Shazia Hafiz Ramji

To begin By the Ghost Light, R. H. Thomson writes, “You who are reading this should know that your family stories are probably more interesting than the ones I will tell here.” This second-person address is a sincere attempt at involving the reader as Thomson journeys through his family’s history in the First and Second World…

In October 1971, in an attempt to decrease tensions between French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians, Pierre Trudeau introduced a policy that has come to stand for the right to celebrate and retain a diversity of languages, ethnic groups, and cultures. The understanding of diversity, however, was not always so expansive. With The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-history of Canadian Multiculturalism…

Anyone who goes to Jasper National Park can gaze up at a 3,300-metre peak called Mount Edith Cavell, named in 1916 after a British nurse who was executed by the Germans for helping Allied soldiers escape from Belgium. Cavell never set foot in Alberta, let alone saw the mountain that now bears her name, but the memorialization reminds park visitors of both her bravery and the colonial connections between Canada and…

In a recent essay in the online magazine Hyperallergic, the Canadian art critic Amy Fung questioned the high costs of ethnic fraud. Specifically, she considered a string of so‑called pretendians: individuals who self-identify as Indigenous even though that’s not their ancestry. She opened with cheyanne turions, the SFU Galleries curator who was called out on Twitter earlier this year for a questionable family…