The following statement is an act of solidarity. It originated with faculty members in the Department of Indigenous Learning at Lakehead University but has grown to include the academic community from across Turtle Island. We stand with the family of Barbara Kentner, the Anishinaabe community, and Indigenous women in the pursuit of justice and ending violence against Indigenous women and their communities.

Canada shares with other settler colonial states a deeply rooted desire to deny or minimize the reality of dispossession and to disregard the Indigenous past. A challenge to the colonial present in Canada will require a society based on human solidarity that rejects colonialism as an abomination and respects and cherishes Indigenous rights and Indigenous sovereignty.

Amidst the ongoing chaos of COVID-19, Manitoba’s Progressive Conservatives are attempting to ram through a bill that will criminalize protests at so-called “critical infrastructure” sites such as roads and railways. Canadian Dimension spoke with Mike Bagamery, an organizer with the Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition (MEJC) about the province’s proposed bill and how we can fight back against it.

Our willingness to leave settler violence unnamed permits it. It allows arsonists to be cast as conservationists, and for systemic problems to be framed as regional disputes. From Atlantic fisheries to Alberta classrooms, there is no part of settler society violence does not touch. After all, it is a whole society that must realize the need to face the consequences of a traumatic history.

44-year-old Richard Kakish passed away after an incident involving the Winnipeg Police in August 2017. Richard died after being kicked and repeatedly punched by officers during an arrest. He was a father of four, and grandfather of three. Here, James Wilt speaks with Richard’s daughter about her father’s killing and her family’s struggle for justice.

Mi’kmaw peoples pay a heavy price for the failure of Canada to uphold the rule of law. The failure to respect court decisions like the Marshall case results in ongoing breaches of our inherent, Aboriginal and treaty rights, not just in terms of enforced poverty and overincarceration, but also the violence by those who have long benefitted from the spoils of centuries of racist and genocidal laws, policies and practices.

Bushby’s trial is already a tragedy, no matter the outcome. But how is this crime connected to a broader system of settler colonial violence that snatches away so many Indigenous lives? And how can we move beyond the half-hearted rhetoric of reconciliation to imagine the real, substantial transformations that need to take place to ensure something like this never happens again?

Liquor control tends to be far more about control than liquor. It has been part and parcel of a network of genocidal policies of colonialism: residential schools, forced relocation, family separation, police violence, and ongoing dispossession. Rather than relinquish colonial management of Indigenous peoples, the state reconstitutes liquor control as a means of justifying continued interventions.

To mark the 30th anniversary of “Oka,” and as global movements to end systemic racism rage on, CD’s Sean Carleton had the opportunity to speak with legendary Toronto hip hop icon Wesley Williams (better known as Maestro Fresh-Wes or Maestro) about his music and the song “Nothing At All” specifically—and what they can teach us today, if we take the time to listen.

This marks the sixth installment in an ongoing curated series that asks contributors to imagine the perils and possibilities that will ground our collective response to or emergence from the COVID-19 crisis. The sixth edition is about the Arctic, with contributions from Crystal Gail Fraser, Julia Christensen, and James Wilt.