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From the archives

A Strange Road to Hell

Technology, culture and the march to World War One

Lax Americana

What happens if Donald Trump returns to the White House?

Gardens of Mourning

The vast, idealistic effort to bury World War One's fallen soldiers

Shazia Hafiz Ramji

Shazia Hafiz Ramji divides her time between Vancouver, Calgary, and London, where she’s working on a novel.

Articles by
Shazia Hafiz Ramji

A Crude Patrimony

David Huebert returns to the well November 2024
In Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life, the environmentalists Matt Hern and Am Johal take a road trip to the oilsands of northern Alberta. There they are dramatically reminded how “we are all implicated in the oil economy; every single one of us is bound up with petro-logics. We are all simultaneously…

To Bespeak a Monument

Our relations and commemorations November 2023
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…

Diversity 1.0

Three white guys walk into a policy debate December 2022
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

A Page from Her Book

Scenes from home and away May 2022
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…

Living a Fiction

Who was Frank Prewett? December 2021
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…