A League of Their Own is one of my all-time favourite movies. I relished every moment of it, from women kicking ass in baseball, to the sultry Madonna pushing the envelope in sports (something I could always personally relate to!), to the oh so strong and beautiful Geena Davis who just kept carrying it on her own way as the best damn player in the league.

On my way back from the United States this time around I couldn’t pull the all-nighter drive I usually do so I can have the next full day to work, so around 2:45am my sagging eyes looked for somewhere to pull over and came upon the exit off 49 South in Wisconsin for Racine.

Racine??!! As in, the Racine Belles from A League of Their Own?!

Yup, it was indeed, so if I was going to pick any random town in the good ole US of A to rest up for a few hours, it might as well be this one!

Racine was part of several midwest towns who formed the original All American Girls Baseball League, which also included the Kenosha Comets, the Rockford Peaches, and the South Bend Blue Sox. The organization formed in 1943 to keep the sport of baseball going when the men went away to war.

I always liked girls playing baseball better anyways.

A few years ago I wrote a piece for This Magazine on the important role campus/community radio stations have played in the lives and activism of feminists. The piece isn’t available online, so I’ll just cut and paste my general point.

Campus/community radio has long been welcoming to women and their views, especially considering the limited access feminists have historically had to mainstream media. Campus/community radio has been an important platform for feminists to engage in discussions rarely heard on mainstream airwaves, tackle important women’s issues and give underrepresented female musicians a presence. It’s a vital outlet in the face of mass media that is becoming increasingly hostile to feminist ideas and generally perpetuates narrow, stereotypical ideas about gender.

That said, I’d like to draw your attention to the horrible situation over at CKLN, the campus/community based at Ryerson University in Toronto. Over the past few months, many programmers and hosts that have been at the station for years have been shut out by illegitimate station management in an effort to make the station commercial.

Among the lists of cancelled shows is Radio Cliteracy, an important and bold feminist talk show, as well as Frequency Feminisms and Honour The Earth, which have been removed from the Sunday grid. So far, over 30 volunteers have been dismissed from CLKN without warning and without cause, including many LGTB, First Nations, psychiatric survivor programmers, women of colour and a trans person.

Luckily, people have been fighting to get back into the station and onto the airwaves with pickets, and by organizing meetings and a website. They need our support, so please do what you can to spread the word about keeping campus/community radio open for all.

There has been much outrage over the Harper government’s quiet cuts to Canadian arts funding.

In the case of the PromArt program – a grant that enables artists to travel abroad to perform, show their films, or promote their books – the cuts weren’t made so quietly. Toronto band Holy Fuck received a lot of media attention, their name evoking the reactionary nature of the government’s assessment of who has been getting (arguably a small slice of) taxpayer dollars.

But it’s not just a band with a swear in its name or lefty journalists like Avi Lewis and Gwynne Dyer who’ve received money, although, as many have suggested, artists’ politics might indeed have something to do with the Conservatives’ budget slashing. Recipients of PromArt have included ballet companies and other high-art performances, which makes the cuts even more confusing at a time when “culture” is increasingly used by governments around the world to attract investment dollars for business development.

The discussions over the arts cuts have directed some attention to the role culture plays in our lives and the often precarious careers of people who make the art and culture that are the base for campaigns like Toronto’s Live With Culture, for example.

Here’s a sample of what people have been saying about the arts cuts, including the always insightful Heather Mallick.

If funding, sustaining and promoting Canadian art and culture is important to you, then take a moment to send an email to your MP. Here’s an action alert from the Council of Canadians with background info and directions on how to send a note of protest.

On September 3, Fuse, a magazine of arts and politics, is hosting a town hall meeting to talk about the impact of cuts to arts funding. Details here.

Several friends and colleagues of mine took part in this inspiring and necessary conference in Saskatchewan whose title “Missing Women: Decolonization, Third Wave Feminism and Indigenous People of Canada and Mexico” says it all.

Travel and work conflicts prevented me from being there physically, but I can tell you that I’m emotionally shaken and stirred by the good work that has come out of it, which you can read about here.

I’ve always personally tried to make it a priority to highlight the strong matriarchy that exists in so many of our Indigenous nations. We were the FIRST feminists which is often forgotten in a lot of mainstream feminist dialogue, and it’s a shame especially when you consider what’s happened to many of the women in our communities today.

More than 500 Aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered over the past 15 years and we have the highest rates of sexual assault and domestic violence against our women than any other race. However what we need to be focussing on now is the things that are happening to prevent these statistics and what we are doing in our communities ourselves to effect positive change.

Where we’ve come from is this strong, ancestral lineage of woman-power culture. Sadly we’ve now arrived at is this consistently prejudicial place where many of us wonder whether, if any of these victims were White, would people care more or do more to seek justice?

A youth patch for the quilt of hope by the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition

I recently saw this sign walking out of an interstate road stop.

I was one of three lone persons of colour in the place and when we walked by, stopped to look at it, made some snarky comments that included shock and dismay, we turned around. Staring back at us were “suspicious” faces (that’s what they uttered) who looked us up and down, looked back at the sign, and then turned to each other with a “well what should do we do now?” kind of sentiment.

What does this all mean? You tell me.

(I mean, I always thought that the real threat of terrorism was right here at home, with the Conservatives, antis, racists, and other oppressors, but hey, that’s just me).

I have to give a loud and proud shout-out to Anti-dote, the amazing Multiracial Women’s and Girl’s Network, since I just got done talking about doing more programming with them.

If you’ve never heard of Anti-dote, mosey yourself on over to their website and check out their fabulousness. Not only do there need to be more opportunities for those of us in communities of colour to exist in safe spaces where we can just be our authentic ourselves and talk about the ongoing issues so many of us are facing, but growing up in this multi-layered racist, classist, and otherwise oppressive world is still a tough thing. Anti-dote has circles of aunties, grandmothers, and sistahs who provide the familial mentorship we all need to carry on and just be!

They are based in Victoria, but hey, it’s all about unity across lands right? So let’s join in and keep these kinds of circles going!

I’ll admit I’ve been quiet on the whole Morgentaler receiving the order of Canada here on the blog, but rest assured it was because I was fending off some media I really didn’t want to deal with, and fighting back on some websites for my pro-choice positions that are attacking me for a new reason as of late…..my culture.

Oh yes. It’s true.

A good one I was sent recently as to why I shouldn’t support abortion rights goes a little something like this:

“(Because we’d be borrowing) from our sordid history of legally defining Jews, blacks, women and aboriginals as non-persons by defining the fetus as such. Astonishingly this approach is supported by Jews (Morgentaler, a holocaust survivor), blacks (Barack Obama), women (Hilary Clinton), and aboriginals (Jessica Yee, Chair, Aboriginal Realities, Aboriginal Choices, and Toronto Action Committee, Canadians for Choice) who ought to know better.”

Wtf?

I usually let stuff like this go since this is certainly not the first website that exists against the work I do, and I’m not going to even give this person the time of my day, but I thought I’d share it with all y’all.

Since it’s that much more offensive when someone is calling out my culture to denounce why I believe people should decide what’s best for their own bodies.

I guess if they actually knew anything my culture, they’d know that we’ve had the notion of reproductive rights way before the word “pro-choice”.

I’m still in the United States and with limited access to phone and internet on the reservation. I’ve been out of the loop with several important events that have transpired in “Kanata” (the Wendat Huron word for Canada, which actually means settlement. Yes, we are on Native land) so I’ll play the catch-up game soon.

For now I want to leave you with one of the things I’ve been up to here. My partner and I decided that on my visit here in his territory of Oneida, Wisconsin we would only eat traditional food and do as many traditional things as possible.

What is traditional food you say? Well we are both Haudenosaunee, which in English means Iroquois, or 6 Nations. The 6 Nations are Mohawk (me), Oneida (him), Onondaga, Tuscarora, Seneca, and Cayuga. We have an ancient lineage of unity and one of the oldest forms of law called the Confederacy. As such, we have similar traditions, customs, and teachings. Corn and strawberries are some of our most sacred foods and we revere them more than just foods, they are life sustinence and you can do so much more than just eat them.

For us it means eating food grown on our territories, by our own peoples. Culture is such an important part of both our lives, and we want to honour our Mother Earth as much as we can. It has been a showing of solidarity across these borders we did not create, and also proof that youth can be part of the fight to get what we lost back.

We created a blog to record our journey here and we invite you to share with us as we go back2traditions!

Talk to you soon!

My partner DJ making some yummy traditional corn mush!

Good Morning Shameless readers! Thanks to our reader Nikita for alerting us all to the fact that Morgentaler has been among those named to Order of Canada. Good morning indeed!

Now 85, Morgentaler, a Polish Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Montreal after the war, opened his first abortion clinic in 1969 and performed thousands of procedures, which were illegal at the time.

Morgentaler, a trained family physician, argued that access to abortion was a basic human right and women should not have to risk death at the hands of an untrained professional in order to end their pregnancies.

Morgentaler’s clinics were constantly raided, and one in Toronto was firebombed. Morgentaler was arrested several times and spent months in jail as he fought his case at all court levels in Canada.

His victory came on Jan. 28, 1988, when the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada’s abortion law. That law, which required a woman who wanted an abortion to appeal to a three-doctor hospital abortion committee, was declared unconstitutional.

This is a huge victory, one that Shameless has believed in for a long time, and such a wonderful piece of Canada Day good news.

Feminist and author Judy Rebick told the Globe and Mail on Monday that it is about time Morgentaler is honoured for his long battle.

“Dr. Morgentaler is a hero to millions of women in the country,” she said. “He risked his life to struggle for women’s rights … He’s a huge figure in Canadian history and the fact that he hasn’t got [the Order of Canada] until now is a scandal.”

Agreed. Now go read this Feministing community blog piece, “Juno Lied,” written by a teenage girl in the US about trying to find out how to get an abortion for her best friend. It really does emphasize how important it is to honour people like Morgentaler in this country.

Photos by SMN.