'Revolt is our only salvation': Spur Festival aims to provoke action
Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges among speakers at 4-day event in Winnipeg
A national festival of ideas designed to spur locals into action in their communities is in Winnipeg this weekend.
Five Spur Festival events took place across the city Saturday, including "Disposable Lives?" a conversation about Canada's missing and murdered indigenous women.
Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada, was one of three guest speakers at the event, which took place at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights Saturday afternoon.
"First Nations children across this country are continuing to receive inequitable services from the federal government in health, education and child welfare," said Blackstock.
"When we see the missing and murdered indigenous women, really it's a predictable outcome of children not having the childhoods they deserve and have a right to have in this country."
Hedges spent an hour demonstrating the similarities of the world's political and environmental realities to those of Captain Ahab and his crew in Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
Capitalism has created a world of perpetual "systematic looting," Hedges said. "Yet we, like Ahab, rationalize our madness."
Hedges said he is not confident the human race is able to create a future of any kind for itself, nor that our species will even survive the greed that has allowed the sources of global warming and climate change to continue unchecked.
"Moral cowardice turns us into hostages," Hedges told the crowded theatre. "Revolt is our only salvation."
Hedges points to revolution and rebellion as a "moral imperative," which is also the topic of his newest book, Wages of Rebellion.
Hedges said there is still room for political movement in Canada, as seen this week in the Alberta provincial election.
The Spur Festival takes place May 7-10 in Winnipeg.
With files from Sarah Lawrynuik