THUNDER BAY—The debate over what exactly happened at last week’s Indigenous Peoples March misses the point. Whatever the order of events, First Nations people will see in the image of a white high school student confronting an Indigenous Elder in Washington, D.C. the callous indifference and disrespect that are constants of their experience.

This is certainly true of the Indigenous people of Thunder Bay, who learned this week that the man accused of throwing the trailer hitch that hit a First Nations woman would stand trial for second-degree murder.

Barbara Kentner was struck in the stomach by the metal trailer hitch thrown out of a passing car on Jan. 29, 2017 as she walked down the street with her sister, who remembered hearing someone yell, “I (expletive) got one.” Kentner, 34, died of her injuries five months later.

The incident horrified First Nations people in a city where Indigenous high school students tell stories of being hit by garbage or racial slurs hurled by pedestrians or out of passing cars.

This is the city that recently saw its police board disbanded while authorities reopen nine Indigenous death cases, four of those being the Seven Fallen Feathers — First Nations students Jethro Anderson, Curran Strang, Kyle Morrisseau and Jordan Wabasse — who died in this city between 2000 and 2011. All this after a sweeping provincial probe into systemic racism inside the Thunder Bay police force.

That image of Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann, clad in his Make American Great Again cap, confronting Omaha First Nation Elder Nathan Phillips said everything without saying a word. The stomach-churning feeling of racism is palpable. It is sometimes in your face, thrown at you by passersby, and sometimes, at least as crushingly, buried in institutions.

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Phillips had just attended Washington’s first Indigenous Peoples March of the Donald Trump era, arguably a time of racial tensions unprecedented in the U.S. since the height of the civil rights movement.

Phillips is a Vietnam veteran (see clarification below). He was marching to bring attention to the denial of rights Indigenous people face globally. Things like clean water, safe housing, health care, a high school education; basics taken for granted by the many but not by those living in First Nations communities.

What Phillips experienced is the reality of Indigenous life in 2019 but has echoes in the not-so-distant past.

More than 50 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote that America was a nation founded on genocide when it “embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race.”

King noted that before there were large numbers of Black Americans in the United States, the scars of racial hatred had “already disfigured colonial society.”

His words resonate today when we look to the U.S. and see a country that elected a president who wants to build a wall to keep outsiders out, who was endorsed by former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke.

This is a society in which Black Americans are jailed at five times the rate of those who are white.

And where Native Americans are killed in police altercations at a higher rate than any other ethnic group.

This is the America Phillips walks in and walked into on Friday.

Sandmann published a letter this week stating that his main intention was to defuse what was happening because he and his classmates felt threatened by “four African American protesters,” who were apparently hurling racial slurs at them.

Phillips sees things differently.

As an Elder, what he was trying to do was calm a potentially violent situation and use the opportunity to teach a valuable lesson in tolerance — especially to young students who seemed to need it.

As Phillips told the Indian Country Today news site, “We’re Indigenous … When we see our youth going the wrong way, we will go up and say, ‘You are doing the wrong thing there nephew, or grandson.”

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Phillips added he was scared but nevertheless stood up to teach the youth a lesson of tolerance because no one else there was doing so.

His lesson is one Indigenous people have taught consistently for centuries and it is one that we continue to teach still — on both sides of the border.

Clarification — January 23, 2019: While Nathan Phillips stated twice in a Jan. 21 interview with CNN, “I’m a Vietnam veteran,” he later told other news organizations that he served in the U.S. Marines during the Vietnam era but was not deployed to Vietnam.