Download entire interview (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.
Grand Chief Gordon Peters is a citizen of the Delaware First Nation, near Chatham, Ontario, and the Chair of the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians Chiefs Council. The Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians (AIAI) is a non-profit organization which advocates for the political interests of its member Nations in Ontario – the Oneida, the Mohawk, the Delaware, the Potawatomi and the Ojibway.
I DON’T KNOW how it happened, or why it happened when it did, but in the last few years debating religion has become a thing. The trend may have begun (or have been reinvigorated, since debating religion is not new) with Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great. He took to the road as part of the book promotion, debating Catholics and evangelicals and Jews and Muslims along the way, and became semi-famous not for his books but rather for the many YouTube videos of these debates. (Side note to writers: books are a lousy way to get rich and famous!)
• Week of 20.04.2014
Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.
THE CURRENCY of the word outpouring was notable this week: over at the National Post, Michael Den Tandt has not only described the phenomenon, but indulged it himself. His essay “Former finance minister Jim Flaherty’s death leaves a void in the Conservative party” issues high praise, pressing Kipling and Aristotle into the service of a lush panegyric. Again, nothing unusual here – it’s what everyone is doing these days, not only at the National Post, but elsewhere.
• Week of 06.04.2014
Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.
HAS IT EVER occurred to you how weird it is to worry about the environment? First of all, think about the word environment. It means everything, all the stuff everywhere that’s all around you: tress, bugs, sunshine, atoms, radiation. My dictionary defines the environment as “the objects or the region surrounding anything.” Worrying about the environment is therefore about as specific and meaningful as worrying about stuff and things.
TODAY’S Philip Nitschke Sydney Morning Herald article is titled “We need a new word for suicide,” but we don’t. Whoever wrote that headline knows damn well that we have another word already, and it’s even used in the article. That word is euthanasia. What we need is to deal in a no-bullshit way with the perfectly good words we already have: because, my friends, whatever you happen to call it, suicide is the future. That’s why I’m going to use the rest of this article defending killing yourself, under certain circumstances which I’ll now describe.
ENTIRE NATIONS have now banned the film Noah. In the United States, Christians are unhappy with a Hollywood movie that substitutes, for the all-knowing and all-mighty LORD God Almighty, a distant, Pagan deity known vaguely as “the Creator.” Aronofsky’s Noah, an emo environmentalist with a too-voguish commitment to veganism and animal rights, is widely denounced, as is the film’s non-biblical (if not anti-biblical) theme – that human sin is against Mother Earth, not God, and that redemption must be found through earth-friendly living.
• Week of 23.03.2014
Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH Carolina has a bit of a mess in its lap. Back in January, Raleigh’s News Observer publicized the story of a whistleblower named Mary Willingham. Weeks passed, and in more recent days Willingham was interviewed by ESPN and CNN. That’s when the ordure hit the oscillator.
AS THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION Commission of Canada hosts its national event this week, in Edmonton, the topic of genocide is once again surfacing. Usually the topic is posed as a question: is Canada “guilty of genocide”? Over the years, I’ve had many conversations that began with this question, and I’ve done a fair amount of reading and thinking. Here are my notes toward an informed conversation about Canada and genocide.
WINNIPEG FREE PRESS reported this week that Manitoba Aboriginal Affairs Minister Eric Robinson will host a two-day roundtable with twenty people who were part of something now known as the “Sixties Scoop.” For some of you this will be a new and unfamiliar phrase, and you’ll wonder why adopted aboriginal children are calling for an apology from the federal government of Canada. This essay will attempt to inform you on these and other points.
I‘M AWARE THAT my readers come from all over the world (thank-you for that) and that you’re not a parochial bunch. And so I beg excuse for the opportunity I’m going to take today to praise the city in which I live: Toronto.
GREETINGS, Comrades. Today we’re chatting about Grayson Bruce, the nine year-old North Carolina fan of My Little Pony who was bullied by schoolmates when he brought a rainbow-colored backpack to his Buncombe County elementary school.
GREETINGS, PEOPLE. This is one of my regularly scheduled posts in which I address something happening in Indian Country. I encourage all of you to stick around, but let me be clear: I’m speaking to Onkwehonwe here, and only Onkwehonwe, and only on my own behalf. More specifically, I’m talking to Kanien’keha:ka, the People of the Flint, better known by some of you as the Mohawks. I am Kanien’keha:ka, of the Haudenosaunee – the People of the Longhouse, aka Iroquois, the name given to us by our longtime Huron enemies.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 