Author Archive
Posts by John Harris:
What follows is an attempt to understand what organized groups were represented at the January 6 riot at the Capitol building, and what these groups stand for. I’ve tried to be as objective as possible, and make no personal comment, though words are connotative as well as denotative, and are read by individuals who have…
Read More
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests against systemic racism, happening now all over the western world, feature something that didn’t characterize the American civil-rights protests of the 1960s — the toppling, defacing, beheading and removal of statues of historical figures, in a series of events referred to by some as “the statue wars.” What’s interesting…
Read More
I knew Ken through Barry McKinnon, my colleague in the English Department at the College of New Caledonia (CNC). Barry regularly included Ken in his series of Canada Council readers, a series that started in 1969 and ran into the mid 1980s. Starting in 1972, I worked as Barry’s factotum in this enterprise, printing posters,…
Read More
Fred Speckeen’s talk, part of CNC’s 50th birthday celebration, was a personalized, humorous, and necessarily abbreviated account of some rather complex history. That history started about a decade before Speckeen turned up at CNC, with UBC President John B. Macdonald’s 1962 report on post-secondary education in BC, a report that recommended the establishment of two…
Read More
Fawcett’s “enquiry” is “impolite” in the sense that it attempts objectivity in a context that isn’t currently welcoming it. As he says, cultural appropriation and misappropriation is “a hot-button question.” However, it’s “a sub-issue of the cultural self-determination that every minority in a multicultural society has the right to pursue” and, as a sub-issue, “it…
Read More
Race” for the purposes of Dr Alexis Mootoo’s speech means Mootoo’s own ethnicity, African, described as “black (visible)” and studied in its interaction with the dominant colonialist ethnicity, which is European (Anglo-Saxon in the U.S. and Portugese in Brazil), described as “white.” “Tensions” are non-violent in the sense of attitudinal and institutionalized (“structural”). In liberal…
Read More
Fabienne Calvert Filteau is in her late twenties and from an old Central BC family. Her great grandparents settled in Vanderhoof around the turn of the twentieth century. As the family expanded it spread across the country but centred itself on a cabin that the grandparents built in the late twenties near Fort St. James…
Read More
In the middle of October 2013, Viv and I received in the mail a file, sent by Bob Atkinson’s widow Karen Mackenzie. The file, Karen said, held drawings that Bob had told her, “were from some German prisoners of war in a camp near Medicine Hat.” In the Autumn of 1971, Bob Atkinson, Paul…
Read More
Welcome to the latest in Graham Pearce’s events, sponsored by the College of New Caledonia. I’m John Harris, and Graham asked me to introduce our readers tonight, Barry McKinnon, Sharon Thesen, and Greg Lainsbury. They’ll read in that order, and then again after a short break, and then take questions. I’m here in my…
Read More- « Previous
- 1
- 2
- 3