Residential Schools and My Journey to the Downtown Eastside – By Stella August

http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/story/residential-schools-and-my-journey-downtown-eastside/7441 I was 6 years old when I was taken away from my parents and grandparents in Ahousat BC and forced into a residential school. The Department of Indian Affairs came to our reserve every year in the 1950’s, taking Native children away and placing them in residential schools to learn the White way of [...]

STARVE THE VULTURES: Analyzing Canada’s prison restructuring

http://againstprison.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/broadsheet.pdf The summer left us in a downpour of repression that sought to bury its discontents beneath the bureaucracy of courts and behind the walls of prison. The end of June marked an encounter between radicals, outlaws, rebels, etc, and the G20 police state in Toronto. A series of prison reforms and amendments to the [...]

BC Pen Riots 1934-1976 (By Michael Barnholden)

Taken from “Reading The Riot Act” (Anvil Press, Vancouver, 2005) In his official dispatches, Warden W.H. Cooper liked to use the french word emuete, meaning uprising or riot, to describe disturbances in the British Columbia Penitentiary. Following forced retirement from his position as head of the Vancouver relief department for untoward behaviour in 1928, Cooper [...]