Rose's Cantina

As a family member of Ashley Simpson , I welcomed the release this week of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by the federal government.  https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/ I hope that it helps.  Clearly, it's taken too long to do a 'deep dive' into why so many women and girls have been savaged, raped and murdered at home, and when they go out into the world. My main hope is that the police in these rural communities get more resources, and better training, because until this happens, more women and girls will be slaughtered and never found. I feel so deeply for the Indigenous community, and for their stolen sisters. It was, in fact, the First Nations community women who embraced Ashley as one of their own. That is their way, they show their wisdom, doggedness and commitment to righting the wrongs of the past. They are so strong and their spirit should make the rest of us ashamed for not caring enough, or not educating ourselve...

#88621286 / gettyimages.com If he's still there, Mr. Bloom must be having a challenging time teaching world history and politics to his high school students. How do you talk to students about ISIS or ISIL, whatever name that's being used these days, especially when you're teaching in a school that has already raised a homegrown terrorist -- a white kid, no less? Mr. Bloom was the best teacher the kids had. Marissa hated high school, but she loved Mr. Bloom. Ditto Stef and Nick. That's because Mr. Bloom was a straight shooter, a teacher who was unafraid to tell it like it was. He'd been an English as a second language teacher in Korea. He smoked pot. He drank gallons of hooch on his off hours. That gave Mr. Bloom cred. I had a teacher like that in high school, Ralph Eising, who wasn't afraid to teach students about the real world.  In Grade 12, Ralph gave us a book of essays to help us understand the curse of being aboriginal in this damn...

In a parking lot exactly two blocks from my house, a beautiful young woman sat holding hands with her loving boyfriend. It was 2 a.m. and the pair had been tooling around Ottawa, enjoying its wonderful gifts and they stopped for just a moment to steal a kiss. In their final hours of life, there was joy, love and happiness. Their future plans were shattered forever when the girl's brother drove up and shot them both dead as part of a family-sanctioned honor killing. Like an old-fashioned western, a common theme was played out: the boy was no good for the sister. A wrong had to be made right. Two lives were wasted because of some kind of misguided patriarchal principle. Women come to this country to escape this kind of barbarism. They pack up, leave everything and start up with new dreams for their daughters. Unfortunately, for many women, there is no escaping their native culture and values. Within their families, as we saw during the Shafia trial, they are abused, to...