Paula's Pick!

If you're looking for some great summer reading, I highly recommend Newfoundland author - Trudy J. Morgan-Cole.

I thoroughly enjoyed: 

By the Rivers of Brooklyn and That Forgetful Shore

....compelling stories that evoke the dreams, the joys and the heartbreaks of those who emigrated and those who did not. Bonne lecture!

Images: By the Rivers of Brooklyn & That Forgetful Shore, published by Breakwater Books Ltd

Female Sexuality - A History of Control

We are all still reeling from the Shafia murder trial – horrified at the crime, saddened at the tragic loss of life. But western shock at honour killings is something relatively new according to author and Oxford Professor Faramerz Dabhoiwala, who just published The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution, a fascinating glimpse into the history of western patriarchy that sheds new light on this debate. Professor Dabhoiwala was interviewed on CBC`s The Current this week.

This Child Will Be Great

Looking for a good read now that your holiday books are finished? I highly recommend: This Child Will Be Great  - the autobiography of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.  I couldn’t put it down! President Sirleaf  - first female president of an African nation (Liberia, re-elected this past Fall),  and winner of the Nobel Prize in 2011 - sets the breathtaking tale of her own life within context of  the equally gripping history of Liberia. Her quest for justice landed her in jail, forced her into exile and eventually opened the door of the presidential office. A real page turner!

Excellent Summary of a Crucial Book

You don’t want to miss this article by MCM staffer Rick Goldman published in last week’s Gazette – an excellent summary of a crucial book  that we all need to read – and the book is free – just download it online.  

Rick Goldman: One analyst’s take on how the economic-equality gap got so large

The Canadian camps of the Occupy Wall Street movement have now been cleared, with protesters vowing to shift to other forms of civil disobedience. The U.S. movement is still hanging on, in the face of sometimes-aggressive police action. Whatever shape the movement may take in the future, it might do well to adopt the recommendations in U.S. economist Dean Baker’s new e-book The End of Loser Liberalism as its policy manifesto.

Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal Washington-based think tank, was one of the few U.S. economists to warn about the inflating housing bubble – long before it collapsed, and at a time when U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was insisting that all was well.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has brought economic inequality to the forefront of public debate. Baker argues that this inequality is the result of the neo-conservative revolution – kicked off by U.S. president Ronald Reagan in 1980 – of the rich using government intervention to funnel wealth from the vast majority to themselves.

Among the key policies of this upward redistribution of wealth have been an all-out assault on unions; free-trade agreements that put U.S. workers in competition with low-wage workers overseas and thus make it easy to move production abroad; the Federal Reserve’s obsession with maintaining low inflation even at the cost of high unemployment; and, of course, financial deregulation that led to a bloated and wasteful financial sector.

These changes put the U.S. economy on a path fundamentally different from that of the three post-Second World War decades, during which workers benefitted from gains in productivity via wage increases and could thus support a robust level of domestic demand. Companies, in turn, had a strong incentive to reinvest in productive activities and further boost productivity, the benefits of which were passed on, in part, to workers.

The neo-conservative policies, by contrast, led to stagnating wages for the majority, sagging domestic demand and, consequently, less incentive to reinvest in domestic production. The growth engine of the U.S. economy shifted instead to “bubbles” (first, the tech-stock bubble of the 1990s, and then, the housing bubble of the past decade) that propped up consumer demand with the temporary wealth this demand created – until the bubbles inevitably burst.

It is therefore wrong, in Baker’s view, to blame the current economic downturn mainly on the financial crisis. The financial meltdown made things much worse must faster, but the underlying problem was the upward redistribution of income, which began decades earlier and laid the basis for the bubble economy.

The short-term solution is not rocket science. As Baker and others, such as New York Times columnist and Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman, have argued, it has been clear since the Great Depression how to revive an economy suffering from insufficient demand: governments must increase spending (ideally on useful things like fixing bridges and hiring teachers and nurses) to stimulate the economy.

Conservatives on both sides of the border reluctantly agreed to this early in the downturn. The Obama government managed to get a mild stimulus program through Congress. However, as Baker, Krugman and others warned at the time, it was inadequate. The current U.S. unemployment rate of more than nine per cent bears them out.

In Canada, the Harper government had to backtrack on its November 2008 fiscal update (which called for spending cuts), prorogue Parliament and return with a stimulus plan. It has since gone back to the mantra of deficit reduction despite high unemployment (7.3 per cent today vs. less than six per cent in early 2008) and Canada’s enviable debt-to-gross-domestic-product level, which is about half the average of other rich nations.

Conservatives maintain that it is possible to promote economic expansion via fiscal austerity. This has been proven wrong everywhere it’s been tried – generally with disastrous human consequences. The bottom line (as they say on Wall St.) is that no one has ever got out of recession via cuts in spending.

To promote greater economic justice, Baker urges educating ourselves about the policies he discusses, some of which may get little play in the media. He offers some specific suggestions, such as a financial-speculation tax (already in effect for stock trades in Britain) and work-sharing to reduce unemployment (already being used successfully in Germany). He argues that the first step is to understand the economics of the main issues; otherwise, he says, “it is impossible to even know when progress is being made.”

Photo of Rick Goldman by Pierre Obendrauf / The Gazette

Rick Goldman lectures at the McGill University School of Social Work on poverty and inequality.

And the Story continues...

Camille Fouillard  is a freelance writer based in St. John's, Newfoundland, and has been working with the Innu for several years. Through this short but compelling glimpse into their story, we can begin to grasp the connections with our own. Merci Camille!

Camille – in 1995, you edited a book in partnership with the Davis Inlet Band Council and the Innu Nation: Gathering Voices; Finding Strength to Help Our Children. What did those voices tell you about women’s strength in a harsh environment?

The book was the result of the Davis Inlet People’s Inquiry, a community self-examination into a house fire that killed six children. I went on to work with one of the Inquiry’s Innu commissioners Nypmpha Byrne to produce a book of Innu women’s stories and writings, entitled It’s Like the Legend. Amongst many things, the voices we gathered told us that culture is key to healing and women are key to the survival of the culture. They have been less assimilated and have less invested in the structures of the dominant culture. This means, for example, that they can actually imagine throwing a judge out of the community to make a statement about how the justice system is not working in their community, and then make it happen, and later renegotiate his re-entry with openness from the system to try new ways.

Camille Fouillard (left) with colleague

What impact did it have on the women and their community to have these stories told and then see them in print?

I believe in the power of the story, that the process of sharing the story for the Innu has been key to reclaiming their place in this world. I have seen people turn their lives around after being given the opportunity to tell their story. My Innu colleague Nympha has talked about how the process of the Inquiry and compiling the anthology encouraged her to return to school, obtain her high school and two college diplomas and eventually train to become an addictions counselor. Women in Labrador Innu communities are much more active today than 25 years ago, both in formal and informal leadership positions. I do believe that the storytelling process of creating these books contributed to this development.

Jack Penashue, Social Health Director of the Sheshatshiu Innu First Nation

How did listening to the stories of the Innu women impact you? How did it change your own story?

My time and work and friendships with the Innu have been a gift in my life.  I’ve learned so much in this relationship about myself and my humanity, my own suffering, about the sacredness of our planet, about joy and laughter, courage and resilience. I’ve learned about the racism in Canada, how we need to challenge our ‘us-and-them’ thinking. I’ve learned about how on this small and fragile planet, there is no room for ‘us and them.’ Whatever the politics, the geography, the culture, the gender, the context, there can no longer be a “them,” there is only an ever-evolving “us.” Do we have time to listen to what the Innu and their culture have to tell us about how to care for our planet?

How important is it, do you think, to tell these stories to a larger audience? What does the larger society have to gain?

I love these books because they give us a glimpse into individual lives of the Innu. This is what Nympha and I wrote in our introduction to the women’s book: We hope this book will serve as a bridge between the Innu and the outside world. As the readers travel through these stories, they will sit close with Innu women. Perhaps they can imagine themselves perched comfortably on a bed of aromatic fir boughs, with a fire crackling from a small sheet-metal stove as soft moonlight shines through the canvas of the Innu tent. Or perhaps readers can invite these Innu women into their own homes to offer them a cup of strong tea. We hope readers will connect with the humanity of these stories. The door will be open for the reader to enter the world of the Innu. Readers can join the women in a place where experiences of love, pain, fear, laughter, sorrow, joy and hope cut across our differences.

What are you working on right now with this community?

I am editing another book, a memoir by George Gregoire, an Innu man from Natuashish. George’s story traces the amazing trajectory of a man, born in the wilds of Labrador before the Innu were settled in communities, yet who somehow managed to get enough education to write this book. The writing is brutally honest, candid, and poignant, cynical, funny, nostalgic. It reveals George in all his complexities. It gives us the personal story along with very articulate views of the bigger picture.  It provides the reader with an intimate glimpse into an Innu life, impossible to grasp from the stereotypical and sensational media stories that bombard us about the Innu.

I’ve also just finished working on a community health needs assessment with an Innu team from Sheshatshiu and I’ve been trying to wrestle my own book of fiction to the ground.


Photos provided by Camille Fouillard

Ru

Photo: Benoit Levac

…et pour suivre le fil de la narration, je vous recommande fortement de vous procurer un petit bijoux de livre: Ru, un récit autobiographique de l’écrivaine Kim Thuy, une réfugiée vietnamienne arrivée au Canada à la fin des années 70 alors qu’elle avait 10 ans. 

Chaque page un chapitre, chaque chapitre un poème à la vie, à la survie, et au besoin de communiquer son histoire afin de pouvoir la continuer!  

(The English version of Ru will be available in January. Don’t miss it!)