Lynne Sladky/AP

Vanessa Correa (left) and Gigi Fiske (right) pass out gallons of milk at a food distribution held by the Farm Share food bank in Miami on July 20, 2022. Long lines are back at food banks around the U.S. as many working Americans overwhelmed by inflation look for help feeding their families.

From the grocery store to the electronics retailer to the car dealership, Americans ask the same question: When will inflation go back down to normal?

The answer is hard, frustratingly so, because the economy looks and acts a lot like a playground seesaw. Although it’s constantly in search of balance, occasionally a bully jumps on one end, tipping it toward recession or high inflation. In most periods, there’s plenty of time to counteract each bully. Sometimes, though, there’s a run of them, one right after the other, making balance almost impossible. That’s what happened in the 1970s and that’s what is happening today.

Today the economy, more globalized than it was back then, is in flux due to everything from geopolitical tensions and the pandemic to environmental stresses like drought. Curbing inflation now by boosting the supply of goods is easier said than done. 

“We seem to be in a world where there is less geopolitical stability, where you’re more prone to having sustained shocks to commodities,” says Jonathan Millar, senior U.S. economist at Barclays investment bank in New York. “And that’s just a world that is very challenging for the Federal Reserve.”

On Wednesday, the central bank is widely expected to raise short-term interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point – a hefty hike and the second such increase in a row. By raising lending rates to make economic activity more expensive, the Fed intends to slow the economy enough to beat inflation but not enough to send it crashing into recession. That’s a difficult tightrope act, especially when some economists believe the United States is in a recession already.

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AARP, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, AAA, Amazon, Jewel-Osco, and Edmunds

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Laurent Belsie and Jacob Turcotte/Staff

It’s just the latest high-wire jump. Already in the 2020s, the central bank – think of the Fed as a playground monitor – has had to negotiate a pandemic and lockdowns around the world, a short but sharp recession, record amounts of government stimulus, and an invasion of Ukraine and subsequent boycotts of Russian energy. These shocks have led to shortages, supply-chain bottlenecks, and boycotts that have tested the resilience of producers and consumers worldwide. “If anything, we have done better than we expected in the last couple of years,” says Diego Comin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College.

Up to now, consumers could take some solace in the idea that, as bad as inflation is now, the 1970s was worse. But the more researchers crunch the numbers, the more this period is looking like the 1970s. And that’s not good news for long-suffering families.

When Americans complain about the inflationary ’70s, what they’re really talking about is the period from 1973 to 1980, when inflation peaked early on after the first Arab oil embargo, fell somewhat, then spiked even higher after the second oil embargo. In 1980, for five months in a row, year-over-year inflation stayed above 14%. (By comparison, inflation last month hit 9.1%.)

Then the Fed did something extraordinary. It drove interest rates so high that inflation fell 11 percentage points over three years – a signal achievement, even if it took a deep recession to accomplish it. But there’s a caveat. The government measured inflation, specifically housing inflation, differently than it does now.

Measured the new way, that 11-point decline looks more like a 5-point fall – or about the same decline needed today to get inflation back to some semblance of normality, according to a new study for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Andrew Harnik/AP

A monitor displays a graph showing average retail gas prices falling since June as Council of Economic Advisers member Jared Bernstein speaks at a press briefing at the White House in Washington, July 18, 2022.

There’s another measurement problem: core inflation. The government reports overall inflation and then strips out volatile food and energy prices to describe the more stable, long-term rise in prices: core inflation. That worked well in the 1970s, but in the past two years the relationship between core and overall inflation has broken down, according to Laurence Ball, an economist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Alternative measures of the core work better and, while they were relatively quiescent six months ago, they’ve climbed steadily, suggesting that high inflation is spreading far more broadly in the economy than just a few sectors.

How long all this will last is anybody’s guess. Dr. Millar of Barclays is optimistic. Barring another economic shock, so many sectors are decelerating that we are already at or near peak inflation, he says. Gas prices, for example, have been falling for a month.

Others are not so optimistic.

“It’s too soon, too optimistic to say we’ve peaked,” says Lindsey Piegza, chief economist at Stifel Financial, a wealth management and investment banking firm. “The Fed at this point is focused on inflation, but that’s not going to alleviate anything from the supply side.”

The central bank is doing its best to tamp down demand for goods and services in order to bring the economy back into balance, but it has no control over supply. And the global economy, which in recent decades did adjust supply relatively quickly, is moving more sluggishly now. Geopolitics and pandemic shutdowns are drowning out the purely economic signals.

That measurement change in housing – using rent instead of mortgage rates to determine costs – also suggests that high inflation could last a while. “Housing makes up 40% of the core CPI measure, and we think that that measure is only going to keep rising for the next 12 months,” says Judd Cramer, author of the NBER study, a lecturer at Harvard, and former staff economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration. “So it could be the case that the core CPI has not yet peaked.”

Consumers are not helpless in all this. They’re showing signs of coping with high prices just as their counterparts in the 1970s did: Buying cheaper goods and cutting out purchases they don’t absolutely need. Since March, for example, traffic to full-service restaurants has fallen while fast-food visits are increasing. Discount stores report fewer discretionary purchases and more one-stop shopping because gasoline is so high.

That said, the Fed has two big advantages over its counterparts in the 1970s. First, they’ve learned from the 1970s playbook and understand far more about how inflation works. Second, the Fed has far more credibility today. In the 1970s, the central bank acted in such a wishy-washy fashion that consumers and businesses alike expected high inflation to stay. Today, they expect inflation to fall back to normal levels. 

“That is something that’s very good for the Fed: They don’t have to break the expectations” on Wednesday, says Dr. Cramer. Instead, they just have to carry out what markets expect them to. 

 “The U.S. economy is in a better position to deal with these shocks than we were in the ’70s,” Dr. Cramer adds.

Hassene Dridi/AP

With Tunisia's democracy hanging in the balance, a woman votes in Ariana, near Tunis, July 25, 2022. Turnout was low as Tunisians voted on a new constitution granting near-unlimited powers to the president.

Democracy in Tunisia, the Arab world’s last hopeful holdout since the revolutions of 2011, was dealt a crushing defeat today – not with the bang of a military coup, but with a whimper of apathy at the ballot box.

Anticipating the constitutional referendum Monday set to tear up their democratic system in favor of a presidency with near-unlimited powers, many Tunisians merely shrugged.

“We spent too much time and energy talking the last 11 years, and left no energy to work to change things for the better. Sometimes a dictatorship is just better,” says Hamzeh Salem, a Tunis cafe owner and political independent in his 30s who, like many, was abstaining from the vote.

“We have a lot of freedoms, but we didn’t get a better life. Freedom and liberties mean nothing if you can’t live comfortably.”

With no minimum-vote threshold required for the referendum’s approval, and many boycotting, it was widely believed the authoritarian constitution drawn up by populist President Kais Saied passed.

The new system replaces the most progressive constitution in the region, a product of two years of consultations that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015.

Articles codified women’s rights, youth rights, and rights for people with disabilities; protect against discrimination of all forms; and guarantee “the right to a healthy and balanced environment and the right to participation in the protection of the climate.”

Yet despite winning plaudits from the West and serving as an inspiration to Arabs struggling against oppression, the democratic system simply did not address decades-old inequality, corruption, unemployment, and crumbling public services, Tunisians say. Political parties only looked out for their own interests, they claim. 

The widespread apathy greeting such an authoritarian relapse speaks to a core question confronting Tunisian citizens and supporters of democracy worldwide: What is the value of liberty without socioeconomic equality and prosperity?

Zoubeir Souissi/Reuters

Tunisians take part in a protest against populist President Kais Saied's referendum on a new constitution, in Tunis, Tunisia, July 23, 2022.

Arab democrats and rights activists across the region who once viewed Tunisia as a guiding light now see a cautionary tale emerging from the North African state: Unaddressed, citizens’ economic grievances can unravel hard-won democratic gains, creating a back door for authoritarianism’s return.

“What rights am I enjoying right now? Only the right to vote,” says Dhia Hammami, a former supporter of Mr. Saied who said he has given up on the political process.

“Where is my right to decent medical care and social security? Where is my right to free movement and transportation? Where is my right to security and safety? The state is not offering me this.”

Populism to authoritarianism

Monday’s vote was viewed by many as the crowning victory for President Saied, codifying the emergency powers he seized in 2021 – ostensibly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic – in what was described at the time as a “constitutional coup.”

Mr. Saied, who was popularly elected in 2019, was determined to overhaul a post-revolution system in which a parliament-backed government and the popularly elected president shared powers, an arrangement prone to policymaking deadlock.

But rather than launch a national dialogue or include political groups in the drafting of a new charter, the former constitutional law lecturer instead named a small committee of legal experts in June to do the work.

Mr. Saied then surprised Tunisians once again July 1, when, rather than forwarding the committee’s resulting draft for a referendum, he put forward his own. Committee chair Sadok Belaid denounced the document as “completely different” from the experts’ draft and said it could “pave the way for a disgraceful dictatorial regime.”

Under Mr. Saied’s tailor-made constitution, the president heads the armed forces and has the authority to form and dismiss governments, dissolve parliament, call for elections, and appoint judges.

There is no check on the president’s powers or mechanism to impeach the executive, and a loophole allows the president to serve for life.

Beyond the power grab, the draft also imperils individual freedoms.

Slim Abid/Tunisian Presidency/AP

Tunisian President Kais Saied and his wife, Ichraf Chebil, leave the polling station after they cast their votes in Tunis, Tunisia, July 25, 2022. Mr. Saied was popularly elected but is seeking near-unlimited powers through the referendum on a new constitution.

“There is no clear definition of human rights or a civil democratic state in this proposed constitution,” says Wahid Ferchichi, honorary president and co-founder of the Association for the Defense of Individual Liberties, one of dozens of Tunisian human rights and civil rights organizations that flourished after the 2011 revolution. 

“The only person who can interpret this constitution is Kais Saied himself. He can change its meaning based on his needs of the day.”

The move has been met with a smattering of protests that continued Sunday and Monday, led by hundreds of Tunisian activists who lived under former dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

But most Tunisians were staying away from the polls altogether, disinterested both in Mr. Saied’s project and in saving a democratic system they say has failed to work for them.

Worn down by inflation, currency devaluation, and food shortages, Tunisians are concerned instead with economic relief. Turnout for the referendum was projected to reach 15%.

Among the small, vocal faction supporting the new constitution are Saied supporters who believe a strong presidency is key to turning around a deteriorating economy, tackling unemployment, and curbing corruption.

Then there are those Tunisian liberals willing to trade away their democratic gains in order to sweep Islamists out of government and public life. A similar bargain was struck in 2013 by Egyptians and strongman President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who, after overthrowing the Muslim Brotherhood there, cracked down on free expression and political activity and jailed tens of thousands – including liberals.

Politicians and rights activists warn of what could come next; Mr. Saied has vowed to pass laws dissolving political parties and allowing the president powers to dissolve civil society organizations and ban them from meeting, issuing reports, or receiving foreign funding.

Then there are the crackdowns. Police beat and pepper-sprayed activists protesting peacefully in downtown Tunis Friday, attacking the head of the journalists association and arresting leading LGBTQ rights activist Saif Ayadi, who reports an uptick in police raids since Mr. Saied’s power grab. 

“We who advocate for legal rights are facing revenge attacks, intimidation, and threats by the police – particularly those of us who advocate for queer rights,” says Mr. Ayadi, a social worker at Damj, an organization that advocates for LGBTQ Tunisians. “I fear for my safety, for my organization, and particularly those who come to us for assistance.”

“Civil society in jeopardy”

Around the region, political and constitutional reform activists have consistently cited the codification of rights in Tunisia’s democratic constitution as inspiration.

Crucially, the 2014 constitution included a “limitation clause” constraining how far the “civil and democratic state” can curb personal and collective freedoms for the greater good, such as in an emergency, the first of its kind in the Arab world.

Zoubeir Souissi/Reuters

A woman distributes stickers urging Tunisians to vote yes in a referendum for a new constitution, in Tunis, Tunisia, July 23, 2022.

Despite Tunisia’s “antagonistic political system prone to deadlock,” the 2014 constitution “was a very progressive way of looking at rights and protected civil society as a product of the system,” says Zaid Al-Ali, a Tunis-based expert on Arab constitutions.

“If this new proposed constitution were to be adopted, it would make it very easy for this new system to curb all rights. It would immediately put civil society in jeopardy,” says Mr. Al-Ali, author of the 2021 book “Arab Constitutionalism: The Coming Revolution.”

Suddenly at stake are freedoms and protections that Tunisians have become accustomed to, but some are willing to sacrifice.

“You can speak freely in Tunisia, but these freedoms didn’t translate to benefits on the ground,” says Abdulkhalek Essid, a Tunis taxi driver in his 60s who describes himself as “unsure” over Mr. Saied’s changes.

“Unemployment is widespread; the dinar has lost its value; prices have increased; youths are migrating illegally and dying. We have liberty, but the situation has deteriorated.”

Other Tunisians say they are simply worn down from five elections in the past decade.

Tunisia’s civil society has been campaigning across the country, urging disillusioned citizens to not give up on their democracy and to resist Mr. Saied’s authoritarian project.

“We tell people: Imagine socioeconomic rights without the freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of education, freedom of media, freedom of association,” says Mr. Ferchichi of the Association for the Defense of Individual Liberties.

“It will prevent anyone from improving the socioeconomic situation, from monitoring the government’s policies, or even complaining about the socioeconomic situation.”

Cautionary tale

Tunisia has been the last refuge in the Arab world for the free exchange of ideas, serving as a regional hub for human rights and democracy work. Activists, journalists, and lawyers across the Arab world continue to come to Tunis to train, learn from the Tunisian experience, and apply lessons back home.

“People have always looked to Tunisia as what can go right, how you can bring in democracy after these really sizable protests. All the progressive change they achieved encouraged Arab democracy activists,” says Kholood Khair, founding director of Confluence Advisory, a Khartoum-based think-tank working on the transition in Sudan, where grassroots activists continue to push for democracy two years after toppling strongman Omar al-Bashir.

“I think it will be a cautionary tale now of what could go wrong even when the military is not heavily involved: You still might not get the democracy you wanted.”

Others, such as tour guide Lassad Chebi, say they refuse to let their children grow up in a dictatorship. They urge fellow Tunisians to safeguard their freedoms.

“Liberty will result in prosperity in the long term,” Mr. Chebi says, “if we can keep it.”

Correspondent Ahmed Ellali contributed to this report from Tunis.

Freedom of press is guaranteed by the Philippines’ Constitution. Yet the island nation has become one of the most dangerous places in the world to exercise that right.

Journalists endured verbal abuse, online attacks, libel charges, and physical harassment for years under the strongman rule of Rodrigo Duterte. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines reports that at least 23 journalists have been killed since 2016, and many expect the new administration will be worse. 

Both President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., son and namesake of the famous dictator, and Vice President Sarah Duterte, daughter of Mr. Duterte, come from political families that are openly hostile toward journalists. It remains to be seen whether they will build on their parents’ legacies of cracking down on press freedom, but the past few weeks haven’t been encouraging. A few days after Mr. Marcos assumed the presidency on June 30, the Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa for cyber libel, marking the latest in a series of blows to the acclaimed journalist and her embattled publication Rappler. She now faces nearly seven years in prison.

It’s one thing to enshrine a freedom in the constitution – it’s another to ensure that freedom in practice. In courts and newsrooms across the country, journalists are fighting for their right to work freely. Still, experts worry about how the press would fare under six more years of persecution, and the impact this all has on Philippine democracy.

Danilo Arao, an associate professor of journalism at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, says the magnitude of harassment and intimidation is producing a “chilling effect” and hinders the Philippine press from “performing the highest normative standards of journalism.” 

“If this continues, you’ll end up with docile and servile people who favor political power, rather than adversarial journalists,” he says.

Defending press freedom in court

Ms. Ressa, who is also a U.S. citizen, is facing seven active cases before the Philippine courts, all filed during the time of Mr. Duterte. 

She says she hasn’t given up “hope that these next six years will be slightly better,” because the Marcoses “are more sophisticated [than the Dutertes] in some ways.” But she’s ready to fight if things get worse. Despite losing her recent appeal against the cyber libel conviction, Ms. Ressa’s legal team considers the ruling an opportunity for the Supreme Court to examine the constitutionality of cyber libel and the continuing criminalization of libel. 

In a statement, Ms. Ressa’s lawyer Amal Clooney said she hopes the high court will “restore the country’s constitutional commitment to freedom of speech. And I hope that the new Marcos administration will show the world that it is strong enough to withstand scrutiny and allow a free press.”

Ms. Ressa says the string of cases against Rappler and the onslaught of attacks against the Philippine media aimed to “make us voluntarily stay quiet, to voluntarily give up our rights.” 

“We’re not going to do that in Rappler. I’ve said this repeatedly over the last six years – and apparently, for another six years: We’re not going to go away,” she says.

Alternative news site Bulatlat.com, one of 27 websites that were blocked by the National Telecommunications Commission during Mr. Duterte’s final weeks in office, has also brought the battle to the courts.

Mark Saludes

Ronalyn Olea, managing editor of the alternative news site Bulatlat.com, checks the internet for news updates at a coffee shop in Quezon City, Philippines, on July 18, 2022. Bulatlat.com was one of 27 websites blocked in June by the National Telecommunications Commission, which cited terror laws.

“The memorandum order clearly violates our constitutional freedoms of the press, speech, and expression,” says Ronalyn Olea, managing editor of Bulatlat.com. “It does not just constitute censorship; it also deprived us of due process of law.” 

The site is still blocked, but Ms. Olea hopes the court will rule “in favor of press freedom and the public’s right to information” at a preliminary injunction set for Aug. 2.

In peril: public’s right to know

News organizations in the Philippines face a plethora of threats that make it difficult to deliver information to the public. Several outlets including CNN Philippines and Rappler have been targets of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, a form of internet censorship in which attackers crash a website for hours or days by flooding it with traffic. 

Last year, DDoS attacks on Bulatlat.com and Altermidya.net – another alternative news site blocked in June by the National Telecommunications Commission – were traced to an IP address assigned to the Philippine army. No one has been held accountable.

Experts say alternative and community publications, which are small and scattered in nature, are especially vulnerable to “red-tagging,” in which authorities open up specific reporters or publications to harassment by linking them to communist or rebel groups. Rhea Padilla, national coordinator of Alternative Media Network, says the government has tagged journalists “for publishing stories that depict the people’s struggle and stimulate critical public discourse.”

Jonathan de Santos, president of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, calls these attacks “a disservice to the Filipino people.”

“They want people to become blinded followers,” he says.

Search for solidarity

Over the past six years, there is a growing solidarity among journalists amid the intensifying attack on press freedom. Mr. de Santos says many individual journalists, especially the young ones, “are setting aside competition to strengthen the fight against disinformation and confront all kinds of attacks on press freedom.” 

“However, we still have to translate this kind of solidarity among newsrooms and media organizations. We need to push back as one industry,” he says. 

For Ms. Ressa, winning the war against media repression requires winning the trust and confidence of the Filipino public, who shaped the foundation of press freedom in the country. 

When Ferdinand Marcos Sr. imposed martial law in 1972, he immediately ordered the military to seize major media outlets’ assets. The closure of trusted news outlets and murder of adversarial journalists eventually gave birth to the “mosquito press,” a collective name for alternative publications that criticized the dictatorship. They were said to be “small, but have a stinging bite.” Later, the 1986 People Power Revolt that ousted the senior Mr. Marcos also helped restore press freedom, enshrining the right in the 1987 constitution. It’s a history that Ms. Ressa hopes Filipino people will remember going into this new era.

“The point is, if only one stands up, it’s easy to slap them down. But if a thousand stand up, then it becomes harder. So it’s not just journalists you have to turn to. It is also Filipinos,” she says. “This is a time when we have to stand up for our rights.”

Congregants filter through the doors for Sunday mass at St. Kateri Tekakwitha Aboriginal Catholic Parish in Winnipeg. Instead of holy water, they place their hands atop smoking cedar and sage to smudge before entering the church.

The Rev. François Paradis, wearing a moosehide stole, welcomes them in English, dotted with Ojibwe. Later, the priest leads them as they turn to face the four cardinal points and recite the Lord’s Prayer.

Blending elements of ceremony with Catholic mass is a natural expression of faith for many Indigenous Catholics across Canada. But it’s not without ambivalence, after more than a century of Canada’s violent assimilation policies – carried out by the Roman Catholic Church, among others – which cast Indigenous spirituality as “work of the devil,” says Father Paradis.

As Pope Francis visits First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples across Canada this week in penance for the worst of those polices – the abuse of Indigenous children at Catholic-run residential schools that didn’t close down completely until the 1990s – he has elicited a range of emotion. Some view the trip as too little and far too late; others say they’ve waited their entire lives to hear “I’m sorry.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The Rev. François Paradis, a Métis priest, wears a stole made of moosehide and beaded by Indigenous women as he conducts Sunday mass.

His trip here resonates widely, for non-faithful and non-Indigenous too, as Canada comes to terms with the injustices of violent colonialism, particularly after hundreds of potential unmarked graves of children have been found in the past year on or near former residential school grounds. But for many Indigenous Catholics, an acknowledgement of that historic suffering is a crucial step in the path toward forgiveness and acceptance.

“For some people ... they need to hear the words ‘I’m sorry,’ ” says Father Paradis, who was the parish priest at St. Kateri from 2003 to 2007 and whose main ministry today is Returning to Spirit, a nonprofit that runs Reconciliation workshops. “While there cannot be healing without the pain being acknowledged, first of all, by the victim who has to be able to voice it, clarify it, and name it, when it is acknowledged by the perpetrators, it is a double blessing.”

Pope Francis arrived in the western province of Alberta on Sunday, and is scheduled to travel eastward to Quebec on Wednesday and north to Iqaluit, the capital of the Arctic territory of Nunavut, on Friday. He has described it as “a pilgrimage of penitence” for the residential schools system, which Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concluded in 2015 amounted to “cultural genocide.” About 150,000 Indigenous children attended the boarding schools. Some 60% of them were run by the Catholic Church.  

The visit follows a historic meeting in the Vatican between the pope and delegations of Indigenous survivors of residential schools in the spring where he apologized. But his words today were more sweeping. The TRC had also called for an apology on Canadian soil. 

“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” the pope told thousands who gathered in Maskwacis, Alberta, near the former Ermineskin Indian Residential School Monday. “I ... recognize that, looking to the past, no effort to beg pardon and to seek to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient,” he said as he addressed the crowd in a powwow circle, “and that, looking ahead to the future, no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Andrew Carrier, vice president of the Winnipeg Métis Association, gets emotional recounting the abuse he suffered at a residential school, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, May 12, 2022. Mr. Carrier is a survivor of sexual abuse by a priest, and physical and verbal assaults by nuns.

Andrew Carrier, the minister for residential schools with the Manitoba Métis Federation, was part of the first delegation in Rome. He says he hopes this week’s visit brings solace to Catholic survivors, as it did for him as he shared his story with the pope this spring. “I am a survivor of being sexually molested by a priest when I was 7 years old,” says Mr. Carrier. He says he spent most of his life suffering in silence, after the nuns at his day school in Winnipeg failed to address the assault and his parents failed to acknowledge it.

“Speaking to the pope, I felt relief after years of pain,” he says. “People don’t realize the trauma of an incident like that, how it impacts your whole life, how it makes you wary about who you are and why you’re a victim. Speaking with the pope, I finally felt that I was heard. This apology meant everything.”

For pope watchers like Annie Selak, an expert in feminist ecclesiology who has studied papal apologies at Georgetown University, the visit is “hugely significant” because it is centered around listening, she says: an important step in restorative justice and Reconciliation. “When you truly listen to someone else, there is the opportunity for conversion. And I think we’ve seen mercy animate Pope Francis’s pontificate,” she says. “I think the potential for healing and changes is as high as the potential will ever be in the Catholic Church.”

Vatican Media/­Divisione Produzione Fotografica/Reuters

Pope Francis meets with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit leaders and survivors of residential schools in Maskwacis, Alberta, July 25, 2022.

The visit has sparked anger and backlash, too. Demands have grown alongside the visit for reparations, for more transparency, for perpetrators to be held accountable, and for the pope to go much farther and denounce the church’s 15th century “doctrine of discovery,” which justified the colonization and conversion of Indigenous lands and people across the Americas. 

Mr. Carrier says he hopes the apology helps revive the church among Indigenous people in Canada. According to Canadian census figures from a 2011 household survey, 36% of Indigenous people identify as Catholic. 

But for Chantal Fiola, a University of Winnipeg associate professor who authored “Returning to Ceremony: Spirituality in Manitoba Métis Communities,” one of the most important things the Catholic Church could do is counter the shame – that continues to this day – that keeps Indigenous people disconnected from traditional spirituality.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Chantal Fiola, a Métis author and professor at the University of Winnipeg, wrote a book about Métis spirituality and the disconnection experienced by her community to their spiritual customs due to European colonialism and Christianity.

Like many Métis, Dr. Fiola grew up Catholic. She sang in the choir at her church and was an altar girl. But she says as a woman, as an Indigenous person, and identifying as queer, she didn’t feel supported in Catholicism and left faith – until she found her way to Indigenous spirituality. “When I grew up faith was such a big part of my life ... and so that was missing for a long time,” she says. But too many are afraid to explore sacred ceremony like the sun dance because for years they practiced covertly in the “backyard.”

It’s not a zero-sum game, though. “Métis spirituality exists on a continuum with Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, on one end and traditional Indigenous spirituality on the other,” she says. “And then there’s the infinite, beautiful, syncretic blends in the middle.”

That’s a fusion Beatrice Chartrand, a congregant at St. Kateri, found only later in her life. She was born Métis in small town Manitoba and always felt Indigenous, she says, but was told to hide and deny it at the same time she was raised a devout Catholic. Today she is proudly Métis; at church she joined the drumming circle. “They asked me to join, even though I’m not musically inclined at all,” she says.

The pope’s apology, she says, is without a doubt too late. “We’ve been waiting for this moment a long, long time,” she says. “But it’s a start.”

Christine M’Lot grew up feeling her culture was invisible.

Throughout most of her public education in Winnipeg, the Anishinaabe educator says she saw almost no representation of Indigenous voices, save for a single book assignment her senior year. It wasn’t until university that she had her first Indigenous teacher and was introduced to modern Indigenous culture – beyond the tepees and nomadic lifestyles of centuries ago, where her early social studies had stopped.

Finally seeing contemporary Indigenous culture reflected back unlocked questions she didn’t know she had, even within her own family – “because you don’t know what you don’t know,” she says. It set her on a career path that would put her on the front lines of “Indigenizing education” in Canada. 

Today Ms. M’Lot, a high school teacher in downtown Winnipeg, designs classes and projects that introduce students to Indigenous culture via math or coding, architecture or essaying. But more broadly, these lessons introduce students to an Indigenous “way” of learning. Looking at the educational possibilities today for Indigenous content, she describes it as “resurgence,” fittingly the title of her new textbook.

“Resurgence” is an annotated anthology of contemporary Indigenous writers and artists, and it twins the content with a teacher’s guide that integrates Indigenous styles of pedagogy. That includes everything from learning circles that can be adapted to any age group to personal reflections by Ms. M’Lot and co-editor Katya Adamov Ferguson to inspire Indigenous methods of learning through storytelling.

“This has the ability to transform Indigenous education because of their willingness to both model themselves engaging with the text in a more holistic way,” says Sara Florence Davidson, an assistant professor of education at Simon Fraser University and co-author of “Potlatch as Pedagogy: Learning Through Ceremony.” “What they’ve done ... can be done with other texts. And so my hope is that once educators work with this text they will have an example of what is possible.”

It was the book by Beatrice Mosionier called “In Search of April Raintree,” a Manitoba classic and story of two Métis sisters and their search for identity after being sent to foster care, that Ms. M’Lot finally read her senior year. Many friends went through their entire schooling without reading any Indigenous content. They learned nothing of residential schooling, even though many were intergenerational survivors. 

Ms. M’Lot’s own grandmother testified before Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established in 2008 to examine the lasting impact of the country’s residential schools for Indigenous children. She recalls feeling lost at the time. “This big thing was happening. My grandma was testifying in front of people. But I didn’t really fully understand it, even though I was in high school and could have totally understood it at that time.” That story of silence is repeated across North America.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Christine M’Lot’s anthology “Resurgence” encourages students to reflect on the works of Indigenous writers and artists and to connect them to their own lives.

Indigenizing education

In 2015, the commission put out a request for proposals to bring a more complete curriculum of Indigenous issues to Canadian students. As a result, the educational landscape has started to change in the past seven years, says Linda Isaac, the national director of Indigenous education, equity, and inclusion for Nelson, one of the country’s largest publishers of educational materials. 

“We spent so many years where anything in history was about us without us,” says Ms. Isaac, a member of Alderville First Nation in Ontario. “Our textbooks were written by non-Indigenous writers, and illustrations were done by non-Indigenous people. And so you got the colonial perspective and only the colonial perspective.”

A former school principal in Toronto, today Ms. Isaac meets with Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators, community leaders, and elders across Canada, and incorporates their perspectives and styles into Nelson’s school resources in a way that makes them “authentic and culturally relevant,” she says, “and it comes from the ground up.”

A sense of empathy and justice drives this curriculum work, but so do awe and resilience, says Ms. M’Lot. While Canadian education has made strides in grappling with the truth – particularly after the revelations last year of potentially hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential schools – so much of the learning has focused on the painful past. “I don’t want to just focus on the trauma of it, but on the beauty and resilience,” she says.

And that has been a hallmark of much of her busy consultancy life that she juggles with a full-time teaching job. When she was asked to develop a math curriculum for the Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology and its Indigenous carpentry program, she sought out a knowledge keeper known for her birch bark baskets. She attended a birch harvest, filling her notebook with ideas for lessons on unit and space, including measuring the circumference of the tree to calculate how much bark will be needed – ensuring to never take more than necessary.

In another project, she worked with Your Voice Is Power, begun as a hip-hop coding and entrepreneur program from the United States. The group brought her on board to “Indigenize” it for a Canadian audience. Students analyze song lyrics from Indigenous hip-hop artists, and then create their own song about a social justice topic.

“Anti-racist work”

For the textbook, the contributors were given an open assignment to present what they so chose – as long as it encapsulated “resurgence.”

Dr. Davidson, one of the contributors, considered the theme for a long time before settling on an essay titled “Beyond the Silence” about her experience painting a totem pole made by her father, Robert Davidson, during the pandemic. It was a continuation of “We Were Once Silenced,” which was raised in 1969 to celebrate a potlatch, a foundational ceremony of the Haida people that the Canadian government had banned in 1884.

Her essay talks about the responsibility she felt, particularly after losing her brother, to keep her family’s knowledge alive. “I had this really transformational experience of painting the pole,” she explains in an interview. “And then when my brother died, I went back to that experience and thought about it differently because so much of my father’s knowledge and expertise as an artist had been passed on to my brother. What happens with all of that knowledge? ... How do we make sure that it gets carried forward? And how do we carry this on so that it’s possible in future generations? And what is our responsibility in this particular moment to ensure that resurgence is possible?”

Students reading her essay are then guided to connect the text to themselves, the larger community, and what most interests them. It moves the classroom away from what Ms. M’Lot calls “factory-style education,” where a teacher disseminates the knowledge and the students listen in classes organized in silos.

“I think that’s something that non-Indigenous teachers struggle with the most,” she says. “They can be experts on content. But it’s the process that I think is difficult to teach.”

“I think learning about Indigenous topics in an Indigenous way can facilitate anti-racist work. I think when you gain empathy for people it’s really hard to discriminate against them and to hold racist beliefs,” she adds. “But I just want to really normalize [this style] for people. I’d like this not to be Indigenous education, but just education.”

Reuters

Abderraouf Arfaoui displays grains of wheat in June after the harvest on his farm in Krib, Tunisia. The North African country imports more than half of the wheat it consumes annually from Ukraine and Russia.

In recent years, Russia has turned increasingly to Africa to compete with China and the United States as a global power broker. But its war in Ukraine has become a setback to its ambitions. Spikes in global commodity prices since the invasion began have compounded a food crisis in Africa, where more than 47 million people were already facing acute malnutrition from drought. Eighteen African countries import more than 50% of their annual wheat from Ukraine and Russia. One in 4 Africans now has too little to eat.

On Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov embarked on a four-nation trip across Africa to offer reassurance. Russia and Ukraine reached a deal last Friday to allow grain ships to pass safely through the Black Sea. African and Middle Eastern countries, Mr. Lavrov promised, would soon receive their full annual grain orders. Prior to his departure, he sent African newspapers an essay blaming food shortages on Western sanctions and reminding Africans that Moscow supported their movements to overthrow colonialism.

That message may not resonate as widely as Mr. Lavrov hopes. Moscow’s main point of resistance? Africa’s youth. Seventy percent of Africans are under the age of 30. They are the most educated generation in African history and have no direct memory of life under foreign or minority rule.

A new survey conducted in 15 nations shows that young Africans welcome foreign investment that advances development and creates economic opportunity. It also found that they are particularly skeptical of outside interference that undermines democracy or exploits the continent’s natural resources.

“African youth see equality of all citizens under the law, freedom of speech, and free and fair elections as the most important pillars of democracy,” states the African Youth Survey 2022, published last month by the South Africa-based Ichikowitz Family Foundation. “The era [of] one man, one vote, once, is long gone on this continent.”

Unlike previous generations raised during the Cold War and final throes of colonial or minority rule, most Africans today grew up in a new era marked by the continent’s gradual embrace of democratic ideals and the rapid growth of Chinese investment.

Russia’s entry of late has had a contrary thrust. Military contractors tied to the Kremlin now operate in more than a dozen countries and have been accused of human rights violations. Moscow seeks a naval base on the Red Sea. It is now the second-biggest arms dealer in Africa (behind the U.S.). Mr. Lavrov’s itinerary reflects Moscow’s cultivation of autocratic or military rulers. That agenda raises alarms on a continent where 74% of young Africans say democracy is always the preferred form of government and 75% express concern about political instability.

While African leaders have sought to stay neutral on Russia’s invasion, many agree that the pandemic and the economic impact of the war underscore Africa’s need for self-sufficiency. Africa needs its own investment strategy, argues Joseph Sany, vice president of the Africa Center at the U.S. Institute of Peace, “to help build a democracy-driven economic power that can mitigate Russian or Chinese coercive influence.”

A new generation of Africans determined to forge their own prosperity agrees. “Seven in 10 youth say that they are concerned about the influence of foreign powers on their country,” notes Chido Cleopatra Mpemba, special envoy of youth for the African Union. “Our generation wants to craft our own future ourselves.” As Mr. Lavrov travels across Africa, that message may be worth heeding.