TLC & TBay's History of Racism

Hi everybody, my name is Sandy Boucher and welcome back to the Learning Curve. As always, this show is about sharing information. Not opinions, but information. So that when you go into those meetings, go into those coffee shops or make those decisions, you have the knowledge and the information and to have an informed discussion. And today I'm excited to bring yet another amazing guest into your home to share that kind of information with you. Today we're going to be talking to Professor Travis Hay. He's a Canadian historian and he has taken special interest in the inquest into the student deaths here in Thunder Bay. I had a chance to sit in and listen to Travis do a presentation recently and what touched me is the fact that everything he shares is fact based. It's the exact reason we created this TV show. So as always, grab your coffee, get into that comfy chair and I'll meet you back here in a few minutes as together we walk through the learning curve. Hi everybody and welcome back to the Learning Curve. Once again, I'm Sandy Boucher and today, as mentioned, our guest is Professor Travis Hay. Hi, how you doing?

I'm good. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be in this chair. Lots of awesome people have been here before.

Thank you. Yes. Because you've seen the show, you've watched past episodes. I love hearing that. That's amazing.

I'm a viewer. I'm a viewer.

You're a viewer. So thank you for coming out today. We have such an important topic to talk about, but before we do that, as always, I'd like to identify the person. So, and this is the part I absolutely love because I invite people either I know really well or I just met. And I always end up learning something new that I didn't know. Right. So. So are you born and raised Thunder Bay?

Yes, yes. I was born in 1988 in Thunder Bay and I spent until I went to school in Toronto, which was about five years ago, but I grew up in Thunder Bay. I went to Sir Winston Churchill High School, which is the one right beside Dennis from Lincoln Cromartie High School. So I graduated in 2006. So while I was at that high school, I kind of got a real firsthand education on the way that the racism in an immediate way functions within that context of Sir Winston Churchill and DFC and the kind of non communication.

Between them that is such an. And here we go again. This happens to me all the time. I think I know where the show's gonna go and then it takes a right turn on Me. And I didn't see it coming. I wasn't here when DFC opened. I was in Toronto. So that's very interesting. Cause I don't know how. When did DFC open, if you had to guess?

I'm not actually sure.

Was it open when you started high school?

Yeah, it was. I started high school in 2002 and it was open that year. Northern Anishinaabe Education Council have been doing a lot of work to try and create a system where kids from Northern reserves who didn't have opportunities for high school up there could get it in Thunder Bay.

Okay, so just to be crystal clear, are you indigenous?

No, I'm not.

Okay, so. But you're noticing differences as a high school student?

Yeah, yeah. So I kind of come at this from the non indigenous side, where I kind of look at my experience and the history I look at is kind of more the history of white folks in Thunder Bay and that kind of history. And because those two things run alongside each other. Right. And literally, in the case of Sir Winston Churchill and dfc, that there's just not a great relationship between those two schools, which kind of became a metaphor for me for the broader things that are happening in the city.

Wow, that's amazing. Now, are you travel, like, do you travel around a lot, or are you basically stay at home based? Yeah, pretty. Okay. And there's. I don't mean to center you out for not traveling. That wasn't my intention at all. But I. Since the first time I met you, I found what you have to say and your attitude about things very reassuring, especially for an indigenous woman in this city. But it's been my experience, and this is just an opinion here, it's not based in fact, but my observation has been that people born and raised in Thunder Bay tend to just keep replicating what's happened in the past. So the fact that you're born and raised here, but you looked at things differently. That's interesting and very reassuring. Yeah.

I was lucky to make some good friends and have some really good teachers and mentors in Thunder Bay. And some of them are from here, some are from out of town. But there is a way in which you can kind of break that cycle, I like to say. Right. Trying to get outside that cycle of anti indigenous racism, which I think is. It's not unique to Thunder Bay, but I think Thunder Bay has a very unique history and a unique set of social relations that make the racism here much more explicit.

Right, right, exactly. And I know it's come up on past episodes of the show that it's always been there to a certain extent. In some cases blatant, in some cases subtle. But since the burning of the bridge, literally the burning of the bridge, it just seems to have come out in full force. As someone who's lived in the city for 25 years, I hear things now in coffee shops that are ludicrous. Right. I can't believe you just said that in public. And is the sad part is you thought it was okay to say that in public?

Yeah. I hate to use this word. Right. But it's very normal for Thunder Bay. And like you say, the sad thing is a lot of people like to say like, oh, that's like an older generation problem. Right. Like we're getting better and things are getting better and people are learning. And I actually take a different view of that. Right. Because I think things are getting worse. We have 19 year old kids in Thunder Bay who are throwing things at people out of moving cars and killing them. Right. So there's definitely a way in which that's not a generational issue of the older generation. That's something that my generation has to take responsibility for and really start to come to terms with.

Right. Wow. Yeah. So you're a professor, you teach at lu?

Yeah.

In what department?

I'm teaching a course in the Indigenous learning department. Kind of like a history course through the fur trade and up to the 20th century.

Okay. And you are a Canadian historian. How did you end up on that track? Historian is not a career choice that has come up in my realm before. So that's why when I met you, I was like, really? That's amazing.

Well, there's not a lot of careers as a historian. Right. So we're doing what we can. But yeah, I did my. I studied history in my undergrad and for my master's at Lakehead University. And I was lucky enough to study under Dr. Kristen Burnett, who kind of introduced me to, you know, more of a. More of a subversive reading of Canadian history. More of like we say, like a fact based reading. Right. Because once you start studying Canadian history, you realize that like, does everyone know this? Is this the history of Thunder Bay? Is this what happened here? Because that's really not something that is widely known, I don't think, or at least if it is widely known, we don't really commit to a deeper understanding, moving forward of how we need to act in terms of that history. Right. And how we need to break that cycle.

Like you say, do you think it's widely known Just personal opinion here.

I don't. I don't at all. Particularly with the history of Thunder Bay. There was a land settlement claim that happened a couple years ago, and all the newspapers started running this story, right? Oh, 99 million given to Fort William First Nation. And I was getting tons of messages of people saying, how could they give so much money to Fort William First Nation? What is the meaning of this? Isn't the government. I'm sure you've heard this a thousand times before, isn't the government just throwing all this money away at first nations issues? And so I wrote a short piece on it. I called it How Thunder Bay Was Made. And I wasn't saying anything new, right? Like, I was kind of just building off of many of the legal representation of Fort William First Nation and just kind of pointing to things like forced relocation in 1905, the seizing of land around Mount McKay, using the sacred mountain as a butt stop for rifle practice for militias. And so I kind of at that moment thought, well, this must be widely known. But then when I. The reaction that that piece got was it was very clear that people aren't widely read in Thunder Bay history. Most people in Thunder Bay, and it sounds a little elitist to say this, but they don't know the history of the land under their feet, right? And so a lot of those horrible things in coffee shops, this is a bit of an optimistic view, but I feel like many of them wouldn't be said if people knew the history of the land under their feet, right? And if they actually came to terms.

With it, I couldn't agree more. And actually being indigenous and having lived in the city for so long, honestly, and I've said this a few times, and I think I shocked a couple of people that back in 2004, I left Thunder Bay and actually moved to Toronto. At that time, if someone had approached me and asked me if there were. If there was such thing as a non indigenous person who cared about the state of existence or what's happening to indigenous people in this country, I would have said, that person doesn't exist. There's no such thing. And that was based on my experience in Thunder Bay. And then I moved to Toronto and I met all these non indigenous people that were actually curious about my culture. Now, don't get me wrong, racism still existed. It was just aimed at someone else, right? Which is why I'm so committ to fighting racism against anyone, not just anti indigenous racism. But for the first time when I was like, I've never had someone interested in hearing about my teachings before. So I started looking at that. And for the very first time, I separated what I had learned in school from what I knew because of who my family was or what our experiences had been as Indigenous people. And I realized that if I had just an education, what I was taught to depend on for my knowledge base, I'd have been as misinformed as they were. So I came back in 2009 with a totally different attitude. Like, guys, it's not. Maybe it's not. They don't care. There's a really good chance they don't know. Right. And I'm not saying it is definitely not the Indigenous responsibility to educate anyone. I'm not saying that in any way, shape or form. But we can't just assume the knowledge is there and being ignored when it is so obvious in so many cases, the knowledge is not there. They're not now. I mean, I guess they could hit Google and find out the information the same way you did. Right. I mean, it's not like national secrets or anything here.

Yeah. Well, there's definitely a lot of privilege that comes behind someone who can say, oh, I want to be a Canadian historian for a. So there's a lot of opportunities that I have that many people in Thunder Bay, I mean, white people here. Right. Like, that they don't necessarily have. And I don't want to contradict myself because I do, as an educator, affirm that ignorance is a problem and that we can get rid of it with education. But I also think that. And I'm going to echo something that Jana Ray Yerxa said on your program. Right. That actual formations of relationships and, you know, respecting the proximities that we have to each other and just kind of speaking with each other like you do on this wonderful program. Right. Is definitely something we need to do. So a line that I like to say is it's. It's not so much about thinking yourself into a different way of acting that you need to act yourself into a different way of thinking because you can read all the books you want, you can understand the history of the city. But still, if you're not proactive in engaging relationships, then the politics that you have or the strategies that you're going to come forward with, if you don't create those in conversations with people like yourself and other people around the city, then you're really kind of just reproducing the same thing over and over again.

Exactly.

So as much as I affirm education, I'll mention another person you had on your show, Sharon Johnson of the Full Moon Memory Walk, right before I ever was, you know, very much like, oh, I need to write about racism and Thunder Bay, and I need to study the racism in this city and the historical root of it and focus on this. This anti indigenous racism in the white population.

First.

I, you know, I kind of. I went to one of those walks and I got to know Sharon, right? And we kind of became friends and, hey, Sharon, I'm sure she's watching, right?

But.

But it was really. It's just as much an embeddedness in community as it is like a study of books and education and that kind of stuff. So while I affirm the education side, again, I really think that it's important to, you know, kind of form those relationships and kind of be respectful about approaching them in a particular way.

Well, I know I always try to remember there's many different ways to become educated, and I definitely agree that education is important and with the formal education system, but you can learn a lot by talking to someone. Right. And having those. Right. Having those relationships. I know I have a large friend base on Facebook, and when I least expect it, I will get an email from someone and it's always a non indigenous person, and they're just writing to say, I learned so much just by watching the conversations you have and what you share. Because I love the fact that my friend list is not just indigenous and not just non indigenous. It's a beautiful, wonderful, diverse mix, and I love that. I wish everyone's friend list looked that way. Right? But they're saying that they sat back and observed very humbly. Right. They didn't take up space, but they watched and listened to how I responded to things and what my colleagues said. And to hear that, A, they were willing to do that and B, that they learned from the process. Right. They took the time out of their lives to. To do that. It's like, okay, that gives me hope, too. We're going in the right direction. Keep going.

A good Facebook friend list or a good feed on Facebook will really. It'll help you deal with that comment section. Right? Because that comment section, that'll hurt your feelings. Stay out of the comment section.

Right.

But you can really get some healing if you have a really good Facebook friend. Listen, you can see, oh, there are people who view that as something that's horrible and toxic and not a great way to talk about it.

Exactly. And I have to admit, I have to do, A, checks and balance on myself in that I am surrounded by whether it's Indigenous or non indigenous people, people that are trying to move forward, that are building respectful bridges, that are having respectful conversations. And I don't engage with the real issue, those people on a regular basis. So I have to be careful that I don't get lost in this little bubble here. Right. You know, and remember that it's all not all sunshine and roses for people that are standing at a bus stop. Right.

Yeah.

So on that note, we are going to take a short break and when we come back, we're going to talk about the inquest as promised. We just had so many other things to discuss, so go refill that coffee and we'll see you in a few minutes back here on the Learning curve. And welcome back once again, I'm Sandy Boucher, and you're watching the Learning curve. And we're here today with Professor Travis Hay. Now, the first time I came across your name, you wrote a letter to the Chronicle journal.

Oh, yeah, that letter.

Now this was back in June of 2017. And yes, I dug it up and brought it in today. And it was concerning white fragility. And, and I really want to focus on the inquest today, but I did want to touch on this because it's one of those phrases there seems to be my mom would call them $15 words, reconciliation, colonialism, white fragility. There's all these new terms out there and easy enough for us because we're engaged. That's what we do for a living. But if you work in the mill or you work at Bombardier or work in one of our stores, maybe you don't come across that and you're trying to figure out what this conversation is. So how would you describe white fragility?

Well, I would describe it straight, strictly within a Thunder Bay context. And that letter, which I wrote with Dr. Burnett at Lakehead, really came from a certain time in the city when a lot of people were saying in relation to anti indigenous racism that, oh, we need to stop pointing fingers, that being called racist is just as damaging to me as racism is on other people. So we had a situation in which people were losing members of their family. Right. Like young members of their family. And equations were being made between the stress that emergency service workers dealing with this issue and what the families were going through. And I just, I thought that was kind of vulgar and obscene to make that equation.

Right.

And so that letter came from a place of kind of frustration with this equation that gets very quickly made between racism against indigenous peoples in Thunder Bay and then white people who feel that Being called racist, having that finger pointed at them. Right. Which is a common phrase, unfortunately, here around town. They would kind of make that equation. And I just. I just couldn't handle that equation being made without saying something about it.

I love that you said something about it. Just going on the record for that. So now we're going to talk about the inquest. And it is really super important to me that even though we're discussing process today, that this was an inquest about the untimely death of seven young people. They had lives, they had people who loved them, and their opportunities to continue and grow and have families of their own were cut short, namely. And I want to take a second to honor them. I don't want them lumped together as the seven students. So we're talking about Jethro Anderson, all of 15 years old, Koran Strang, 18, Robin Harper, 19, Paul Panachis, 21, Reggie Bushy, 15, Kyle Morrisseau, 17, and Jordan Wabas, only 15 years old now. Heart wrenching. This, this, the fact that this has happened, the fact that we had to call this inquest or that the inquest was called, but then you did this event at Lakehead University called racism and spotlighting in Ontario's courtrooms. Why? What did you discover from your historian perspective?

Historian perspective? Well, I wanted to talk about spotlighting specifically because I thought it was a good way to talk about what happened at the inquest. And spotlighting for me is when you kind of shine light on one thing, right. But then everything else around it kind of stays in the dark. So when I looked at the inquest, what I saw was a spotlighting of alcohol, right, where, you know, police lawyers in the coroner, they really wanted to focus on alcohol consumption as a cause of death.

Right?

And so all these other things like treaty history, the lack of high schools on reserve, the experience of students facing racism in Thunder Bay, a whole wide variety of issues were very difficult to talk about in that inquest space, and not least because many rulings were made during the course of the inquest that things like racism, things like the quality of police investigations, things like broken treaties, that these weren't conversations within the scope of the inquest. So the spotlighting conversation and the racism that I saw there actually, to me, really mimicked and mirrored a lot of what I see in comment sections, right, where you have someone with very little background in history, very little training in treaty law, very little understanding of first nations issues, and they just cite alcohol as if that's an explanation for what's happening. In this city. And through that, it becomes normalized. That, oh, if we just talk about alcohol, just mention it. And that makes sense of everything that's happening in Thunder Bay. What's unfortunately been called the river deaths. Right. That if you just cite alcohol, you can make sense of it. And so the talk that I gave was kind of take issue with that and to point about all the different ways in which racism worked around that inquest to kind of create that what I would call a toxic legal space where lots of disrespectful conversations were had about those seven children.

And you just described every one of those coffee shop conversations. And now spotlighting was a new term to me. But that's exactly the discussion I have on a regular basis. And it's always alcohol. Yeah, we're seeing that, unfortunately. Rest in peace with Barbara Kempner again. I mean, her family is getting dragged through the mud, her memory. And it's alcohol, alcohol they're talking about and not what happened to her. Right.

And you see that lots of those rumors were started on Facebook.

Yeah.

And so it's very much a connection, I say, between that, that comment section racism and that more official courthouse racism. And that those aren't that different or not as different as many people might like to think.

Why do you think? Again, I'm going to put you on the spot and ask an opinion. But my opinion, people are looking for the simple answer. They want a simple answer. And I know when they ask me, when they're silly enough to ask me, and of course you're going to get this long winded answer because you got to bring in all those aspects. So, you know, they regretted asking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right. But they want it to be simple. They want to be able to gravitate to something like alcohol. And I always go to. Well, it's a teaching of my moms that if someone is doing something that you couldn't even imagine doing, instead of asking what are they doing, ask yourself what would have to happen to me to put me in a place or a mindset where I would think that decision's a good idea? Right. How bad would I have to be hurting or how lost would I have to be to make the decision they're making? And so it puts you on more in their shoes as opposed to this place of judgment. Because I really have no room for judgment. Right. And I think that's what's happening that people are blaming, you know, you use alcohol or you use drugs without asking why. And can we really honestly say, very cliche Here. But can we really honestly say if we walked in their shoes that we wouldn't do the exact same thing?

And in Thunder Bay, we have a culture of drinking here.

Right, Right. Welcome to Northern Ontario.

I got sent home on my senior year from a trip to Montreal because I got in trouble drinking. It's a small town. People know I got in trouble numerous times throughout high school for drinking. But when I partied, I partied at people's places whose parents were out of town. I partied at those kind of places. And students coming in from other cities or, sorry, from Northern Reserves, they don't necessarily have that social network of people who, oh, Johnny's dad's out of town, let's go party at his place. Right. So teenagers party, that's what they do. Right. From a preventative aspect, that's. To focus on drinking is just silly because good luck trying to get 17 to 25 year olds not to experiment.

With drugs and alcohol in this city especially.

Yeah, yeah. So I did when I was growing up. It's just that I was in a much safer place when I was partying than students who come from First Nations Reserve who don't have that kind of privilege, don't have that kind of network of support, don't have those empty houses of people out of town to party at.

Exactly. And I mean, in a lot of the cases they're staying in boarding homes. Right. They're not with family. This is not a. Mom and dad aren't so close. So it's not even Again, here we go. Multi dimensional. Right. It's not even just teenagers experimenting, but it's teenagers that have been totally removed from their comfort zone, that are incredibly homesick, that are facing racism often for the very first time. Right. Because they're now in a city. Right? Yeah. And I've heard it from a few students where they've said that if I'm out there acting like an idiot in the middle of intercity mall, for example, and someone calls me on it, I totally get it. Right. Like I was acting like an idiot. It makes sense, right? These kids aren't stupid. But what blows them away is walking down the street and having a complete stranger drive by and slow down to yell out some horrific slur. And that's what they don't understand because as they always say, you don't even know me. How can you hate me when you don't even know me? And that's the history.

Yeah. And that is where I think the history comes in. Right. And I think Dave Kreiderman said this when he was on that. It's like people are kind of trapped in this history. Right. You don't necessarily have to know every detail in 1905 and this year to actually reproduce a very violent set of relations into Goldie's behavior. So I don't think someone like Braden Bushby, the gentleman who threw the trailer hitch, I don't think that he's necessarily very well aware of the history, but that doesn't prevent him from reenacting it. Right?

Exactly. Yeah. And I'm all about self awareness. Why did you think this would be a good idea? Why even, like, we live in a city that produced an environment where a young man thought it was okay or fun or whatever to throw that trailer hitch.

And like we were talking just last night, there's reports of BB guns being shot at people on Arthur street and on Brown Street. So even the warning narrative of, oh, he got in trouble, he's facing second degree murder charges. Should be first degree. He's facing second degree murder charges. The idea there is that that might be some kind of preventative measure for this happening again, and it's not. If anything, it's getting worse. Right. Which is an unfortunate reality of Thunder Bay, but it's one we definitely have.

To talk about, and we have to keep talking about it. And would you believe our time's up? So, once again, thank you for joining me. We shared a lot of information today. Professor Hay did a fantastic job of sharing some insight and some information that I want you to take in and consider and use in those coffee shops. Conversations around your dining room table with your friend. If you have questions, always, I'm available. Reach out to me. I would love to help you. As together, we walk through the learning curve. Take care of yourself. See you next time. Bye. Bye.