• Week of 24.08.2014
Pastafarians | Ferguson, MO | Toronto Election 2014 | The Islamic Caliphate: past and present | Religion and War | Why Care What Goes on in the World?
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Monthly Archives: August 2014
Full Circle: the Aboriginal Healing Foundation & the Unfinished Work of Hope, Healing & Reconciliation
An excerpt from my book Full Circle: the Aboriginal Healing Foundation & the Unfinished Work of Hope, Healing & Reconciliation, Chapter 3, “Long-Term Visions & Short-Term Politics.”
THE MANDATE of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation was conceived as two related components: healing and reconciliation. As a funding agency, the AHF supported these with money and community support workers and other clerical services. Another large part of the Foundation’s work and legacy subsisted in its research agenda, which by 2010 had produced 20 studies all focused upon the Indian Residential School System and its current-day manifestations. The research was meant to advance one objective above all others: healing. The topics explored were enormously complex and included fetal alcohol syndrome, incarceration, domestic violence, sexual offenses and addiction. Behind the complex subjects however were practical questions: what relationship does the Indian Residential School System have to the realities of current-day life? Is there an underlying and perhaps even unifying agent which may account for the many apparent diverse forms of physical and emotional turmoil we can discern in indigenous communities? When communities undertake to solve their problems for themselves, what works, and why? Such were the sort of concrete prospects to which the research agenda was directed.
Coming Fall 2014—”Residential Schools: with the Words and Images of Survivors”
The First Nations Financial Transparency Act and Business as Usual in Ottawa
THE RON GIESBRECHT story is an everyone-saw-it-coming affair, and that’s among the reasons why the First Nations Financial Transparency Act has engendered both its champions and detractors. “This is the greatest piece of legislation passed by our parliament, I believe, in a long time,” Derek Fildebrandt (of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation) has been reported as saying. You can imagine him salivating these recent and delicious months, in anticipation of the handful of uncloseted Chiefs à la Giesbrecht, just as you can imagine the few rueful and disgraced Chiefs lamenting a lapsed age of innocence.
My Top Ten Posts of All Time, by Social Media Shares (2010–2014)
The following are my most widely-shared posts on Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, Pinterest, Email, Press This and Google+
Consummatum Est: a story
“I have been ready to die for an eternity now.”
THE KNIFE IN BOTH hands, I give a quick thrust and pierce the skin of my throat. The snap reminds me, all this time later, of the German wieners of my youth. Now I’ll lie here on the floor for what will seem an eternity. But like every other time, I won’t die. I won’t even bleed, or feel pain.
The End of Month Roundup
HOWDY, and welcome to the End-of Month-Roundup—which for the month of July is coming to you at the beginning of August. That’s because this was a busy and exciting month. Let’s review.
If you’ve been watching this site, you know that two books of mine were released this month. One of them, the 20th Anniversary Edition of Real Things Real People Are Really Doing, is available as a download here. Copies of the other, Full Circle: the Aboriginal Healing Foundation & the unfinished work of hope, healing & reconciliation, can be had by contacting me.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 