Of all the possible imagery the Federal Government could have chosen for the cover of the speech from the throne, they chose the worst picture possible.

bad choice

Why would anyone in their right mind choose a picture of tobogganing for the cover of a speech about economic recovery?  By choosing a photograph of a sport where people willingly throw themselves down a hill at high-speed, sometimes with bumps along the way, the designers of this cover inextricably linked the report with the idea of decline.

There are countless other images that could have worked. Winter is almost over, they could have used a springtime image. Spring is all about rebirth and renewal. A budding plant is a great visual metaphor. Someone tending a garden or planting a field would have worked just fine.

Even a cover without a photograph would probably have been better.

As the antidote to disconnection (and since it is Black History Month), I choose poetry:

Let America be America Again by Langston Hughes.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(an excerpt)

Go read the rest, it is a great poem.

I always was a dreamer, I just never though I’d be day dreaming in shades of grey. I feel lost in the great grey middle nothingness of America. Why is so much of my city built of nothingness?

I love February. Oh, it’s cold and hard, but February is also Black History Month! Say what you will about the validity or need of a month devoted to the history of a certain people, I really like Black History Month.

It took me a long time to learn how to read. By the start of grade two I still couldn’t really make heads or tails of words. Lucky me, my poor reading was noticed. I was doubly lucky to go to a school where a specialist was available. I took remedial reading throughout grade two and grade three.

It wasn’t until grade three, Ms. Cromwell’s class, that reading took flight for me. Ms. Cromwell was a young black woman from Nova Scotia. She was, is, a fantastic teacher. With her I learned to love reading. She made reading, and Black History Month, a really big deal. The two were so intricately related, and so exciting, that you couldn’t help but become engrossed in learning. She spared no stops in preparing for February. There was a talent show, special guests, films, and food. Something new happened every day, and a lot of those activities required books. Emancipation from slavery and emancipation from illiteracy are fundamentally intertwined ideas. Ms. Cromwell had a remarkable way of explaining both to 8 year olds. I owe a large debt to her talented and caring teaching.

I went to a very heterogeneous school. Everyone was from everywhere. I was one of only 4 kids in my class who were Canadian-born and white. It was a challenging place to hang on to your identity and connection to history. In Ms. Cromwell’s class, multiculturalism meant more than maintaining disparate and distinct social enclaves. Multiculturalism meant interweaving stories. To Ms. Cromwell, and the rest of my class, living together meant a rich and shared history. Thanks to her, Black History is my history. Ms. Cromwell’s Black History Month said so strongly “there is room for you, your story is important too.” You didn’t have to be black to share in the benefits of Black History Month. Sharing black history was a powerfully binding experience.

So, in honour of Ms. Cromwell, I’ll be celebrating Black History Month this month.  And for your edutainment, a song. This performance by Nina Simone gives me the shivers. Enjoy:

What was it that the Decentrists desired when they dreamed of the city as a garden? What did Le Corbusier see when he imagined the towers of the Radial City, gesticulating like giant fingers in some obscure salute? Did anyone think to ask people how they wanted to live? Did anyone look around, to see the value of the city as a social and economic environment? The failures of the Robert Taylor homes in Chicago and Clichy-Sous-Bois in Paris are resounding examples of the general failure of the social housing projects of the 20th century to adequately address the housing needs of citizens of the city. The planners tried to build utopia, but forgot to account for the nature of people.

We may be poised to make the same mistake.  Regent Park in Toronto is being torn down, as are thousands of other aging or unserviceable social housing complexes. They will be replaced with condominiums. A massive relocation is under way, with social housing mega-blocks swapped for social and economic “diversification.” We are conducting a large, living social experiment played out on real human beings.

In the inner-city housing project of Toronto’s Regent Park, Kendell and Mikey, like their surroundings are in the process of transformation; the environment and social pressure tempting them to make poor choices, their mothers and mentors rooting for them to succeed. Turning his camera on the often ignored inner city, Academy-award nominated director Hubert Davis sensitively depicts the disconnection of urban poverty and race from the mainstream.

Have we learned from our experience, or are we building for another failure?  Is the redevelopment of the mega-projects just?

Here’s a fantastic little video via my friend HelloHellaStella about octupuses that use coconut shells as portable housing:

“We were blown away,” said biologist Mark Norman of discovering the octopus behavior off Indonesia. “It was hard not to laugh underwater and flood your [scuba] mask.”

original article from National Geographic

The highlight, for me, comes half way through when the little guy tucks himself inside two shells. When another scoots her way across the ocean floor is pretty cool too! This video does not contain sound.

Who said we coudn’t have a little fun around here, eh?

I am inspired by my friend Josée’s reporting from the Copenhagen Climate Summit, so I thought this would be a good time to focus on issues of environmental justice. For too long, we have lied and externalized the true costs of doing business. That loan is now being called in. It will be poor people who pay our debts, in deteriorating health, longer commutes, higher food prices, or the eradication of fertile soil and potable water. There really are too many ways to list how the situation facing poor people is unjust. A lot must be done.

Mass action has for a long time been the only real tool for regular people to change things. So too for climate justice. I believe that mass action is an important part of political and economic support of environmental change. On that note, I share with you documentation of two mass-actions that make a call for radical, but reasonable, changes in the way we conduct our daily lives.

The following are videos of two protests on either side of the United States involving cyclist riding with cars. They share a similar message about the unsustainable design of the a car-based city, but that is where the similarity ends. The videos use two different styles (so do, as you will see, the actions), but their message is equally strong. The first for it’s classic call for justice and solidarity, the second for it’s insanity.

Enjoy:

High School Bike Bus from Keri Caffrey on Vimeo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNZSe8Q8-Iw

P.S.  While mass action, culture, and an affordable press have long been tools available to working and poor people, accessible broadcast media is new. The ability for normal lay people to produce quality propaganda like the above is a novel and exciting development. What this access will actually mean is anyone’s guess.

Oe Menia — Bieke Depoorter

A beautiful idea, beautifully rendered.

Oe Menia by Bieke Depoorter recently won the Magnun Expression Award. I am encouraged that this series beat out a strong showing of predictably outstanding , typically hard-core, but otherwise boring “photojournalism”.

Those other stories included a bunch of poor people in a variety of locales, all looking poor. There are pictures about drug addicts, abused miners, and survivors of war. There are pictures made at great risk, and pictures made in incredible places. The also-ran photographers are all supremely talented in their own right, but their work falls short for the same reason: it is impersonal.

Depoorter’s approach was different too:

“I am looking for a place to spend the night. Do you know people who would have a bed, or a couch? I don’t need anything in particular, and I have a sleeping-bag. I prefer not to stay in a hotel, because I don’t have a lot of money and because I want to see the way people live in Russia. Could I stay at your place, perhaps? Thank you very much for your help!”

What Bieke Depoorter has, and the others lack, is a fundamentally social approach to photography. Her photos are documents of a social experience first, and photographs second. Yes they are beautiful, but their power is that they embody a relationship. There is nothing special about the places Depoorter went to, but we will never be able to visit. Her photography is unique, a record of an event and a relationship that is impossible to receate. Yes, her people are poor too, but the photos aren’t cloying or sterotypical. They describe, with respect, a particular human experince in the specific and the general.  They do not abstract and isolate, they connect. When I look at these photos, I feel a frenetic, agitated, almost crazed energy just below the surface. I cannot say the same for the others.

And as a supplementary series, I find her pictures of sleeping places a perfect counterballance.

Credit to my friend Saty for the heads up about this work.

Telling our Healthy Stories

Photographs tell us many things about the past—what our ancestors looked like; how our cities or towns once appeared; or who was present at important political events. People look to their photographic archives for their history. Yet when Aboriginal people look for images of their ancestors, what their communities looked like, or important historical events in their lives, the records become scarce. We are more familiar with the stereotypes of the Indian chief and squaw, the Eskimo, or Half-breed, than engaging with them as real people.

~Jeff Thomas (Iroquois), in Where are the Children? Healing the Legacy of the Residential Schools (published by the Legacy of Hope Foundation, 2003

For the past several years, I’ve been immersed in developing useful health information for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people across Canada. I’m passionate about making sure that Aboriginal people in Canada get information that empowers them to think about achieving good health in their traditional ways.

My good friend Jackson and I have an ongoing dialogue about what it means to be healthy (and ultimately, happy). While my own perspective as a mixed-race First Nations woman is unique from Jack’s, our common bond is that we both understand first-hand the issues that Aboriginal people are dealing with—isolation, poverty, healing.

As an inter-generational survivor of the residential school system (and the foster care system, and the sixties scoop, phew!), I grew up surrounded by a lot of anger, guilt, abuse, and mistrust. As I grew into a young adult, the act of creating became very important for me to deal with all of these emotions. Jackson is a person who gets the importance of being creative along the healing journey, and thankfully, he has often been the impetus for my creations.

That’s why I asked Jackson to join me on my research journey this year. Thanks to a Trillium grant, I’ve been looking at what we can do to help prevent obesity in Ontario’s Aboriginal communities. People kept telling me, “We need to see people who look like us.” So many books and reports that aim to help Aboriginal people actually serve to reinforce many of the stereotypes that aren’t exactly helpful.

I discussed this with Jack. He knows me well, and he knows I’m a stubborn force when I’m working to achieve my visions. I knew he would be able to understand, respect, and most importantly, help me to achieve my vision when it came to putting my friends and other people I love in front of the lens.

We’ve now collaborated on several photo shoots in Toronto and Ottawa for my research. Jackson’s images help me turn my words into something that people can actually use, something that inspires them. I see faces light up when they see our photos. Jackson’s shots help people to get an understanding that as Aboriginal people, we don’t fit into the stereotypes that so many hold about us. Not all of us are brown or red, and some of us even have blonde hair and blue eyes. His images help everyone (including me!) to question our ideas about what we think about Aboriginal people.

Getting this far wasn’t easy. There is no guidebook to producing useful images of Aboriginal people in a culturally appropriate way. Most of my friends don’t have handlers, and I had no budget for lighting, locations, or much of anything else. Jackson had to get up close and personal with many of the children, aunties/uncles, parents, teachers, and grandparents. He couldn’t walk into a room, shoot the children, and leave. He actually had to engage.

One warm, summer evening I invited Jackson to meet some of my close friends for the first time, a beautiful Métis family that I love dearly. They had arranged a delicious feast for all of us to enjoy together. As we sat down for our meal, their 4-year-old was smiling wildly and climbing all over Jackson as if he were a jungle gym. His parents smiled warmly at me, and I was clear on the fact that everyone knew we were safe with Jack. For us, this child’s act spoke volumes—we believe that children are closest to the Creator, and they know when they are safe.

My research isn’t over, and neither is my collaboration with Jack. Many people are excited about this work, so I’m aiming to expand it and get us up north to meet the Dene and Métis people in the Northwest Territories. It’s sort of selfish, I guess—having Jackson around helps me feel safe. It means there is someone sensible to listen, give useful feedback, and help me to stay inspired and sane.

For now, I present to you what we have achieved so far. Jackson’s photos provide the beautiful images for this video, and the backdrop for the research I’ll present at the Our People, Our Health conference in Ottawa in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more or visit my website, beststart.org for more information.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YnW1793enw

Guest blog entry by Melanie Ferris (contact: m.ferris@healthnexus.ca)

The Yankees won the World Series, and yesterday the city was covered in pinstripes.  The revelers in blue and white were brilliantly coordinated and chaotic in their homage to the baseball heroes. Everyone was proud to be a New Yorker. They were proud of the power and glory of this city, which is really a country unto itself. Seeing all the sports fans asserting their citizenship with head-to-toe Yankees gear was pretty surreal. Their vertical pinstripes aligned perfectly with the converging lines of stone, steel, and glass of the tall towers all around. Those towers represent an incredible amount of power, and the aspirational nature of life in New York and the United States in general.  Too bad I missed the parade.

It seems fitting that I’ve had too much coffee. This city is hyper.

Instead I spent the afternoon in The Strand. What a fantastic bookstore. My best friend’s father worked in New York for some time, and when I asked him what I should do here (the last time I was here, in 2005), all he had to say was “go to Strand.” I could spend all day and all of my money there, perusing their 18 miles of books. Among the gems I’ll be bringing home is The Photographer, a book by the graphic novelist Emmanuel Guibert about the French photographer Didier Lefèvre’s trip to Afghanistan with MSF in 1979. The book is an interesting combination of photographic contact sheets overlaid by graphic panels. It works well, the story is funny and engaging. The artwork by both men is subtle and evocative. I’m looking forward to reading more on the flight home. Funny that the subject most interesting while I’m here in New York is the focus of the “War on Terror” and the most un-urban of places.