Blackfoot Country
Publishers and authors have the right to define their books by genre as they please—a book of poetry in this case. But to my eye and ear, the text of Walter Hildebrandt’s Blackfoot Country is [...]
Sid Marty
Sid Marty
Part 1: A Tribute to Charlie Russell
Charlie Russell loved to fly, and he seldom phoned first those times when he would fly his Kolb ultralight airplane north from Hawk’s Nest ranch on the boundary of Waterton Lakes National Park, [...]
Firewater:
One of the many Canadian communities hit hard by the ongoing fentanyl debacle is Standoff, Alberta, headquarters of the Kainai (Blood) First Nation, where a state of emergency was declared in [...]
How I Did Not Try to Kill Andrew Suknaski
Andy, late lamented friend, celebrated author of Wood Mountain Poems, The Ghosts Call You Poor and many other texts: you were too frail and too medicated, the last time I saw you alive, to chew [...]
The Banker and the Blackfoot: A Memoir of My Grandfather in Chinook Country
John “Jack” Cowdry, the author’s grandfather, first came to my attention in L.V. Kelly’s Alberta ranching chronicle The Range Men (1913). The Cowdry brothers were the first bankers to set up shop [...]
In Praise of Protest
On January 24, 2012, the Stop Castle Logging protest had been underway for 13 days in temperatures down to −35 degrees and a wind-chill reaching −45. Alberta Forest Service (AFS) had served [...]
Spin, Baby, Spin
Power outages are not rare here at the foot of the Livingstone Range north of the Crowsnest Pass, thanks to summer electrical storms, ice buildup in winter and west winds that can gust (where I [...]
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Kenney’s War on Workers
My wife and I spent our last day of our summer vacations in 2019 on a picket line with healthcare workers at Edmonton’s old General Hospital. Most of the cleaners, healthcare aides and nurses at the information picket were women of colour. Like public-sector workers across the province, they were ...
The Story of Joseph Lewis
In 1799 Joseph Lewis, a Hudson's Bay Company employee, arrived in what is now Alberta. He was 27 years old but his life had already been crammed with adventure.
Born in 1772 in Manchester, New Hampshire, at 20 he’d made his way to Montreal, where he joined the North West Company ...
All The Rage
The tipping point came a week from the end of the campaign, and
by April 16 in the Big Four Roadhouse on the Calgary Stampede grounds, United Conservative Party supporters felt scant need for civility. Not anymore. The UCP had won the 2019 Alberta election, taking 63 seats to the NDP’s ...