The Volcano publishes news for working class and Indigenous peoples across British Columbia, Canada. We print between 8,000-10,000 paper copies of our issues and distribute them around the province. Our newspaper is free and we don’t paywall our online content – we rely entirely on your donations to continue operating. The Volcano is currently printed and published on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish Nations.
Editorial Collective: Listen Chen, Ivan Drury,
Isabel Krupp, and Laura Rose
About Us
From 2012 to 2014 we published as the Downtown East. The Downtown East was a print newspaper providing news and voices for the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood community in Vancouver, BC. The name was borrowed from the Downtown Eastside Resident Association (DERA) newspaper in the 1970s and ‘80s. Browse our articles from 2012-14.
In early 2015 The Volcano reorganized with a wider vision of reaching more communities facing displacement across BC. Our new name, The Volcano, refers to legacies of peoples’ struggles on these territories and to the proud tradition of telling stories as a way to stay alive. In 1911 Six Nations Mohawk writer E. Pauline Johnson published a version of a Squamish legend told to her by Joe Capilano (Sá7pelek). The story of the “Lost Island” tells of a Squamish prophet, anticipating the coming of settlers, who hid all the people’s “courage, fearlessness, and strength” on an island that sunk into the sea. This power was hidden, but was safe, “living forever.” In a collection of stories published in 2014, over a hundred years later, Wayde Compton, a writer and Vancouver Black community advocate, retold this story as a volcano exploding suddenly in the middle of Burrard Inlet, birthing new land out of old stories, free of Canada. For anyone who has lived in British Columbia for long, stories of an inevitable terrible earthquake should be familiar. The Volcano promises that shaking up society as it is can bring back the islands of courage we have been looking and waiting for. Read our editorial to the first issue for more on our name and history.
The Volcano is affiliated with the Red Braid Alliance for Decolonial Socialism, a revolutionary organization that fights to build working class and Indigenous power.
For questions, comments, or submissions of article ideas write to: editors@thevolcano.org.
We gratefully accept donations via PayPal, Patreon, or cheque.