Vol103iss5

Volume 103, Issue 5 Monday, September 30, 2013

McGill THE

DAILY

These issues since 1911 mcgilldaily.com

Published by The Daily Publications Society, a student society of McGill University.

The McGill Daily

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Table of Contents

Monday, September 30, 2013

03 NEWS

15

SCI+TECH

On electronic waste

Principal’s contract released

Technology for the greater good Fight for the right to education for all Open data for all Rez Project tackles equity issues

This week in science

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HEALTH & ED Harassment and discrimination at McGill Canada’s troubling history with Indigenous communities Third annual Indigenous Awareness Week SSMU talks sustainability, bike gates A critical look at gender

09 COMMENTARY

19 SPORTS

Redmen hockey preview

20 CULTURE

POP it like it’s hot Players’ Entertaining Mr. Sloane

An open letter of thanks to Juliano Mer-Khamis Cinema Politica: 5 Broken Cameras Confronting assumptions of straight- Four days of art and time ness

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EDITORIAL Criticizing journalistic ‘neutrality’ about gentrification Indigenous awareness should be year-round

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FEATURES

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24 COMPENDIUM!

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Free Tarek and John Canadian political prisoners in Egypt go on hunger strike

“Non aux hausses” A protest against the Parti Québécois’s electricity hikes

What’s climate justice?

New workshop series spotlights environmental activism on campus Divest McGill’s first event of the year A discussion on divestment from fossil fuels as a form of protest Arts Undergraduate Society’s bi-weekly meeting Debate on the Charter of Values and the value of General Assemblies

Labour troubles next door The ongoing struggle of union negotiations at Concordia University

What’s the BoG? Principal Fortier’s first Board of Governor’s meeting

Mashrou’ Leila wants to make you dance

Two short stories about motion and New Department of Occult Studies, Minor of Serious Heterosexual Men stillness

McGill’s Campus Community Radio Station

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING 6 pm Tuesday October 8th, 2013 STUDENT ATTENDANCE REQUESTED Lev Bukhman, SSMU-3480 McTavish Food and Childcare provided For more info: funding@ckut.ca

SACOMSS Sexual Assault Center of the McGill Students’Society

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Monday, September 30, 2013

McGill unveils Principal Suzanne Fortier’s contract Lacks ‘perks’ and allowances afforded to previous Principal Molly Korab | The McGill Daily

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n Thursday, the McGill administration released Principal Suzanne Fortier’s contract with the University in full. Fortier’s contract, as it currently stands, outlines a base salary close to that of previous principal Heather Munroe-Blum, and does not contain many of the ‘perks’ or benefits present in the previous contract.

Fortier’s salary stands at $390,000, which, when adjusted for inflation, remains close to Munroe-Blum’s 2009 salary of $369,250. The new contract also includes a discretionary bonus of up to 20 per cent, based on performance.

Kevin Whittaker, president of the McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA) – an organization that took a strong stance against Munroe-Blum’s large allowances – said that the discretionary bonus remained the only component of the contract that seemed open-ended.

“It is the nature of the position that such a clause is needed to some degree – maybe not to 20 per cent,” Whittaker said. “I’m not crazy

about the 20 per cent, I think it could have been less […] I mean, at 10 per cent, we’re still talking $30,000 plus.”

“I think that a follow-up to this would be: what percentage did [Fortier] earn?” he added.

Earlier this month, Fortier told The Daily that her contract would be less complex than that of the previous principal. “We wanted to make it a more simplified document,” she said at the time.

Some of the simplified clauses include the removal of the allowances Munroe-Blum was given for automobile and housing costs, which made up part of approximately $120,000 in total benefits, according to the Montreal Gazette.

Instead, Fortier’s contract notes that she will be reimbursed for all “reasonable costs” of the use of her vehicle for University business, as well as “reasonable expenses” in the use of her personal residence for University business.

Stuart “Kip” Cobbett, Chair of the University’s Board of Governors, disputed the notion that the language of such clauses might take away

from accountability. He noted that such costs are typically impossible to predict, and that while there is not a cap on such expenses, they would have to be approved prior to reimbursement.

When asked why a cap on “reasonable” expenses would not exist, especially seeing that Munroe-Blum spent $132,000 on travel expenses between January 2008 and September 2009, Cobbett said that Munroe-Blum’s travel expenses should be viewed in the context of a massive fundraising campaign, Campaign McGill, that the University was running at the time.

Like Munroe-Blum’s contract, Fortier’s contract stipulates that she may be reimbursed by the University for financial planning services.

While Munroe-Blum’s first-term contract allocated $3,000 per year for such services, Fortier’s contract allows for reimbursement up to $2,000.

Fortier’s contract also includes the stipulation that she must receive the approval of the Chair before engaging in outside commitments, including directorships, commissions, or consulting. Unlike Munroe-Blum, who

was a member of various corporate boards including the Royal Bank of Canada, Fortier is not currently a corporate board member.

The direct publication of the contract on McGill’s website is an initiative that, according to Cobbett, came from multiple sources, including Fortier herself. MunroeBlum never published her contract on the McGill website. In 2011, The Daily accessed her first-term contract through an access to information request.

“Dr. Fortier believes very strongly that her contract should be transparent and made available,” Cobbett said, noting that it was likely the first time ever that the principal’s contract has been posted on the McGill website.

Overall, Whittaker was optimistic about both Fortier’s contract and tenure.

“She is far more receptive to comments and concerns than in the past,” he said. “The issue of transparency seems to be addressed [in the contract], so we’ll see how that translates into her other duties.”

Education Across Borders Collective protests in front of school commission Group advocates right of non-status children to attend school Joelle Dahm and Emmet Livingstone | News Writers

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n September 24, close to 40 people gathered outside the Commission scolaire de Montréal (CSDM) to protest the lack of access to schooling for undocumented, or non-status, children. The demonstration was organized by the solidarity group Education Across Borders Collective (EABC), a part of the migrant justice group Solidarity Across Borders.

EABC is a collective advocating for access to education for all, as well as a clear and accessible process for families that guarantees them confidentiality and free access to school.

A few members of the collective attended the CSDM’s meeting, while the rest remained outside for a discussion. Jaggi Singh, a member of EABC and a Montrealbased social justice activist, spoke to the crowd over a megaphone.

“There are children here in Montreal, probably numbering in the thousands, who can’t go

to school because they don’t have documents.

To put that in context, in the States, since the [1980s], all children regardless of immigrant status have [had] the right to attend school.”

“Deportations still happen, and there are still problems, but at a minimum, children are allowed to go to school. Except here in Quebec,” he continued.

With a new directive issued by the Quebec government this summer, education is more accessible to children who lack a permanent code, typically a marker of immigration status. Now, it is sufficient to provide a birth certificate and a proof of residence, such as a hydro or water bill. However, non-status children are still asked to pay up to $6,000 in tuition per year.

The protest was the most recent in a series of demonstrations organised by the EABC to put pressure on the CSDM. Representatives of the CSDM told the crowd that they were neither elected officials, nor in a

position to change policy, and questioned why the group was targeting the bureaucracy rather than the politicians.

“They have the power to stop sending people bills, they have the power [to] say that it’s in the directives that we’re not going to ask for your immigration status,” said Singh in response.

Tensions ran high as representatives from the EABC tried to address the CSDM. Some protesters were told they could attend the meeting, only to be blocked by security at the entrance, leading to scuffles and shouting between activists and representatives of the CSDM. Catherine Harel-Bourdon, the president of CSDM, said in French: “Please note that the CSDM agrees that the education of every child should be privileged, but as a public institution there are laws set by the ministry. [...] We are in direct contact with the people, but if you have other requests, you should contact the ministry, because it is the ministry making the rules.”

“We encourage [non-status] families to present themselves at our administrative centre, where we will help them through the administration process in a personalized and confidential approach. During the last weeks, we only received seven families without immigration status at our office,” said Harel-Bourdon.

The EABC replied that there is no clear statement on the issue of confidentiality of documents specifically for non-status families, and criticized the alleged lack of information on the CSDM’s webpage.

“The commissioners say just to ignore the letters, but they don’t understand the situation of those families,” Romina Hernandez, spokesperson for the EABC, told The Daily.

“They see those letters coming again and again and don’t know what is going to happen, or if the education office is communicating with immigration. They live in constant fear.”

The McGill Daily

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Monday, September 30, 2013

Rez Project discusses diversity politics Strives for safer space on campus Isabel Dickens | The McGill Daily

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ez Project, a series of volunteer-run workshops, hit campus residences in September, focusing on educating students living in residence at McGill on topics of sexual assault, gender, and sexuality.

“Sexual assault happens disproportionately within university residences,” Chelsea Barnett, one of the two coordinators for Rez Project, wrote to The Daily in an email. “Furthermore, homophobia and transphobia in particular are issues students may not have been challenged to think about before.”

The project was started ten years ago by groups of students from the Sexual Assault Centre of the McGill Students’ Society (SACOMSS), Queer McGill, and residence floor fellows. It was created out of a perceived need to increase education on the diverse identities that new students will encounter in residences. By opening discussion with new students on these topics, Rez Project hopes to make McGill a safer place, and bring individual identity privileges to the forefront.

“Some students are shaken because they’re recognizing their own privileges for the first time,” wrote Barnett. “Other students feel like they’re being given space and time to

be heard for the first time.”

The current model of the workshops is influenced by groups on campus, such as SACOMSS Outreach. Rez Project facilitates dialogue on topics of identity and equity by asking students to define what certain words such as privilege or cisgender mean to them, and how these terms are important to keep in mind in the residence setting.

Rez Project is not without its limitations.

For one, the reception of Rez Project is far from consistent. “It’s all over the map, really [...] Some [participants] are totally checked out altogether, others walk away having learned something new,” Barnett wrote.

“There’s always a handful of people in the room with typical privileged identity who don’t understand the relevance of [the] workshops, people who don’t see how it affects them. We hope to help those people recognize the way [the] system privileges them and how other identities do matter,” said Annie Preston, another of the coordinators for Rez Project.

Another concern is Rez Project’s approach to incorporating intersectionality into the workshops. “One of the critiques

of Rez Project is that it is not intersectional enough, and privileges certain marginalized identities more than others […]

Rez Project was designed by students from Queer McGill, SACOMSS, and floor fellows, who saw a need for these workshops, and that is one of the reasons why it’s focused like this,” Preston explained.

In an effort to fix these limitations, Rez Project has added two new activities to the workshop this year. “One is the use of [the] standpoint diagram to help people recognize how their own social location will affect their ability to understand the material. The second is a ‘gendering’ sexual activity to look at the way in which society determines how your gender affects your sexual activity and how society perceives it,” said Preston.

“We decided to add the [standpoint diagram] because we felt like there are students who don’t identify [with] the categories in the workshop – just because they don’t identify as queer, it doesn’t mean queer people don’t exist and we need to exclude them,” said Preston. “We also felt like the workshops were missing a connection between sexual assault and the fact that it was an act of power and

not a matter of desire.”

Rez Project continues to plan for further initiatives to educate the McGill community on these topics. “In an ideal world, Rez Project would be one of many mandatory workshops that students would attend,” Preston wrote to The Daily. “We’d like to see the rollout of a workshop series that covers other aspects of identity: race, ethnicity, ability, religion, and mental health and suicide.”

“It sets a standard of caring for your fellow students that is impossible to do without Rez Project,” Queer McGill member Grace Khare told The Daily. “It also helps people who may not know about diversity politics wrap their heads around new concepts.”

As for the short-term, Preston hopes that “students feel more able to discuss these topics, [are] able to talk about them more fluidly with floor fellows, and [are] more respectful of peoples identities.”

“It’s really important for people whose experience may go poorly unless everyone sits through Rez Project,” said Khare. “It’s an excellent starting point for new students.”

With files from Hannah Besseau.

This is expected by the vast majority of the 60,000 engineers and the general public, which the OIQ has a mission to protect. The OIQ intends to respect every last one of its commitments.

M. Daniel Lebel, Eng., FEC, PMP President

Charbonneau Commission: the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec respects its commitments and files disciplinary complaints

As you may have already seen in the media, on September 10, the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec (OIQ) announced that its Office of the Syndic – created by the Professional Code to control the practice of the profession and allow the OIQ to fulfill its mission of protecting the public – has completed some of its inquiries and filed disciplinary complaints against five engineers involved in corruption or collusions activities.

The engineers concerned by these complaints – Claudio Balliana, André Lebeuf, Luc Leclerc, Robert Marcil and Gilles P. Vézina – will have to answer to the OIQ’s Disciplinary Council in the coming weeks.

These engineers are being charged with a total of 20 offences against the Code of Ethics of Engineers (lack of integrity, dishonest practices, conflicts of interest, accepting unfair advantages, etc.) or against the Professional Code.

Getting to the heart of the matter

The complaints filed are the first of many similar announcements that will be made in the coming months.

In fact, over one hundred engineers are currently the subject of an inquiry in connection with collusion and corruption schemes, not to mention the some 350 cases involving illegal political party funding.

The hearings of the Charbonneau Commission on business practices in the municipal sector undeniably tarnished the reputation of the engineering profession over the course of last year. The OIQ is very aware of this fact, which is why its Board of Directors made a public commitment to get to the heart of the matter. These first complaints confirm that members who violate the laws, the rules of ethical and professional conduct and their Code of Ethics are subjected to inquiries and have to answer publically for their actions.

Restoring the respectability of the profession

In the mid-2000s, nearly 75% of Quebecers had confidence in engineers in all sectors combined. The most recent data show that this percentage has slipped to barely 51%. This means that one out of every two Quebecers no longer has confidence in engineers, even though the overwhelming majority of Québec engineers practice engineering in a manner that is beyond reproach. The engineering profession is going through a crisis, whose scale is causing us to take strong, symbolic actions to restore respectability to the profession.

Solutions for the future

It is also critical for mechanisms to be set up so that society can be spared another crisis that is just as costly as the one we are experiencing now. With this in mind, the OIQ will assist the Commission in the coming months with the progress report that was ordered by the Québec government for January 2014.

The OIQ’s proposals for countering the collusion and corruption schemes will focus on two main issues.

The first is the professional supervision of engineers. The measures proposed by the OIQ (training, inspection, etc.) will be designed to provide tools and support to engineers so that they are better able to give their ethical obligations priority over their employment or business obligations.

The second major issue will be the supervision of clients and organizations that hire engineers (infrastructure managers, engineering consultants, construction contractors and their sub-contractors). The OIQ will propose specific measures to improve the selection committees set up as part of the process of awarding public contracts. Procedures, as well as administrative, financial and quality controls will also be included in the OIQ’s recommendations.

The OIQ firmly believes that the profession can and must make a contribution to rectifying the situation. Our announcement on September 10 is proof that we are taking action.

We will continue to take firm actions in the next few months and will keep you informed of them.

Daniel Lebel, Eng., FIC, PMP

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Harassment and discrimination at McGill

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t the first Senate meeting of the 2013-14 academic year, Lydia White, Associate Provost (Policies, Procedures and Equity), presented the annual report on the Policy on Harassment, Sexual Harassment, and Discrimination Prohibited by Law. Instituted in 2005, the policy is currently under a routine review, and will be presented with revisions to Senate later this year.

What is the policy? What does it cover?

The policy aims to educate the McGill

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community on issues of equity and harassment, and to resolve potential problems.

Excluding criminal cases, it covers cases of harassment, sexual harassment, and discrimination prohibited by law (or, the exclusion or preference of a person based on characteristics such as race, sex, or disability).

How does someone file a complaint?

Students, graduate students, administrative and support staff, and academic staff, can all file complaints. A potential complainant

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can first see an assessor to talk over the situation. Otherwise, a written complaint must be submitted to an assessor, who will then deem whether the complaint falls under the purview of the policy. Complainants can name multiple respondents in their complaint.

What are the possibilities for the resolution of complaints?

Some complaints never make it past an enquiry. Other complaints are withdrawn.

“Sometimes by talking to somebody, [poten-

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tial complainants] realize they can take it into their own hands,” or that there is a better path to resolution, according to White. Those that advance into an enquiry can either be resolved informally, or proceed to a formal resolution. In a formal resolution, the complaint can either be found to have grounds or not.

If it has grounds, consequences could include disciplinary action for the respondent – but everything remains confidential.

–Compiled by Dana Wray –Infographics by Will Werblow

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Indigenous Awareness Week at McGill Illustrations by Nadia Boachie

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rom September 23 to 27, McGill hosted its third annual Indigenous Awareness Week, which aimed to create awareness about oft-overlooked Indigenous issues at the university. The week, organized by for the Social Equity and Diversity Education Office (SEDE), saw over 480 students, staff, alumni, and community members take part in events ranging from informational talks to interactive

workshops and movie screenings.

Allan Vicaire, Aboriginal Sustainability Project Coordinator, spoke to the importance of the week at McGill. “I think there is a big misconception over what Indigenous people are, we have a lot of international students, and just even Canadians [...] we’re not taught the proper history – we’re taught the watered down history,” he said. “We need to break down misperceptions with the truth.”

This year saw a change of the name of the week from “Aboriginal” to “Indigenous”, which, according to Vicaire, “is more of an inclusive term.” Looking to the future, Vicaire stated that the organizers were looking to alter the title once again. “It’s more than awareness [...] you also want to talk about the achievements and struggles.”

- Compiled by Jordan Venton-Rublee

“‘Who Makes the Call?’ A Panel on Indigenous Identity” Arianee Wang | News Writer

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hursday saw a critical look at the complex questions of identity faced by many Indigenous peoples in Canada, as well as issues of status and inclusion, with a panel titled “Who Makes the Call.” Paige Isaac, coordinator of McGill’s First Peoples House, moderated the panel discussion between Cecile Charlie, Skawennati Fragnito, and Michael Loft.

The panelists discussed their experiences of what it means to be Indigenous, as well as their thoughts on the importance of Indigenous legal status. After the Indian Act was enacted in 1876, many Native people faced the dilemma of being non-status – in

other words, they had no legal right to own land on reserves and often faced exclusion from their own band.

In 1985, Bill C-31 amended the Indian Act to grant status to the children of Native women who married non-status men – an issue that directly affected the family of Fragnito, one of the panelists. Still, this did not end the conflicts between the legal definition of identity and self-identification.

Loft, a social worker and associate professor with McGill’s School of Social Work, explained that “bloodism,” or the practice of defining status by the amount of nonNative blood, “didn’t come from our peo-

ple” but instead stemmed from the Indian Act itself.

“Once you lose your status, you can never get it back,” Loft said, explaining that status was important within a community for inclusion. He also pointed to low high school graduation rates in some Indigenous communities as an effect of a lack of inclusion.

All of the panelists emphasized that identity – and not just the oft-discussed issues of land rights or the Indian Act – was a crucial fight in the struggle for Indigenous rights.

“This isn’t just talking about numbers, or talking about rights, but this is about people,” Loft said.

“Challenges and Barriers for Indigenous Women”

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Jordan Venton-Rublee | The McGill Daily

he opening ceremony of Indigenous Awareness Week featured a talk given

by Teresa Edwards, Director of Human Rights and International Affairs at the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), on the struggles faced by Indigenous women across the country.

Touching on Aboriginal women and the justice system, missing and murdered women, and domestic abuse, Edwards highlighted the systemic racism within the Canadian justice system. For instance, she noted that one in three females in the federal correctional system is Aboriginal.

Edwards also spoke out against the common misperception that the women who go missing live high-risk lifestyles, stating that instead, “a high-risk lifestyle for Aboriginal women is being an Aboriginal woman.”

Edwards also spoke on the need for allies. When asked by The Daily how a student at McGill might act as an ally, Edwards said, “Education is always powerful. Non-Indig-

enous people can be great allies – they are going to go into the world and be judges, police, teachers. And they can in turn educate people on the real situation of Indigenous people, good and bad, to make a better Canada for everyone.”

“As an ally you can come to show your support at public, peaceful demonstrations, or on October 4 to honour the many missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada and across the globe,“ she said.

According to NWAC’s Sisters in Spirit Database, which started in 2005 to gather information on missing and murdered women across Canada, there are 582 cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women across the country.

Speaking to The Daily on the importance of Indigenous Awareness Week, Edwards stated, “If people knew and had the information they would be in a better place to make decisions and behave differently, and to be more informed with politics, with legislation, all the decisions that they make.”

The McGill Daily

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Monday, September 30, 2013

“Restructuring the Indigenous-Crown Relationship in Canada: The Promise of Indigenous Multilevel Governance” Jill Bachelder | News Writer

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ast Tuesday, Christopher Alcantara of Wilfrid Laurier University spoke at Thomson House about strained relationships between the Crown and Indigenous communities, critiquing at the top-down approach traditionally used by the government under the Indian Act. Canada has a history of exploiting and oppressing Indigenous populations. The Indian Act, first enacted in 1876 and later amended, is seen as an attempt to assimilate Indigenous peoples to Canadian culture, contributing to poverty and their disem-

powerment. While it does not govern Inuit or Métis peoples, to this day, the Act remains the main piece of legislation that governs the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Crown, despite a general consensus that the act has failed First Nations as a whole.

This, Alcantara said, is because the Canadian government continues to impose its own vision on Indigenous populations, with little consultation with tribes and band members – though recent developments, such as certain tribes’ transitions to self-

governed land ownership, show that this trend may be shifting.

Alcantara argued that a multilateral governance system, in which Aboriginal groups are empowered to create policies tailored to fit the needs of their communities, should replace the current top-down approach of the Canadian government. If Indigenous populations are given freedom of choice, they will be able to experiment with different courses of action and determine how best to proceed in raising the standard of living, he said.

“Indigenous Health For First Nations, Inuit and Metis”

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do important work in increasing attention to Aboriginal medical care. These doctors also cite the causes of health disparities as including factors such as colonization, migration, loss of language and culture, and disconnection from native lands.

“I’ve met a lot of Aboriginal people that say ‘I’m on my healing journey, but I’m not healed,’’’ Brascoupé said. “[It’s] because they want to break the cycle of colonization.”

Susannah White | News Writer

n Tuesday, a group gathered to participate in “Kanien’kéha 100: A Super Crash Course in the Language of the People of the Flint,” a Mohawk language learning session. The session, led by Akwiratékha Martin of Kahnawake, provided a basic introduction to the Kanien’kéha language, its history, and the ongoing language revitalization efforts in Kahnawake and beyond.

Martin, a language instructor in Kahnawake, began his session – as is customary in Mohawk tradition – with the Ohenten Kariwatkwa, or the “words that come before all else.” He then began a brief history of the language and explained the etymology of the name ‘Mohawk,’ a word in the Algonquin language that translates to ‘Man-Eaters.’ For this reason, many Mohawk people prefer to refer to themselves as Kanien’kehá:ka, or ‘the People of the Flint.’

Martin also provided some context for the state of Indigenous languages today, many of which have gone extinct. For instance, there are no longer any living speakers of the Laurentian, Neutral, Erie, and Susquehannock

Joelle Dahm | News Writer

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“Understanding Mohawk: Language and History”

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“Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance”

Sarina Gupta | News Writer

o close off the talks and lectures of Indigenous Awareness Week, Simon Brascoupé, an adjunct research professor at Carleton University, gave a presentation on the status of health and well-being of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada. Brascoupé began the talk by reciting statistics disclosing the relative poorness in both health and healthcare for Indigenous peoples as compared with non-Indigenous peoples.

According to Brascoupé, Inuit infants die at 3.6 times the rate of other Canadian babies; in 2010, tuberculosis had doubled among Inuit infants to 185 times the rate of Canadian-born nonIndigenous infants; and by mid-2010, 116 First Nations communities across Canada were under a drinking water advisory.

The health challenges for Aboriginal, Métis, and Inuit peoples range from a crisis of chronic disease to lung cancer rates. Brascoupé supported the notion that solutions to such problems should be community-based.

Brascoupé also noted the importance of advocacy in improving Aboriginal health, from organizations to individual doctors and researchers.

Aboriginal doctors, such as Malcolm King,

Some audience members questioned the effectiveness of Alcantara’s idea of “slow, incremental change” in making right the wrongs faced by Indigenous peoples at the hands of settlers.

“We must always be motivated by justice,” said Alcantara, but he noted that while large attempts at change may seem appealing, they usually do not work. Through the empowerment of First Peoples and celebration of their culture, Canada may one day see the healing of a nation that has been oppressed for centuries.

languages, to name a few.

According to Martin, there are approximately 1,300 first language Kanien’kéha speakers today. There are also several Mohawk immersion elementary schools in various Mohawk communities; the schools continue to grade six, after which Kanien’kéha is offered as a second language course.

“While children do develop a solid base of the language […] there is something missing,” Martin said. “Many children do not become fluent speakers due to governmental standards for the curriculum, and most of the children’s parents are not speakers, often turning Kanien’kéha into a kind of ‘school language’ that goes unpracticed in the home.”

Shortcomings aside, Martin highlighted the importance of revitalization projects.

Above all, he stressed the “absolute beauty” of the language, emphasizing the meaning that can be awarded to a single word. “Think of any sentence you can,” he urged the audience, “then crush it into one word. That’s how awesome Kanien’kéha is.”

riday saw the screening of the documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, followed by a speech from Elder John Onawario Cree. Onawario Cree was present at the 1990 Oka Crisis, a land conflict between the Mohawk, the Quebec police, and the Canadian Army.

Director Alanis Obomsawin took the viewers through the struggle, which started in Kanehsatà:ke and the town of Oka, when the local Mohawk community attempted to protect their sacred land from development as a golf course.

After the Mohawk community decided to barricade the bridges that led to their land, the Quebec police led a raid on Mohawk territory that ended with Mohawk elders arrested and thrown in jail. The film essentially painted a portrait of the people behind the barricades.

During his presentation afterwards, Onawario Cree explained that many people didn’t understand why the Mohawk would

stage an uprising. “In the [1990s], there were a lot of promises broken,” he said. “They sign treaties, and don’t honour them.”

“Now, we are protecting the land against the pipeline, but the oil companies do what they want,” he added. “It hasn’t gotten any better – it has gotten worse. We are still fighting for our land.”

Ultimately, he said, “the most important thing that came out of all this was the pride of being a human. Being a human being first, and then being a Mohawk.”

The McGill Daily

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Monday, September 30, 2013

SSMU talks sustainability at second meeting Bike gates, finances also dicussed Lauria Galbraith & Hannah Reardon | News Writers

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fter a relatively quiet first meeting, the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) held its second Legislative Council meeting of the year on September 26, discussing sustainability, finances, and bike gates.

Sustainability at McGill The meeting opened with a presentation

by Arts and Science representative Courtney Ayukawa and recent McGill graduate Lily Schwarzbaum on the ongoing ECOLE (Education Community Living Environment) project, of which the two are coordinators.

According to its website, ECOLE is an ongoing project that aims to create a sustainable living house in the Milton-Parc community.

Organizers want ECOLE to be a hub for McGill’s current sustainability community and a model for sustainable living. The project also tries to break down barriers between various environmentally-minded groups on campus.

ECOLE has been in the works for the past couple of years, and is supported by SSMU, Student Housing and Hospitality Services, and the McGill Office of Sustain-

ability. The project will launch for its pilot year in September 2014.

Ayukawa and Schwarzbaum explained that the project was focused on three aspects: living, learning, and community. 8 to 12 students will be living in the ECOLE house, working towards material and social sustainability. Each of these students will also be expected to do an independent research project on the topic. Ayukawa and Schwarzbaum told Council that ECOLE will serve as a much-needed physical space for both sustainability communities in McGill and Milton-Parc.

Applications for ECOLE’s pilot year will be sent out this winter, and despite concerns raised by some councillors, Schwarzbaum insisted that living space in the house will not be exclusive to environment students.

“We really want to approach sustainability from a holistic sense [...] so we’d love to see both the diversity of student applicants in terms of their department [of ] study but also in the research projects that they’re involved in,” said Schwarzbaum.

Students will not be paid to live in the sentative. These revenues will likely be house, but their rent will be subsidized, and used to cover expenses from recent renothey will receive academic credit for the in- vations to the student pub. dependent study as well.

Milton bike gates In one of the motions put on the floor, SSMU’s finances Also present at the meeting was a repre- the Council addressed the issue of the Milsentative from Richter, an accounting firm ton bike gates – a topic that provoked both that has audited SSMU financial reports for outrage and bemusement from McGill students earlier this year. the past eight years.

Many of the councillors expressed their “We gave a clean opinion,” the Richter frustration with the gates. According to VP representative told the Council.

The Richter representative also laid out University Affairs Joey Shea, the gates were SSMU’s 2012-13 revenue at $7.7 million, of constructed without informing the Office which $3.1 million came from student fees. for Students with Disabilities.

“Basically there are two [options]: you can SSMU’s expenditure for the same year was calculated at $7 million, resulting in a sur- either bike through the gates, which means plus. However, the Richter representative they don’t do anything, or bike right up to the told Council that the surplus will only ac- gates, get off your bike and get right back on,” said Arts Undergraduate Society President count for deficits in previous years.

Gert’s significant jump in revenues Justin Fletcher, who is filling in an empty over the past year was also of significant AUS representative spot at Council. “These interest. “Gert’s revenues went up by al- gates do not solve the problem.”

The motion against the Milton bike most $300,000 which means students are drinking more,” joked the Richter repre- gates passed unanimously.

Centre for Gender Advocacy takes a critical look at gender Annual workshop series opens discussion on feminist organizing and action Emily Saul | The McGill Daily

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o acquaint people with feminist organizing and action, the Centre for Gender Advocacy is putting on a two-week series from September 23 to October 4 entitled “Another Word for Gender.”

The Centre offers free services and resources to the Concordia and greater Montreal community, and advocates for a number of social justice issues. The workshops in the series address gender and social justice issues, including content on men and feminism, trans* history, missing and murdered indigenous women, and sexual assault awareness.

“These are issues that affect everybody, absolutely everybody,” Bianca Mugyenyi, programming and campaign coordinator of the Centre, told The Daily.

“A lot of the time people think that as a gender advocacy center, we are only dealing with women’s issues or trans* issues, but certainly not men’s issues. A lot of these so called ‘women’s issues,’ are men’s issues. We want to address that, and we feel that everybody needs to be engaged in order to challenge gendered violence.”

“Another Word for Gender” hopes to provide workshops and encourage the community to engage with a deeper understanding of gender. One such workshop dealing with men and feminism, held on September 30, aimed to facilitate discussion on what it means to be a male feminist, along with other topics.

“The point of the workshop is to talk

Khoa | Photographer about our experiences with men and feminism. We’ve prepared questions such as ‘what does it mean to be a feminist man and do men suffer under patriarchy,’” said Dan Parker, one of the presenters of the “Men and Feminism” workshop.

“We also want to talk a bit about how we can see men as part of a feminist movement, as completely intrinsic and essential to the movement. [We want] to try to conceptualize this without stepping on the toes

of women who are leading the movement,” said Tim Keen, another of the presenters of the “Men and Feminism” workshop.

“Obviously there is a massive problem if you start showing up as a man in a feminist movement and start taking control because you’re perpetuating the same problem that you’re trying to solve,” Keen continued.

The Centre hopes its annual series will encourage personal development and mobilization. “A pretty important kind of

energy is required for social change and social justice, [and we] try to do that by inviting incredible, real people with real stories,” said Mugyenyi. “[The “Another Word for Gender” series is an] opportunity for people to gain skills; [it’s] an intro to feminist organizing and action. We’re pretty serious about our desire for people to [...] become social actors.”

With files from Hannah Besseau.

Commentary

The McGill Daily

9

Monday, September 30, 2013

Asking the right questions

A letter of thanks to Juliano Mer-Khamis Kai Cheng Thom From Gaysia With Love

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Alice Shen | The McGill Daily o Juliano Mer-Khamis Director, Freedom Theatre An Open Letter

Re: Miracles and Revolution “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting our time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” – Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s.

Dear Juliano, You are never going to read this letter, and even if you could, it is doubtful that you would remember me. But I remember you.

We met five years ago at Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank of Palestine. You were giving a lecture on your use of theatre as a revolutionary practice to a group of expat foreign aid workers and students from Britain, Canada, and the United States who were there with the dubious project of ‘helping’ (read: ‘saving’) Palestine.

I was there to visit friends, and wondering about my own political position in your home – self-declared saviour? Privileged foreigner engaged in ‘third world’ voyeurism? Activist?

Learner? Or nothing at all? Juliano, this may sound trite, but you said something then that I have been thinking about ever since, that will remain in my heart for the rest of my life.

An American university student had just asked you if you could “explain the mentality” of teenage Palestinian suicide bombers. How,

the student wanted to know, was it possible that people so young, with so much life ahead of them, could give up their lives so meaninglessly? Why would they kill themselves, knowing that their deaths could never create change in the face of the machine of the Israeli apartheid state? Didn’t they know that it was better to live and cling to hope, rather than die and forfeit hope altogether?

“You are asking the wrong question,” you replied, “You should be asking: What is the miracle at work that not all Palestinians have become suicide bombers already?”

There are rare, terrifying, incredible moments in life when the shadowed landscapes of our private experience are thrown into sudden illumination by the words of a stranger. Juliano, there could be no two lives more different than ours: you, a Palestinian activist and elder in your community; and me, a half-grown, Chinese-Canadian transgender kid struggling to figure out life. Yet I cannot deny that I felt that lightning flash of recognition as you spoke, that guttural sense that somehow what you were saying was related to my life and community as well as yours. And so I am writing you this open letter, despite the fact that you were assassinated two years ago, hoping that I do not presume too much, because I still believe that there is something vitally important about the resonance I felt in your words – and because I think that I may be finally beginning to understand.

I am starting to see that the colonial nation state – whether Israel, Canada, or the United States of America – has a specific project in mind, a project that does not include the bodies of those it deems unworthy to live within its borders. Everyday, trans* people of colour in North America experience violence in the streets and discrimination in educational and employment institutions; our mobility is limited and regulated by state borders, and we are routinely brutalized and killed by the police. Our experiences are by and large hidden from more privileged communities, and when our stories are made available to the general public, we are demonized and ridiculed.

What would it mean to replace “transgender people of colour in North America” with “Palestinians and Israeli Arabs,” Juliano? Or “police” with “Israeli Defense Force”?

I am not trying to equate my oppression with yours, because that exercise would be both offensive and pointless. Vast differences do exist between us, and our positions in the colonial web of power, privilege, and violence that entraps this world are not the same. Yet I believe that we are also connected by this web, and this connection is an opportunity for shared understanding – to fight in solidarity.

For I am starting to see as well that there is a deep consequence to denying our parallel experiences – and there are forces invested in hiding them, in preventing us from having this conversation. There is a reason that

Israel portrays itself as the only safe haven for queer people in the Middle East, just as there is a reason that the white, gay middle class in North America pretends that samesex marriage is the only issue of concern to queer people here; this even as Palestinian queer people struggle for recognition of their existence and trans* people in North America mourn the deaths and rapes of our siblings.

Our oppressions are connected, Juliano, and I wish you were alive to tell me whether you already knew this, whether you disagree.

But even though you are gone, I still want to tell you: it was your words that helped me see. Your words that helped me understand that the miracle you spoke of – the miracle that I have not yet died – lives in my body, and the bodies of all oppressed peoples who yet struggle to breathe in the confines of the margin. You made me understand that your war is interlinked with mine; your words helped me to understand that I inhabit a place of war. It took me nearly five years to understand this, Juliano, to understand that in fighting for myself I must fight for others and they for me, but now I see. I am ready. I do not forget.

Sincerely, Kai Cheng From Gaysia With Love is a bi-weekly, epistolary exploration of intersectionality

by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The McGill Daily

10

Monday, September 30, 2013

Commentary

Flying under the gaydar

Dealing with assumed straightness in the workplace

“

Hey Eric, you got a girl?” asks one of my bosses, a twenty-something Anglo Montrealer sporting his usual baggy jeans, plaid shirt, and Nikes. “No,” I reply, flat out.

“You want one?” he continues. “No,” I say casually, my response sending him roaring into a fit of laughter.

It seems funny to him that a strapping, young university student like myself isn’t interested in a girlfriend. To him, saying I don’t want a girl meant I’m more interested in casual hookups and don’t want to be tied down.

Of course, he’s assuming that I’m into girls. And why wouldn’t he? The other kitchen workers at this high-end burger joint are all straight men (or at least seem to be).

Although there was one cashier I strongly suspected might be gay, work in the kitchen often meant bros gawking at a wide range of women waiting in line to order their burgers.

I’ve never given my boss, or anyone in the kitchen, many hints that I’m gay. I do try to keep my nose out of situations like the one earlier described. One of them points out a girl to me and I don’t really say anything.

They’ve asked me whether or not I frequent Montreal’s strip clubs, and on one occasion, I politely declined an invite to a post-work Friday night trip to one of Ste. Catherine’s fine establishments.

I don’t blame them for thinking I’m straight. In my uniform I look far from fabulous: black pants, a baggy black polo shirt, long white apron, and a silly burger cap. I keep to myself, don’t talk much, and when I do, it’s not about girls. As a dishwasher, I can pretty easily alienate myself from the guys working the grill.

It’s just a job. I’m working less now that the semester has started again, yet I can’t escape the feeling that for those 15 hours a week, I’m back in the closet. That dark, scary, confusing place. Am I okay with that? I’m completely comfortable with my sexuality.

I’m comfortable with my gay identity and like to think I’m far past the part of my life when I struggled with that fact. But when I’m at work, I’m lying.

Eric White | Commentary Writer

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily Nevertheless, the kitchen guys increasingly seem to understand I don’t really respond to their comments and questions about my preferences for women. I don’t know if I’ve given them enough hints to help them realize I might not be straight, or if I’ve just made it seem like I’d rather be left alone, but as long as I’m not constantly berated with stupid comments, I don’t care too much what they’re thinking or suspecting. At this point I’d rather continue lying to the guys in the kitchen than come out and risk further alienation.

In addition, I’m no longer lying to everyone at work. After two months of working there, I finally came out to some coworkers.

They weren’t the kitchen staff, though, as I’ve always felt more comfortable relating to the cashiers and servers, the majority of whom are young women.

The first time I came out was immediately after attending Montreal’s Pride parade. After donning my tank top, short shorts, and basking in the gay glory of the parade, I hated be-

ing in my stupid burger hat and apron — the uniform that put me in the closet. As I walked out of work with one of the cashiers, she was wearing a colourful dress and told me that she had gone to the parade as well. Even telling one person brought huge relief.

A week later, a female server I’m friendly with texted me and asked to hang out. It’s one of those moments I fear, and it’s happened before: a girl will mistake my casual friendliness for something more. I responded saying I’d love to hang out, but by the way, I’m gay. She was cool with it, mentioned she was bisexual, and that her roommate, the aforementioned cashier at our restaurant, is also gay, confirming my suspicions.

Just when I was losing hope, I was reminded that us queer people do have secret strength in numbers. Soon after, I talked to the cashier about being gay at work. Since he’s in the front of the restaurant, it doesn’t seem too difficult for him. He knows how the guys in the kitchen can be, but doesn’t have

Letters Consulting on solidarity Dear Daily, I would like to thank Davide Mastracci for his commentary, “Take it off,” (Commentary, September 18, online) which raises concerns about a campaign I started with my Université de Montréal colleague, Marie-Joëlle Zahar, calling on educators to wear a visible religious symbol in their lectures, to protest the proposed Charte des valeurs québécoises, and to express solidarity with vulnerable groups.

The commentary raises the worry that our strategy “veers into being culturally appropriative.” I would like to reassure Mr. Mastracci that I consulted with and received positive responses from both the Muslim Students’ Association

as well as the Muslim Council of Montreal.

Salam Elmenyawi, President of the Muslim Council of Montreal, responded on September 16, that he was “elated, heartened and humbled […] to know that my fellow citizens are willing to go so far to defend my right and the right of my community, in fact it is the right of all of us.” Furthermore, on September 22, Mr. Elmenyawi wrote, “While the hijab is an integral part of my religion it is simply a scarf open for anyone to use, the purpose of which is modesty and if anyone wishes to wear it for any reason they are welcome, as we have no exclusivity over it. However, those wearing it for solidarity with Muslim women

and to protect the rights of all are indeed very much appreciated and such action would be considered an honourable action in defence of freedoms.”

In addition, our reasons for opposing the Charter should take into account not only the fundamental freedoms that would be violated, but also the adverse economic and social consequences for members of vulnerable groups, such as the denial of equal opportunity to work in the public sector, and the thwarting of their efforts to integrate into Quebec society.

—Catherine Lu Associate Professor, Political Science

to interact with them the way I do. I may still have to deal with the bros in the kitchen, but I can’t undervalue that companionship in terms of my comfort at work.

It’s too bad my French isn’t good enough to deal with customers, or else I’d hands down prefer to work up front. For now, I’ll probably deal with the kitchen’s unwelcoming, rigid straightness. But you never know when I’ll crack.

When a pretty girl about my age started working there a few weeks ago, the kitchen guys kept asking me if I liked her. No, I replied. Why not, they asked? Despite the urge to yell out “Because I like dick!” I resisted one of my temptations to come out in a shocking and grand way. Instead, I told them she wasn’t my type. Although for now I’ll have to settle with the companionship of a few queer coworkers, this silent battle isn’t over yet.

Eric White can be reached at ehwhite93@ gmail.com.

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Monday, September 30, 2013

Gentrification is not grand

‘Neutral’ journalism and the working class neighbourhood Aaron Vansintjan A Bite of Food Justice

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hen you walk through any neighbourhood, it’s easy to be impressed by all the new buildings. They’re often the biggest things around. So it’s no surprise that when Trevor Chinnick wrote a piece about St. Henri in The Daily (“The canal below the hill,” Culture, September 16, page 17), it was the “public improvement” that really drew their eye. How could it not?

Expensive loft spaces and the renovation of the Lachine Canal are hard to miss.

But what struck me about their piece was the way it focused on how St. Henri’s working class past was making way for “vibrant” younger residents and “grand” expensive lofts. The Daily’s article is a very clear example of something I see all the time: writers trying to be neutral in their stories. As it turns out, this neutrality is really just silence on essential parts of a story. ***

Walk through Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG) now and you’ll see some old derelict theatres and warehouses, but many more new condos rising up. There’s a new sports centre and a stadium. The super-hospital – a spanking-new conglomeration of several English-language hospitals – looms over the same Turcot highway that has a reputation of shedding cubic metres of concrete onto passers-by.

It’s easy to mistake the new as progress.

After all, younger and richer people are moving in, there are fewer ugly buildings, and new stores and restaurants are popping up.

NDG, which also shares a working-class history, seems to be in the process of a new and exciting “revolution,” in Chinnick’s words.

It overlooks how this “revolution” affects people who are struggling the most. It can push them out of their homes and take their food away. *** The NDG Food Depot is a food bankturned-community centre that got kicked out of its space last April. Most news articles covering the incident glossed over the reasons, staying clear from laying blame or politicizing the event. “NDG Food Depot forced to move by week’s end,” read one headline in the Montreal Gazette, but it went no further than mentioning disagreements with the landlord.

A friend, Adrian Turcato, and I, decided to investigate. A series of clues – condo developers making an offer the landlord couldn’t refuse, a new super-hospital moving in down the road, another community space getting kicked out two years ago – led us to one culprit: gentrification.

Like in St. Henri, gentrification happens when neighbourhoods become appealing to developers and new residents. Institutions

Tamim Sujat | The McGill Daily that work hard to bring people together and serve to make neighbourhoods safer – such as the Food Depot, cheap grocery stores, Head & Hands and Action Communiterre down the street, cheap restaurants – help to make neighbourhoods more attractive. The sneaky thing about gentrification is that it’s precisely such places that are most affected when new, richer residents move in or mega-projects get built in neighbourhoods. Another effect is that long-time residents are pushed out of their homes and unable to access the things they need.

Cynthia Angrave, who works at the NDG Food Depot, already feels the effects. “It’s going to be a neighbourhood that will be pushing people like me out,” she said. “I definitely live in full knowledge that I will receive a letter from my landlord at some point that he’s sold the building […] for condos. Condos were built right next to me in what was an empty lot, and I can just see it encroaching. This is a real concern for me.”

The fact that the Depot was pushed out of its space to make way for a condo is proof that gentrification negatively affects those who are already most vulnerable. In this case, it literally takes the food out of their mouths. But that’s not the end of the story.

As the new super-hospital was being built, efforts were made to ‘consult’ the community. An open discussion was held,

and Bonnie Soutar, director of development at the Depot, was in attendance. She told everyone there about the neighbourhood’s issues: new development was pushing people out, and many community groups were feeling the negative effects. “They nodded their heads but I never heard any follow-up of it,” Soutar about said the consultation. “Everyone said, ‘yes, yes, we have to help the Food Depot find a space,’ [but] we didn’t really get a result from that.”

The effect of the super-hospital, then, isn’t just that it pushes people out. By moving into a neighbourhood, bringing in new residents, and at the same time not cooperating with the essential services that already exist, the super-hospital actually helps to destroy the lives of old residents and the organizations they rely on.

Similarly, when journalists write about a new development or increased gentrification without reporting on how communities are affected, they help force people like Angrave out of their homes through not making the public aware of the flip side of the gentrification coin.

So when talking about St. Henri, why not talk about other community groups than the historical society? Why not talk about St. Henri’s vibrant churches, resident-initiated food markets in the midst of food deserts, people uniting to resist being pushed

out of their homes, the plans to destroy Village des Tannieres by expanding the Turcot highway and the local movement to stop it, and cheap grocery stores that help tie the community together? These are part of culture too, and ought to be included in a newspaper Culture section.

Not including these aspects of what makes a neighbourhood thrive means, first of all, erasing the lives of many still-struggling low-income people in favour of the mostly affluent, and second, actually exacerbating the negative effects that expensive new lofts and condos can have.

“The canal below the hill,” and the coverage of the NDG Food Depot are two very clear examples of something I see quite often: in trying not to be too political, in attempting to be ‘objective,’ journalists miss a huge part of the story. In so doing, they can actually make matters worse.

The NDG Food Depot now runs out of the basement of a church. If you’re interested, you can help them out by stopping at their new address, 2146 Marlowe, or find out more at depotndg.org.

A Bite of Food Justice is a bi-weekly column discussing inequity in the food system while critiquing contemporary ideals of sustainability. Aaron Vansintjan can be reached at foodjustice@mcgilldaily.com.

Features

The McGill Daily

Monday, September 30, 2013

IN MOTION

12 The following are two works of fiction that deal with the rhythm of motion and stillness. We treat you with two different texts lying on the intersection of movement and language.

BOOMERANG BULLETS Alexander Teaspoon* | Features Writer It’s like someone is shooting bullets at your leg and screaming Hunger’s Empire!

Desktop pictures, all empirical and shit, on your mantelpiece where you keep your computer. Why do you keep your computer there? What’s the use? Like he said, “what’s the use?” What? Animals and trees and people and more people crowd my vision of nothingness to keep me in touch with the earth I once knew.

Fuck that, I still know it like I know my feet jogging, although I never do that. Dancing bullets hitting my peripheral view (if I would have eyes in my legs, that is), everywhere whooshing by like I could hear them.

I want to hear them so bad, so bad that I could not cry. You know when you want to do something so bad you’re crying but really you’re not, like you’d want to cry but not really although you are but not in the sense you’ve been taught by having to fake cry for your girlfriends who think you aren’t sensitive enough so they shoot bullets at you and then you cry because one of them hits you where your eye would be? (If you had eyes in your leg, that is.)

Okay yeah, he has beautiful eyes like a captain out of a clear blue sky (that’s the colour of his eyes) and I can’t imagine how life would be without eyelashes protecting

you from shit penetrating into your eyes like the lead perforating your every tendon like a boomerang. Boomerang fucking bullets. That’s a new concept, probably not.

Fucking war and shit. Whoa what’s happening, do I even want to know? Do I? Do you? Are we the same or thinking the same or acting the same or is that all the same? I don’t know if I want to know if I do? If that makes sense, I don’t know. So your fucking Stetson is crooked. Like I care, although I do. Because it’s important for the cold you know, modern fur or whatever. So the bullets all ran out and my vision is clear, thanks captain! You’re a blast!

A rough draft is what this is. All nervous like inside. Proper fucking heartthrob you are! Whatever sprung to your feet or where they sprung when you ran which is pronounced the same in Swedish. Like her asking what the time is over and over again and people actually believing her like “muppets,” as the captain would say. Going inside and stealing stuff because that’s what you do when you’re a prolific Swedish thief. Right?

Yeah right. So moving forward which is backward and nowhere to be seen as the bullets start raining vertically in the wrong direction. The earth saying: “Fuck you rain, I’ll just make you feel what I’ve been feeling like for

the past forevers. And yeah you are afraid, of course, why not and why yes. You are completely utterly aware that you are inexplicably right. Like everyone that ever lived before you, even those who didn’t live for very long.

Like my Mother’s miscarriage. Sister. Which is a dire subject to point out, as I have no idea what that is like and I hope you won’t ever know. What it feels like.”

That’s my thought about the current crisis in the midst of my own crisis consisting of fucking bullets flying everywhere. Dance dance dance. And dance faster not that the bullets are increasing in speed but you are.

You are so excited about everything that you can’t stop so a bullet hits you. Whatever. Like you would care now or at any other time? This is what everything you’ve ever felt before feels like. This excitement towards moving towards something new. Like the door that will get you out of here, like the different door which you got out of involuntarily, now referring to my mother’s miscarriage of course!

Which I am very sorry for addressing again.

Trigger Warning, Trigger Warning. Like the articles with the comments you know? The comments everyone fucking lights up like Christmas fireworks in the countries that do those sorts of things. I hope there are countries like that, otherwise this meaningless

tradition will have meaning like the turkey instead of swine at the table, waiting, while you’re calling your relatives masturbators with your grandmother in their graves. At the cemetery which has the gates that you want to walk through very fast, like the door. Or the shirt or whatever people walk out of.

And I, yes I (it changed, see analyze the shit out of it, like now, please) will now walk out of the saloon because, surprise; (yeah fucking semicolons) this was me all the time like everything is all the time and you can’t escape it (me) because I made you shoot, I put the bullets in. The fucking boomerang bullets I picked from your mantelpiece next to your computer that splintered my already fucked up leg. That’s it, now I can’t walk anymore, ever. So I’ll run out of this place. Now. this is the whole thing “this is the whole thing” is not a part of this Chat conversation end This is the whole thing. “This is the whole thing” is not a part of this. Oh wait now it is.

Chat conversation end. *Alexander Teaspoon is the penname for someone who may or may not be a U1 Arts student, depending on the immigration workers’ strike, which he supports.

Features

The McGill Daily

Monday, September 30, 2013

13

Short stories

by Alexander Teaspoon* and Lucy Cameron

WHERE WE’RE AT Lucy Cameron | Features Writer

W

e are driving through the Fairbanks hills, past the stables and buttercoloured mini-mansions, through orange groves and strawberry fields, as I administer Sonia’s vitamins. Her hands are calm at ten and two; her head barely clears the dashboard. Sonia is a tiny person, and when we drive together I am always somewhat surprised she can reach the pedals. In public, from behind, she looks like my child.

In the passenger’s seat, I am sifting through a canvas sack filled with supplements, vitamins, pills, eyedroppers, and some immunogummies that are rejected on the basis of their sugar content. I help myself.

“This is where my energy healer is,” she points as we fly past a new shopping centre.

The green arrow that is us inches forward on the screen embedded in the dashboard. “She is amazing. I walk in with a cold and come out completely healthy and balanced.”

We wind further through eucalyptus trees and arbutus, past the produce stand my mother used to shun when we were growing up. I can’t remember why. I am trying to remember exactly how long it has been since I was here last, but I am getting the numbers mixed up with the pills, and Sonia weighs the handful I offer her with some suspicion. “The person who owned all of this land just died without a will,” she says, waving her hand vaguely at a thick forest to the east. “There’s like 16 family members in court about it.” “That’s crazy.” I am mildly concerned that my sweat and hair dye are staining the cream-colored seat. The woods give way to clusters of low-lying gated communities named after trees before we are sucked up onto the 5. No one feels compelled to shift lanes to accommodate the merge; the cars find their places intuitively. Two by two like reindeer they adjust, and once in traffic we float north effortlessly.

“Good thing there is no traffic,” Sonia says.

We haven’t moved in five minutes, or maybe we have. The sign imposing the fine for litter on the Sea World-sponsored highway seems slightly bigger than it was.

A few hours later the sun has set, and the sky is still blue. The backseat of the car is filled with the harvest of our errands: boxes, strings of white lights, and bridesmaids dresses body-bagged from the dry cleaners. We are waiting patiently in a semi-circular line-up for a double-double, no tomato, no onion, a hamburger all-dressed, a small order of fries, a small vanilla shake. A young man with a southern drawl and a microphone in his ear leans in the window of our car to take our order and tells us it will be about eight minutes.

Sonia considers this figure and grudgingly accepts, as if she would have abandoned the wagon chain if he didn’t cut us a satisfactory deal. “We are all at the mercy of her blood sugar,” Sonia’s mother once said to me.

Sonia looks like a small gray bird at this time of day. She is giving her friend advice over the phone, chewing the insides of her cheeks in concentration. The friend, I am briefed, has just gotten out of a relationship and does not see any point in anything anymore. I suggest that not seeing any point is maybe better than seeing no point, but Sonia rolls her eyes. Her phone sucks life from the cigarette lighter as she composes her statements thoughtfully. I am staring at the lights reflected in the lagoon that was virtually lifeless when I left ten years ago, but has recently been experiencing a resurgence of biological activity according to the woman at the juice stop this morning. The line-up of cars isn’t moving forward, but Sonia keeps absently relaxing her foot on the brake so we are inching slowly closer to the massive chrome bumper of the truck in front of us.

“She wants to know when it will stop hurting,” Sonia explains. “She thinks that if she has a timeline to work towards it won’t be so bad.” She pauses. “The not-knowing,” I add dumbly. There is a canal of waste waters unknown beside the In-N-Out directly down the bank and to our right that leads into the lagoon. It is cordoned off by barbed wire, which seems excessive. For a moment, I imagine what it would be like to leap from the car, vault over the fence, and swim the ravine down to the lagoon. “I don’t know… yeah.” I must have some advice to offer this situation, but I can’t focus. It won’t be articulated. I remember a kid who sat next to me in an English class in early high school who refused to speak in class, and when called upon would snarl angrily under his ketchup breath, “The revolution won’t be televised.” I thought he was brilliant, and years later when I figured out this was a popular slogan not of his own invention, I wasn’t really disappointed.

Slogans are great communicators. They are the hamburgers of human experience.

“It doesn’t get easier,” I go on, and Sonia looks at me like why do you have to be so negative and I look up and left like I don’t know. She sighs and hovers over the glowing screen, looking for something to say. The car in front of us rolls up to the light of the window, and the forearm of a man who must barbecue often extends to collect his bounty.

“You learn to be quiet about it,” I am rambling.

“It doesn’t get better, but if you can get good at keeping silent then I think everything that you aren’t saying eventually just dissipates.

Quiet is safe.” I don’t know if I agree with what I am saying, but Sonia is typing quickly, and I don’t think any of it has to do with what I’ve said. She nods digestively, her eyes screwed to a focal point. “Oh. You can go now.”

We jerk forward to the open window

and slam to a stop. The kid in the drive-thru window is attractive and there is some sort of subverted balcony scene playing out between him and Sonia as she pays and asks for extra ketchup. There are still the same soft peaks of green-gray foam in the ravine amongst the cattails that used to excite me as a kid. Once on a field trip I studied and recorded them for an entire afternoon.

It is almost completely dark as we pull into the parking lot of a campground two exits south to divide our spoils. I am trying to speak under the radio rather than over but end up muttering like the woman on the bus who gets two seats to herself. It seems to me that all advice is wasted; people are going to do just what they want, what they have been unconsciously counting on, whatever it is they think will make them happy. Sonia doesn’t agree, and says, then no one can really communicate, with an implied, Idiot. We listen to a full song without talking. “She isn’t having a good time,” Sonia says finally, about the friend I presume. We watch the horizon purple and grow darker and flatten. Sonia’s burger is getting cold and the fat ossified, selfloathing. “No,” I agree. I want to say something else, to feel for this friend of my friend, but the words are stillborn in my stomach.

The link between cause and effect seems broken, or like it was never that simple in the first place. My milkshake is turning into cream in the cup-holder as I watch a man with a shopping cart cross six lanes of traffic in the dark. We head home following the instructions of a disembodied car voice that can’t pronounce the street names but whose superior directions are unquestioned.

Lucy Cameron is a U4 Philosophy and English Literature student, and an editor for The Veg Literary Magazine.

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Monday, September 30, 2013

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The Literary Supplement: Identit y

Sci+Tech

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Monday, September 30, 2013

An electronic wasteland

The importance of recycling used electronics Chris Mills | The McGill Daily

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here’s no better symbol of ‘noughties’ consumerism than the iPhone: the quintessential smartphone, coveted by millions and the pride and joy of many a teenager. But after a few years of hard use, these status symbols often get unceremoniously trashed, in a process that’s creating a growing problem for the economy and environment alike.

Technology, in general, has a fairly terrible lifespan. The components are not built to last – the lithium-ion batteries that power most electronics have a shelf life of around two years. Additionally, the rapid improvements in computing power render modern software too resource-needy for old machines ( just think of trying to install the latest version of Windows on a PC from a few years ago).

As such, consumers often find themselves upgrading laptops and phones every few years. The average owner hangs onto their smartphone for two years, and a laptop for only a year longer. It’s a practice essentially enforced by manufacturers: official software updates, like Apple’s latest iOS 7, tend to only roll out to the latest generations of a device.

Bought a cutting-edge iPhone 3GS in 2010?

Sorry, but according to Apple, it’s too old to bother supporting nowadays.

The problem is only getting worse. In the past, the critical components of a computer – RAM, hard drive, and the like – were easily upgraded by folks at home, adding a few years of life onto a machine that was slowing down a little. Yet, with laptops getting increasingly thinner, less accessible and more self-contained, the years of being able to mod PCs (of which laptops are now the overwhelming majority) are quickly coming to an end: consumers are in thrall to the manufacturer. Mobile phone batteries, by far the most common point of failure, are often non-replaceable at home, meaning that when the battery of an otherwise perfectly good phone dies after two or three years, several hundred dollars’ worth of components go to the landfill.

That last comment about landfills is particularly pertinent. Not only are shrinking lifespans hurting consumer’s wallets, but it’s also a blight on the environment and the economy.

Electronic waste (‘e-waste’) is a big problem. An estimated 50 million tonnes is produced worldwide every year. Electronic products are often difficult to recycle, owing to the wide mix of materials used in their manufacture, some of which are inherently toxic. Old-school cathode ray tube televisions, for example, contain bromide and lead, and the aforementioned lithium-ion batteries can cause serious contamination if not disposed of properly.

As a result, recycling levels as a percentage of electronic waste are pitiful. Worldwide, only around 20 per cent goes to recycling, leaving vast tracts to landfills. For cellphones – a rapidly increasing area of waste – the number falls to a pathetic 8 per cent.

Sylvan Hamburger | Illustrator Due to the cost of recycling in an environmentally friendly manner, governments are loath to take on the extra cost of recycling e-waste for free. Some efforts have been made in Canada. Product stewardship programmes, administered on a provincial level, obligate manufacturers to bear the cost of recycling their used products by utilizing a series of free drop-off points throughout the province.

Although these measures are a step in the right direction, they’re not necessarily a remedy. Much of the ‘recycling’ is shipped overseas, to third-world countries where regulations are looser and the disposal far from green. Waste is often melted down to recover valuable materials, releasing toxic emissions and damaging both the environment and the workers during the recycling process.

Thankfully, old electronics aren’t all doom and gloom. With recycling so difficult and landfill objectionable on a number of levels, some individuals and organizations simply encourage increasing the functional lifespan of devices.

Some of this happens naturally through the marketplace. Sales of secondhand smartphones have exploded in recent years, and will likely double in the coming decade. According to Toni Sacconaghi, a industry analyst at Bernstein, a financial research firm, “analysis suggests that the used smartphone

market is poised to explode – we estimate that the market will grow from 53 million to 257 million units over the next five years.”

While that might not be great news for manufacturers hoping to push sales ever higher, polishing up devices and selling them refurbished is good news for consumers and groaning landfills alike.

Admittedly, there’s also a huge proportion of e-waste that no one in their right mind would buy. Still, a laptop that’s broken for you might provide some use to others, even if they’re not exactly willing to pay for it. That’s the principle behind the Freecycle network, a website that seeks to hook up people who are trying to dump unneeded stuff with folks who could use it.

The principle is absurdly simple – like Craigslist, but where everything is free – but the reality is more dramatic than most expect. A quick search of the Montreal area throws up the expected menagerie of mouldy armchairs and questionable curtains, but also a surprising number of perfectly serviceable items, from year-old IKEA wardrobes to printers, calculators, and even a 32-inch TV. Speaking to various Montreal Freecyclers, it’s clear that the motivation is a mixture of altruism and laziness. Sarah, who was offloading the aforementioned TV, said, “I’m moving out, and rather than trying to

sell it to a shop or my neighbour, I wanted to give back to the community I’ve lived in for the last 15 years.” The story for others was slightly different: according to Guillaume, who was offloading an old printer and a desk, “I looked into eBay, but it would’ve taken far too long for a few dollars. With Freecycle, I put them on the internet, no picture, and they were gone the next day.”

McGill is making an impressive effort in this area. Battery recycling programs exist, with dozens of pick-up points across campus; the sustainability policy also encourages donating old cellphones to a Canada-wide programme that donates them to women’s shelters across the country. Additionally, an organization called McGill Reboot redistributes used electronics across campus to promote reusing.

Despite these encouraging efforts to combat electronic waste at both grassroots and governmental levels, the problem at large is still largely unattended. As the volume of e-waste grows, manufacturers continue hastening the product cycle, with scant attention to making their devices easier to recycle – Apple last year removed its products from the Green Electronics Council’s leading eco-friendliness certification programme. After all, when you’ve got $94 billion sitting in offshore accounts, who has time for the environment?

The McGill Daily

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Sci+Tech

Monday, September 30, 2013

Widening the web

The global impact of technology Christopher Cayen-Cyr and Diana Kwon | The McGill Daily

Jonathan Gosier talks at the Kongossa Web Series

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any 21st century North American students take their technological resources for granted. When living in a modernized environment, putting access to technology into perspective is no easy task. Ingrid Biwole and Franck Nlemba, co-founders of Africa Link Technology, aim precisely at debunking this mentality.

The tandem initiated the Kongossa Web Series (KWS), a series of live seminars that hopes to explore the avenues offered by technological progress. Biwole and Nlemba recently fulfilled their goal of expanding the project beyond the borders of their home country, Cameroon, by bringing the conference to Montreal.

The bilingual conference opened on September 20 at Montreal’s Centre for Sustainable Development with a press conference in which the leaders elaborated on KWS’ extensive background and its genesis in Cameroon.

Biwole – who left her home country during her college years to study numerical communications in France – used her foreign experiences to convey the importance of seizing technological opportunities. “It was only when I left Cameroon that I realized how few opportunities our youth had back there,” she explained.

This led her to the creation of KWS, a project that held conferences across three universities in Central Africa in 2010, reaching approximately 1,000 students eager to learn about how the technological projects they knew nothing about could change their lives. A second edition in early 2013 invited local African entrepreneurs to attend. Biwole repeatedly emphasized her goal to inspire people, and this passion was echoed by Nlemba, who stated that misinformation can

inspire fear of technological advancements.

“Many people in African communities are afraid of technology, as they don’t know what to make of it,” he added. “We need to change this mentality.”

Alain Douyon, a Senior Director from Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique (CGI), was in charge of giving the introductory talk, and made his message very clear: leaps into the future are not optional, they’re compulsory. He specifically mentioned Smart Grid projects, electrical grids that aim to optimize information about the distribution and use of electricity by leveraging information technology. With these ideas in mind, the conference was off to a start.

On Saturday, talks were given by entrepreneurs, technologists, and researchers working in various sectors but with a common goal – to create positive impact. From advice on creating your own brand to discussion on the importance of access to technology in the developing world, the day was filled with thought-provoking ideas.

Laurent Elder, program leader in information and networks at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), spoke about the positive impact of technology on international science cooperation, describing the importance of tech in bringing people out of poverty. According to Elder, in the lowest socioeconomic status countries, over 90 per cent of its citizens own mobile phones. The popularity of these devices can be attributed to their role in improving the efficiencies of daily activities, maintaining social relations, and providing the ability to earn, save, and act in an emergency.

Though mobile phones are widespread, the internet is largely unaffordable for many.

Diana Kwon | The McGill Daily

The importance of increasing access to technology in developing countries is multifold – technology impacts everything from agriculture to healthcare. Digitizing the process of updating patient information makes it possible to save lives while saving money for governments. Easy access to pricing information for crops can help local farmers increase profit. In Elder’s words, “The interesting thing to think about is whether it’s because countries are poor that they don’t have access, or they don’t have access because they are poor.”

It is not only in the developing world that technology can improve the lives of individuals. Shivani Goyal, a researcher at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation in Toronto, highlighted the importance of developing mobile applications (apps) to help increase the quality of health care. “We’ve found that we can use smartphones to get individuals to better manage their own health,” stated Goyal.

Goyal and colleagues are developing activity monitors on mobile phones to help individuals understand their behaviours and be motivated to change them. For example, breathe is a mobile app developed to help individuals self-manage their asthma by providing easy access to personal health information. The usage of these applications is not limited to those with medical conditions – they can also act as preventative measures by allowing all individuals to keep track of and manage their own health.

Technology can also benefit all nations by increasing communication and exchange of ideas. Jonathan Gosier – a tech entrepreneur, developer, and activist – is one of the players working to connect rural African villages to the internet and make the connections

between technology and media in Africa and the rest of the world. In this talk, Gosier introduced the idea of the African diaspora holding much potential for helping the continent in the coming years. According to Gosier, the diaspora consists of the people who are either from Africa, or are connected to Africa in some way. “It’s the people who are connected to the continent both in mind and possibly by body […] it’s the people who are aware and are leveraging their power for the greater good and ultimately the prosperity of the continent,” he expressed.

Through the creation of global initiatives such as Apps 4 Africa (funding projects for Africa, from Africa) and Question Box (a platform designed to provide easy access to areas with literary and technical barriers), Gosier hopes to help build resources between the two worlds. “For me, I think what I’m most optimistic about isn’t necessarily the technology, but about the communities connecting and reconnecting […] I feel like a lot of things have been tried, and that’s one of the things that is most fragmented and disappointing – that someone with a great solution in Haiti doesn’t know about the same solution in Montreal,” Gosier told The Daily.

Building on the premise of bridging global gaps in technology, the conference sparked discussions for students and entrepreneurs alike. This first venture out of Africa hopes to open doors for those in Montreal to get involved. For Nlemba, this means greater participation from youth in the community: “we want to set up a platform for students to be able to create something or have an impact somewhere else in the world.”

The McGill Daily

Sci+Tech

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Monday, September 30, 2013

Doing the web crawl The ins and outs of open data Naomi Eterman | Sci+Tech Writer

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hese days, the answer to a question is just a few clicks away. Search engines like Google make this possible by discovering, indexing, and ranking websites using algorithm-driven virtual spiders. Without these ‘web crawlers,’ navigating through the billions of websites that comprise the World Wide Web would be a daunting task.

Still, for overarching questions about the trends and connections described by web crawl data itself, individuals would need access to data storage and power that until recently was available only to Google.

Lisa Green, the director of the non-profit open data initiative Common Crawl, spoke at the RPM Startup Centre in Griffintown last week about how her organization is simplifying the process of data analysis for all kinds of ‘curious coders.’

The talk, organized by Montreal Girl Geeks, focused on the philosophy of open data and its utility to small-scale researchers, educators and entrepreneurs.

Gil Elbaz, Silicon Valley database engineer and the co-creator of Google-acquired software Applied Semantics, founded Common Crawl in 2008 with the mission of democratizing access to the web. According to the organization’s website, Common Crawl “produc[es] and maintain[s] an open repository of web crawl data that is universally accessible.” The corpus covers approximately 300 terabytes of data corresponding to 8 billion web pages to date, all stored on Amazon S3 cloud storage service. Also, in keeping with the objective of a freer web, the entire crawl algorithm is published and publicly available on GitHub, a repository for coders to publish, store, and share code.

The Common Crawl Foundation has facilitated many success stories. In 2012, Mat-

Science blurbs What’s happening in science at McGill.

thew Berk of Zyxt Labs, Inc. tested around 1.3 billion URLs from crawled web data.

After discovering that almost a fifth of the websites contained references to Facebook URLs, he founded a new social media startup called Lucky Oyster that allows users to make recommendations to friends based on information from networking websites.

In the same year, Common Crawl hosted a code contest that showcased the breadth of crawl-data applications in different fields. Data Publica, a Paris-based open data directory, mapped the key players in the world of French open data and their connections to each other in the virtual sphere. Another group mapped the probable definition of a word based on its appearance in Wikipedia entries. The possibilities are truly staggering.

Green acknowledges the appeal of Common Crawl to business and startups, but is more inspired by the social implications of an openly accessible data repository. Individuals can now seek data-based, computational solutions for the greater good. Next month’s écoHACK Montréal, for example, partners experts in urban sustainability with tech-savvy coders to collaborate on sustainability projects in the city. Easier access to knowledge will also provide useful tools “for the two guys in the basement with a good idea,” Green added.

Opening up databases can even precipitate unexpected windfalls for taxpayers.

When the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK opened prescriptions data up to the public last year, certain interested third parties discovered that an average of £27 million per month was spent by doctors prescribing proprietary (i.e. patented) cholesterol-lowering statins to patients, when generically available drugs were equally

Diana Kwon | The McGill Daily effective. A switch to cheaper drugs would save the NHS £200 million a year.

Changing the status quo would also make open data an appealing alternative to the fastidiously guarded copyrights of the printing age. Creative Commons, where Green was formerly chief of staff, is a non-profit organization that offers copyright licenses for creative and academic material. It has reshaped the possibilities of copyright protection on the internet for large-scale collaborative organizations like Wikipedia and independent artists alike. Admittedly, there is at present a significant lack of case law regarding data to render a Creative Commons approach to open data feasible.

The ‘open’ movement extends well beyond data and into the realm of open educa-

tion, global access licensing for medicines, and open access to research. The movement has also gained traction at McGill with clubs such as Universities Allied for Essential Medicines advocating for the University’s adoption of global access policies, which would ensure generic production of all McGill-affiliated medical innovations.

As the information available on the internet rapidly expands, open data is becoming an increasingly important tool for the computer-literate generation. Leann Brown, the organizer of the open data event, is passionate about spreading the ‘open’ message to people in the technological world: “That’s what Montreal Girl Geeks is about – encouraging you to teach and enable yourself and share that knowledge in the community.”

The wonder of words A look at psycholinguistic research

H

Sivakami Mylvaganam | Sci+Tech Writer

ow do bilinguals juggle the different languages they know? Under the direction of Debra Titone, a professor in psychology at McGill, the Titone lab marries the studies of psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to investigate how bilinguals and monolinguals understand and produce language.

The lab is currently studying how bilinguals – particularly English-French bilinguals – manage their knowledge of multiple languages. To address this question, Titone and her students have investigated crosslanguage competitors. Cross-language competitors, as Titone explains, are words that overlap across languages as to how they look or sound, but vary in meaning (‘chat,’ in English and French).

While it is perhaps easy to imagine that a bilingual’s brain switches off one language when using the other, there is evidence that both languages are active simultaneously.

At the Titone lab, researchers monitor behavioural changes such as eye movements to understand how the brain resolves such ambiguities during reading, listening, and production activities.

They also investigate how factors such as second language proficiency and cognitive capacity play a role, and whether bilingual experience produces structural brain changes. Using neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging – a tool used to measure brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow – they look at whether bilingual experience produces structural changes in the brain.

One may often think of the single word as the functional unit of language; however, written or spoken language often comes in multiword chunks. To address this, the lab looks at the extent of a bilingual or monolingual person’s sensitivity to formulaic sequences (the chunks of speech) during

comprehension and production including how they respond to idioms or other figures of speech.

A look at language-impaired populations also provides important insights.

Schizophrenia is classified as severe neurophysiological disorder that is obviously very different from dyslexia. By contrasting language and basic reading skills in people with dyslexia and schizophrenia, Titone has found evidence to suggest that similar regions of the brain implicated in reading are affected in both disorders. As a result, language processing may be similar as well.

The Titone lab also conducts bilingual and monolingual research on other aspects of language, such as emotional word processing and language processing in healthy, older adults. Ultimately, they hope to contribute to a more holistic understanding of our language production and comprehension.

Health&Ed

The McGill Daily

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Monday, September 30, 2013

Problematizing Canada’s history

The government’s continual oppression of Indigenous communities Ralph haddad | The McGill Daily

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[I meditated for a long time] about the state of perpetual thankfulness that we as settlers should have for the privilege of our welcome to this place.” By “this place,” Mary Eberts, a longtime lawyer in private practice, means Canada. But when considering how long settlers have been dwelling on Indigenous land, she expresses that she “was thinking how presumptuous of [her] to thank someone for hosting [her] on this occasion.” Eberts spoke at the new installation of the Wallenberg Conferences – “that honour Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat whose actions saved the lives of thousands of Jews in Hungary during the Second World War,” according to the conference page. The event, aptly entitled “Law vs. Justice: How the Courts are preparing the way for one last fatal round of treaty negotiations with Indigenous Peoples in Canada,” was organized with the help of the McGill Centre for Human Rights & Legal Pluralism. This event was also part of Indigenous Awareness Week.

Genocide is how Eberts likens the treatment of Indigenous people by Canada. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on the December 9th 1948, states that there are five elements of genocide: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the whole of part of the group, imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. “Certainly the intent was there [on the government’s behalf ],” she asserts. Little doubt exists about whether there is substantial evidence to back this claim up.

Stephen Harper, Canadian Prime Min-

Robert Smith | The McGill Daily ister, proudly exclaimed to the world at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh in 2009 that, “[Canada...has] no history of colonization.”

Conversely, Duncan Campbell Scott, a Canadian bureaucrat, prose writer, and poet, once proclaimed, “The happiest future for the Indian [sic] race is absorption into the general population, and this is the object of the policy of our government. The great forces of intermarriage and education will finally overcome the lingering traces of native custom and tradition.” He later followed up his previous comments with with, “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian [sic] in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic [...]” Contrary to Harper’s claims, there are clear examples of colonization tainting Canada’s history.

Canada, by definition, is a settler colonial state. It is also one of four settler colonial states to vote against the UNGA Resolution on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 (originally accepted 114 to 4). In 2010, it endorsed the resolution, but called it “aspirational” and not “legally binding,” reiterating that Canada was really trying to implement good and fair measures for Indigenous peoples because they had already apologized for the ‘Indian’ residential schools disaster. The fact that the Canadian government feels like it can wipe its hands clean of any responsibility with just an apology is in itself highly problematic, because, according to Eberts, “The dominant society coexists on and exercises exclusive jurisdictions over the territories and jurisdictions that Indigenous people refused to surrender.”

The Canadian Supreme Court has made it clear that Indigenous communities and the Canadian government should not resort to litigations in order to solve their problems, claiming instead that they need

to turn to the negotiating table. To Eberts, the negotiation is an unequal one because the government has sovereignty, and First Peoples only have a right of occupation.

“The First Peoples are going into this world of negotiation with more than one foot and one hand tied behind their back,” Eberts said.

Historically, Canada has a dreadful track record with negotiations. In 2007, it was reported that there were more than 1,300 claims filed against Canada. A professor at the University of Western Ontario made a conservative estimate that it would take the government approximately 50 years to resolve the claims filed at this rate.

René Dussault, co-chair of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, stated that Indigenous communities have less than a third of the land base accorded to them by the written terms of their historic treaties struck with the government. These failed, mainly because treaty terms were not carried out, or allocated land was later expropriated or sold, for highways, railways, hydro-lines, seaways, and cities.

Given the facts, one has to wonder what will happen at these negotiating tables. Eberts noted that the Federal government approaches these negotiating tables with a ‘take or leave it’ approach: “If the First Peoples don’t want it, then everything stalls.”

The Crown’s Constitutional Duty to Consult and Accommodate Aboriginal and Treaty Rights makes it mandatory for the Federal government to sit and consult with First Peoples about whatever development project is being proposed or seeking a license.

Eberts stressed that, “The process does not give Aboriginal groups a veto over what can be done with land [...].” She added that, “The basis of consultation, or the duty to consult, is said to be the honour of the

Crown: it is a principle that servants of the Crown must conduct themselves with honour when acting on behalf of the Sovereign.”

So far, the representatives of the Crown in Canada have blatantly not conducted themselves with honour when dealing with Indigenous communities and land.

“The Supreme Court of Canada [acknowledges] that before the settlers came and stuck their flag on the shore, that Indigenous people had sovereignty over the land,” continued Eberts. The Supreme Court also fully acknowledges that Canada has a duty of reconciliation of land (among other things) to the Indigenous population, “but in my moments of cynicism,” Eberts claimed, “I think that the duty of reconciliations means that First Peoples have to reconcile themselves to the fact that they’re going to get kicked around by Canada yet again.”

In Eberts’ words, words that cannot be paraphrased, “Canada, do not do this in my name anymore, because I am sickened by what you do, I am ashamed by what you do,.

Please treat First Peoples with respect and with dignity, and share Canada with them.

Do not leave them [to] occupy the margins.”

One solution to the problem is the answer of shared sovereignty over the land.

In direct response to her proposal, an Indigenous audience member responded, during the question and answer portion, that, “A shared sovereignty would be the Native people sanctioning thieves coming into our homes and stealing what is in our house, and then for us to say [that] we’re okay sharing what they have stolen from us.”

Essentially, Eberts’ closing statement holds an inherent truth that resonates with a long and problematic history of colonialism in Canada: “Canada does not have an [Indigenous] problem,” she declares, “Canada has a settler problem, and we have to fix it.”

Sports

The McGill Daily

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Monday, September 30, 2013

A new year, a new dynamic

Redmen hockey tries to get back to their winning ways Sason Ross | Sports Writer

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

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fter an injury-riddled season that ended with a devastating loss to the Nipissing University Lakers in a bestof-three quarterfinal series, 2-1, the McGill Redmen are looking to return to the former glory of their 2012 Canadian Interuniversity Sport championship season. Even with all the injuries, leading to an estimated 130 player games lost (meaning over the season, injured players missed a collective 130 games), the Redmen were able to finish the season with a respectable 17-7-4 record, leaving them third in the Eastern Conference of the Ontario University Athletics league. So what went wrong?

What changes have been made to remedy last season’s defeat? What should we be expecting from our McGill Redmen Men’s Hockey team this season? To answer these questions, I sat down with Kelly Nobes, the head coach of the Redmen.

The first thing I wanted to know was what type of system is implemented for the success of his team. “We like to play a fast game. We like to play quick transition, quick attack style of play,” Nobes said. This style was attributed to the smaller-sized team that McGill had last year, which was one of the main things that Nobes and coaching staff wanted to change.

“This year we added more size, so we are looking to play a more physical style and more aggressive. We’ve got a good group this year, a young group. 22 guys in their first or second

year. Our skill level is high, speed is good, good size and lots of depth,” Nobes continued.

Not only was size upgraded but also maybe more importantly, this year’s squad has a lot of added depth.

Mainly due to injuries, the depth on this team could be what changes the ill fate of last year’s team into a team more like the 2012 championship team. Nobes said, “Now we’ve got a roster of 29 guys, which is more than you would normally carry, but we are going to rely on that depth throughout the season if and when injuries occur.”

The next area of concern that I addressed was goaltending. When asked, Nobes seemed very confident in his goalie tandem, claiming, “We are in good shape there. We’ve got a fifth year goalie who was [at McGill] last year, Andrew Fleming, and we have a first year goalie in Jacob Gervais-Chouinard who played in Sherbrooke last year. Saw a lot of games there, saw a lot of rubber there, and he finished the season with Hamilton in the American [Hockey] League [the level below professional]. So he is a very solid goaltender.”

Last year, Fleming posted a 2.45 goals against average, a .923 save percentage and earned 8 wins in 15 games. When asked who would be the starting goalie come opening day, he simply replied, “[The goalies] are going to sort that out as we go.” This could see a goalie controversy develop, if both ‘tendies’ push each

other for the starting job. Like last year, we could see a split of starts, with more of a 1A, 1B goalie situation. From the goalie position, our conversation turned to leading scorer for the McGill Redmen, Patrick Delisle-Houde.

Racking up 24 points in 26 games played, on a team that lacked high offensive output, rookie Delisle-Houde was one of the prominent scoring threats for McGill last year. “We expect Pat[rick] to produce offensively for us,” Nobes continued, “But he is a 200 foot player [meaning he plays well anywhere on the rink].

He can be our best guy in the defensive zone, on the penalty kill, and he is going to put some pucks in the net this year [at the same time].”

Look for Delisle-Houde to improve his numbers in his second year, due to the additional offensive support the coaching staff brought in this year. Of the players brought in, Coach Nobes specified one that McGill students should look out for this year.

Coming from the Western Hockey League, Neal Prokop has been added to the roster. The 6 foot 3, 212 pound forward should bring the power forward type player that the Redmen lacked last year to the lineup. “For us we needed to add some size for our lineup, and guys like that are going to help us,” Nobes said. This infusion of size is what Nobes proclaimed will “be [an] advantage to us. Means that we might be a little more durable too.”

One of the biggest concerns of last year’s

team was the lack of offensive output. Of all the Eastern playoff teams, McGill ranked second to last in goals for with only 89. When asked if Coach Nobes was concerned with this statistic he responded, “We were so depleted due to injuries last year that it had a factor in our offensive output. But we also didn’t generate enough offensively and clearly that’s an area we are looking to improve and you will see that number go up for sure this year.”

Although these are only predictions at this point, the Redmen’s coaching staff has tried to change the dynamic of the group to make sure that the events of last year do not repeat themselves. The one attribute that Nobes commented would be in short supply this season is “the obvious, and that is experience.” Nobes hopes that the young players can step up and prove to the team that they are accountable servicemen for this club.

Through more depth up front, a bigger team, a more aggressive style of play, and developing younger players, the Redmen are poised to have a comeback season and return to former splendour. Nobes finished by saying, “We made a lot of changes. In terms of our personnel, what we are doing off the ice, in our training, and how we are managing ourselves.

Time will tell if some of these changes help but we are confident that they are going to make a difference.”

Culture

The McGill Daily

20

Monday, September 30, 2013

Droning bass tones and saxophone riffs The world of POP Montreal Celine Caira | The McGill Daily

Celine Caira | The McGill Daily

A

s the bass-heavy sunsets of Piknic Electronik begin to fade from our memories, and a fall chill resurrects hoodies long stored under our beds, it might seem like September could not possibly hold as much excitement as those delicious summer months. Fortunately, vibrant and youthful Montreal has something to amuse us at all times of the year.

The question, “What is POP Montreal?” is a loaded one that has no right answer.

POP Montreal is not simply about showcasing underground bands, nor is it just about providing a media platform and gallery space for visual and performance artists. The POP Montreal festival, with its wide and multidisciplinary artistic scope, ultimately serves to remind us of the importance of supporting local artists within an accessible, independent, and minimally corporate atmosphere.

According to the event organizers, the POP Montreal International Music Festival is an annual not-for-profit curated cultural event that looks to champion independence in the arts. Beginning Wednesday, POP Montreal presented an assortment of art forms and events including symposium discussions, live concerts, artisan and visual art exhibitions, fashion shows, film screenings, and a few all-night loft parties. Last year, the five-day festival showcased more than 600 artists and attracted audiences of over 50 000 people.

POP Montreal provides critics, musicians, curators, music producers, and fans alike

with a rich and dynamic introduction to the next generation of independent musical talent and art forms.

On Wednesday I attended the festival’s launch party at POP Montreal headquarters on St. Urbain where, appropriately, L’École Des Beaux-Arts once stood. Although the launch was designed as an exclusive RSVP event solely for artists and press-pass holders, to my surprise POP volunteers welcomed inquisitive passersby. This illustrates the first cardinal characteristic of POP Montreal: accessibility.

Ticket prices range from free to $40, and most events take place at a series of venues situated over a relatively compact area, reachable by foot, metro, or bike, making it easy to sample a variety of artists while getting to explore the Mile End. The launch party gave a taste of the bold cross-section to be expected at POP Montreal over the next five days. There was a variety of art installations in the dark rooms upstairs at the POP headquarters. Projections looped shaky images of indecipherable objects across the room, accompanied by droning bass tones. These projections were so spooky that one even succeeded in making a five-year-old boy cry. Downstairs, partygoers had pretty much struck gold. POP Montreal offered free food, music, and drink for its opening night, along with a gift bag containing glow-in-the-dark nail polish, a bike bell, chapstick, and condoms, among other things (in other words: just the essentials). Surprise musical guest

Fabricville, who could be mistaken for a group of escaped balding carnival clowns, began to play an acoustic cover of M.I.A.’s “Jimmy” that quickly launched the eclectic crowd into fits of sporadic swaying.

Next up, after all this swaying, it’s onto the Théâtre Rialto for Fashion POP, an annual design competition that attracted the city’s brightest up-and-coming fashion design talent. Following this, Le Divan Orange was host to Jay Malinowski & The Deadcoasts of Bedouin Soundclash fame. The rest of the week was a fantastical blur of visual and musical experiences.

Highlights of POP included Colin Stetson’s performance on Thursday at Théâtre Rialto. Stetson is a bass saxophone musician who dabbles with experimental, jazz, indie rock, and dub-step styles. Eyes bulging and cheeks puffed like a blowfish, he challenged my previous conceptions of what sounds could be humanly produced with a saxophone. Up close you can almost feel the pain and physical stress he undergoes to miraculously produce such heaving and complex sounds. He didn’t have any looping devices or pre-recorded background music for aid; everything the audience heard was produced live and birthed from his hunky diaphragm. As a result of looping his breath for four minutes at a time, he seemed to not be able to see straight or coherently address the audience following each song. His endearing “Sorry guys, I can’t see you [...] too much blood in my head” got a chuckle or

two from the audience.

Aware of its home in a bilingual city, POP Montreal attempts to appeal to both English and French speaking audiences.

To facilitate this, bilingual volunteers were provided at every venue. Still, there was definitely a lack of Quebec talent at this year’s festival. Visiting several venues across the Mile End, I stumbled upon Dresden Dresses, The Trick, Colin Stetson, Honey Wild, and Tim Hecker, all of which, except for Dresden Dresses, hail from outside Quebec, and all of which performed in English or had English song titles. Although I applaud Dresden Dresses and Colin Stetson for their efforts in addressing the crowd in French, I would have liked to see more local Quebec artists at this year’s festival. If POP Montreal claims to be a festival that promotes local talent, what is more local than native Quebec artists?

Now, if you’ll excuse the corny metaphor, POP Montreal is like a soda pop beverage: it looks cool, tastes sweet, and makes you hyper as hell, yet all the while you are not exactly sure what’s inside.

Perhaps it is the festival’s mélange of obscure venues and unusual content that allows it to be just as exciting every year.

I can confidently say that POP Montreal is enshrined among the most beloved of Montreal cultural celebrations. Whatever the secret ingredient, POP Montreal is a gathering that brings forth and amplifies the city’s underground artistic pulse like no other.

The McGill Daily

Culture

21

Monday, September 30, 2013

Bizarre love triangle

Players’ Theatre entertains Mr. Sloane Rosie Long Decter | Culture Writer

M

cGill’s Players’ Theatre begins its 2013-2014 season with Entertaining Mr. Sloane, a 1960s black comedy by English playwright Joe Orton.

Sloane tells the story of a 20-year-old orphaned man, the eponymous Mr. Sloane (Daniel Carter), who takes up residence with middle-aged Kath (Pam Austin), and her father (Frederick Geitz). Kath and her brother, Ed (Stephen Reimer), are drawn to the mystery and youth of Sloane, and vie for his attention and affection, much to the dismay of their father, who profoundly distrusts the lodger. Director Nikolay Shargorodsky does his best to balance the ensuing comedy and conflict.

Right from the opening lines, when Kath and Sloane enter mid-conversation, Sloane does not cater to its audience. Shargorodsky’s describes Sloane as a “simple” show in his director’s note, and, indeed, in some aspects it is very minimal: there are only four characters, the plot itself is fairly straightforward, and the entire play takes place within one living room. But it is easy to miss the quick-witted dialogue as it flits by, or to get lost among the layers of predatory, immature and incestuous interactions between the characters. The dark humour can sometimes be unsettling. It’s often hard to tell which parts are supposed to be funny.

Kath is the only female in the show: a lonely, disconnected woman who gave up her illegitimate son for adoption when she was young. She sees her lost son in Sloane, and tries to both mother and seduce him,

with a desperation accurately portrayed

by Austin. Kath’s dereliction becomes occasionally painful to watch. She can appear to be an unsympathetic depiction of a 1960s woman subject to her brother’s orders and the judgments of society, which give her limited agency. Ed is also attracted to Sloane, though much less explicitly, and Sloane seems to reciprocate. Their relationship, according to Shargorodsky, is the “most honest part” of the play, likely because Orton himself was gay. Shargorodsky has succeeded in conveying that honesty: their on-stage chemistry feels genuine. The banter between Sloane and Ed is the most natural and, by consequence, the most interesting in the play, in contrast to the interactions between Kath and Sloane, which occasionally seem forced. It’s unclear whether this is a directorial decision. The individual characters and mannerisms of Ed and Sloane are well acted by Reimer and Carter, right down to Ed’s tendency to tap his index fingers together when speaking.

Aside from the relationship of Ed and Sloane, Entertaining Mr. Sloane is extremely satirical, mocking the competitive ‘sibling rivalry’ and overall selfish nature of human beings. As the play goes on and Sloane is revealed to be increasingly aggressive and immature, Kath and Ed become correspondingly more attached to him. Shargorodsky’s interpretation strives to emphasize Sloane’s child-like nature, and his tendency to act on his passions, which in turns exposes the darker tones of the play. Shargorodsky has especially focused on Sloane’s aggressive-

Georgia Gleason | The McGill Daily ness, again eliciting from the audience that disconcerted feeling one can only get from black comedy.

A viewer of Sloane needs to do a bit of rolling with the punches. The mood of the show switches so constantly that one scene in which Kath has broken down into tears may cause feelings of sympathy or sadness, while the next time she cries on stage could have the audience laughing out loud. This is what makes that makes Sloane so intriguing to Shargorodsky, who says that he is able to enjoy and understand “something different every time” he re-examines it. For Shargorodsky, that is where the comedy of

the show lies, because “things are funny when you don’t know how you feel.”

Players’ Theatre claims that their 201314 season consists of shows that “juxtapose reality with what is magical and imaginative.” Entertaining Mr. Sloane is an intimate experience that certainly treads a fine line between the harsh realities of human behaviour and the absurdity and imagination of satire. Though it may very well leave you unsure of how you feel, it will provoke your thoughts on humour, family relations, and passion, and after all the aggression and desperation, it just might leave you smiling.

5 broken cameras and 1 Cinema Politica Palestinian nonviolent resistance in documentary form

C

inema Politica McGill is one of the many campus branches of Cinema Politica, a Montreal-based non-profit network that advocates the screening of independent and alternative political documentaries, the likes of which you won’t see on prime-time television.

This year signifies a fresh start for the McGill division. Equipped with a new and enthusiastic team, Cinema Politica McGill is determined to be bigger and better than ever before – a “revival,” according to the organizers.

This year, in addition to weekly screenings, Cinema Politica McGill will be co-hosting a series of events with, for example, Amnesty International, Oxfam, and the McGill chapter of Journalists for Human Rights. The team has also been in talks with the Cinema Politica network: they are hoping to invite directors to speak about their work in person.

The first screening of the year was 5 Broken Cameras (2011), a compelling documentary about Palestinian non-violent resistance in the West Bank. The Cinema Politica McGill team chose this documentary

Hannah Yoken | Culture Writer specifically due to its emotive nature: they wanted to cover a current, relatable issue.

“Everyone ought to know what’s happening, we hear a lot but not from this point of view.

It’s an untouched subject,” explained the organizers. They hoped that the topic would attract a large audience. Armed with free popcorn and a musical performance (emphasized in the social media advertising the screening), Cinema Politica McGill hoped to draw in a wider audience.

The documentary chosen for this purpose was 5 Broken Cameras, the riveting first-hand account following the life of Emad Burnat, a farmer-turned-filmmaker residing with his family in the town of Bil’in. The film focuses heavily on Burnat’s children and their experiences growing up in the unstable, often violent environment of the West Bank. As the Israeli army is fencing in the town of Bil’in, Burnat is constantly filming. His cameras are destroyed by violent reactions as he films his local community’s resistance, framed within the wider Palestinian resistance.

Filmed as a sort of a day-to-day video diary, 5 Broken Cameras mixes footage with conversation. The documentary is transparent in its subjectivity – it is a straightforward portrayal of real life events from one man’s perspective, as they took place.

In one scene, Burnat is in an accident and has to go to Tel Aviv to access the more advanced medical technology of an Isreali hospital, and because he’s not Israeli he gets slapped with a huge hospital bill. Since he was not injured through the Palestinian resistance, the Palestinian authorities refuse him financial help. This tension within the resistance is something Burnat only subtly hints at.

Burnat’s subjective point of view is both the greatest strength and greatest weakness of 5 Broken Cameras. It is through emotion that Burnat works as a filmmaker, and his whole documentary hinges on viewers’ investment in the people on screen. Still, however poignant, 5 Broken Cameras remains a single piece in the conversation.

5 Broken Cameras has been recognized in

the wider arts community as well: In 2013 it won the World Cinema Directing award at Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards this year. The documentary was also recognized and praised widely throughout Israel and won Best Documentary Film at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2012.

Following the screening, the team members of Cinema Politica McGill facilitated a discussion, which allowed the audience to voice their opinions and feelings.

The discussion focused on theories and facts related to the Palestinian resistance rather than a personal response to the documentary. This was not too surprising considering that most of the viewers seemed far removed from the action and based their comments mostly on their academic study of the region in question. 5 Broken Cameras shows only one of the many sides to this issue, and a follow-up screening from a different point of view would be a good way to approach this multifaceted topic further.

The McGill Daily

22

Culture

Monday, September 30, 2013

The shape of things to come

Time Forms explores the links between time and art

T

he first thing to be seen upon entering McGill’s New Music building on September 18 was a collection of middleaged artists dragging box-mounted tablets around the front foyer on strings, filming the ceiling. They walked, writhed, and rolled across the floor. To the outside world it would have looked like madness, but in Time Forms this was just part of the norm.

This strange performance marked the launch of Time Forms, a four-day conference exploring the relationship between the experience of aesthetics and the fluctuation of time. The workshops focused on art as a manipulator of temporality and challenged the concept that time can be cut into convenient and discrete units.

The works strove to break free of the mechanical “clock time” by which modern humanity abides, while investigating how art can make “time felt.” Clocks are seen as the fundament of time. They are made up of hours, minutes, and seconds, and consequently, are measurable constants in the world. What then accounts for those moments with friends when time seems to flow by effortlessly, or those days in class when the hand on the clock seems hardly to move at all? Time Forms aims to delve into this notion of fluctuating time, and explore its connection with the aesthetic experience.

Despite the slightly esoteric nature of its premise, the curators of Time Forms – McGill professors Alanna Thain, Stephen McAdams, and Eric Lewis – made accessibility a goal when organizing the conference. “We want not only everyone to be able to get in, but to feel like they belong here, too,” said Thain. The structure was also important. Time Forms was designed to counter the typical conference-style layout, in order to stress the inconsistent nature of time. The pace of activity was in constant flux: for one hour, a participator could be sitting down listening to a talk on multitemporalities, and the next, chasing a dancer down Prince Arthur.

Putting together Time Forms was no easy task: it required the hard work and time of many people who were interested in the concept, and that turned out to be a surprising number. Lewis estimates that a few dozen parties from McGill were involved.

“We’re all interested in breaking out of the traditional academic silos,” he says. Thain continues, “We were also lucky to have good community partners.” These partners ranged from the PHI Centre, where the events on September 21 were held, to the Performing Arts Fund of the Netherlands, which funded the Vloeistof dance group’s visit to Montreal and hosted the dance experience titled, “Am I Here Now?” One workshop, called “Maintenant” (“now” in French), was led by McGill music professor Eleanor Stubley and sculptor Joël A. Prévost. “Eleanor [Stubley] spends a lot of time theorizing about touch,” said Lewis.

“If you want to do more than just theorize about it, engage with a sculptor.” In June, Stubley began collaborating with Prévost, a

Lucy Gripper | Culture Writer

Emma Wen| Illustrator self-taught sculptor from Montreal. The two got together over a three day period during which Prévost would sculpt Stubley’s hands as she conducted her original compositions.

The fundamental shape of the sculpture was based on the position of Stubley’s hands at the start of the piece, with details added as the sculpting process continued. During “Maintenant,” videos played behind them on a screen, artistically arranged to stress different aspects of the collaboration: capturing movement and emotion with sculpture, a conductor bringing life to notes, the materiality of togetherness, and metaphysical versus clock time, just to name a few.

These sort of deep philosophical ponderings were not rare in Time Forms. There was a performance of the legendary trombonist, scholar, and pioneer of electronic music George Lewis’ piece “Mnemosis.” As explained by Lewis in the discussion that followed, “Mnemosis” was based on two philosophical concepts: Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of timelessness. Nietzsche postulated the idea that the universe is a recurring entity that will continue to recur in a similar manner an infinite number of times, while Wittgenstein said that whoever lives in the present lives for eternity. As a result, “Mnemosis” itself has repeating portions, and is laid out in a way in which the listener can cognitively enter and exit the piece at will. It was terrifying by most standards. The pianist dragged a jar against the inside of her piano, and at some points it was as though the wind instruments were just being blown on rather than actually played.

During an event called “Lunch Beat” in

the basement of the New Music Building, food was given out on one side of the room while the rest was transformed into a giant dance floor. The lights were low, the trance music was loud, and several art installations lay around the room. On one screen, glitchy films flashed, while another screen showcased phrases like, “make this moment last” and, “now………won.” As Thain described, “What do you normally do at lunch? […]

There’s something about daytime dancing that’s a different way of feeding yourself and feeding your body and feeding your soul. […]

There’s something about taking an art break in the middle of the day, and particularly a body-based art break. [It] gives you just a different experience.”

The Vloeistof dance tour “Am I Here Now?” played on imagination in daily life.

Small groups followed a dancer around Montreal while listening to an mp3 recording of the dancers’ ‘thoughts.’ She made remarks on pedestrians’ weight, the state of the neighbourhood, and sometimes referred to the group itself. The dancing was unconventional: it involved raw movements that seemed out of place in the middle of busy Montreal. The dancer ran, zig-zagged, and threw herself into bushes. At some points she would stop, and repeat abstract movements so that the group would have to stop and watch her (along with some people who just happened to be passing by). It was not a performance that had been rehearsed and presented countless times before, but rather a new and unique work every time, one that was co-created by the audience.

All in all, the organizers were pleased with the outcome of the event. “It was a huge

and complicated undertaking; it required a lot of elaborate technical support because of our strong emphasis on performance and media, the coordination of a lot of people who had never worked together before, and a group of participants, both presenters and audiences, who were willing to take risks with novel forms of engaging with research [and] creation,” said Thain. She also expressed hope that another Time Forms conference would happen in the future, albeit not any time soon. In the meantime, the organizers are involved with the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas and plan to run several workshops through it. Thain explains, “We’re still working [the workshops] out, but one may involve a visit to the beehives at Macdonald campus with a mobile cinema, others may involve looking at how ‘slow food’ movements intersect with contemporary political practices and critiques of labour under neo-liberalism.”

While it may be difficult for some to do serious philosophical reasoning with such quirky distractions, the participators in Time Forms seemed to do just fine. No one batted an eyelash when musicians plucked at their instruments during presentations, and everyone was still paying attention on the dance tour when passers-by took pictures and giggled at the dancer. It didn’t seem like eccentricity was a goal of the conference, but rather a symptom of gathering so many like-minded artists and thinkers. The Time Forms conference effectively brought together people of different backgrounds and different ages, and allowed them to connect based on a shared desire to think about time, think about art, and be a little bit obscure.

Editorial

volume 103 number 5

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Indigenous awareness: No ‘minor’ issue

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Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

F

rom the founders’ appropriation of Native land to build this university, to the ongoing investments in the exploitative companies underwriting Le nord pour tous “North for All” – a resource exploitation program in Northern Quebec – McGill has a continual history of colonial appropriation. In the midst of this colonial history, this past week marked the third annual Indigenous Awareness Week at McGill, celebrating Indigenous culture in Canada.

Organized by the Social Equity and Diversity Education (SEDE) Office’s Indigenous Education Program, the Awareness Week is an incredible opportunity for the McGill community to gain awareness of First Peoples’ issues.

However, Indigenous Awareness Week and the McGill Pow Wow (which is entering its 12th year) have a short history on campus – symptomatic of an institutional failure on the part of the University to acknowledge the importance of Indigenous issues and its complicity in creating a culture of erasure.

Knowledge and awareness of Indigenous issues should not be limited to one week of the year – it should be a constant presence. Advocates have been working on instating an Indigenous Studies minor at McGill since the early 2000s, and the process appears close to resolution, as the program is currently under review by the McGill administration. Such progress is indeed encouraging; however, the fact that it has taken the University so long to institute an Indigenous Studies program is shameful.

Other universities in Canada have long-running versions of Indigenous studies programs. The University of Toronto instated its program in 1994, and since 2001, the University of British Columbia has offered an interdisciplinary major that includes topics such as Indigenous fem-

inism, Aboriginal politics, and oral history. Here in Montreal, Concordia’s Aboriginal Student Resource Centre maintains a far more central location on its campus than McGill’s First Peoples’ House, increasing its visibility to the population at large. McGill’s programs that do feature Indigenous-related content often relegate that content to seminars or special topics courses, rather than as part of a core curriculum.

This passivity toward the official implementation of a visible Indigenous presence on campus should not be considered the fault of activists, but rather an institutional failure on the part of the University. The Indigenous Studies minor is in the works, and will be a significant step forward for the McGill community. Advocates hope for a major program a few years after the inception of the minor, which would do more to emphasize the importance of Indigenous issues here at McGill.

The progress shouldn’t stop there – nor will it. Many have already taken it upon themselves to mobilize for the minor program, and the success of Indigenous Awareness Week reflects the strength of such advocates. For those who missed this past week’s events, or who wish to further their awareness of Indigenous issues, plentiful resources exist.

Indigenous media is active in our communities, including the Kanata journal at McGill, the Native Solidarity News Collective at CKUT, and others. There are also on-campus groups, such as the First Peoples’ House and SEDE’s Indigenous Education Program. While bureaucracy and institutional failure may hinder the awareness of Indigenous history and culture, the McGill community should nevertheless take it upon ourselves to become more informed.

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Compendium!

The McGill Daily

24

Monday, September 30, 2013

Lies, half-truths, and networking with the occult

McGall green-lights new department and minor More Cthulhu and heterosexual men promised for 2014

Heterosexual man enjoying necromonical literature Public announcement of Department of Occult Sciences In an effort to remind students of their insignificance in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence, Principal and ViceBaroness Suzie Forte announced today that McGall would create a new major in Occult Sciences. The University will add this major as an option for all undergraduate students beginning fall 2014.

According to Warren Rice, a former professor of classical languages at Arkham’s Miskatonic University and the head of McGall’s new Occult Sciences department, the program will focus on preparing students to “cope with the inconsequentiality of humanity.”

“We live in a vast and incomprehensible universe,” said Rice. “How can we expect students to cope with the knowledge their lives are devoid of any meaning and that they are mere amoebas compared to the magnificent horror of the Outer Gods?”

Students enrolled in the program are expected to learn R’lyehian, the language of Cthulhu, in order to “please the Great Old Ones.”

“We start with the most common phrases, namely ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh C’thulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn’ and then go to the more complicated aspects of the language, like saying ‘Hi’ or ‘Thank you,’” Rice said. “Unfortunately, R’lyehian has a lot of words for ‘slumber,’ ‘horror’ or ‘I am losing my mind,’ but nothing that’s really useful for a normal conversation.” Rice remarked that the language component of the major would be “comparable” to learning Ancient Greek, in that it would serve no purpose other than translating “ancient and/or heretofore unknowable verses,” and “boring your friends at parties.”

Rice will be hosting a luncheon on Wednesday where he will be reading selected passages from the Necronomicon, and facilitating a networking event for new department members. A lamb will be slaughtered for the event.

—Benadryl Custardbatch Minor in Serious Heterosexual Men swiftly approved McGall’s Department of Anglophilia announced, through an email sent to all un-

E.k. EK | The McGall Weekly dergraduate students in the Faculty of Farts, that a new minor has been green-lit. The Serious Heterosexual Men minor will be available for selection simultaneously with the major in Occult Sciences, in fall 2014.

McGall has come under fire recently for its lack of coverage of serious heterosexual male writers, in comparison to a main competitor, the University of T-Dot (U of T).

The U of T made headlines last week as one lecturer, Dirk Glibbymore, was showered with accolades for his intensely serious, heterosexual coverage of only the most serious and most heterosexual writers.

An interview with Glibbymore, published in The Blob and Snail, went viral online and was met with widespread praise due to his sharp wit and uncompromising diligence in presenting students with only the best literature, written solely by “real guy-guys.” He explained that he was only capable of lecturing on “people that [he] truly, truly love[d]. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women.”

Glibbymore’s overnight stardom online led to several follow-up interviews, in which he elaborated on his stances. “Peo-

ple know what they’re signing up for. Serious heterosexual men, taught by a serious heterosexual man. That’s all.” Glibbymore was, however, quick to note that he “very open-mindedly” teaches the works of Truman Capote, notable for being serious, but not terribly heterosexual. At the time of printing, there is no word yet as to whether Capote was Chinese, or a woman.

McGall has been accused by professors in the U of T’s Department of Words of simply attempting to “cover its ass” in light of the attention drawn to Glibbymore’s enlightened syllabi. In response to these comments, the Department of Anglophilia officially maintained that the minor was long in the works, and was simply delayed in the approval process until now.

McGall’s Dean of Farts, Christopa P. Manfreddo, spoke briefly with The Weekly over the phone. “McGall’s been in the game of serious heterosexual men longer than you even know,” he said. “T-Dot thinks they can teach real guy-guys better than us? Our guy-guys are top fucking notch. I say bring it on.”

—E.k. EK

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