Toban Black

A post that I put together for the Sociological Images web site

Basically, I compare Olympics marketing imagery and rhetoric with the living conditions and activism of indigenous peoples here in Canada. (The post is about a Canada-wide context, more so than it’s about Vancouver and the VAN Organizing Committee per se.)

I invite you to skip the blurb about me, at the start of the post.

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Lisa helped to edit the writing, and Gwen fixed formatting problems that I had left in there.

I also appreciate other help from Laura, Annick, and Steve.

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The post stems from a relatively brief e-mail that I had sent in to Sociological Images back on May 24th, 2009. After writing some thoughts on Flickr posts here and here, I had sent the e-mail to the web site editors to connect the same sorts of native issues to Olympics marketing that already was circulated around here in Canada.

Then, after May, I published a piece about some native activism in Ontario, and I became very involved in pro-native campaigning against the tar sands — for the sake of wider climate justice.  (I have posted about climate justice issues here.)  (So far, I mainly have been a climate justice activist in a local Mobilization for Climate Justice group; but I also have started to form collaborative connections with people in other areas of the U.S. and Canada.)  And, over the past two weeks, I was very involved in anti-Olympic protest organizing, which I mainly joined because of how the day of action was connected with tar sands issues.

In a “Feminism and Race” Women’s Studies grad course that I was in last term, I also worked through some indigenous and climate justice issues.  That course helped a lot with the writing that I did for the Sociological Images post.