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.
Is AI making us more human or less? In this letter in Walrus magazine (Sept-Oct), I call for a broad public discussion about this
I support the concerns about AI raised by your excellent editorial in the June issue, and by Thea Lim’s smart, insightful essay on companion chatbots — which 52 per cent of American teenagers are reportedly using on a regular basis. Your flagging of these concerns is…
Decolonization becoming a healing
Here’s me glowing after sharing my journey of decolonization as a healing journey and a journey home to the earth: Oct. 25, with the White Rock/Surrey, BC university women’s club (CFUW). “What an immense responsibility and opportunity you have awakened,” one commented…
“Highly recommended… honest and eloquent”
I want to share this lovely review of Meeting My Treaty Kin: A Journey Toward Reconciliation in last Saturday’s Vancouver Sun. It’s by Tom Sandborn, who doesn’t say “highly recommended” often. I’m also honoured at how he understood my impulse to confront my colonial…
A jolting moment of awareness: What reconciliation requires
Here’s a link to my piece in the June issue of Broadview Magazine. I describe a moment when I was jolted into awareness of my unconsciously colonial thinking, and was challenged to change. Drawn from my memoir, Meeting My Treaty Kin: A Journey Toward Reconciliation,…
Hooray for Canada’s independent bookstores!!!
As a writer who’s spent 40 years trying to contribute to public-interest conversations in Canada, I want to salute Canada’s independent bookstores for the vital role they play in nurturing these conversations, and ensuring that diverse voices are heard, and local ones…
Protesting the Cancellation of ‘Sisters’
I want to share my outrage that Wendy Lill’s play Sisters, about nuns running a residential school, was cancelled mid-run in Victoria, B.C. last week, on the grounds that it is “offensive.” As a writer who’s only recently taken up the challenge that reconciliation…
Finding My Treaty Kin a Healing Journey
I now realize that writing Meeting My Treaty Kin, and the journey behind it, has been healing. It’s healing the disconnect that I inherited, and helping me learn how to align myself with the earth’s wise ways of being. Check out this 2.5 min. video. If it speaks to…
The Aftermath of the Fifth Estate’s piece on Buffy Saint Marie: a white writer’s reflection
I’ve recently been learning to take responsibility for possibly colonial biases in my seemingly neutral “professional” practices as a writer. I wonder if there’s a similar soul searching happening at the CBC, given the anguish the Fifth Estate’s “investigation” of…
Thanks for empathizing as I confessed
Thanks for empathizing, book-launch audiences, when I confessed: I’d thought I could sidestep all that colonialism baggage by calling myself treaty ally and kin, not realizing the baggage was inside me. The power dynamic of colonialism and white superiority was like a…
Buffy Sainte Marie: a cultural worker’s response
I’ve been touched by people’s response to my memoir with its theme of challenging my unconsciously colonial ways of thinking to make space in my mind and heart to fully appreciate, honour and respect Indigenous ways of thinking that have prevailed here since before…
Responding to Clifford Cardinal’s Land Acknowledgement Challenge
The trick about taking the reconciliation challenge is taking responsibility for colonialism without feeling so personally responsible that you freeze and do nothing. Here’s a video of me responding to Cree-Lakota playwright Clifford Cardinal’s Land Acknowledgement…
Introduction to ‘Meeting My Treaty Kin – A Journey Toward Reconciliation’.
It’s hard enough facing the truth about residential schools. It’s even harder to face how the colonial and white-superiority thinking behind those schools’ long existence continues to shadow the thinking of non-Indigenous Canadians – like me. I only started facing…
I want to congratulate the people of Manitoba for taking the Reconciliation challenge.
They rejected the Conservatives’ colonial-style power of naming, and chose the healing power of listening instead. Congratulations, too, to Wab Kinew. As a journalist, in 2008, he helped persuade CBC Radio to listen, and change their language policy from saying…
Taking the Reconciliation Challenge is worth it!
Here’s a link to my essay in The Globe and Mail on national Truth and Reconciliation Day. It’s on what reconciliation requires of settler Canadians like me. I hope you’ll read it and leave a comment. I invite you to share how colonial thinking has blocked you, or how things changed once you took those blinkers off. Taking the reconciliation challenge is worth it!
Taking the Reconciliation Challenge
Check out this essay I wrote for the Ottawa Citizen about the breakthroughs that occurred once I busted myself out of the colonial thinking boxes in my mind.
Prologue to Meeting my Treaty Kin – A Journey Toward Reconciliation
When the TRC released its calls to action in 2015, I took some action of my own. I discovered that an 1827 treaty had legitimized my great great grandparents settling in traditional Nishnaabe territory, in present-day Southwestern Ontario, in 1832. Checking out what…
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…