By Special Correspondent Jessica Yee
Right now I’m owning the title/stereotype/image/whatever you conjure up in your mind about “angry Natives” because along with the usual colonial-type affronts to our people and communities, there are some notable racist extremities happening across Canada as of late. Initially I felt like there was just way too much going on [...]

By Guest Contributor Toban Black, originally published at Contexts.org
The 2010 Olympics logo is an altered version of traditional Arctic Inuit sculptures. This quasi-indigenous logo has been displayed in a barrage of Olympics branding. You can see two examples of this marketing in photos — from the summer of 2009 – shown below.
With this Olympics logo, [...]

By Guest Contributor Shannon Joyce Prince
Read “Why Haiti Matters Part 1″ here.

Ou konn kouri, ou pa konn kache – You know how to run, but you don’t know how to hide.

Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which one tells of the whole by evoking a part.  In my original piece “Why Haiti Matters,” I [...]

by Guest Contributor Shannon Joyce Prince
In the current edition of Newsweek[1], President Obama claims to tell Americans why Haiti matters. Unfortunately, his claims reflect the racism, dishonesty, and denials of history that surround the way the “First World” frames Haiti and Haiti’s earthquake. Haiti does indeed matter to a variety of people and [...]

By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García

DC Comics has begun drumming up buzz for the “First Wave” world – an alternate universe populated by pulp characters like Doc Savage and The Spirit, and pulp incarnations of modern characters like Batman and the first Black Canary.
Monday, though, we got a first look at a potential wrong [...]

by Guest Contributor Minh-ha, originally published at Threadbared
This post is supposed to be about the latest occurrences of blackface in fashion — specifically, the 14-page editorial featuring Lara Stone, a white Dutch model, painted black and shot by Steven Klein for the October 2009 issue of French Vogue and also Carlos Diez’s show at Madrid [...]

Though the word Namaste has been a South Asian greeting for centuries, now every yoga student, celebrity (check out Al Gore’s picture in the wiki entry) and creepy guy trying to hit on an Indian woman thinks it’s fine to use it as a way of saying “hey” or “I’m so in touch with what [...]

By Guest Contributor Marisol LeBron, originally published at post pomo nuyorican homo

Reuters recently published a pieced entitled “Reggaeton fever shakes up Cuba’s culture” the article cites an now infamous (in reggaeton circles anyway) quote by Juventud Rebelde that calls reggaeton a “reflection of ‘neoliberal thinking’.”
I think the development and growth of reggaeton in Cuba has [...]

by Guest Contributor Ay-leen the Peacemaker, originally published at Tales of the Urban Adventurer

“In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on.”- Jean-Paul Sartre

Prologue
When I first became interested in steampunk last year, I posed a question to one of my friends.
Me: “So… I was wondering [...]

by Guest Contributor (and regular commenter) Jha

Steampunk! Variously described as an aesthetic, a genre within scifi/fantasy that sprouted from cyberpunk, and a subculture vaguely related to the goth counter-culture. Like many other things with vague origins and a tenuous identity that overlaps with others, it is hard to pin down what steampunk is.
The only that [...]

by Special Correspondent Jessica Yee, originally published at Rabble

Ed. Note: Jessica wrote this in response to Canadian border patrol agents being armed in Akwesasne. This article gives a summary of the situation:

A respected security and anti-terrorism expert says Canada’s federal government should stand by its guns and ignore threats from Mohawk militants in [...]

by Special Correspondent Jessica Yee, originally published in Ricepaper Magazine

Being mixed First Nations and being raised in the urban centre of Toronto, I’m often faced with the question of “Am I Indian enough?”:
Do I attend ceremony here?
Can I really understand what it’s like to be Native not living on the reservation now?
How am I going [...]

by Latoya Peterson
I watched yesterday’s thread with great interest – and not just because the racists came out to play behind the scenes. When I first got the tip on Gisele’s shoot, I pulled up the images in the company of my host in Houston. As we all looked at the images pop up, [...]

by Special Correspondent Wendi Muse
So even though fashion designers have a tendency to appropriate and re-design fashion they witness during their world travels (or, cough, imperialist imaginations), the magazine writers and journalists just can’t seem to find the right words to characterize the collections. Instead of talking about geometric prints, the use of found objects [...]

by Special Correspondent Jessica Yee
Savage. Squaw. Indian. Would we all agree that these are immensely derogatory names that should not be, in this day and age, still used to geographically locate places? Or even people, for that matter?
From the varying answers I’ve received when posing this question, it all really depends on who you ask [...]