by one means or another, had to be removed. Patrick Wolfe is entirely correct in saying that "settler societies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies," which, by occupying land of their ancestors, had got in the way (1999, 2). If, here and there, their labor was useful for a time, capital and settlers usually acquired labor by other means, and in so doing, facilitated the uninhibited construction of native people as redundant and expendable. In 1840 in Oxford, Herman Merivale, then a professor of political economy and later a permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office, had concluded as much. He thought that the interests of settlers and native people were fundamentally opposed, and that if left to their own devices, settlers would launch wars of extermination. He knew what had been going on in some colonies - "wretched details of ferocity and treachery" - and considered that what he called the amalgamation (essentially, assimilation through acculturation and miscegenation) of native people into settler society to be the only possible solution (1928, lecture xviii). Merivale's motives were partly altruistic, yet assimilation as colonial practice was another means of eliminating "native" as a social category, as well as any land rights attached to it as, everywhere, settler colonialism would tend to do.

These different elements of what might be termed the foundational complex of settler colonial power were mutually reinforcing. When, in 1859, a first large sawmill was contemplated on the west coast of Vancouver Island, its manager purchased the land from the Crown and then, arriving at the intended mill site, dispersed its native inhabitants at the point of a cannon (Sproat 1868). He then worried somewhat about the proprieties of his actions, and talked with the chief, trying to convince him that, through contact with whites, his people would be civilized and improved. The chief would have none of it, but could stop neither the loggers nor the mill. The manager and his men had debated the issue of rights, concluding (in an approximation of Locke) that the chief and his people did not occupy the land in any civilized sense, that it lay in waste for want of labor, and that if labor were not brought to such land, then the worldwide progress of colonialism, which was "changing the whole surface of the earth," would come to a halt. Moreover, and whatever the rights or wrongs, they assumed, with unabashed self-interest, that colonists would keep what they had got: "this, without discussion, we on the west coast of Vancouver Island were all prepared to do." Capital was establishing itself at the edge of a forest within reach of the world economy, and, in so doing, was employing state sanctioned property rights, physical power, and cultural discourse in the service of interest."

- Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), p. 172-174.

[tenofmuses]

Hello! i just discovered your account. I read the same chapter in the North American Folk Magic book and felt connected to it through my french canadian ancestors. I’m having trouble locating books or really anything about these folk traditions. Do you have any to recommend? thank you so much <3

Hello! :)

I’m so sorry this has taken me months to reply to—I’ve had a reply half-written in my drafts for ages, but the end of the year was crazy so I wasn’t able to finish writing it until now. Hopefully this is still helpful!

I’m going to start off by saying that I’m by no means an expert on this topic (I’m fairly new to reconnecting to these practices), so I’m probably missing some key sources. My French is very poor, so I’m unable to read a lot of the sources that are out there—especially Quebec-specific sources, which are often written in French.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any French Canadian folk magic 101 books (at least not that I know of!) out there, so we have to get a bit creative when it comes to sources.

First, I highly recommend checking out the website Courir le loup-garou (link)! They have a lot of articles about different aspects of Acadian and French Canadian witchcraft (sorcellerie). All of their articles are bilingual, and it’s an excellent, accessible resource to get you started. They also have a page on there with sources they’ve used (books, articles, etc.), so it might be helpful to take a look at those.

I’ll also direct you to @lesorciercanadien, who is a practitioner with excellent informational posts, as well as sources cited that you can comb through.

There is a podcast episode of Three Witches and a Druid, interviewing Laurence Cote, who is a French Canadian folk practitioner, about the subject. Link (goes to the Apple podcast app) here.

Another thing to do is to look at the living culture of your family members or people you know. Personally, my Acadian side of the family are very Christian and have no ties to any sort of magic or animistic beliefs—they don’t even pray to saints, which is a common aspect of French folk practices. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for me to work with! Just means I have to be creative. For example, my Acadian family members use summer savoury in a lot of traditional recipes (meat pies, chicken fricot, stuffing on Christmas), so that’s an herb that I incorporate into my craft a lot of the time.

Food is an excellent and accessible form of culture that you can utilize in your own practice. By looking at common ingredients and working with the spirits of those plants and herbs, for example, or by practicing kitchen witchcraft as you try different recipes. I’ve found this a great way of connecting with my ancestors—following family recipes or even looking up Acadian recipes online and devoting that time spent cooking to those ancestors. It always makes me feel closer to them.

Similarly, I find that listening to traditional music is a great way of connecting to these ancestors. I’m unsure if it’s the same for general French Canadians, but I grew up listening to my Acadian family from New Brunswick playing folk music—specifically fiddles and mandolins and banjos. Sometimes I listen to this music as a way of reconnecting to that side of the family.

Another way to find sources is academic journals, and these will usually be articles about folklore, history, or religion. Use Google Scholar/JSTOR/etc. and search terms like the following ones: "province name"/"quebec"/“acadian”/“french canadian”/"city name" AND "witchcraft"/"folklore"/"magic"/"folk healer." Etc. These aren't always exciting reads, and sometimes the research goes nowhere, but I've found some amazing info this way.

Another type of source to look out for is folklore books—specifically ones related to French Canadian folklore. I was going to insert the name of an old one I read a while ago here, but unfortunately I’ve misplaced the name. I’ll include it here if I find it.

The story of Evangeline is one that is incredibly important in Acadian folklore, and the epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is worth a read. Evangeline is a folk hero to many, and is honoured by some folk practitioners.

I’ll also note that there tend to be a lot of awful racist stereotypes related to Indigenous people in some of the older articles and books about witchcraft in Canada, so that’s something to keep in mind as you do research.

Many of the mentions of Indigenous peoples within the particular papers I have read are due to the close ties some Acadian and Mi’kmaq peoples had with each other historically, which led to cross-cultural communication, trade, kinship, and the sharing of beliefs and knowledge. For example, the northern lights have shared folkloric beliefs for both cultures, which shows the cross-cultural communication that took place between them.

Until someone writes a comprehensive French Canadian or Acadian folk magic book, this is what we’ve got—unless there is a wonderful source out there that I haven’t come across yet! It’s a lot of work to dig through all of these sources to piece together your own folk practice, but I find it very rewarding. Putting in all that work just makes you feel all the more connected to the practices you’re doing, and it’s very worthwhile, at least to me!

Again, sorry this took so long, and I hope it helps! Happy new year :)

[bobastudy]

Things I did last semester that boosted my average:

I don’t really like to toot my own horn but I see these posts a lot and I thought I’d share what really worked for me personally :)

•took both handwritten and typed notes (minimized hand fatigue so my notes were actually good lol) (also it’s far easier to take extensive notes and delete them later than to take minimal notes and be stuck trying to remember what was said)

•before an exam: created flashcards, diagrams, and rewrote or fleshed out notes on a word doc in a simulated exam atmosphere to enhance later recall

•planned a month at a time so I knew in advance when I could socialize and when I had to Grind™️ to prevent burnout

•made friends in my classes!! genuinely makes a big difference

•annotated the hell out of everything (pencil or post in textbooks to resell, pen and highlighters in books I knew I’d keep, all online readings were converted to PDFS and I scribbled all over them)

•annotated with jokes this is maybe unorthodox but I swear it worked for me- I’d laugh at the wording, draw emojis, reference memes, and crack jokes in the margins of my books and it made it so much easier to remember key points of the readings later on

•cut off toxic friends. self explanatory lol but stress impacts your grades!

[ladycharles]

Saw this list of resources for Canadians (though some are globally relevant) to help Palestinians as a QR code at a table at an event last night, and I wanted to share in case anyone is in Canada and interested. What's going on is so horrifying and disheartening, I know there's little we can do but it's important to use what little influence we have when our siblings around the world are in danger.

[auressea]

https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/national-day-truth-reconciliation.html

Mental health supports available

Former residential school students can call 1-866-925-4419 for emotional crisis referral services and information on other health supports from the Government of Canada.

Indigenous peoples across Canada can also go to The Hope for Wellness Help Line 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for counselling and crisis intervention.

Call the toll-free Help Line at 1-855-242-3310 or connect to the online chat (Please use Google Chrome).

Truth and Reconciliation Week

This bilingual educational program is open to all schools across Canada. All sessions will be held virtually, allowing classroom participation from across the country and the involvement of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. From September 25-30, 2023, registration is required.

@allthecanadianpolitics

[creampuffqueen]

here we fucking go again. another natural disaster in the southern us where non-southerners are acting stupid. what’s new?

[jewvian]

Didn't think Canada would turn out to be one of the most antisemitic countries in the world but here we are!

[catocomet]

CANADIANS: THERE IS A PETITION YOU CAN SIGN FOR CEASEFIRE

IT IS PARLIAMENT LEVEL

DO NOT LET YOUR VOICES GO UNHEARD

CEASEFIRE NOW. FREE FALASTEEN.

[nando161mando]

"Canada’s push to exploit Ecuador’s natural resources, despite Indigenous-led resistance and national instability, fits the broader pattern of Canadian engagement with Latin America, especially in the context of the government’s Critical Minerals Strategy and the new Cold War with China.

Ninety per cent of the world’s rare earths production is located in China, which also controls the expensive processing and refining of these minerals — key links in the production chains of high-tech manufacturing and the defence industries in the U.S. and its allies around the world."