Heather writes on Social Justice, Environment, Reconnection, Indigenous Rights and Peace Activism.
She’s published Op-Eds in The Ottawa Citizen, The Globe and Mail and Rabble.ca.
Our Long Struggle for Home: The Ipperwash Story
It's been quite the journey these past four years -- learning about my treaty heritage and the responsiblities associated with it. As part of this, I worked with some Nishnaabe members of the Stoney Point Reserve as they told their story of reclaiming their ancestral...
Ancestral Homeland as healer & teacher
I want to share what I learned as I prepared a keynote speech to a United Church regional council AGM, and also share a link to it so you can see the images. I became even more convinced that the trauma of displacement and dispossession that my forebears experienced...
Decolonizing the environmental movement? Review of “Decolonizing Prehistory”
The how of seeing reality fundamentally conditions the reality we work with. So to me, seeing nature solely through the lens of Western science is part of the problem. This book, reviewed here, reminds environmentalists (and others) of another, more deeply historical...
Seeking truth in Metis Heritage
Writing this review of Michelle Porter's poetic memoir, Approaching Fire, taught me a lot about the distorting power of official public memory. The review was published in the Literary Review of Canada (reviewcanada.ca), March, 2021. Three underlying facts propel this...
Renewing our relations with the earth
Renewing a lived relationship with the earth is essential to renewing our responsibility to sustain it as a habitat hospitable to human habitation. This is the implicit message of a book by Jerry Fontaine I just reviewed for the environmental magazine, Watershed...
Lindsay Keegitah Borrows’ “Otter’s Journey”
I want to amplify the voice of this clear-thinking and generous-hearted Anishinaabe-kwe linguist and lawyer by sharing a review I did of her book about Indigenous langugage and law revitalization, published in the Literary Review of Canada, June, 2019. When I headed...
Dancing Joy to the World
Here's us line-dancing women on Gabriola, B.C. We're taking up the Jerusalema Dance Challenge that's been going around the world to raise joy during the Covid pandemic. The song was composed by South African musician Master KG, and performed by Nomcebo. I’m glad I...
Beth Brant in review
Here's a review of A Generous Spirit: Selected Works by Beth Brant Edited by: Janice Gould (Inanna Publications, 2019) Just published in Herizons Magazine (Fall, 2020) This inspiring and important book doesn’t just bring Beth Brant (Degonwadonti, Mohawk) to new,...
Today I Stand upon the Shore
'Today I Stand Upon the Shore' original music written and performed by Pat Mayberry 2014 Video by Heather Menzies Blog Series: A journey of reckoning and reconnection I went looking for my ancestors after writing No Time: Stress & the Crisis of Modern Life, which...
The Treaties | Ottawa negotiated in bad faith
printed in Literary Review of Canada Magazine in October, 2019 Read our lips: we agree to share the land, not surrender it. That, according to this fine, careful study, is what Indigenous parties were trying to say during the negotiations of Treaties One through Seven...
Honouring the Peace
printed in the Watershed Sentinelon Sept 14, 2017. The river, the beauty of the valley, the treaties With the drums and chants of “Makh Chi” (by Ulali) blasting on the car stereo, we descend into the Peace River Valley – we being Rita Wong and Valeen Jules with Poets...
Why Hassan Diab’s ongoing incarceration in France is Canada’s ‘Dreyfus Affair’
Published in the Ottawa Citizen on: November 27, 2017 The Hassan Diab case is beginning to reek of the late 19th-century “Dreyfus Affair “now that a fourth French judge’s order for Diab’s release for lack of evidence has been quashed at a higher level, and this...
Land and Power
Two books – Is Racism an Environmental Threat by Ghassan Hage and As We Have Always Done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – explore the personal in the political.
We have a historic opportunity to consider alternatives to Site C
If this coalition and the beginnings of its locally determined vision are given a chance, they could set an example of reconciliation between Canada’s Indigenous and settler populations. Their dialogue and what emerges from it could also help point the way toward a post-150 re-conception of Canada.
Reclaiming Common Ground: past and present, part 1
Based on Heather Menzies' presentation at Camp Gabriola on August 26, 2016. Part 1 of 2 A politics of hope can prevail over a politics of despair if it’s guided by a vision that itself is grounded in what has worked in the past... when the so-called unseen hand of...
Reclaiming Common Ground: past and present, part 2
Based on Heather Menzies’ presentation at Camp Gabriola on August 26, 2016. Part 2 of 2 I won’t go into what killed the commons. Nor will I risk being a romantic and nostalgic by suggesting that it always worked out well. And I certainly don’t want to suggest that we...
Canada’s National Library as Cultural Commons
Based on her presentation celebrating the re-opening of the LAC to the public By Heather Menzies It might be rude when celebrating the Library and Archives of Canada being re-opened as a public cultural space to ask why this matters. But it still might be appropriate,...
Living the Limits to Growth with Heather Menzies
On March 9, 2016, Heather Menzies spoke to the Canadian Association of Clubs of Rome in Ottawa, Canada, where she spoke on the theme "Living the Limits to Growth." Have a listen and let us know what you think in the comments. So sorry to miss it in person! It is...
Reclaiming the Commons wins the Ottawa Book Award
Heather Menzies received the honour of the Ottawa Book Award for Non-Fiction on Wednesday, October 21, 2015. Here is what the jurors said: Jury Statement: "In this eloquent memoir written from the heart, Menzies takes the reader on a fascinating trip to the...
Ancestral Relations with the Land
If we are to heal the earth, we must also heal ourselves, individually and as communities. Moreover, the two are inter-connected. It’s all about relations -- relations of mutual recognition and respect and mutual support and sustainability. It’s also about the daily...
Doing Development Differently
I recommend that Rachel Notley bring together not a blue-ribbon commission, but one with a green ribbon and a yellow, black, red and white one to represent the equal voice that will be given to Aboriginal understandings of ‘development’. The election of Rachel Notley...
Reclaiming Cities as Commons
People working to reclaim cities as habitats, especially habitats that can sustain them with healthy food, water and transportation options, are in a sense reclaiming the commons. Certainly the commons offers a useful heritage to draw on, starting with the shift of...
People’s Climate: Di-vestment and Re-vestment
“The People’s Climate” Blog Series, Part 4 When the great Crash, ecologic or economic, comes, Heather Menzies' brilliant critique will provide an understanding of why it came about, and a path towards a truly sustainable way for humanity to live on the planet. - David...
People’s Climate: “Without Ties to the Land is to be a Broken Person”
“The People’s Climate” Blog Series, Part 2 By Heather Menzies, Author of Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good Without ties to the land is to be a broken person. - Scottish proverb As I continued to walk the land my people had walked and worked and with which...
People’s Climate: Seeking my Pre-Canadian Identity
“The People’s Climate” Blog Series, Part 2 “Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good is an admirable, even noble, vision, and expresses very eloquently what will have to be done if humanity is to escape the current race towards disaster."- Noam Chomsky Fable...
Occupy Habitat?
Occupy Habitat? Reviving the Occupy Movement, Climate Change & the Commons By Heather Menzies (author of Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good) Oxfam’s recent report, Working for the Few, on one per cent of the world’s population controlling most of the...
People’s Climate: Countdown to Paris, 2015
“The People’s Climate” Blog Series, Part 1 This article starts “The People’s Climate” blog series by Heather Menzies, author of Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A memoir & a manifesto. In Reclaiming the Commons, I praise Bill McKibben and 350.org as...
Remembrance Day in Ottawa
Remembrance Day is always an important day for me as a peace activist and also as a writer who tries to speak truth to power. I participated once again in a White Poppy ceremony at the Cenotaph in Ottawa, after the main Red Poppy event. In my speech I made it clear...
Why I wear both the red poppy and the white
Peace activist Heather Menzies wears the red poppy to commemorate the sacrifices of Canadians who have died in war, and the white one to honour those who brought the war home. By Heather Menzies Published in the Toronto Star on Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2014 I will be wearing...
New, Old Notions of Land Title – Ottawa Citizen op-ed
First published in the Ottawa Citizen, July 8, 2014. The Supreme Court’s 8-0 decision recognizing Aboriginal title to land First Nations communities have inhabited since before European contact is huge. It legitimizes understandings of land tenure as habitation and...
Cheers to Blue Communities
Every time a community passes a resolution or otherwise chooses collectively to become a “blue community,” I cheer. A blue community is one that recognizes access to water as a human right and promotes publicly owned water and waste services. (See Brent Patterson's...
David Bollier reviews Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good
Commons blogger David Bollier has reviewed Heather's new book, Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good. "The great virtue of Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good is its willingness to probe into the deep personal and spiritual dimensions of commoning -- while...
Healing our Relationship with Bees
Walking the land of my ancestors helped me remember that we live in nature, even as we turn on the tap for a drink of water in a high-rise apartment, or hang a planter full of marigolds and salvia in the backyard of our suburban home. Walking the land that they...
Our common connection to the land
In Halifax, the last leg of my book-launch tour, I met a beautiful person: a Mi’kmaw elder, Billy Lewis, who welcomed me to his ancestral land. I offered him a pouch of tobacco as my gesture of thanks. I also told him that I now understood why it was so important to...
Bill C-33: A Lost Opportunity to Rethink First Nations Education
What bothers me the most about C-33 as currently written —NOT being as the title (First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act) suggests— is this: It’s the lost or postponed opportunity at stake in genuinely returning control of First Nations education to...
The Road to Tullicro
I had only one small clue to guide me: the word Tullicro. It’s where my great, great, great grandfather James Menzies was born, in 1792. Turns out it’s a fermtoun or township, a commons community, half way up into the hills rising on either side of the tumultuous Tay...
Breaking from the Status Quo
When you’re stuck, you’re stuck because you know you’re at a dead end. You know you’re just flapping your lips, moving words around on the page or in your mouth but without cutting through to something that truly is an alternative to the status quo. I knew that the...
Karl Polanyi and the Commons
Commons blogger David Bollier posted recently about the works of the great Karl Polanyi now being available online. Yes, too, I am cheering over this. I quoted a lot from Polanyi’s classic The Great Transformation when writing Reclaiming the Commons for the Common...
Reclaiming the commons in Canadian politics
First published in the Ottawa Citizen, May 20, 2014 The House of Commons became more fully representative over time, as the franchise was extended to all men, not just property holders, and to women as well. But its record at representing the common good of...
On Thomas Berger and the Peel River Watershed
printed on rable.ca on February 24, 2014 Once again, Thomas Berger is at the centre of a case that questions whether only one understanding of development will rule, or whether justice demands negotiation among alternatives. In the 1970s Mackenzie Valley Pipeline...