Sandi L. Boucher (Red Thunderbolt of the Loon clan, Seine River First Nation) delivers a direct spoken message urging viewers to actively oppose racism, exclusion, and the mistreatment of marginalized and Indigenous people. She frames silence as lethal—arguing that inaction and minimizing perpetuate harm—and calls for vocal, structural change rather than passive complicity.
Chapters
So let's get this week's party started. I have a question for you. All seriousness for a second, just for a second. If I were to ask you to hate, if I told you I need you to hate, would you be willing to. Maybe. That's confusing. Probably is. We should probably talk about it. Sa. Foreign. Hi, everybody. It's Andy Boucher here once again. I'm Red Thunderbolt, woman of the Loon clan, a proud member of Seine River First Nation in Treaty 3 Territory in Northern Ontario. And this is not my usual angle. If someone had told me years ago that I would do a YouTube video asking people to hate, I would have told them they were nuts in the head. But during my break, I was catching up on some movie viewing and something I never do. I miss it. Definitely something I have to do in the future. And I forget what movie I was watching, but I came across a quote. It's a quote from Malcolm X. Here's the quote. What you do not hate, you will eventually tolerate. What you do not hate, you will eventually tolerate. So no surprise here. I need you to hate racism. No more silence. No more. It wasn't that bad. No more minimizing. I need you to hate it. I need you in joining me in creating spaces that have have no room for racist comments and attitudes. I need you to hate exclusion. All of those systems that were built that have excluded indigenous people pretty much since the settlers got here. And I need you to hate the crappy treatment of marginalized people. Why can we not have all the same benefits? Why can we not have equal access to health care? Why? Why can we not have the supports we need? That's human beings looking after human beings. And we need to hate anything less than that. Whoops. I just dropped a Post it note. Be right back. I am back. This one was so big, my index card spilled over into post it notes. So I need you to hate those things. And here's why. And this is going to be blunt and direct and true, Sandy red Thunderbolt style. Because silence kills. Silence kills and it kills us. Every single day, indigenous people lose their lives either to systems or circumstances or other people, because people didn't hate those situations enough to do something about them, to create them. Indigenous people are flowers trying to grow in soil doused in gasoline. You have heard me say this a million times. We need to hate the systems that have created that environment. And we need to vocally be part of changing them. Because if you do not hate that enough to speak up, then you got to own your place. As being part of the problem. That was blunt, but that's the truth. There is no option. And before you say anything else, talking about this silence and that silence kills. This is a generational thing. And I hope you realize that, because every now and then, I'm not sure if it's happened on YouTube, but it's definitely happened in my work over the years. Whether someone's responding to a blog post or whatever the case may be. And they always want to hang on to this illusion. We're talking about when the settlers first got here and first started organizing into governments. And these people want to believe that the everyday average settler. Where's my Elmer Fudd? I love that cartoon. That the everyday Edward settler had no idea how the indigenous people were being treated, had no idea about residential schools, that that was a government thing, that the average everyday settler, if they had known, they would have said something. I don't think you're that naive, are you? So, for one, they knew. Two things happened. Either they knew not two things happened. One of two things happened. Either they knew what the government was doing because they elected these people to represent them. They. They wanted the land that the indigenous people were getting moved off of. They wanted to keep those scary indigenous people away. And if that meant moving them and doing things to eliminate them, they either knew and agreed with it or knew and stayed silent. Both just as bad. So maybe you're not spitting out the racist garbage, but if you're not saying something when the other person does and you're in that room equally as guilty. Do you understand what I mean? So we got to hate on this. White silence is a huge problem when it comes to marginalized people. This is not just our fight. If you want to be proud of Canada, then we have to change these systems that no one should be proud of. The fact that in the words of Senator Murray Sinclair, that this country has to acknowledge what it once did to its most vulnerable people, the indigenous people, the indigenous children. I need you to start hating on these systems, on these structures, on these environments that have created way too many Indigenous deaths before their time. I always advocate for love, but sometimes what I need people to do is hate. Do not tell me that that is too strong of a word because that would be minimizing Indigenous pain. This is not the place where that's allowed my block delete works. I hope that makes sense. We got a week of a whole bunch of different videos. I hope you're going to enjoy it. I love you. Take care. Bye bye.
