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Currently viewing articles tagged with Winnipeg.
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“If You Want to Change Violence in the ‘Hood, You Have to Change the ‘Hood”
In the summer of 2009, at a funeral in Winnipeg’s North End following a gang-related drive-by shooting, two of us were approached by members of a North End street gang. They wanted to talk. Too often the voices of the people who have intimate knowledge of, and are integral to, the problems in Winnipeg’s inner city are not heard. Our report endeavours to give a voice to these six Aboriginal men.
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The Power of Myth
“Winnipeg is an oubliette,” says Guy Maddin in his mythical memoir “My (Other) Winnipeg” in Border Crossings magazine. It is? The conception of a cold city populated by sleepwalkers, perpetually astonished at its own age may work for the city of Maddin’s mythologies. Yet, this author left Winnipeg for Montreal five years ago quite ready to forget the place — but forgetting Winnipeg has been impossible. It is impossible because, in the realm of art nowadays, Winnipeg is everywhere.
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Winnipeg’s North End
Winnipeg’s historic North End was a contradictory place. Poverty was widespread and deep; out of its midst grew a rich and vibrant culture. Today’s North End is similar in many respects — deep poverty and racism, and an emergent culture of resistance, for example — yet different in important ways.
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Radical Winnipeg
As you cross the Slaw Rebchuck bridge, a cement arch straddling the vast rail yard that in earlier times cut off the city’s north from its south and center, a sign is visible. Opposite a high school named for a prominent organizer of the Winnipeg General Strike, on the sloped, brown roof of Nepon Motors, it reads “Welcome to the North End: People Before Profits.” Only an aspiration, I know — but where else but in Winnipeg would you find this welcoming?
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On the 90th anniversary of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike
Canadian mythology holds that this is a peaceful country. There¹s no class struggle here, we never had a revolution. The Canadian way is discussion, compromise and mutual respect. We have evolution, not revolution. But if Canada is such a peaceful place, how to explain the revolts, rebellions, uprisings and pitched battles that dot our history? How can they explain Mackenzie, Papineau, Riel, Poundmaker, and other rebels whose actions have disrupted the peaceful flow of Canadian development?
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The Winnipeg General Strike
The Winnipeg General Strike is a landmark in North America by any measure. From mid-May to late June 1919 – for six weeks – about 35,000 workers – the bulk of Winnipeg’s labour force – walked off the job and risked hunger, blacklisting, and potential police and military repression. The event has often been commemorated by the labour movement in the city as it is this week; and sometimes more widely. There was, for instance, a tremendous exhibit in 1994 at the Manitoba Museum to mark the 75th anniversary, and a long-standing bus tour that many of you will have taken.
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Media as insurgent art
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” —Bertolt Brecht
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North Winnipeg’s Seal of Identity
“The place of childhood provides the seal of identity.” This epigram opens the first chapter of Roland Penner’s memoir, Growing Up ‘Red’ in Winnipeg’s North End. It holds true even for those of us who grew up only “pink” — i.e. whose parents were CCFers rather than Communists, and who as a result never set foot in the Ukrainian Labour Temple at Pritchard and McGregor.
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Building Resistance
In western Canadian cities like Winnipeg, a new and particularly destructive form of poverty has emerged over the past thirty years. It is inextricably linked with racism, is disproportionately concentrated in the inner city and has especially damaging effects on Aboriginal people. At the same time, it is Aboriginal people and especially Aboriginal women who are in the lead in developing effective, close-to-the-ground strategies to combat this new poverty.
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Red in Winnipeg’s North End
In a fascinating memoir, the American award-winning and once blacklisted film writer, Walter Bernstein, warns about the dangers of looking back by reminding us of what happened to Lot’s wife: she turned into a pillar of salt. So, if perchance that happens to me, all I can ask is that you throw a little of that salt over your left shoulder.
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