Category Archives: Updates

See you in 2018

I’m taking a proper Christmas holiday. Here’s to a year of big ideas

✎  Wayne K. Spear | December 14, 2017 ◈ Updates

2017 HAS BEEN MANY THINGS, and boring isn’t one of them. At waynekspear.com I launched the fifth season of The Roundtable Podcast, a program that first aired in June 2012, and I will soon produce my 100th episode. This website has grown steadily the past seven years and I’m leaving for the holiday having had my busiest and best month ever. I’m committed to the look and feel and format that I unveiled this fall: an article will come out Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8 am, and Saturdays at 10 am The Roundtable Podcast will be published. I hope you’ll agree that Season 5 has been the best so far. And there is much more to come throughout the months of January–April.

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I’m not going to reveal all of my big ideas for 2018. But here are some highlights. Next year I am planning to introduce guest posting and some longer investigative pieces. I will be focused on Indigenous people, politics, and current events, and there will be more coverage of the arts—including on the podcast, where I hope to feature writers, painters, musicians, and other creatives. My hope and my plan is that I will continue to do in 2018 what I’ve done in 2017—bring you guests who are (or, in my opinion, should be) making headlines.

On Saturday, December 16, the amazing Cindy Blackstock will be my guest on The Roundtable Podcast, Season 5 Episode 90. The podcast will then be on holiday until Saturday, January 13, 2018, and I will return with a new article on Tuesday, January 16.

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.”

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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.

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The End of Month Roundup

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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.

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RTRPARD at 20: Yes, I have a book that’s old enough to buy booze

Real Things Cover

LATER THIS MONTH, I’ll be releasing a special 20th anniversary edition of my 1994 hit collection of stories entitled Real Things Real People Are Really Doing. Available as a download at waynekspear.com—for a limited time only!—this 20th anniversary edition will include a new story and my reflections on the making of RTRPARD. What a time it was. My only regret is that my book can’t actually drink beer. Look for it July 30, 2014.

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Updates and Such

A Children's History

GREETINGS, friends and comrades. Work continues apace on the book that Larry Loyie, Constance Brissenden and I are, for now, calling “Residential School: A Children’s History.” I am also putting the finishing touches to another book about the Indian Residential School System called Full Circle: a story of the Indian residential school legacy, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, and reflections on the work of hope, healing, reconciliation and change. (That title may still change also. These things are not certain in the book trade until it’s in print and on the shelves.)

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