Ideas

Prize-winning journalist Tanya Talaga (author of Seven Fallen Feathers) explores the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples in her 2018 CBC Massey Lectures series, titled All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward.

Prize-winning journalist Tanya Talaga (author of Seven Fallen Feathers) explores the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples in her 2018 CBC Massey Lectures series, titled All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward.

Prize-winning journalist Tanya Talaga (author of Seven Fallen Feathers) explores the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples in her 2018 CBC Massey Lectures series, titled All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward.

In her 2018 CBC Massey Lectures series, titled All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, prize-winning journalist Tanya Talaga (author of Seven Fallen Feathers) explores the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples.

IDEAS contributor Sean Foley asks one central question: does the mortal and material fascination with Tom Thomson, leave us with something enduring - something to carry us through the next century, and beyond?

In her 2018 CBC Massey Lectures series, titled All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, prize-winning journalist Tanya Talaga (author of Seven Fallen Feathers) explores the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples.

For Talaga, that cultural genocide has led to a forced disconnection from land and language by Indigenous peoples. The need now, she says, is for Indigenous self-determination in social, cultural and political arenas.

We live in a glut of data. Individually we produce vast amounts of information about ourselves simply by living our lives: where we go, what we like, where we shop, our political views, which programs we watch. Each day we produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data and the rate is growing. In the last two years alone we've generated about 90% of the data that's out there. IDEAS contributor Anik See looks at this tremendous amount of data and how some people are harnessing it, not for surveillance or selling, but rather for the public good.

For more than 40 years, Gareth Peirce has fought to expose and overturn miscarriages of justice and free the wrongfully accused. Based in London, she was instrumental in freeing members of the Guildford Four, who were falsely convicted of carrying out the IRA bombing of a British pub. More recently, she has been representing members of the new suspect community - Muslims falsely accused of being terrorists. Peirce warns eroding human rights under the questionable guise of national security, is a profound attack on democracy.

The U.S. midterms are yet another prompt for many Americans - and people around the world - to reflect on what America actually is now, politically, socially and culturally. Contributor David Zane Mairowitz is originally from New York, and has been living in Europe for over 50 years. He returned to the U.S. in the spring of 2017 to travel through six southern states, where he recorded his encounters with everyday people at restaurants, churches - and gun shows. His aim: to gain insight into an America he's now struggling to comprehend.

The U.S. midterm elections have been billed as a referendum on the presidency of Donald Trump. And many think the elections will chart the future course of American democracy at a time when anger, xenophobia, chaos and bitter partisanship and polarization have led people to despair for the future of liberal democracy.