Amazon to create 3,500 new tech and corporate jobs in Vancouver and Toronto

Financial Post Staff , Bloomberg News

© Provided by Financial Post Amazon jobs will include software development, designers, cloud computing and sales and marketing executives.

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Amazon has announced plans to create 3,500 corporate and tech jobs in its Canadian technology hubs Vancouver and Toronto.

The lion’s share of jobs, which include software development, designers, cloud computing and sales and marketing executives, will be in Vancouver. Amazon says to make room for 3,000 new workers it will expand its location at The Post in downtown Vancouver, leasing 18 floors in the north tower and 17 floors in the south tower, as the sole corporate tenant.

“Amazon’s investment has tangible benefits for the broader economy and community – from the people we employ, to the small businesses we empower, to the charities we support, to the academic opportunities we fund. We’re proud to reaffirm our commitment to Canadian cities at this critical time,” Jesse Dougherty, Amazon VP and Vancouver site lead, said in a statement.

A weak loonie, lower wages and a steady flow of graduates make Canada an attractive place to expand for tech companies whose largest expense is labour.

The average wage of a software developer in Vancouver last year was US$92,726, compared to US$141,785 in San Francisco or US$128,067 in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, according to a July report by real estate firm CBRE Group Inc. Once rental costs are folded in, the cost of running a 500-employee operation in the Canadian city is half that of a similar-sized operation in the Bay Area, it found.

Vancouver also had the fastest-growing tech labour pool of 50 markets surveyed in the U.S. and Canada by CBRE, while the quality of its talent based on academic degrees and work experience ranked among the top 10, the study found.

The expansion positions the company to become one of the city’s biggest employers: Vancouver-based telecommunications giant Telus Corp. has about 8,000 staff in the province, according to Business In Vancouver.

With files from Natalie Obiko Pearson, Bloomberg

Alberta's oilpatch gets a rare gift — a U.S-backed $22-billion export line to tidewater via Alaska

Yadullah Hussain

© Provided by Financial Post A White Pass and Yukon passenger train rounds a curve on the narrow-gauge track as it descends through the mountains to Skagway, Alaska. 

It may well be his last few weeks in office (at least according to the public polls), but U.S. President Donald Trump just gave Alberta oil producers a gift.

Amid his increasingly-deranged conspiracy theory tweets over the weekend, he broadcast a more presidential tweet on Friday: “Based on the strong recommendation of @SenDanSullivan and @repdonyoung of the Great State of Alaska, it is my honor to inform you that I will be issuing a Presidential Permit for the A2A Cross-Border Rail between Alaska & Canada. Congratulations to the people of Alaska & Canada!”

Dan Sullivan is a U.S. senator serving Alaska, and Don Young is a Congressman serving the American last frontier. The U.S. president has been sweet on the Canadian oilpatch before, having approved TC Energy Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline project which had been rejected by the previous president Barack Obama. If it proceeds, the railway project could serve as another important outlet for Alberta’s oil producers who have struggled due to lack of pipeline capacity. However, railway lines are deemed to be a more expensive way to transport oil compared to pipelines.

The proposed 2,570-kilometre A2A railway aims to transport bulk commodities such oil, grain and ore in addition to containerized goods, and aims to develop “a new railway connecting the Alaska Railroad and Alaska’s tidewater, to northern Alberta.”

The project is expected to cost $22 billion, of which $7 billion will be built in Alaska and $15 billion in Alberta, according to the company.

Construction will begin near Fairbanks, where the Alaska Railroad currently ends, and move south and east through Alaska, across into Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and into Alberta.

The proposed route will connect the North American railway network, via Northern Alberta to the existing Alaska Railroad network and Alaska’s deep-water ports.

“This is a world-class infrastructure project that will generate more than 18,000 jobs for Canadian workers at a time when they are most needed, provide a new, more efficient route for trans-Pacific shipping and thereby link Alberta to world markets,” A2ARail founder and chairman Sean McCoshen said in July, as he announced commissioning an engineering firm to start a detailed land survey along the Alberta segment of the railway’s proposed route.

“The new rail line will create new economic development opportunities for a wide range of businesses, communities and Indigenous communities in Canada and Alaska,” the chairman said. “We estimate that A2A Rail could unlock $60 billion CAD in additional cumulative GDP through 2040 and lift household incomes by an average of 40 per cent.”

The company’s president is Jean Paul Gladu, who served as the president and CEO of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business from September 2012 until April 2020.

The Alaska–Alberta Railway Development Corporation (A2A Rail) is privately owned and funded by its McCoshen, who the company says has spent more than US$100 million through the early phases of the project.

“As the project progresses, it is anticipated that A2A Rail will seek investment from infrastructure funds, Sovereign Wealth groups, and private investors. Additionally, A2A Rail is looking into several government issued grants and loan guarantees in both the U.S. and Canada to assist in providing the risk capital needed to develop the railway,” according to the company website.

IT'S NEVER THE RIGHT TIME DEPT.
Air France leads tax pushback in climate vs recovery fight

By Laurence Frost and Kate Abnett

© Reuters/Pascal Rossignol FILE PHOTO: Outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Lesquin

By Laurence Frost and Kate AbnettPARIS/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Air France-KLM is battling new green taxes on top of the coronavirus crisis - in a test of growing policy tensions between righting Europe's crippled airlines and delivering on climate goals.

The Franco-Dutch group, sustained by 10.4 billion euros ($12.2 billion) in state-backed loans, faces higher duties in both home markets as well as EU plans to hike airlines' carbon costs.

The struggle unfolding around Air France-KLM is part of a larger reckoning for carbon-intensive industries as efforts to tackle global warming spawn more taxes and regulation.

While campaigners say those are long overdue, crisis-hit airlines warn their timing and severity will cost thousands more jobs and hurt development of lower-carbon technologies.

New taxes "do not support emissions reductions", said Air France-KLM Chief Executive Ben Smith in response to proposed increases to French passenger duties.

"In fact it's counterproductive and would deprive us of finances that could otherwise be invested in environmental projects," he told an online industry forum this month.

Tensions can only rise as emissions goals are toughened to slow dangerous climate change. The European Union's executive now wants to cut greenhouse gas output by 55% in the next decade rather than the previous 40%, from a 1990 baseline.

While the pandemic has dampened climate protests led by Extinction Rebellion and Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, their political legacy must be squared with the economic emergency.

GREEN WAVE

French municipal elections saw the ecologist EELV party take Lyon, Bordeaux and Strasbourg in a June 28 "Green Wave". The next day, President Emmanuel Macron promised to advance 146 proposals from a "citizens' climate convention".

Those include an airline duty increase to 30 euros per short-haul economy passenger and 400 euros for long-haul business, from their current 1.50-18 euro range. At 2019 traffic, officials say the sector would pay 4.2 billion euros.

Key members of the government, which underwrote 7 billion euros for Air France, are backing away from the pledge as officials draft legislation in response to the convention.

"It would be grotesque to take back with one hand what we'd given the sector with the other," Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told daily Les Echos.

Le Maire and his Dutch counterpart were among nine EU finance ministers who had called for "taxation or similar policies" to curb emissions by raising air fares.

From Jan. 1, the Netherlands is introducing passenger duties worth 220 million euros at pre-crisis traffic. A Greenpeace legal challenge is also demanding steeper emissions cuts in return for KLM's 3.4 billion-euro aid package.

OFFSETS UPSET

Airline emissions account for 2.5% of the global total but are set to triple by 2050. Under a U.N.-brokered programme, CORSIA, the industry aims to counter emissions growth from international flights with carbon offsets, whose effects are contested.Airbus has given itself until 2035 to put a "zero-emission" plane into service, but many are sceptical about that deadline. Synthetic fuels are also too scarce and expensive to offer a near-term solution.

For intra-European flights, airlines would face a higher bill for European carbon credits under plans outlined this month to reduce free permits for the sector.

EU officials have also signalled likely moves to end a tax exemption for jet fuel enshrined in international treaties, a process that could take several years.

Germany, which has pushed ahead with an airline tax increase to fund cheaper rail travel, plans binding minimum quotas for carbon-neutral alternative jet fuel.

Far from giving struggling airlines a break, campaign groups are urging governments to use bailouts to force faster progress.

"Airlines' reliance on governments strengthens the case for acting to cut their emissions," said Andrew Murphy of Brussels-based Transport & Environment.

Assuming a slow recovery, the group says CORSIA's market mechanism would price emissions as low as 17 cents per long-haul flight, leaving little incentive to curb greenhouse gases. ICAO, the U.N. aviation agency that developed the programme, said it was "grossly misrepresented" by the research.

NOT FARE

Other emissions-cutting proposals may divide the industry.

Air France-KLM's Smith called on French ministers to consider a minimum fare instead of taxes, citing the 40-euro minimum recently introduced in Austria. "Let's discuss that," he said in a newspaper interview.

While minimum fares can curb overall traffic and emissions without hurting traditional airlines' profits or jobs, they punish budget carriers and their customers."This is another mad idea from a high-fare airline that can only survive with over 10 billion euros of illegal state subsidies," Ryanair said. The low-cost giant is challenging rivals' EU-approved bailouts in court.

"Ordinary consumers all over Europe have benefited from and will continue to demand low fares, choice and competition," it said.

However these tensions play out, airlines face a rising tide of carbon costs on top of their current woes.

Maintaining fuel tax exemptions would present a "flagrant inconsistency" with EU climate goals, said Christian Egenhofer of Brussels-based think tank CEPS.

Taxing fuel would be an important step even if rates started low, Egenhofer said. "You know what happens with taxes – they always go up."

(Reporting by Laurence Frost and Kate Abnett; Editing by Mark Potter)

Gap in early death rates between rich and poor growing: research

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Poor Canadians stand a greater chance of dying early than the well off and that gap has been growing for decades, says a detailed new analysis.

The study, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, found the chances of dying before age 75 or of avoidable causes has been declining for almost everyone. But they've been declining for the rich much faster than for the poor and have been doing so for a generation.

The gap is growing for both women and men, the analysis found. And the chances of an early, avoidable death for women with the least education are actually growing.

"We've made no overall progress towards reducing overall health inequality," said Faraz Shahidi of the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

"The size of these inequalities in mortality are even larger than we previously thought."

Shahidi and co-author Abtin Parnia analyzed more than 16 million records from five different censuses and divided incomes into five groups. The incomes for each group varied from census to census. In 2016, the median household pretax income -- which would represent the middle group -- was $70,300.

The study found that for high-income men -- the top fifth of earners -- the mortality rate before age 75 declined by nearly 50 per cent between 1991 and 2016. For those in the bottom fifth, mortality declined by 34 per cent.

Education levels revealed the same pattern.

Premature deaths in men with a post-secondary degree declined by 47 per cent, but for men without a high school diploma the decline was 21 per cent.

The pattern was just as stark for women.

Premature death for high-income women declined more than 40 per cent, but 19 per cent for the less wealthy. Mortality rates for women with university degrees went down by more than one-third, but less than two per cent for those without a high-school diploma.

Shahidi found similar results when he looked at avoidable deaths caused by behaviours or by treatable conditions. For women with little education, mortality rates increased -- by up to 12 per cent for those who didn't finish high school.

The links between income, education and health have been well-established by previous research, Shahidi said.

"It's an inference," he said. "But it's an inference we make on a massive body of science telling us that people's everyday social and economic conditions are a fundamental factor driving health inequality."

Shahidi said eliminating the gaps in rates of early death is "virtually impossible" without reducing the income and education gaps that help create them.

"In the absence of policy action, we tend to see those inequalities widen," he said. "There are very actionable policy solutions which (governments) can put in place to address and reverse this trend."

Those measures include raising wages, more progressive taxation, generous social assistance, easier-to-access employment insurance and protecting job security.

"It's in a large part through lack of policy action that we have allowed, as a society, these inequalities to grow over time," said Shahidi.

"These health inequalities are fundamentally rooted in everyday conditions. And everyday social and economic conditions are what they are for people, because of the political decisions policy-makers make."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 28, 2020.

Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

Ambassadors appeal for acceptance of LGBTQ people in Poland


The Associated Press

© Provided by NBC News LGBTQ AND ANTIFA FLAGS

WARSAW, Poland — Polish leaders on Monday rejected suggestions that LGBTQ people are deprived of any of their rights in the country, after an open letter from 50 ambassadors and international representatives cited a need to work for “non-discrimination, tolerance and mutual acceptance.”


The ambassadors’ appeal, made in an open letter published Sunday, comes as an increasingly visible LGBTQ community in Poland has faced a backlash from the right-wing government, many local communities and the Catholic church.

“Human rights are universal and everyone, including LGBTI persons, are entitled to their full enjoyment,” the letter said, using the acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said he agreed that every person deserves respect but that he completely disagreed with the ambassadors’ claim that LGBT people were being deprived of that.

“Dear Ambassadors, I can tell only you that tolerance is in Poles’ DNA,” Morawiecki said at a news conference on Monday. “Nobody needs to teach us tolerance.”

Some of Poland’s leaders, including the president and lawmakers from the ruling party, have cast the movement for civil rights for LGBTQ people as a threat to traditional families. President Andrzej Duda won a second term this summer after calling LGBTQ rights an “ideology” more dangerous than communism.

Meanwhile, dozens of towns in conservative parts of eastern and southern Poland have passed mostly symbolic resolutions declaring themselves to be free from “LGBT ideology.” Many of the declarations express the view that young people will be demoralized if confronted by the issue.

“Human Rights are not an ideology — they are universal,” U.S. Ambassador Georgette Mosbacher tweeted. “50 Ambassadors and Representatives agree.”

Joachim Brudzinski, deputy head of the ruling Law and Justice party who is now a lawmaker to the European Parliament, shot back at Mosbacher on Monday, saying “we in Poland also agree.”

“Therefore, we are waiting with hope for the next letter, this time in defense of murdered Christians, imprisoned #ProLife activists, people dismissed from work and persecuted for quoting the Bible, people subjected to euthanasia against their will,” he wrote on Twitter, along with some other examples of alleged abuse of Christians.

It was not exactly clear what Brudzinski was referring to. Poland is a predominantly Catholic nation where Christians do not face persecution and where abortion is illegal in most cases and euthanasia is outlawed. In one case, however, an IKEA employee in Poland was fired for citing Biblical passages to suggest gays should be killed. The current government has spoken in the employee’s defense and a state prosecutor is suing the IKEA manager who fired him.

Brudzinski also waded into the debate about LGBTQ rights in the summer, saying on Twitter that “Poland without LGBT is most beautiful.” His tweet included an image of Jesus and eggs in a bird nest — a bird family which he described as “realizing God’s plan.”

That triggered articles in the Polish liberal press about how homosexuality is a naturally occurring phenomenon in the animal world — just one of many examples of an outpouring of support in Poland for LGBTQ people. In Warsaw, for instance, it has become common recently to see rainbow flags hanging from apartments or people carrying rainbow bags.

The ambassadors’ letter paid tribute to the work of the LGBTQ community in Poland as it seeks to raise awareness about the challenges its faces. The rise in hostility has led many to live in anger and fear or even to emigrate from the country.

Many activists say their greatest priority now is to get legislation passed criminalizing hate speech against people based on their sexual identity.

The letter was signed by the ambassadors of the United States, many European countries, including Germany, Ukraine and the United Kingdom, as well as further off nations like Japan and Australia.

It was also signed by representatives in Poland of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Community of Democracies, which is based in Warsaw.

Opinion: Breonna Taylor's death reminds me this country doesn't love me as much as I love it


Opinion by Lisa Respers France, CNN
1 hour ago

© Patrick Smith/Getty Images North America/Getty Images ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND - JULY 05: In an aerial view from a drone, a large-scale ground mural depicting Breonna Taylor with the text 'Black Lives Matter' is seen being painted at Chambers Park on July 5, 2020 in Annapolis, Maryland. The mural was organized by Future History Now in partnership with Banneker-Douglass Museum and The Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture. The painting honors Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by members of the Louisville Metro Police Department in March 2020. (Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

Some days I feel like a woman without a country.

The death of Breonna Taylor has been yet another painful reminder that women like me, Black women, are not safe in America.

We can be killed in our own homes by police and an officer will be charged over the bullets that missed, a charge that came only after months of calls for justice.

Make no mistake, Breonna Taylor's death wrought destruction - and not just for the family and friends who knew and loved her.

There has been constant outcry in the six months since Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was shot in her Louisville, Kentucky, home while police were executing a search warrant.

She is just one more Black person whose life has been overshadowed in many ways by their death and who, sadly, have become symbols of the racial inequality that has always been, and feels like it may always be.

Such discouraging thoughts have become so familiar that I fear I am becoming numb to it.

The #SayHerName and #JusticeForBreonna campaigns have kept Taylor's face ever before me on social media since her death. In that beautiful young woman's face, I have seen my sister, my nieces, my friends and myself.

I have wept for her and us, even as I have shed tears for a country where many are just now seeing its problems with systemic racism and racial injustice.

Typing that word alone will stop many people reading and to those who feel that way, it is hard to know you are tired of my and Breonna Taylor's Blackness.

Tired of hearing about it, thinking about it and feeling guilty about the disparity that it brings.

Imagine how tired we feel inhabiting these Black bodies. Because we live in a nation where being accused of racism angers people more than the fact of actual racism. A country where I am sure to be called a racist, accused of race-baiting and/or "playing the race card" for even daring to discuss our race problem.

© CNN Lisa Respers France

To that I say: White mothers, talk to me about how you prep your White children, your sons in particular, to try and handle interactions with police so they can make it home safely. All the while knowing that no matter what you tell them there is no guarantee.

White wives, have your White husbands taught themselves how to change rear light bulbs in their cars so they can avoid being stopped by police? Because my Black husband has.

These are all constant traumas that Black women like me, like Breonna Taylor and so many other Black women I could, unfortunately, name, have had to endure.

A few weeks ago, I posted to Facebook some thoughts about what is happening in America right now—how none of it is a surprise to me because I know the history.

"I'm not shocked by the cruelty & divisiveness because I have forever snapshots in my brain of White people smiling beneath the mutilated bodies of lynched Black people," I wrote. "Voter suppression doesn't surprise me because I am the descendant of those threatened, harassed and blocked from polling stations."

I pointed out that I "sprang from women whose children were ripped from their arms and sold, but those women had to keep on living and serving."

"It's why we bury our Trayvons and our Tamirs and then become activists and run for office. We give the world beauty for ashes on the daily, with food that is more flavorful because salt seasons and what's saltier than tears?," I posted. "We dance a little harder, sing a little louder and love a little deeper because we know life is fleeting and always has been. Covid kills us more, racism kills us more. Life. Kills. Us. More."

Black people as a whole have struggled to have our humanity recognized and respected, but Black women in particular have taken that fight to the polls.

According to the report "Black Girl Magic: The Power of Black Women in Elections" put out by the AFL-CIO, "Black women drive turnout for the black community and are one of the most progressive voting blocs in the country."

It continues: "They demonstrate high levels of support for progressive issues such as police reform, raising the minimum wage and protecting Social Security. Moreover, the majority of black women have an economically liberal view of government."

To possess such power and still know that the laws we have helped bring to fruition will—so often--not protect us, feels excruciating.

It also fuels the burning desire to hold America accountable to "the justice and liberty for all" it promised.

Knowing this country doesn't love me as much as I love it would seem reason enough to give up on it.

But I won't let the deaths of Taylor, George Floyd or the others who have sparked a racial reckoning in this great nation have happened in vain.

I love this country too much to not want to see it be the best that it can be.

Rio Tinto changes tack, ready for talks over Bougainville mine

© Reuters/HUMAN RIGHTS LAW CENTRE Theonila Roka Matbob stands in front of the Pangua mine in Konawiru, BougainvilleMELBOURNE

 (Reuters) - Rio Tinto Ltd said on Tuesday that it was ready to talk to stakeholders over allegations of human rights breaches at a giant copper mine in Bougainville that it formerly owned, after community members filed a complaint with the Australian government.

"We are ready to enter into discussions with the communities that have filed the complaint," it said, adding it would also speak with current mine owners as well as the Bougainville and Papua New Guinea governments.

The stance marks a change from April, when Rio rebuffed a request by the same group for a review of health and safety concerns at the mine as a starting point for discussion around compensation and remediation.

It also highlights a different approach by Rio to social responsibility, after its destruction of sacred and historically significant rockshelters for an iron ore mine in Australia in May cost its chief executive and two other executives their jobs.

Rio Tinto subsidiary Bougainville Copper (BCL) ran the Panguna copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea from the early 1970s to 1990 when it was abandoned during a civil war that was largely fought over how mine profits should be shared.

Rio handed its shareholding in the mine to national and local governments in 2016.

The complaint, backed by 156 community members, was filed on Tuesday to the Australian OECD National Contact Point by Melbourne's Human Rights Law Centre. It alleges that the large volumes of mine waste left behind poisoned water sources, flooded lands and sacred sites, and caused a range of health problems.

Rio said that it was aware of the "deterioration of mining infrastructure at the site and surrounding areas, and claims of resulting adverse environmental and social, including human rights, impacts," despite not having had staff at the mine since 1990.

While global miners have not been forced to account for mines they operated in the past, or those they inherited, they have come under increased pressure from shareholders in the past few years to ensure high standards of responsible mining.The Bougainville mine - Bougainville Copper Ltd - is part listed on the Australian stock market and part-owned both by the Bougainville and PNG governments .

Bougainville, which held an election last week, is in talks with the Papua New Guinea government over its independence.

(Reporting by Melanie Burton. Editing by Jane Merriman)

Native American women shape how museums frame Indigenous culture

Understanding women’s roles in Indigenous society can help draw a line from the past to the present. An exhibition in Chicago features the contributions of Crow, or Apsáalooke, women and proclaims: We are still here.

Courtesy of the Field Museum
“Wherein Lies the Beauty of Life,” by contemporary artist Ben Pease, portrays an Apsáalooke woman in a traditional dress covered with elk teeth, holding her baby. Mr. Pease uses flowers to represent divinity and beauty.


September 25, 2020

By Richard Mertens Correspondent
CHICAGO

Growing up on the Crow reservation in Montana, Nina Sanders learned some of her most valuable lessons not in school, where the textbooks were silent on her people and she was discouraged from speaking her native language, but at home with her grandmother and great-grandmother, listening to their stories and “tearing apart sinews, washing clothes outside, picking berries.”

Now Ms. Sanders celebrates the contributions of Crow, or Apsáalooke (Ahp-SAH-luh-guh), women in a major exhibition at Chicago’s Field Museum. “Apsáalooke Women and Warriors” paints a vivid picture of Apsáalooke history and culture, drawing on the Field’s extensive collections of Indigenous objects, including 19th-century ceremonial war shields, as well as on the work of contemporary artists, like rapper and fancy dancer Supaman. The result is rich and wide-ranging and proclaims unmistakably: We are still here.

Museums are increasingly turning to Indigenous peoples to represent themselves to the world, a movement that Ms. Sanders and others call the “decolonizing” of American museums. What sets Ms. Sanders’ exhibition apart is its focus on women, portraying them as keepers of culture and celebrating their devotion to family, clan, and homeland.


“The women in my community are incredibly resilient, beautiful human beings who have managed to keep our community together in moments of devastation,” says Ms. Sanders, a guest curator at the Field and the first Native American to curate an exhibition there. “They just shine.”

Richard Mertens
Guest curator Nina Sanders (right) and one of her collaborators, JoRee LaFrance, parade down a street near the University of Chicago to celebrate the opening of a new exhibit at the Field Museum that pays homage to the role of women in Apsáalooke history and culture, March 12, 2020.

“Apsáalooke Women and Warriors,” open until July 18, 2021, and expected to travel after that, tells about the Apsáalooke through their own eyes and their own stories, beginning with their creation from the sea and continuing through their migration to the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and eventual settlement on a reservation south of the Yellowstone River. The exhibition uses examples of Apsáalooke artistry to suggest how traditional beliefs and values have persisted and endure today. It shows the Apsáalooke reaching back to old ways of life and reinventing them in new circumstances and a new time.

The exhibition also reflects a transformation in museum practice and representation of Indigenous Americans that dates to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. That act, itself a product of decades of activism, led to the return of remains and sacred objects and a new era of collaboration between museums and Indigenous peoples. It also inspired a shift away from portraying Native Americans as a vanished people toward emphasizing their contemporary culture.

The focus on women is more recent. Among the inspirations for Ms. Sanders’ exhibits were not only her childhood memories but also a recent, groundbreaking exhibition about Indigenous women artists, called “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists,” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Novelist Louise Erdrich said of that: “At long, long last, after centuries of erasure, Hearts of Our People celebrates the fiercely loving genius of Indigenous women.”

Paying more attention to women has highlighted underappreciated aspects of Native American culture, including the importance of communal ties, says Amanda Cobb-Greetham, a member of the Chickasaw tribe and director of the Native Nations Center at the University of Oklahoma. Ms. Cobb-Greetham, who is also a trustee of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, contrasts the idea of “repatriation”– returning Native remains and sacred objects to the tribes from which they were taken – with “rematriation,” or the restoration and reassertion of core cultural values.

“It redefines how we understand leadership, or significant achievement, and what values we want to carry forward,” she says. “That may or may not be military leader or government official. It may be something entirely different.”

John Weinstein/Courtesy of the Field Museum
The “Apsáalooke Women and Warriors” exhibition opened at the Field Museum in Chicago in March 2020 and runs until July 18, 2021. In it, rawhide war shields are displayed beneath giant images of women “to symbolically care for these shields,” an exhibition note explains.

One of the women portrayed in the Field exhibition is Sharon Stewart Peregoy, an Apsáalooke elder and Montana state representative. Though most Apsáalooke leaders have been men, including those in elected positions today, Ms. Stewart Peregoy says women have played a central role in helping the Apsáalooke endure decades of dramatic and often painful change.


“Through the transitions, especially with Native women and Crow women,” she says, “there was a need for everyone – and still today – to pull together, to participate, and with the ending of nomadic life and making the change to being put on the reservation, to be able to undergird our men, our warriors, quietly, not so quietly in some ways, but to get them to have hope again. That way of life died. But the woman says no, we can inspire to be more.”

Courtesy of the Field Museum
A photograph of Apsáalooke woman Jordynn Paz by Adam Sings In The Timber. The exhibition at the Field Museum portrays women as keepers of culture and celebrates their devotion to family, clan, and homeland.

Ben Pease is an Apsáalooke artist who contributed paintings and other works to the exhibition, including an oil painting that shows a procession of women on horseback, each wearing a gold halo. “We do believe as Apsáalooke people that women are holy and sacred beings,” Mr. Pease says. “They have the ability to give life and save culture and perpetuate culture into the future.”


Mr. Pease grew up in Lodge Grass, Montana, reared by “mothers and aunts and grandmothers,” he says.

“I learned the strength of women early on, and the role they play. In an underresourced and underrepresented community, they lead and are the great leaders to help us step into the future – but also to preserve the past, to be keepers of medicine and knowledge.”

The Field exhibition portrays the Apsáalooke as matriarchal and egalitarian. In one of the tribe’s stories, man and woman are created at the same moment. Rawhide war shields, decorated with owl feathers and dried bird heads, are displayed beneath giant images of women “to symbolically care for these shields,” a note says.


And yet beyond this, Ms. Sanders and her Apsáalooke collaborators invite viewers to reimagine what it means to be a warrior today and to perform the acts of bravery that traditionally distinguished the greatest Apsáalooke fighters. They pay homage to past warriors and leaders like Plenty Coups, Spotted Tail, and Joe Medicine Crow, an author and decorated veteran of World War II. But they also celebrate women – and men – who have become scholars, artists, and teachers.

“Nina tries to present a contemporary interpretation of what a warrior is,” says Ms. Stewart Peregoy. “That’s the idea – to get our young people to reawaken to their Native self, to their Crow self, and to what they can aspire to.”

John Weinstein/Courtesy of The Field Museum
A war shield made and owned by Crazy Sister-in-Law. This war shield is made of buffalo hide, parts of a burrowing owl, and natural earth clay pigments. Crazy Sister-in-Law was a male warrior and one of the most respected leaders of his time during the early 1800s.

“Apsáalooke Women and Warriors” opened in Chicago in March with a gesture to the past: a traditional Crow parade in which scores of Apsáalooke visitors, mostly women, walked in a line down city streets, some on horseback, and many more on foot, to the accompaniment of Apsáalooke singing and drumming. Ms. Sanders’ grandmother, Margo Real Bird, was among them. At a ceremony afterward, the pair stood arm-in-arm, a reminder of the bonds between past and present that Ms. Sanders wants to honor.

“It’s love,” she says. “It’s what transmits culture across time.”

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The Sudbury model: How one of the world’s major polluters went green

Volunteers have worked for decades in Sudbury, Ontario, to restore the land in the once-polluted mining town. They say their work holds lessons for breaking the endless cycle of conflict between industry and environmentalists.

Laura Cluthé
Houses line a street in Sudbury, Ontario, where they can see the Superstack, a symbol of the city’s gritty past that is being replaced with two smaller stacks.


September 24, 2020



By Sara Miller Llana Staff writer
@sarallana

GREATER SUDBURY, ONTARIO

When the Superstack was constructed in 1972, it was the tallest structure in Canada – and the tallest smokestack in the world. At 1,250 feet, it’s visible from every vantage point in the area. It can be seen from the bustling streets of downtown to the quiet cul-de-sacs of residential neighborhoods. It looms large in the distance from highways that feed into a city that is home to one of the largest mining complexes in the world.

Built by Canadian company Inco before it was purchased by Vale, the Superstack has long stood as a reminder of the environmental devastation that mining wrought here. But this year the chimney is being fully decommissioned.

Residents of Sudbury harbor mixed feelings about the Superstack. Some see it as a memorial to their rise as a center of nickel and copper mining globally. Others see it simply as a familiar landmark that signals they are home. Gisele Lavigne lives in the Copper Cliff neighborhood at the Superstack’s base. She spends her evenings looking at the towering structure from her yard, and likes it when the stack disappears behind a heavy fog. “And when it rains, you’ll see half a stack, depending on which way the wind blows,” says her partner, John Leach, who works in the mining industry doing sand and high-pressure water blasting.


Others see the Superstack as a relic of an era of polluting that doesn’t fit with the current ethos of Sudbury. One leading scientist here, John Gunn, believes the concrete shell should be “blown up.”

Whether or not the structure remains a fixture on the skyline when it’s taken out of operation, it tells a powerful tale of renewal. The stack was built as part of an industrial complex that denuded the land here of any kind of vegetation, leaving blackened rocks and lakes without fish. The landscape drew comparisons to moonscapes and barren Martian worlds. At one time the smelters in Sudbury were the largest point source of sulfur dioxide in the world.

Laura Cluthé
“When one speaks of the Sudbury story, it somehow seems local and isolated, and it’s not local and isolated. It’s an example of what we need to modify in order to be able to live alongside a thriving environment.” – David Pearson, an earth scientist who has been instrumental in the city’s green revival

It got so bad that scientists, politicians, industry officials, and the community finally came together to halt the pollution, replant the trees, and restock the lakes. It has been 40 years of toil and triumph, and the story is not over yet. But today Sudbury enjoys some of the cleanest air quality in Ontario. Residents swim and fish in the 330 lakes inside the city’s boundaries. And those here say the community of 165,000, at the gateway of northern Ontario, offers a lesson in how to break the cycle of conflict that the current climate crisis often creates, pitting industry against the environment.

“That’s what we need to take from the Sudbury story, and we need to apply it to today,” says David Pearson, an earth scientist and driving force in turning around Sudbury.

“When one speaks of the Sudbury story,” he says, “it somehow seems local and isolated, and it’s not local and isolated. It’s an example of what we need to modify in order to be able to live alongside a thriving environment.”

***

This area was once called Ste. Anne of the Pines for the old-growth forest that flourished here. Later, after the logging industry moved in, lumber harvested from the prized trees was shipped far and wide – including to Chicago to help rebuild after the Great Fire of 1871.


Environmental devastation accelerated after the 1880s when metal deposits were found along a crater formed by a prehistoric meteorite impact. The deposits, discovered during the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, represented one of the largest concentrations of sulfide ore in the world. The metals forged in huge foundries here were used to build armaments during both world wars. Early methods of roasting the ore polluted the landscape locally, while later smelting techniques expanded the damage regionally. Dr. Pearson, who arrived from a coal mining town in northern England, remembers distinctly how bad the air smelled one day in 1969. “It was perhaps humid, and [the plume] came down to ground level,” he says. “And I parked in the parking lot, and I had to run in order to be able to hold my breath long enough to get into a building because the smell of the sulfur dioxide was so powerful even in my car. ... I had never experienced anything nearly as penetrating a pollution as this.”

Laura Cluthé
“Looking up and seeing a green patch emerging from the dead earth was nothing short of a miracle.” – Dave Courtemanche, recalling how he and his fifth grade classmates, in 1975, got grass to grow in a barren part of the Sudbury landscape as a school experiment.

For a child in Sudbury back then, fun didn’t involve climbing trees or playing hide-and-seek in the forest. Young people like Dave Courtemanche, who went on to become mayor, clambered over rocks. There was no greenery to be found in his neighborhood or at his school, which directly faced the mining slags. One day in 1975, a university professor came to Dave’s fifth grade class to propose an experiment: Let’s see if we can get grass to sprout in the barren landscape.

On a hillside, he and classmates carved out an acre of land and limed and fertilized it. As tufts of grass began to poke through, he recalls a feeling that might be comparable to children of the tropics seeing their first snowflakes. “Looking up and seeing a green patch emerging from the dead earth was nothing short of a miracle,” he says from that old school building today, which looks out onto woods and grassy fields. Mr. Courtemanche was unwittingly among the first volunteers in one of the largest regreening efforts in Canadian history.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Sudbury was a company town. At its peak, 20,000 miners worked underground – the ebbs and flows of the city defined by worker shifts. No one dared speak out against the industry.


But then Laurentian University was established in 1960. “Nobody was going to say anything against the company, essentially,” says Peter Beckett, an ecologist at the university and chair of the city’s advisory panel on regreening. “And so the university was kind of the first independent thing in the town, and people started asking questions: ‘Can one do anything about the landscape?’”

As it turns out, they could. Biologists at both the university and at Inco had been experimenting with regreening, first potting plants and then moving to plots outside. By 1975, the “Sudbury recipe” was created – the basis for a massive liming project that would neutralize the soil and allow for replanting.

Laura Cluthé
The old Creighton nickel mine, which was closed in the 1980s, houses an underground research facility where scientists study neutrinos.

The effort coincided with a downturn in the nickel industry and worries on the part of local politicians that the town wasn’t going to survive unless it reinvented itself. Regreening became a communitywide endeavor. Unemployed miners and student volunteers alike wielded lime sacks and scattered seed. Dr. Beckett remembers the first year in 1978, when the community landscapers would scour their Garden of Eden for the first shoots. “After the Aug. 15 [heavy rains] that first year, every member of the committee was out every day looking constantly at the same area to see if any green fuzz was coming up,” he says. “And then one day, about a week later, everybody just shouted, ‘eureka,’ just like the Greeks.”

On a hillside overlooking Kelly Lake, Dr. Beckett and Graeme Spiers, another scientist from Laurentian University, show how the landscape would have looked if no replanting had taken place. They point to a sickly birch tree surrounded by a few mounds of metal-tolerant hair grass.


Nearby stands a lush forest. It’s one of the replanted parcels. Overall, locals have created a forest of about 10 million trees and shrubs. Since 2010 they have focused on replanting native species, about 80 different types, and they are working on measuring carbon capture that will help the city meet its goals to be carbon neutral by 2050. After 40 years and $33.5 million (Canadian; U.S.$25.4 million), they are about halfway through the recovery of 200,000 acres of land.

Yet the effort is about more than fixing a lost landscape. “If you improve the environment, you attract people and suddenly your community starts feeling better about itself,” says Dr. Spiers.

The two have traveled the world delivering that message – to Australia and South Africa, Peru and Poland, Chile and China. Their roadshow is called “Sudbury, 40+ Years of Healing.”

Laura Cluthé
“If you improve the environment, you attract people and suddenly your community starts feeling better about itself.” – Graeme Spiers, a scientist from Laurentian University in Sudbury (left) with Peter Beckett, a Laurentian ecologist

***


None of this would have been possible without tough regulations, though. When the Superstack was built, mining’s motto for the era was “Dilution is the solution to pollution.” New technology and evolving processes helped reduce emissions in Greater Sudbury, but the Superstack dispersed them further afield, to neighboring provinces, and as far as the United States and Greenland. It essentially turned a local problem into an international one.


Sudbury’s reputation was already suffering. In 1971 and 1972, NASA sent astronauts to the city ahead of the Apollo moon missions to study the geology of the crater basin. It was the second-largest impact crater in the world, and they wanted to prepare for similar sites they might see on the moon.

But instead of lauding Sudbury as a lunar training ground, the press came up with another moniker for the city: a moonscape. The city’s image took a severe hit.


It didn’t help that emissions from the Sudbury smelters had affected an estimated 7,000 lakes in the region. Declining populations of lake trout, which thrive in Canada’s cold, clear northern waters, became a symbol of the environmental degradation, similar to what the polar bear is today for a warming Arctic.

Dr. Gunn, director of the Vale Living With Lakes Centre in Sudbury, recalls attending his first international science conference in Ithaca, New York, in 1980 and learning that his peers were using the name Sudbury as a unit of pollution – “How many ‘Sudburys’ does your country represent?” He says he has since devoted his entire career to make the term Sudbury known as a “unit of restoration.”

Sudbury’s pollution even sullied relations between the U.S. and Canada, as acid rain emerged as a significant environmental issue. “I traveled to Washington, New York City, and a couple of other places in the United States and tried to persuade them to cut their emissions. And when I would go down to lecture them on their problems, the first word that would come out was Inco,” says Jim Bradley, who was Ontario’s environmental minister at the time and grew up in Sudbury. “Inco was the largest single emitter of sulfur dioxide in North America at the time.”

Laura Cluthé
The “Under ground,” a mural that is part of a campaign by artists in Sudbury to beautify buildings, celebrates women who worked in local mines.

So the provincial government developed the Countdown Acid Rain program, which forced Inco and other major polluters in 1985 to cut emissions by more than 60% in under a decade. The companies balked at first. But Mr. Bradley remembers the exact moment he knew they had changed.


“Three years later, they came down to Toronto and had a press conference, with the word Inco in green,” he says. “And there they announced that they would not only be complying with the regulation that we were forcing on them, but that they would be exceeding the provisions of it and that they would be making a profit of 19% on one aspect of it and 6% on another aspect.”

Part of the shift was driven by the changing politics of the environment. The Superstack had become a rallying point for activists in both North America and Europe. “The [company] didn’t want a dirty reputation,” says Dr. Gunn. “Senior executives admitted that their kids gave them [trouble] at home.”

Today, Dr. Gunn stands at the edge of Silver Lake, which he once documented in a book as being one of the most acid- and metal-contaminated bodies of water in the world. Kids are jumping off rocks. A dog paddles furiously in the water.


The whole cleanup, local organizers say, is a testament to how the community came together. “There’s no question, of course there was finger-pointing, but it was not the dominant mood at the time,” says Dr. Pearson, the earth scientist. “You have to remember that the city was very defensive, very self-conscious. ... So when there were glimmers of an opportunity to repair the landscape and improve the image of the community, people got together without pointing fingers. It was a ‘let’s get on with this’ kind of attitude.”

Everyone, young and old, got involved. “It was such a powerful experience for our children because now they were part of the solution,” says Mr. Courtemanche. “I would argue that you can’t be part of the solution until you see yourself as part of the problem. So we were all part of the problem here. We let the landscape perpetuate the way it was until folks realized they could come together and effect phenomenal change.”

Laura Cluthé
Canada’s first transcontinental railway runs through downtown Sudbury. Workers discovered vast nickel deposits in the area when the rail line was being built in the 1880s, spawning a thriving mining industry.

That, he believes, is a lesson urgently needed today. “This idea that you have to take sides, that these types of major issues are political and polarizing, I think is fundamentally wrong. People just need to show up and say, ‘I’m going to be part of the solution.’ And quite frankly, I think the world needs more Sudburys if we’re going to tackle some of these major issues facing society, whether we’re talking about climate change or COVID.”

***


Sudbury is still very much a mining town. There are 7 to 11 mines operating at any given time, says Jennifer Beaudry, the senior manager at Dynamic Earth, a mining museum. It’s just that mining looks very different than it once did.

The Superstack is part of that evolution. The mining company Vale finished the final steps to take it out of service in July, replacing the towering structure with two smaller stacks that require far less energy to operate and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the smelter by approximately 40%. The move is symbolic of how technology is advancing, and the city has become a research hub for new mining techniques.

“It’s not shovels and pickaxes [anymore],” says Ms. Beaudry.

The narrative is not unblemished, though. Some locals think the mining companies, for all the profits they dug out of the ground here, should have done more – earlier – to help both workers and the town.

Laura Cluthé
Young people in Sudbury, Ontario, jump off rocks into Silver Lake, once one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world.

Yet the overwhelming feeling seems to be one of pride in the city’s restoration. In 2015, Canada’s statistics agency polled urbanites nationwide and found Sudbury’s residents to be the happiest in the country. Tourists no longer come to see the slurry in the city’s big smelters run like hot lava. Instead they head to Dynamic Earth to go on an underground tour, or visit Science North, the city’s renowned science museum. More students are flocking here, too.

“No, this is not a mining town, at least not anymore,” says Vinay Balineni, a student from India who is working on a business degree.

Pride in the city’s new environmental ethos is even reflected in local art. Muralists paint building facades with scenes that celebrate natural resources. “There’s been not just transformation of the environment but transformation of the mentality of why it’s important to create opportunities for environmental consciousness and conservation,” says Johanna Westby, a muralist and graphic designer whose works depict lakes, trees, water, and birds.

Perhaps more important for the future, a new generation of environmental activists is taking root in Sudbury. Jane Walker, Maggie Fu, and Sophia Mathur epitomize the trend. The three teens, who just started eighth grade, recently participated in virtual climate training with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

Sophia is often called Canada’s first climate striker, joining Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg and youths around the world in skipping classes every Friday to demonstrate on behalf of the environment. She is also the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Ontario provincial government for weakening its climate targets. The 13-year-old infuses her words with passion, eloquently talking about the intersection of social and climate justice.


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“I think Sudbury’s regreening showed everyone [here], and the world, that with our community working together, we can make a difference,” she says.

It’s a story of inspiration the three teens hold close to them while they carry out their strikes, which they do virtually these days because of the pandemic. Says Jane: “If we can do all this [transformation] in the community, well, then we can do anything to try and help our environment.”

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Tracking down the origins of ‘witch hunt’

I was hearing “witch hunt” so often that a few weeks ago I experienced semantic satiation, in which repetition causes a phrase to lose meaning and be perceived as nothing but empty sounds.

Evan Vucci/AP
President Trump speaks to reporters about border security in the briefing room of the White House, Jan. 3, 2019, in Washington. Mr. Trump has repeatedly used the phrase "witch hunt," but where did it originate?


January 10, 2019

By Melissa Mohr

President Trump tweeted about a witch hunt more than a hundred times last year. It is debated in the news and across social media: Is the Russia investigation a witch hunt or is it not a witch hunt? I was hearing “witch hunt” so often that a few weeks ago I experienced semantic satiation, in which repetition causes a phrase to lose meaning and be perceived as nothing but empty sounds. Then I began to wonder, what is Mr. Trump actually saying when he uses those words?

Obviously, the term refers to real, historical hunts for witches that occurred sporadically across Europe and later in America from the 15th to 18th centuries. Like wildfires, anxieties about witches would flare up in this period, following a rough pattern. Misfortunes would happen in a village, and some women on the fringes of society – an old herbalist who lived alone; in Salem, Mass., the slave Tituba – would be accused of causing them through magic. These women would be imprisoned, sometimes tortured, and asked to name their accomplices. Sometimes they could prove their innocence by undergoing a “trial by ordeal” – being thrown into a pond to see if they sank (innocent) or floated (guilty) – but often they were executed without opportunity to refute the charges against them.

The self-proclaimed witchfinder general of England, Matthew Hopkins, was responsible for one of the largest witch hunts, executing more than 300 suspects in the 1640s. He preferred to say that he “discovered” witches, however, and witch hunt only became the term of choice in the late 19th century.


George Orwell, author of “1984,” was one of the first to use the term metaphorically: In the 1930s, he called “trumped up accusations” by one group of communists against another a witch hunt. The idea of political witch hunts spread quickly in the 1950s. Investigations by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others to discover secret communists in the US government, in Hollywood, and at universities were frequently denounced as witch hunts. Use of the term implied that the fear of communism in the United States was in fact hysterical and overblown, and that, like alleged witches in the past, suspected communists were unjustly accused, unable to defend themselves fully, and forced under great pressure to reveal the identities of others.

Is the Russia investigation a witch hunt? Is the metaphor appropriate? In a sense it doesn’t matter. Sometimes hearing words over and over doesn’t turn them into meaningless syllables, as with semantic satiation. Instead, it makes them seem true, a phenomenon known as “the illusory truth effect.” The more the president repeats “witch hunt,” the more likely it sounds, whatever the facts.