LOUDCANARY is one interconnected journey through everything and nothing, and it’s the online home of Brian Awehali.
Consider the canary: a shock of yellow in the inky black and a chirp to warn you that you’re about to choke to death on coal gas. Now that’s a role, a job, a metaphor.
My work, which is most often about nature, capitalism and predictable disaster, is a bit like that small bird in a big dark hole, but it’s been published in dozens of print and online publications, including The Guardian, Z magazine, Counterpunch, The Progressive, Alternet, Earth Island Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Terrain, Tikkun, High Times, The Black World Today, ColorsNW, Native Nations Network, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Santa Fe New Mexican, Britannica.com, Kansan Uutisten Viikkolehti (People’s Weekly News, Finland), Ger (Denmark) and Third World Resurgence (Malaysia).
In 2004, I founded LiP: Informed Revolt, a magazine devoted to politics, culture, sex and humor, that I edited until 2007. LiP garnered awards from several local and national organizations and publications, including Utne and SXSW. During this period, several features I wrote, about the Cobell v. Norton “Indian Trust” case (in which the US government admitted in court to “misplacing” $137 billion owed to Native Americans), and about alternative energy development projects on Native American lands (“Native Energy Futures“) were recognized with awards from Project Censored and the Society of Professional Journalists.
“Funny, refreshing, intelligent and outrageous!”
– Historian and activist Howard Zinn
I also edited and designed Tipping the Sacred Cow (AK Press, 2007), an anthology of LiP’s best material. Contributors included Vandana Shiva, Tim Wise, Winona LaDuke, Lisa Jervis, Dr. Bruce Levine, Mary Roach, Michael Eric Dyson, Timothy Kreider and Christopher Hitchens (pre-Iraq War), among many, many others. [Full PDF of Tipping the Sacred Cow available as of May 2011]
In addition to my freelance writing and work on LiP, I was also Books (and later, Technology) Editor for the online magazine of Encyclopædia Britannica. For six months in 2002, I worked in Seattle as Interim Executive Editor for Sea Kayaker magazine. Then, in 2003-4, I worked as Web Editor for the Santa Fe New Mexican, one of the last independent newspapers in the United States, where I learned that being independent or family-owned doesn’t mean you’re actually any good. (My mistake).
As time between my primary pursuits allowed, I also contributed my editorial and design expertise to the Chicago-based Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., the world’s oldest continuously operating radical labor press, the Western Prison Project, The Great Books Foundation, The Nader/LaDuke Green Party candidacies of 1996 and 2000, and several Pacific Northwest-based non-profit environmental organizations.
I divide my time between Oakland, CA and Austin, TX, volunteering part-time on an organic farm, bicycling, raising Delilah (the newest family member, right, and below), playing music, working on feature assignments, and inching towards the completion of my first novel, an arty ecological tale for young adults of all ages.
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CONTACTING ME
You may contact me by email here. I am currently available for freelance journalism and photography assignments.
“Awehali,” one of several variant (romanized) Cherokee spellings for “eagle,” is drawn from the name my great-great-grandmother Lucy Hawk Daylight gave to me when I was six and she was 86. I adopted it in 2001 for my public life. My forebears are Irish, Scottish, Quapaw and Cherokee, and I am a tribal member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Ani-tsiskwa (bird clan).
