Steven Parmenius

  Since publishing my last piece “Global anti-Indigeneity”. I have received a number of questions about it. Since they are good questions I am happy to answer them to the extent that they have answers (we are dealing, after all, with an evolving conversation not an achieved, mature one). These are questions specifically to do with my piece and not the subject of indigenous rights in general. I make this distinction because there are questions about the latter that I cannot answer because it is not my business to answer them. I think that indigenous people are naturally sovereign yet we all recognize that natural justice exists in tension with positive law and political facts on the ground and that any society is a compromise between the two. Indigenous people are the ones to determine what sort of compromises are acceptable or even desirable to them. Thus, I will not be addressing such abstract (yet worrying to the National Post ) questions as to whether indigenous people should be...

  Blaise Pascal uses a striking image that ought to give us pause. Humans he points out both know they are going to die and successfully pretend they are not. Imagine he says a man running towards a cliff and holding a piece of paper in front of himself so he does not see the cliff he is running towards. This is a complex act for to hold the paper there the man must know, deep down, that the cliff is before him. Yet the paper blocks the cliff out of his immediate consciousness so that he can confidently barrel forward. He both knows and does not know he is running to his doom. Pascal intends this is an image of how we deny to ourselves on a daily the basis the one thing in this world we know for certain: humans are mortal animals just like the famous syllogism says. I think this is also an excellent image for the climate crisis which we know is hurtling upon us even as we employ every weapon in our mental arsenal to block this from our awareness. At a certain point though one needs...