The dispossession of peoples in Grassy Narrows and the Ring of Fire is not unrelated to the dispossession of Brazilians, Mexicans, or Burkinabè people caught in the crosshairs of Canadian extractivism; rather, they are all marginalized victims of an acquisitive economic system that Canada has been enforcing upon the people within and outside its own borders since the nation’s founding.

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Capitalism and Dispossession: Corporate Canada at Home and Abroad, edited by David P. Thomas and Veldon Coburn. The collection brings together a broad range of case studies to highlight the role of Canadian corporations in producing, deepening, and exacerbating conditions of dispossession both at home and abroad.

When it comes to Canadian oil, the “Putinist” smear is only the newest stage in a series of attempts to discredit largely Indigenous-led anti-pipeline protest movements. And it’s not just the ramblings of Jason Kenney—one of Canada’s prominent think tanks has also endorsed that view, foreshadowing the character of the Canadian elite’s newest assault on land defenders.

From Oka to Wedzin Kwa in Canada; from Wounded Knee to Standing Rock in the US; from Kahoolawe to Mauna Kea in Hawai’i, Indigenous peoples are confronting white settler colonialism in the Anglosphere. These ongoing contestations are having huge ramifications globally, revolutionizing international relations, and helping realize “a better world is possible.”

In the context of atrocities so severe that they confound comprehension, novels like Nona Fernández The Twilight Zone and Katherena Vermette’s The Break play an indispensable role. They are in living dialogue with existing bodies of non-fictional testimony and formal inquiry reports by imagining the most devastating consequences of their respective violences.

December 11, 2021 marked the 24th anniversary of the Delgamuukw ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada. Celebrations of this pivotal moment are conspicuously absent in our society. In fact, it is probably a safe assumption that many living on the land in question, and across the rest of British Columbia—much less the entire country—are not aware of what the Delgamuukw ruling is or what it represents.

A zoning law would have opened up the southern Argentinian province of Chubut to large-scale mining by multinational corporations. But the law was defeated in just five days by an alliance of environmentalists, workers, youth, and indigenous people. Their fight points the way forward for other movements around the world.

In this interview, Indigenous climate activist, writer, and filmmaker Clayton Thomas-Müller talks to Canadian Dimension about his new memoir, Life in the City of Dirty Water, which recounts his early years of dislocation growing up in the core of the Manitoba capital—from the domestic and sexual abuse he endured to the drugs he sold to survive—to his career as a campaigner for 350.org.

We traveled to Wet’suwet’en territory to learn about the Unist’ot’en Healing Centre, located in the northwestern part of British Columbia on the territory of the Unist’ot’en. It is a remote and rural area and most people living in southern urban communities are unaware of the remarkable activity taking place there to “heal the land and heal the people.”

Canada, like most of the Western (wealthy) world, is a self-styled “liberal democracy,” broadly considered the gold standard in global development. Liberal democracies are founded on a commitment to universal human rights and freedoms, values codified in international law. But in the last week in Canada, we have seen these liberal values rocked to their core.