U.S. Latin@ Uprising Link

Hi.

Sorry about the lack of original writing in the last week and change...the combination of being sick plus being out of town (while still sick) was a tough one. I'm back in Sudbury and mostly better, except for the odd nasty cough, and L is better too. I should have some original writing up some time tomorrow evening.

In the meantime, here is an interesting post by Joaquin Bustelo called "Making Sense of the Latin@ Uprising." It takes a look at the recent mass movement in the U.S., which is responding to a piece of horrible anti-immigrant legislation currently on its way through Congress, from a Marxist perspective that seems similar to that of Stan Goff, the owner of the site on which it is posted.

Hunger Strike Over, Struggle Continues

Sara Anderson, the Ojibwe woman and Sudbury resident on hunger strike to demand higher welfare rates in Ontario, has ended her hunger strike after reflection and discussion with an Elder. The following media release was put out by the Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee yesterday or the day before. More detailed and personal communication from Sara will likely be forthcoming in a little while -- right now she is spending some time recovering from her ordeal and, I believe, engaged in further spiritual reflection under the guidance of an Elder.

Here's the release:

Sara Anderson started her hunger strike two and a half weeks ago. She was demanding a significant raise in social assistance rates; the reinstatement of the previous Special Diet Policy; making it easier for people with disabilities to get onto the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP); and making sure that everyone on social assistance who moves is offered a Community Start-Up Fund.

Today Sara decided to end her hunger strike after the advice of a First Nations elder that it was not her time to die. Sara accomplished a great deal in her brave and determined struggle. She brought a great deal of awareness to the desperate circumstances tens of thousands of people on social assistance live every day in this province due to the Ontario government’s social assistance policies, especially regarding the low level of social assistance rates and the slashing of the previous Special Diet policy. People and organizations across the province came to Sara’s support and she received many letters of support from across the province. She was invited by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty to speak at their anti-poverty March into Rosedale on April 8th and spoke at a media support conference at Queen’s Park on April 13th. She appeared in the legislature on April 13th when NPP MPP Micheal Prue asked a question on her behalf. Although Premier Dalton McGuinty refused to meet with her when he was in Sudbury eventually she did get a meeting with Liberal MPP and cabinet minister Rick Bartolucci.

Last week Sara got the first indication of how taking action can get results. When her OW worker and her supervisor came to visit where she lives she was handed a cheque for an extra $55. This was an interesting amount since it is exactly the difference between what she used to get on the Special Diet and what she is getting now. What took place is that with pressure placed on them because of Sara’s struggle OW was able to restore her Special Diet to its previous level. We were told this was only temporary, lasting only for a month or two. If it is possible for OW to do this in Sara’s case they should do this for everyone who has had their Special Diet cut who has not yet reached the end of the time period for their old form. We already know that there are a number of people in Sudbury who have been cut back from $250 a month on their Special Diet to $10 or $20 a month, and a number of appeals have been launched. Being restored to this higher amount even for a few months would make an important difference in these people’s lives.

In today’s Northern Life (p. 6) we read about Raymond Boucher who has had his special diet slashed by $51 a month. We demand that Raymond Boucher’s Special Diet be restored to its previous rate of $147 a month.

Even more significantly, yesterday, Sara was informed of another instance of how struggle gets results. She was informed that despite the previous rejections of her ODSP application and the appeal hearing set for May 9th that she was now going to be granted ODSP. This will mean that she and her daughter will be able to enjoy a higher rate of support (unfortunately this will still not be enough to live on and meet human needs). All that had been submitted to ODSP since the hunger strike began was a small and not that substantial piece of medical information. With the pressure provided by her hunger strike this technical detail was used to justify not following the usual bureaucratic regulations and to grant her ODSP status before the appeal hearing. If this can happen in Sara’s case it should be happening in all the cases of people with disabilities who apply for ODSP who are routinely rejected from ODSP and often have to wait years to be transfered from OW to ODSP.

Sara’s struggle has been an inspiration to anti-poverty activists across the province. It shows once again that taking action, speaking out, and putting pressure on the government can bring concrete results. Sara’s hunger strike is now over but she has done a great service to the anti-poverty struggle more generally. The struggle to raise the social assistance rates by 40% * which is only back to where they were in 1994 * will continue as will the struggle for the reinstatement of the previous Special Diet policy.

Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee

Welfare Hunger Strike Update

As I have posted about before (1, 2) an Ojibwe woman living in Sudbury, Sara Anderson, who depends on socal assistance for her income, is on hunger strike to demand an increase in social assistance rates, a restoration of the previous special dietary supplement, and changes that make it easier for people with disabilities to get on the Ontario Disability Support Program. Yesterday, on the 13th day of her hunger strike, Anderson met with her MPP, Minister of Mines and Northern Development Rick Bartolucci. Here is a media release coming out of that meeting:

Sara Anderson Meets with Cabinet Minister Rick Bartolucci

Yesterday on the 13th day of her hunger strike Sara Anderson met with Sudbury Liberal MPP and Cabinet Minister Rick Bartolucci. Present at the meeting were Sara Anderson, Rick Bartolucci and an assistant, and Rick Grylls, President of Mine Mill/CAW Local 598. Sara Anderson is demanding a substantial increase in social assistance rates; the re-instatement of the previous Special Dietary Supplement policy; making it easier for people with disabilities to get onto the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP); and that everyone on social assistance who moves be offered a Community Start Up Fund. Sara Anderson's hunger strike is continuing.

The matters discussed at the Saturday morning meeting included raising the social assistance rates and access to Community Start Up Funds. Bartolucci made it clear that he would not intervene regarding Sara Anderson's appeal of her rejection from ODSP which comes up on May 9th. Bartolucci committed himself to put in writing what he is going to do regarding raising the rates and Community Start Up Funds in a letter which Sara Anderson will receive on Tuesday. If these commitments are not acceptable to Sara Anderson the hunger strike will continue and the Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee will be calling on all anti-poverty and social justice groups across the province to join in a provincial day of action in support of Sara Anderson and her demands. For more information contact XXXX YYYY at 000-0000.

HUNGER CLINIC ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Cars On Trains

I have the flu at the moment, and am therefore not feeling particularly able to do much in the way of work, whether on my social movement history project or in terms of blogging that would take any intellectual effort. But I have a little bit of time, so I thought I would do a quick and easy post that I had already half-written in my head, on a completely silly feature of the transportation infrastructure that is in my city and my province.

The duplex of which we rent half is about thirty or forty feet from one of the main trans-Canada rail lines. You get a clear view of the track from windows in the back of the house, and you hear and feel every train that passes -- the first few nights we lived here it disturbed my sleep but now I mostly don't notice. I don't really know much about the current state of Canada's rail infrastructure, so I'm not sure what proportion of trans-Canada rail travel actually goes past our back door. I do know that partial deindustrialization in Western countries and shifts to just-in-time production systems over the last couple of decades have meant rail is not as significant a mode of transportation for goods as it once was. Nonetheless, lots of freight trains go by our house every day.

When we decided to move from Los Angeles to Sudbury, it was not a decision that sat easily with me, and it is one that I continue to wrestle with as part of larger processes of self-reflection. One of the things that made it more palatable to me was the opportunity for greater connection with southern Ontario, which can provide me with things that this city cannot -- existing social networks, both friends and family, as well as opportunities of various sorts. Our decision to get a car not long after moving here was a complex one and I won't explore it in detail. I do appreciate that it rests at least in part on having the economic privilege to afford one, something we did not have during our stay in L.A., and something that many people in our car-centric culture do not have at all and are therefore punished for. It has been important to me to find ways to live that do not involve owning a car, for environmental reasons and complicity in imperialism reasons and because they are money sinks, and one of the prime ways I wanted to do that was by living in a city that made it unnecessary and then renting one when it couldn't be avoided. Though I'm sure a case could be made for Sudbury fitting that definition, we ended up reluctantly deciding that it did not meet it for us. One of the central arguments for me was the importance of a car in keeping connected with the south in a way that was not so inconvenient or unpleasant as to make it unlikely that I would do it.

I have always liked trains. I don't really have many memories growing up of travelling by train in North America. I know there was a trip to Montreal with my mother and a visiting cousin when I was probably three or so, during which I'm told they conversed with each other in broad Glaswegian accents in character as "Senga" and "Saidie," apparently something they did from time to time when they were younger and which would have moritified me had I been a little bit older at the time. I remember a couple of school trips in late public school and high school that involved the train. But for the most part, my early experiences of the train were in Scotland -- we went for four or six weeks every summer until I was thirteen, and stayed with my grandparents. My grandparents lived in a neighbourhood in Glasgow called Burnside, and to get to the train station you had to take the bus or walk down a great big hill to another neighbourhood, Rutherglen. I always enjoyed opportunities to travel around the city, whether it was going with my mother to visit an old friend of hers, to a bagpipe maker with my dad, out on some errand with my Granny, or whatever. These trips almost invariably involved some combination of the light rail system and buses. (It wasn't until I was in university, and I discovered that some of my friends who grew up in the same area of rural and small town southern Ontario as me did not really know how to jaywalk across city streets, that I realized that I also learned that skill on these trips, on the streets of Glasgow.)

So, yeah, positive formative associations with rail travel. As an adult, my experiences with trains have been much less, but have included extensive use of it during one eight-month period of university when I was on a work term in Ottawa and wanted to come back to Hamilton and Kitchener-Waterloo for frequent visits; on a one-month trip to Europe after university was done; and then for a trip to the heavily militarized metropolis of San Diego when we lived in Los Angeles (which was L's first train trip).

So here it is: I like the train. It appeals to me both politically and emotionally. I would rather spend the duration of the trip between Sudbury and Toronto reading or writing or looking out the window than sinking my energy into keeping a ton of steel and glass pointed in the right direction. I live in a city that is a node of significant rail infrastructure of national importance. You might think this was a good match.

Passenger service between Sudbury and Toronto occurs a grand total of three times per week. The only passenger train that makes that trip is the one that goes between Toronto and Vancouver (which, for readers who don't know Canadian geography, is the complete other end of the country, and it's a big country). When I have happened to see it go by, it has only two or three cars, and often enough they do not appear to be full. Despite that, fare between Sudbury and Toronto is (I think) several times that of bus fare.

It's dumb enough that there is this great sustainable transportation infrastructure already here but not organized in a way that people can practically take advantage of. But here's the kicker: One common kind of train car on the freight trains going from East to West has a solid metal frame, often painted yellow, with plain metallic panelling making up the sides. That side panelling has lots of small holes in it, and if you look closely in the right light you can see the cargo.

Automobiles.

I have no quantitative evidence for this beyond my own anecdotal observations, but I would put money on my guess that there are more cars that take the train to, from, and through Sudbury every week than there are human passengers.

That's messed up.

Review: Aboriginal Education

[Marlene Brant Castellano, Lynne Davis, and Louise Lahache, editors. Aboriginal Education: Fulfilling the Promise. Vanocuver: UBC Press, 2000.]

Education and pedagogy have always interested me. Though my partner, both of my parents, one of my sisters, an uncle, a grandfather, and a number of friends have all had formal roles as educators of one sort or another, other than helping to lead a very few workshops and one semester as a teaching assistant, I have not. Nonetheless, parenting, writing, and social change activity -- the three main kinds of work that currently fill my life -- are all about pedagogy in some sense, because they all involve deliberate attention to how your actions and choices will shape the consciousnesses of others.

As well, I suspect that one, perhaps two, chapters in the book I am writing will be related to education. One, in fact, will be the very first chapter of the book, and will talk about the experiences of and actions to challenge mainstream education by two indigenous women. It was as part of my research for this chapter that I read Aboriginal Education.

The book contains many of the documents, reports, and pieces of research related to the education sector that were produced as part of the process of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, or derivatives of those documents. A couple of weekends ago, after I had already started reading this book, I happened to be talking to someone I know who recently wrote a Master's thesis on Aboriginal education -- she said she made heavy use of this book as a reference.

The nature of the content varies widely. Some of the papers are quite technical, things like reviews of policies or practices of various sorts across different jurisdictions. As important as such material is, and as historically useful as it is to have it surveyed in a single volume, that sort of thing is rarely interesting reading. However, the majority of the essays deal with ideas about issues of pedagogy and identity and power and resistance, in one form or another, usually in connection with real examples and case studies. I was particularly interested in the essays about concrete experiments in education, from things like the culturally based science curriculum produced by the Akwasasne School Board to some of the innovative efforts in post-secondary education across the country. I also appreciated the history of broadcasting efforts controlled by Aboriginal peoples, and the various discussions related to what exactly it might and can and should and does mean for pedagogies to be based in indigenous traditions and genuinely controlled by indigenous communities.

It is hard to make overarching statements about a collection of this sort. Only two observations occur to me as being relevant to more than one of the essays published here. The first is some curiosity about the extent to which these papers being produced for a state-driven process, the RCAP, as well as the fact that the state is the only potential (if usually reluctant and rarely reliable) source of money for educational efforts controlled by indigenous communities, has resulted in some of the papers reflecting an image of the state and of the potential for the state to embrace positive change that is perhaps more charitable than the evidence warrants. The other has to do with technology -- the book was published six years ago, and I suspect much of the material was written several years before that, but in only one short decade a lot of the references to computer, communication, and broadcast technologies feels a bit dated.

Certainly this book has provided me with much important background information that will be useful when I come to write the relevant chapter some time in the next few months. But I think for a non-Aboriginal person to read this book and mainly go away thinking, "Well, it isn't it nice what they are doing. They are doing some cool stuff with little support," is really missing the point. Educational institutions and pedagogies which are colonial, and which colonized peoples wish to disengage from and/or carve safe niches within, are inevitably reinforcing the colonial relationship in how they educate and socialize the children of the colonizers into habits of privilege and domination. What are we (the colonizers) doing about that?

Don't really know, to be honest, but the question kind of scares me, as the parent of a pre-schooler that will all too soon be a schooler, as a nineteen year veteran of those institutions myself, and as someone with lots of nears-and-dears who do or did work in those institutions.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Lost

For the most part, major broadcast network television is Wonderbread instead of focaccia or baguette or even ol' fashioned whole wheat. It is kraft dinner instead of my partner's grandma's sinfully delicious macaroni and cheese. It is the peck on the lips to wish a friend good-bye instead of the passionate buss with someone you have the hots for. It is reading the best you could find in a pinch at the mall bookstore instead of what you'd buy if you weren't three hundred miles from Toronto Women's Bookstore.

I feel this way about Lost. It's not awful, and in fact I enjoyed it at times, but it is a product of a media meat grinder that is massified, filled with gatekeepers with dominant/elite sensibilities, and largely run by managers or committees. Therefore, Lost is pretty bland and shows only realities (or imaginaries) that those gatekeepers deem to be acceptable and perceive to be as widely acceptable as possible to the audience they wish to deliver to advertisers.

The show's presmise is that an airliner flying from Sydney to Los Angeles is blown a thousand miles off course and crashes on a mysterious, perhaps malevolent, tropical island. Many passengers survive, but it soon becomes evident they ain't getting rescued. They must learn to live together and to navigate the strangeness and the violence of their new home.

I recently completed viewing the first sesason on DVD. It started strong -- it had a good lead, in writing parlance, and when you start with a plane crash how can you not? The overall arc of the season was reasonable. It did a good job of walking the line between showing the island as creepy and other-than-normal, while not committing to any particular explanation (conspiratorial, supernatural, or otherwise) for this. Individual episodes consist of both stories on the island and flashbacks to provide backstory for the major characters, and episodes varied a lot in the quality of their writing. At the level of scenes and dialogue, the writing was generally competent but uninspiring, and sometimes contrived. All of which may sound harsher than I intend -- I did watch the whole season, after all, and may indeed continue to watch.

The thing is, after a few episodes, "This could be cool" was replaced with, "Right. Of course. Sigh."

The first thing is that, despite pretending to be about forty people stranded on a tropical island, it is really about the boys -- about masculinities. Sure, yes, there are entire episodes that focus on the experiences/backstories of particular female characters. But, well, I once read about this simple test to apply to a movie or TV show to get at least a surface sense of how it deals with gender: 1) Is there more than one female character? 2) Do they talk to each other? 3) Do they talk to each other about things other than the men in the movie/show? I didn't really start paying attention to that until a good way through the season, but I think that though every episode passes (1), only a few pass all three. The relationships among men are central, the relationships between men and women (generally existing or potential pair-bonds) are included, but relationships among the women are mostly invisible.

There's nothing wrong with a show focusing on masculinities. Despite its weak writing and uneven acting, I like Queer As Folk, and one of the main reasons is precisely because it tells stories about masculinities and about homosocial relationships that are outside of dominant narratives in some ways. But many of the masculinities in Lost are very canned, and none of them are particularly challenging or sources of learning. Nor do any of the relationships among the men particularly encourage the viewer to think about masculinities or men or relationships in ways beyond the narrow range of the mainstream.

You have the All American Boy (a doctor with unresolved father issues who ends up the unofficial leader of the crew). You have the Southern Redneck Conman (roguishly charming, with a particularly contrived backstory). You have the Liverpudlian Rockstar Junky (a la some Gallagher or other, who seems to get increasingly sexist as the season progresses). You have the Token Black Man (works hard, just reconnected to his eleven year-old son from whom he was estranged for reasons not his fault). You have the Token East Asian Man and the Token Latino Man (who is an entertaining character, if not a particularly interesting one, and who also has a very contrived backstory). The only woman consistently present in every episode is the Girl Next Door Gone Bad (yet more contrived backstory), and she is so present because she is part of a strange triangle of -- well, not really "love" or "lust," which I'll talk about below, but at least "interest" between her and All American and her and Redneck, and of course hostility between the two men. The only remotely interesting-to-me masculinities are the character who is called "John Locke" -- haven't read enough liberal theory to really get the reference -- and who who seems to be modelled rather explicitly on Kurz in Apocalypse Now, and the Iraqi man, "Sayid," who I'll have more to say about below.

There is a certain simple but genuine realism to some of it -- penis waving contests over leadership, over status, would inevitably happen in such a situation. But relationship formation would also happen, in related but separate ways, among the women, and that is mostly not shown. It was epitomized for me in the season finale when they were doing one of those trite but sometimes effective TV things where, in a tense moment, various characters were shown saying things of Deep and Philosophical Import to one another. For various plot reasons, the boys plus Girl Next Door Gone Bad were out being adventurous, so if you didn't want to ignore the other women completely they had to be talking to each other. When it was the turn of the men, you could feel the statements resonate through relationships constructed by the writers with lots of effort over an entire season. When it came to the women safe back at camp, I couldn't remember some of them ever being shown speaking to each other before, so the interaction completely lacked emotional depth.

And no one in the show is presented as queer in any way. Not that a simplistic, liberal approach to representation necessarily makes good sense or good stories. But you know that even if some writer at an early brainstorming session were to suggest, "Hey, let's have four older, butch-ish lesbian feminists coming back to San Francisco from a sexualities conference in Canberra on the plane!" that it wouldn't get past the network gatekeepers and would therefore probably be self-censored by the writers. And there's a whole realm of storytelling out the window -- one element of the processing into blandness, dominant preconceptions of the world, and conformity that is inherent to dominant mass media. And let's face it, wouldn't it be entertaining to watch (Queer As Folk reference) Brian Kinney absolutely loathing everyone around him but somehow managing to seduce a few of his fellow castaways anyway, not to mention the ways in which his hypermasculinity would play into the inevitable boy status contests as the group of strangers started to cohere?

And even in the het realm, as per necessities of broadcast media, sex is largely erased. Yes, there are some romantic tensions -- the quasi triangle I mentioned, a marriage that crumbles, one obvious attempt to establish a new liason that fails just at the point of success, and another seemingly asexual pair bond that forms. In fact, the season finale went out of its way to highlite the status of all of the heteronormative pair bonds deemed to be important, more so than any other class of relationship. But on the whole, the realities of sexuality and romantic relationships were glossed over. Not that everything has to be about sex, of course, but from what I know about how human beings interact, once it was clear that rescue was not imanent, sex would be a profoundly powerful force in bringing people in this intense, life threatening situation together, and in tearing them apart. Even if only a few indulged in new partnerships, it would be guaranteed to rock the group dynamic in ways more and different than what was shown.

I would've come to all of that eventually, I think, but the factor that initially and dramatically pierced my charity towards the show was the handling of "Sayid." Initially, I was interested in what the writers would do with him. The actor, Naveen Andrews, is talented and extremely charming. The idea of what could be done with a three dimensional Iraqi character in a U.S. show at this point in history intrigued me. This was reinforced in the first or second episode when they made it clear that they wanted to humanize him but also make him a potentially challening presence. This exchange occurred before anyone knew much of anything about him:

American character: So you were a soldier, huh?
Sayid: That's right.
American character: Where did you serve?
Sayid: Iraq.
American character: Cool. I had a buddy in the 83rd Airborne who fought there. What unit were you in?
Sayid: The Republican Guard.
American character: [Horrified raised eyebrows]

What a great opening to show something about war and nation and humanity, right?

Except not, of course. Soon enough it became clear that really "Sayid" was intended as a vessel for everything white North Americans think we know about Iraq. He remained compelling as an actor and humanized as a character, but the content to do with his identity as Iraqi or Arab was kept firmly within the bounds of stereotype. Not that I am particularly knowledgeable about those identities, those realities, either, but precisely because nothing about his character stood out as being a challenge to white North American preconceptions, which tend to be shallow and oppressive, shows something about the thinking that went into writing him.

For example, "soldier" and "Republican Guard" got fleshed out to include that he is from Tikrit (Saddam's home town), that he was a torturer during his stay in the military (and therefore managed to be both in military intelligence and in an elite combat unit), and later we find out that his old college roommate became a terrorist and the CIA recruited "Sayid" to infiltrate his old friend's cell. Leaving no stereotype unturned, eh? I wonder why his main element of backstory didn't get to be his troubled relationship with his father or his cursed lottery winnings? And neither the episode that involved flashbacks to his days as a torturer nor the one that used flashbacks to his more recent attempt to infiltrate a terrorist cell showed any particular political insight or nuance, and seemed to be written to be consistent with what little we in North America really know about such things, as opposed to educating and challenging. For example, in the infiltration flashbacks, he gets credibility with this cell by spotting a bug in their house that the CIA has put there specifically for him to find, and in that moment his friend endorses him to the others in the cell by saying, "He's okay. He was a Republican Guard." Again, I too am ignorant of such things, but I'm not so sure that being a member of an elite fighting unit in a secular nationalist regime would bring automatic acceptance and respect in what is presumably a Wahhabist or similar group, at least without some further explanation.

But what really got me was the way the issue of his engagement in torture was handled. In the present-day story on the island he is shown to deeply regret that part of his past. Yet it seemed to take relatively little to get him (through some extremely contrived twists of plot, and at the urging of All American Boy) to torture someone on the island in the present. He is shown as regretting it afterwards, but not with the kind of wrenching depth of self-loathing I would expect from someone who has purged such a horrible practice from his being and then somehow been dragged back to engaging in it, and he gets over his regret extremely quickly. To be even remotely plausible, it should have been written as much harder to make happen, and utterly devastating to him for a prolonged period of time if it did, I think. Or is the fact that he is Arab enough to allow it to be plausible for the writers to dispense with a psychologically realistic portrayal of what it means to engage in torturing fellow human beings? Of course, it may also be a product of the ways in which torture as a practice has crept into a kind of (revolting) sterilized acceptability in North American culture, if the circumstances are seen as sufficiently extenuating.

And while we're on the topic of racism, I didn't quite get why being a woman from an owning-class Korean family makes it completely natural, with no further explanation or backstory or mention of training in the field that I saw, for one character to automatically know how to turn plants into herbal remedies on a strange island 2000 km from her homeland. Would it be accepted as plausible by writers or viewers, with no need for further backstory, for a young woman from the McCain family (which owns most of Nova Scotia) to be dropped onto an uncharted island in the south Atlantic and to start churning out home remedies? Again, this could be ignorance on my part, but it did make me wonder.

So there you go. It's an interesting premise and a beautiful setting, and it isn't a bad show in many ways. But the realities of being produced by/for a dominant institution in a massified medium means that certain assumptions are made about who are the viewers that matter, about what can and cannot be talked about, and about where detail and nuance are necessary and when they are not. I don't actually expect otherwise, to be honest. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to write about it, and it doesn't mean I'm going to stop desiring more from the media I consume.

Education Quote

Once upon a time twin giants were born. One was evil and one was good. Because they both had the same name people had trouble telling them apart. The evil twin tricked people by saying he was the good giant. He tried to change people so that they would be just like him. He always pretended to know what was right and told children they were stupid and bad. He ate most of the children who met him, but he kept a few favourites and made them fat and arrogant.

The good giant tried to help people. He made children happy and helped them find answers to their questions. The children who met this giant grew strong and wise. As the children grew older and became adults, the good giant remained their friend and they were always welcome at his house.

Of course both giants were named education. We must know the difference between these two giants if we are to stop gambling with our children's lives.

-- Eber Hampton

Hampton is talking specifically about the relationship between indigenous peoples in North America and the various things that the word "education" can mean, but there is definite relevance to other peoples as well.

More On Welfare Hunger Strike

Today the Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee held a media conference in support of Sara Anderson's hunger strike, which is to demand an increase in social assistance rates, outside of an event attended by Premier Dalton McGuinty and Minister of Mines and Northern Development Rick Bartolucci, who is also our local MPP.

L and I attended part of it. It was a small event. A few local labour leaders spoke, as well as Sara herself. It was my first opportunity to meet Sara -- I didn't do much more than introduce myself, because I get the sense she has been harassed by strangers wanting to talk to her over the last week. Despite being a fairly low-key event, I did find myself fairly effected by it, emotionally speaking. I may write more about that later.

Here are a few items just circulated by one of the members of the Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee, which is doing what it can to support Sara in her choice of action.

A brief action report by GK:

We had a media conference and support rally for Sara Anderson today outside Science North where McGuinty and Bartolucci were appearing. We had a number of union and community supporters and a number of media outlets were present. We handed out 250 copies of the leaflet below. While Bartolucci and McGuinty refused to meet with Sara we do know this issue was raised by Rick Grylls the President of CAW/Mine Mill Local 598 with Rick Bartolucci and he delivered a letter from Sara to Bartolucci. We also know that a number of reporters asked McGuinty about this at the media conference after his announcement. He apparently said that rather than raise the social assistance rates they were trying to find other ways to support people on social assistance. We hope that Sara will feel up to going to Toronto tomorrow and will be able to deliver her message at the OCAP rally herself. Meanwhile we hope that all OCF groups can raise Sara's struggle in your communities.

The text of the flyer that was being handed out to the local luminaries going into the event:

Support Sara Anderson on Hunger Strike to Get Social Assistance Rates Raised

Sara Anderson, a 45 year old First Nations mother on Ontario Works (OW), is currently on a hunger strike to help people recognize the desperate conditions in which tens of thousands of people on social assistance are forced to live across Ontario. She is demanding:

* the raising of the social assistance rates by 40%. This would bring the social assistance rates back to where they were in 1995 before the Tory cuts. As Sara puts it with the recent tiny increase by the Liberal government "Welfare rates went up by two percent, but our rent went up by more than that."

* the re-instatement of the previous Special Diet policy which allowed people on social assistance to receive funding for nutrition for themselves and their families. Sara recently had her Special Diet plummet from $75 a month under the old policy to only $20 with the new policy, a $55 cut in her and her daughter's monthly income;

* making it easier for people living with disabilities to be able to get on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) which provides people with more financial support. As it stands many are routinely rejected when they apply. Sara's application for ODSP was rejected and this rejection was upheld by an internal review. She has an appeal scheduled in early May.

* that all people on social assistance who move be offered community-start up funds to allow them to establish their new home. Sara was only given $90 for her move last fall when she should have been offered hundreds of dollars in start-up funds.

Today Premier Dalton McGuinty and Cabinet Minister and Sudbury MPP Rick Bartolucci are at Science North to make an announcement regarding funding for the Northern Ontario Medical School. They both have been directly involved in and are responsible for the government decisions that have led Sara to go on a hunger strike. While we welcome more funding for the Medical School we ask the following question: what is the point of having more doctors when the level of social assistance in Ontario is so low that it means that tens of thousands of people are being underfed and are suffering from health complications arising from lack of nutrition?

What you can do to support Sara Anderson:

* Sign the on-line petition at http://ocap.ca/rtr/diet/petition (at the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty website) to Premier McGuinty calling for a major raise in social assistance rates and for re-instatement of the previous Special Diet policy. This petition has already been signed by more than 1,400 people.

* Write letters to, or call, Premier McGuinty (fax 416-325-3745 or write Dalton McGuinty, Premier, Legislative Building, Queen's Park, Toronto, Ontario, M7A 1A1) and Sudbury MPP and Cabinet Minister Rick Bartolucci (at 705-675-1914) supporting Sara's demands.

HUNGER CLINIC ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

I would add that on the issue of people being rejected when they apply to get on ODSP, I remember hearing from legal clinic staff a number of years ago when I lived in Hamilton that they had received unofficial word from official sources that, at that time, ODSP intake staff had been instructed to reject everything they received and make everyone go to appeal. Don't know if that's still happening, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear it.

And here is a recent article from a local newspaper called Northern Life:

Thursday, April 06, 2006
One week without food, protester's resolve strong
BY KEITH LACEY

A few words of encouragement from a friend is keeping a Sudbury woman who is on a hunger strike in good spirits.

Sara Anderson plans to take her crusade to the premier when he visits city today. She hasn't eaten since Monday.

Sara R. Anderson, 45, has stopped eating to protest what she says is an inhumane social assistance system.

She hasn't had anything to eat and has stopped taking medication for severe arthritis since early Monday morning.

She plans to continue her hunger strike, "until I get in writing" the Liberal government is willing to make significant changes to the province's welfare rates.

While feeling serious hunger pangs for the first time since starting her protest, Anderson was in an extremely good mood Thursday, mainly because a friend phoned earlier in the day.

"I'm in very happy spirits because my friend Muriel just called and she's a dear, dear friend of mine," said Anderson. "I didn't want to worry her and told her I was doing OK, and she offered me many words of encouragement and that really makes me feel good."

Anderson plans on participating in a rally this morning organized by the Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee outside of Science North, where Premier Dalton McGuinty is visiting to make an announcement supporting the Northern Ontario School of Medicine's Bursary Program.

Anderson says she endured significant physical pain after stopping taking medication for arthritis, but she's developed a pain tolerance and hunger is now becoming more prevalent.

"The hardest part right now is continually smelling a bannock burger, which is a burger made using traditional native bread with a hamburger patty in the middle," she said. "Most natives love these burgers as it mixes today with the past and they taste so good."

Anderson says her protest is about forcing the government to increase welfare rates significantly, but she would also like to see more people with legitimate claims be accepted into the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP).

She was denied a disability pension more than once, even though she has a bullet hole in her hip. She was shot and hit while working as a truant officer about 25 years ago on the Grassy Narrows First Nations near Kenora.

She also has numerous pins in her left ankle after being pushed off a second-floor balcony during a domestic dispute in Winnipeg 15 years ago and hasn't been able to work since, she said.

"When I have applied for disability, I've been told repeatedly I don't have any substantial disability...I guess a bullet hole and ankle that has caused me severe pain for many years isn't enough."

Her teenage daughter Sheryl has shown remarkable support during the first few days of this hunger strike.

"She's my rock and always has been," Anderson said.

If she feels strong enough, Anderson plans on boarding a minivan with her daughter and members of the local Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee to participate in another rally through Toronto's Rosedale's swanky community Saturday evening.

When informed some people have voiced opposition to her hunger strike and insist they have managed to get by while collecting social assistance, Anderson said negativity from people she doesn't know will not discourage her.

"I'm determined to keep up my hunger strike," she said. "Until I'm given assurances from the government that things are going to change, then I will continue.

"I don't care if some people out there criticize me. This is something I have thought about for a long time and I do believe one person can force changes and I'm not about to give up."

"I haven't changed my daily routine too much," she said. "I'm trying to drink as much water as possible and I'm sleeping a little bit more, but I'm still spending time with friends and my daughter and I'm trying to get outside to get some fresh air when I feel good."

Anderson says she's excited about her brother, a retired band chief from a Northern Ontario First Nations reserve, coming to visit her some time next week.

"It will be great to see him," she said.

Please get involved in struggles to raise social assistance rates wherever you live, and spread word about Sara's action!

Hidden White Normativity

One of the first blogs that I ever read regularly was Paul Street's. He doesn't write so much these days, after moving from a job as a researcher at a major urban civil rights organization in Chicago to go back to teaching university history, but he still has some interesting things to say. I am interested in the ways in which different socially determined experiences shape our instincts, our gut responses, our unconscious, our blindnesses in very particular ways, so I thought I would link to this new article by Street in The Black Commentator: "Race, Place, and Freedom: A Katrina Classroom Memoir."

He starts off like this:

"One of the most important, though most subtle and elusive, aspects of white supremacy," notes the radical black philosopher Charles W. Mills, "is the barrier it erects to a fair hearing. It is not merely," Mills adds, "that people of color are trying to make a case for the economic and juridico-political injustice of their treatment; it is that they are additionally handicapped in doing so by having to operate within a white discursive field." Within that biased field, Mills observes, "the framework of debate is not neutral: it is biased by dominant white cognitive patterns of structured ignorance, an overt or hidden white normativity so that at the basic factual level, many claims of people of color will just seem absurd, radically incongruent with the sanitized picture white people have of U.S. history."

Read it!.

Hunger Strike For Higher Welfare

Today in Sudbury -- the city in which I live -- Sara Anderson, an Ojibwa woman who depends on welfare for her income, has taken the drastic step of beginning a hunger strike to demand higher social assistance rates in Ontario.

I've been out of town for a few days so I'm not clear on the details, but from what I understand she announced her intent to begin this action as an individual acting on her own. Late last week there was a report in a local newspaper about this, which prompted a number of people in the anti-poverty group that I am a part of to get in touch with her. As a result of that connection, the Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee will be supporting her action however we can.

It should be noted that this support does not mean that the group or me as an individual are necessarily encouraging people to adopt the hunger strike, a potentially very dangerous tactic, as a general approach for seeking an increase in social assistance rates. However, Anderson has decided that this is the path she wishes to take, and I think it is important that she be supported in the action she has chosen.

Here is a media release put out earlier today:

Starting Monday morning, April 3rd, Sara Anderson, a 45 year old Sudbury woman on Ontario Works (OW), will begin a hunger strike to demand a substantial raise in social assistance rates. She has announced that "I will stop eating food and taking any medication and will survive only on water." Referring to the recent Ontario budget announcement she states that "Welfare rates went up by two percent, but our rent went up by more than that." She also points out that "My life is not about living, it's about survival." She describes her life as "having become a prisoner of welfare." She is the mother of a 15-year old daughter, who supports her decision to go on hunger strike. Anderson promises to "fight this struggle to the end."

After she pays her rent, Anderson has less than $300 a month to live on and she can't afford any quality of life for herself or her daughter.

After she pays her daughters school bus pass, cable and phone bill and food for their three cats there is barely enough to pay for food. Just to bring people on social assistance back to where they were before the massive Tory cuts to social assistance in 1995 there needs to be an immediate 40% increase in the rates. While Ontario is a wealthy province people on social assistance are forced to live "on bread crumbs." As Anderson puts it "people on welfare no longer have any dignity and are forced to live like animals. That shouldn't happen in this country. That's why I'm going on this hunger strike."

Anderson is also protesting the recent Liberal government slashing of the Special Dietary Supplement which has made it much more difficult for people on social assistance to get the nutrition they need. Anderson has seen her supplement plummet from $75 a month under the old policy to only $20 with the new form and policy. This means that she lost $55 of her and her daughter's monthly income. This cut was the "last straw" that convinced her to go on a hunger strike. To get this new form filled out by a medical professional she had to pay $40 out of her own pocket. These expenses should be covered by OW.

Sara Anderson came to Sudbury in the early 1990s from Grassy Narrows First Nations near Kenora. She has not been able to work for wages since she came to Sudbury because of a series of injuries and disabilities. (For more information on Sara Anderson see Keith Lacey, "Woman Prepares for a Hunger Strike to Protest Welfare System," Northern Life, April 2, 2006, pp. 1 and 7). Anderson is demanding that the government substantially increase social assistance rates and re-instate the previous Special Dietary Supplement.

She is calling on people to sign the on-line petition at http://ocap.ca/rtr/diet/petition (at the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty website) to Premier McGuinty calling for a major raise in social assistance rates and for re-instatement of the previous Special Diet policy.

This petition has already been signed by more than 1,400 people.

Last year Anderson applied for and so far has been refused her application for the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). This would have given her and her daughter access to more funds for food and living. She has been turned down with the argument that she does not have a "substantial" physical or mental impairment (reported in a letter from Denise Ryckman for the director of ODSP, Nov. 8, 2005). This is despite her physical condition which prevents her from being able to work for wages because of major hip (when she was a truant officer she was shot in the right hip area), knee (she has arthritis in one knee), ankle (her ankle was broken 20 years ago and she has two plates and a pin holding it together and now also has arthritis in her ankle), foot and back problems. She also has history of bad migraine headaches and has been diagnosed with 'depression' and with 'severe post-traumatic stress disorder.' She challenged this rejection of her ODSP application and asked for an internal review which upheld the initial rejection and now has an appeal scheduled in May. Anderson is demanding that it be made easier for people living with disabilities to be accepted onto ODSP.

Anderson moved into her current residence last September. At this time she was given a total of $90 for moving expenses. She was given no offer of a community start-up grant which is her right as an OW recipient. This denied her access to funds that would have allowed her to establish a new home for herself and her daughter. Anderson is also demanding that each person on social assistance be informed of their right to access community-start-up funds when they move. Since she did not receive these funds every month she has to hock much of her furniture simply to pay for the necessities of life.

Anderson hopes that her hunger strike will help people recognize the desperate conditions in which tens of thousands of people on social assistance are forced to live across Ontario. She is asking for people to write letters to, or to call, Premier McGuinty (fax 416-325-3745 or write Dalton McGuinty, Premier, Legislative Building, Queen's Park, Toronto, Ontario, M7A 1A1) and Sudbury MPP and Cabinet Minister Rick Bartolucci (at 705-675-1914) supporting her demands. She is also looking for the donation of a computer so she can access the internet to help to organize support for her demands.

The Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee, a Sudbury group supporting a 40% raise in social assistance rates and the reinstatement of the previous Special Diet policy, is providing support for Sara Anderson in her struggle. While we do not advocate hunger strikes for people living in poverty who are already in difficult nutritional and health situations we certainly well understand the reasons that led Sarah Anderson to decide to go on a hunger strike.

If you require more information or wish to contact Sara Anderson contact XXXX YYYY at 000-0000.


HUNGER CLINIC ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Please contact the provincial government and demand that social assistance rates be raised and that the special dietary supplement be reinstated, and get involved in anti-poverty activities in your local community.