Most days in Aamjiwnaang go by quietly. Workers head to their jobs while kids go to school. Teenagers record songs, letting their younger siblings rule the playground. Meals are cooked and shared. Football championships are lost, baseball games won. Stories are told. Lights go out and dreams takeover until the next day. Years pass. A grandfather turns fifty as his…
A twenty-minute subway trip out of Manhattan lies a neighborhood you won’t find circled on any tourist map. Abandoned buildings dot the landscape and the smog from idling industrial trucks choke out the sun. Floods are frequent here, as the area is thirty feet below sea level and is not connected to the New York sewage system. To its residents,…
At most Oilers’ home games, as people scurry into Rogers Place past chill winds in Edmonton’s downtown core, you can find Blair Gladue as “Mr. Magoo” sporting head to toe custom costumes, face-paint and, always, a drum. Singing, cheering, high-fiving, and posing for the occasional photo, he looks like he could be an employee but Gladue does it strictly for…
Snow collects on the brim of Mike Ranta’s birch bark hat as he watches a whiteout set in on the Chilcotin Highway in northern British Columbia. Built on a bold dream of past success, Ranta is attempting to cross the North American continent, alone, by canoe, one last time. In 2014 Mike Ranta became the first person in history to canoe…
My father died by suicide when I was 12. It had been a year since I’d last seen him, far longer since he’d been a regular presence in my life. A few years prior, when he started missing his weekly visits, my mother had tried to explain depression. By the time I was 11 and he was an in-patient at…
In a part of the world best known as the home of Sidney Crosby, at a narrow gym in an industrial park, a 31-year-old woman powers through a slew of improbable athletic feats. Lindsay Hilton, from Halifax, N.S. was born without hands or arms or legs. What she has, though, is ambition, a passion for CrossFit and rugby and the…
Patricia Garnett is known in her city as “the doll lady.” I met her for the first time in 2013 and asked her about her story because I was curious. She told me that she had lost her child. Patricia carries around one or two dolls around most times she leaves her house in Saint John, NB. She has not…
Canada has long been described as a country that spans “from coast to coast”, with little acknowledgement of the Arctic, which makes up its longest and northernmost shoreline. As of this week it will be harder for Canadians to ignore the splendour of the country’s North. After four years of work, the country’s first permanent road to the Arctic Ocean…
Since the election of Donald Trump, thousands of refugees have crossed the Canadian border over fears they might be otherwise be arrested and deported as a result of a national crackdown on asylum seekers. Refugees have been flooding in all along the Canada/US border, which is the longest in the world but most of the journeys are being made at the…