One important element in this new phase of pan-Africanist struggle is the fight against foreign mining companies. West Africa is a mineral-rich region, and leaders from Traoré to Goïta to Senegal’s Bassirou Diomaye Faye recognize that greater state control of the industry is a necessary precondition for sovereign development.

Efforts by Western governments to suppress evidence-based history, whether through banning “critical race theory” or a focus on ideologically sifted “facts and dates” must be fought. We need to insist on national histories being told from the point of view of the common people with that history placed in the context of the whole history of our species.

Like our Palestinian allies in this struggle, we refuse to be patronized by Canadian policymakers. We refuse to be told that we are making a mountain out of a molehill. And we refuse to be told that we lack understanding by politicians who are in fact contradicting themselves. Our demands are simple and we will not stop pressing for them until they are realized.

On November 28, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) announced it had selected Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the municipality of Ignace as “host communities” for all of Canada’s high-level nuclear waste. Yet the extent to which the people of northwestern Ontario consent to the proposed waste repository is, at best, unclear.

History is teaching us that a return to liberal democratic normality marinated in neoliberalism has passed its best-before date. To honour the sacrifices of the World War II generation, and the innocent victims of war, including the mothers of the Atacama, we need to educate ourselves about fascism—what it is, and how to defeat it.

It’s one thing for outlets like The Hub to sell editorial space to corporations or even paid propagandists, but involving real journalists in the process puts them in an unenviable situation. As Marc Edge writes, it makes you wonder how a journalism purist like Peter Menzies might feel about writing sponsored content.

Ellen Gabriel was the spokesperson for the Kanien’kehà:ka defending “The Pines” from a proposed nine-hole golf course expansion in 1990. Nearly 35 years later, When the Pine Needles Fall offers a counter-history that retells the story of the conflict and situates the crisis as the latest entry in a centuries-long history of violent occupation and land theft that began in 1717.

Safer supply is a public health initiative meant to keep people alive and connected to care. It is a lifeline. A tether to the supports necessary to move towards wellness. If our goal is to end the opioid epidemic, safer supply, harm reduction services, and voluntary treatment must be supplements to a larger project of reconstruction.

The pandemic taught us the risk of relying on global supply chains. They are fragile and can be upset by political upheavals. Trump’s election upsets the apple cart. It’s time to recalibrate Canada’s place in the world. If we’ve lost one reliable friend, can we gain others? Will we take charge of our own economy so we can maintain democracy here?

In The Message, Coates writes of a constellation of shared experiences—between Black Americans, Africans, Palestinians—which led him to feel “the warmth of solidarity, of conquered peoples… finding each other across the chasm of oceans and experience.” It is the recognition that if the imperial powers operate conjointly to oppress us, we ought to join in solidarity ourselves.