A river of tears Seven children, all of them Indigenous, have been pulled dead from Thunder Bay waterways since 2000, leaving a racially divided community searching for answers—and praying for change

On this, at least, everyone can agree. On the evening of May 6, two children, a boy and a girl, went missing in Thunder Bay, Ont., after dark. It had been a cool, early spring day in the northern Ontario city. Overnight, the temperature dipped to minus one. The boy was 14, a skilled hunter raised on the shores of Hudson Bay who dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. The girl was a big-hearted 17-year-old who liked to read and draw. They were Junior Rangers and strong swimmers. The boy, Josiah Begg, grew up swimming the Winisk, an ice-cold, fast-moving river. They were later found dead, less than three kilometres apart in the city’s mud-brown McIntyre River. The girl, Tammy Keeash, was discovered the day after their disappearance, lying face down among reeds in a couple of inches of water. Her pants and underwear were pulled down; there were markings on her hands and face. It took two weeks to find Josiah, in waters just west of the bridge at 110th Street. The stretch of the McIntyre that claimed them isn’t much of a river. In places it’s less than a few feet deep. It’s a man-made spillway dug to protect city residents in high-water years. In the past decade, it’s been doing the precise opposite, so often in fact that some have begun referring to it by a chilling sobriquet: the River of Tears. Bear Clan Patrol volunteers look out over the Kaministiquia River in Thunder Bay. Cole Burston With horrific frequency, the bodies of children keep being pulled from the McIntyre and the Kaministiquia, the river that makes up the city’s southern border—seven in total since 2000. All of them were Indigenous, aged 14 to 18. And all but Tammy were boys. They were in Thunder Bay for schooling or medical services that were not available in their fly-in, northern Ontario communities. Just how these children ended up in the water is where people here begin to disagree. What you believe seems to depend on perspective—that is, whether you grew up drinking water from the tap and going to well-funded schools where your teachers looked and talked like you; or whether you knew from a young age what it’s like to feel isolated, out-of-place, vulnerable. Based on anecdotal interviews, many in white Thunder Bay accept what police have been telling them: that these are tragic accidents. Talk to Indigenous residents, however, and you will hear ominous stories of First Nations men who survived being thrown in the river; of patterns in the gender, ages and dates these kids went missing; and of the cursory way police appear to be investigating their deaths. The fear among Indigenous residents, where rumours of a serial killer are rampant, is palpable. Many refuse to go anywhere near city waterways. Some parents have been pushed into agonizing decisions: to keep their high school-aged children home in isolated communities, where they may be safe, but cannot attend high school. Fear may ultimately compel Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN), which represents the 49 Indigenous communities surrounding Thunder Bay, to keep its high school-aged students out of the city come fall. If past experience holds, almost every other year, one of the 200-odd children NAN sends there will die suddenly, almost always in a waterway. The question of how they end up there is dividing the city, inflaming racial tensions, pitting white Thunder Bay against members of the small Indigenous community, who feel they can’t get police to take these unexplained deaths seriously. Many here count police officers among their daughters, neighbours, friends. The mayor, Keith Hobbs, is a former officer. Many in the community will tell you the real problem is the finger-pointing directed at the Thunder Bay Police Service. But these deaths didn’t drive the wedge between the two communities. Long before volunteers from Kasabonika Lake First Nation pulled 15-year-old Jethro Anderson from the Kaministiquia in 2000, a little over a month after he left for high school in Thunder Bay, the two communities seemed resigned to living the way they always have: siloed among their own. What the deaths have done is sharply outline the divide: the misunderstandings, the mistrust, the deafening silence. And in this, some see opportunity. What gets lost amid the rancour, however, is a sense of who these kids were, a communal mourning befitting such tragedy. This may help explain why a spoken-word poem about Josiah went viral last month, earning as many views on Facebook as there are people in Thunder Bay (146,000). The poem, by Thatcher Rose, a 21-year-old member of the Fort William First Nation, drove home to anyone of any colour the singular horror of the drowning death of a child. It calls to mind what one local remarked after seeing Josiah’s mother visit the McIntyre: “I never knew it was possible for someone to cry so hard.” That is where Rose’s poem ends: And as the moon shied away because she couldn’t bear to watch

He felt his life leave his young fragile body

And the river hid it, he shook and shivered

I just keep imagining him yelling

help me please I can’t breathe

help me please I can’t breathe

And a mother came to face her worst fears

A little boy replaced every ounce of water in that river with her tears

Chapter 1 Thunder Bay city limits. Cole Burston Thunder Bay is actually two towns: Fort William and Port Arthur, a distinction residents still stubbornly maintain. To outsiders, it looks more like three, including the neighbouring Fort William First Nation on the southern bank of the Kaministiquia River, where you will find the best fried pickerel in the area at Bannon’s, and a bird’s-eye view of the Lake Superior harbour city from atop Thunder Mountain (Anemki-wacheu in Ojibway). It is the largest city in northwest Ontario, and the region’s commercial, medical and industrial hub. Pulp mills and government are its two main employers. The city’s rugged landscape, isolation and live-hard vibe help it retain the feel of a frontier town. It is 90 per cent white, one of Ontario’s least diverse cities; the growing Indigenous community now makes up eight per cent of the population. Josiah Begg. Josiah was visiting with his father, Rene, for a medical appointment. They had flown in from the Oji-Cree community of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, known here as “KI,” but Josiah was mainly raised in Peawanuck, which might be the smallest, most isolated Indigenous community in Ontario. Josiah had moved to the community of 200 for kindergarten after his parents’ relationship ended. His mom, Sunshine Winter, had fallen in love with a local, James Chapman. It wasn’t long before Josiah was calling James Dad; he grew even closer to Michael, James’s father, a respected elder in the community, who taught him to trap marten and drive an ATV. When the family, which later grew to include a baby, Sagastao, headed out for a month to their spring camp near the confluence of the Winisk and Shamattawa rivers, Michael and Josiah always rode side by side in the bow of the freighter canoe. He saw his grandpa more like a best friend. Josiah was nine when he bagged his first bird. He could pluck and cut a goose, smoke moose and track caribou. He drummed and learned to fast with his mom. This summer, he was going to participate in his ﬁrst sun dance; he already had his red wrap and matching head- and wristbands. Josiah returned to KI for grade six after Sunshine and James separated. He yearned for the land and wrote vivid stories of stalking caribou and following moose downriver. But he liked the new opportunities in KI, a community ﬁve times the size of Peawanuck—the hockey tournaments, the new friends and the chance to get to know Rene. There was a reason Josiah’s Nikes always looked brand-new: he scrubbed them clean with a toothbrush. He buttoned the Oxford shirts he favoured to the chin, refused to hand in his homework until it was perfect and built himself a tidy gym out of a treadmill and a few weights. He rarely missed a daily workout. Josiah was also a wise soul who looked out for his mom. “Look forward,” he’d tell Sunshine, “don’t look back.” This winter, he burst through the front door with a wide smile and a bounce in his step. He’d found a job all by himself, he announced, pulsing with pride. Sunshine was still home with Sagastao, and Josiah wanted to help with gas and food money. He’d introduced himself to the owner of one of KI’s general stores: “I’m hard-working,” Josiah told him. “I’m motivated, and if you hire me, I will try my best.” He was made stock boy on the spot. The night he disappeared in Thunder Bay, Josiah was out with friends; the evening had begun at a skate park near the city’s harbour. The last known security footage puts the boy at a waterfront bus terminal around 9 p.m. The police have not released the cause of his death, which they continue to investigate. A memorial for Josiah Begg at the side of the McIntyre River. Cole Burston Tammy grew up about 100 km south of KI. She was in Thunder Bay seeking counselling she could not access on the North Caribou Lake First Nation, where she lived with her grandmother, Bella Benson, a Pentecostal widow. Tammy adored her grandma, but her family will tell you that inside, she was hurting. “She never felt she belonged anywhere,” says her great-aunt Katy Brown, Bella’s sister. “She ached for a family to call her own.” This may have been what made her so devoted to her dog, Julius Caesar, a husky with a black-and-brown coat and a gentle, cream-coloured face. Wherever Tammy went, Julius Caesar followed, sometimes on the long walks she and her friend, Wuanita Johnup liked to take around Weagamow Lake. While they taught themselves to cook tacos, burritos and spaghetti sauce, there was Julius Caesar, begging for scraps at Tammy’s heels. The big dog spent every night curled up beside Tammy in her bed. When sadness overwhelmed Tammy, forcing a hospitalization in Barrie, Ont., and another in Thunder Bay, she ached for her husky. Tammy Keeash. When Tammy was 12, her 18-month-old brother, Leonidis, who was being raised in care outside the community, died suddenly from injuries consistent with a 10-foot fall. Not long after, Tammy was riding in the back of her uncle’s pickup truck. Her uncle was reversing when a toddler dashed into the path of the truck. Tammy tried to grab hold of the baby, who was the same age Leonidis had been when he died, but caught only air. A half-second later, he was crushed by the wheel of the truck. His death haunted her. “I tried to save him,” she told Katy, months later. “I tried to grab him. But I couldn’t.” It wasn’t long before she began talking of hurting herself. But she fought hard to heal, to understand herself. This spring she began living in a Thunder Bay group home, where she could access daily counselling and be near her mother, Pearl Slipperjack. She’d cut her hair short. She’d started drawing, and was learning to play guitar. She told her family she wanted to be a police officer. She told Wuanita she eventually wanted to run for chief. She hoped to change Weagamow. The day she died, she visited family before heading out for the night with cousins. She was happy; she was starting to feel whole again. The kids were drinking on a hill overlooking the Neebing-McIntyre Floodway, near Chapples Park, a well-groomed recreation area with a paved trail popular with cyclists, dog walkers and kids on scooters. Tammy’s cousins told police she was with them until 10:30 p.m., when she headed home to meet her 11 p.m. curfew. “I don’t want to get grounded,” was the last thing she told them. Five days later, police called her death non-criminal, which, to NAN Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler, confirmed their inability to conduct “competent and credible investigations into the epidemic of deaths in Thunder Bay’s rivers.” During Tammy’s funeral, Julius Caesar twice snuck into the church. Both times, he went galloping right for Tammy’s coffin. The second time, he managed to rest his chin there for a moment before being hauled out.

Chapter 2 Last month, Statistics Canada revealed that one-third of the hate crimes directed at Indigenous people in Canada in 2015 occurred in Thunder Bay. The city had the highest rate of hate crimes reported in the country—more than double that of second-place Hamilton. Many Indigenous people here have stories that speak to the city’s hostile atmosphere. Melissa Kentner, an Anishinaabe city resident, was once soaked by a McDonald’s soft drink hurled from a passing car. One man, who wishes to remain anonymous, recounted being beaten and thrown into the water by two white men in a blue truck. He escaped and was later taken to hospital. In 2014, a young Indigenous man was hospitalized in the city after being hit by a brick thrown from a passing truck. In the most widely reported incident, 34-year old Barb Kentner, Melissa’s sister, was hit by a trailer hitch thrown from a car, rupturing her small intestine. She died earlier this month. Related reading Waiting for death in Thunder Bay Words have left scars of their own. Ardelle Sagutcheway, who left the Eabametoong First Nation as a 13-year-old for high school in the city, says she has never felt as ashamed as the day someone called her a “dirty Indian” in Thunder Bay. “I realized that to them, I don’t wash. I’m not clean. I don’t take care of myself. When you realize that’s how everybody sees you, you start to hate yourself. It’s then you start really noticing the perfect families on TV, in newspapers. You know that no matter how hard you try, you have no hope of ever becoming that.” Anastasia, a 17-year-old from a northern Ojibway community who preferred to withhold her surname, says she has been yelled at from passing cars three times since moving to Thunder Bay. “Go home!” someone screamed a few months ago. “I can’t,” she says. “There’s no high school on my reserve. I have nowhere else to go.” Anastasia is one of a handful of non-white kids at her school, where, in three years, she has yet to make a single friend. The rising tensions in Thunder Bay have proven a challenge for police. When an eight-month coroner’s inquest into the deaths of seven Indigenous students who died in Thunder Bay concluded last summer, one of the more significant revelations was that three of the five river deaths could not be explained. Every time an Indigenous person has been pulled from the river here, the police have made the same assessment, hurriedly classifying them not as crimes but tragic accidents, says Grand Chief Fiddler, sometimes within hours of the discovery of the body. “A post mortem and toxicity report take weeks,” he adds, not “48 hours.” Fiddler, who has been in politics 24 years and lives in Thunder Bay with his wife and two daughters aged 12 and 17, has been accused of picking a fight with the police, and of deflecting blame from NAN communities. He says he is asking the police to “do their jobs: to properly investigate these deaths,” nothing more. Last month, Ontario’s chief coroner announced that two outside police forces, including the York Regional Police, would be brought in to investigate Josiah and Tammy’s deaths. In reponse to questions from Maclean’s about the investigations, the Thunder Bay Police Service notes that it has never used the term “accidental” regarding Tammy’s death and that it supports the joint police effort “to work on behalf of Tammy and Josiah’s families and their communities.” There is nothing easy about policing Thunder Bay, the country’s one-time murder capital, a small town with big-city crime and social dysfunction. It’s a place, not unlike Winnipeg or Regina, where the results of Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous peoples are coming home to roost—the intergenerational effects of residential schools, cyclical poverty and addictions—but with even fewer supports. “The fact is, Thunder Bay is not equipped to handle it,” says Mayor Hobbs in an interview with Maclean’s. He believes the provincial and federal governments have abdicated their responsibilities, leaving the city “holding the bag.” But Hobbs says the notion that a serial killer is stalking these kids is “ridiculous.” To the mayor, the real common denominator is alcohol: “If you are sitting, drinking at the top of a hill, chances are good that when you stand up, you’re going to fall down it,” he says. The mayor told Maclean’s the river deaths are a “national problem.” He says the racist actions of hateful people do not define the city. He has publicly blamed “high-priced Toronto lawyers” for sowing discord between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in his city. And he believes national media are out to make the city look bad. All of that may be true, but to Fiddler, it also reads like a laundry list of excuses for inaction. “People think this is normal. This is not normal. Families are crying out for answers.” Fiddler, who left the Muskrat Dam First Nation when he was 13 for high school, first in Sioux Lookout, Ont., then Thunder Bay, believes the city’s leaders, none of whom are Indigenous, are missing the opportunity to show Thunder Bay that they stand with Indigenous people, that they grieve the loss of these children. “No mayor, city councillor or police chief from Thunder Bay has ever attended one of the funerals for these children. Not one city councillor, not one member of the police services board, not even the chief of police ever attended the inquest into the deaths of seven children in Thunder Bay.” Last month, Danny Smyth, Winnipeg’s incoming police chief, travelled to the Bunibonibee Cree Nation in northern Manitoba for the funeral of Christine Wood, a 21-year-old who was murdered while visiting family in Winnipeg. “This is what reconciliation looks like,” Sheila North Wilson, grand chief of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak wrote on Facebook above photos of Smyth shovelling dirt onto Wood’s grave with members of the Bunibonibee community. There has been no more vocal and pointed critic of the Winnipeg police than North Wilson. A spokesperson for the Thunder Bay police, Chris Adams, stresses that the force recognizes the need for reconciliation. “Thunder Bay Police Service acting chief Sylvie Hauth has asked to meet with the Indigenous leaders to improve our relationships,” he wrote in an email to Maclean’s. As for why no officials attended the funerals, he explains that “it’s a delicate balance in deciding how far to interject into a family’s grief at the time of a funeral . . . Many of us here at the TBPS are parents and we have never lost sight of the impact and void these tragic deaths have created.” Fiddler nevertheless characterizes the current state of the relationship between the city’s police and its growing First Nations community as “non-existent.” Like many here, he says he’s never seen racial tensions in the city so high. To Jana-Rae Yerxa, an Anishinaabe academic from Little Eagle and Couchiching First Nation, it’s like a battle is “exploding in the city.” For a while, the argument played out in the Chronicle Journal, the local paper, which alternated perspectives with a daily letter to the editor. One side would urge Thunder Bay to “get behind” their police who “put their lives on the line” for them and “feel criticized and judged.” The other side would point out that worrying about the emotional distress of police while children were dying was “obscene,” and that the concerns raised by Indigenous leaders were “legitimate.” The low point may have been an anonymous letter from a police officer attacking Fiddler. The officer concluded by saying he was not a “systemic racist.” Or maybe it was comments from a Thunder Bay officer, Const. Rob Steudle, who wrote: “Natives are killing natives and it’s the white mans fault natives are drunk on the street and its white mans fault natives are homeless... Well let’s stop giving the natives money and see how that goes.” One area Crown prosecutor, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not granted permission to speak to the media, said the makeup of the mostly white, mostly male force, which is staffed almost entirely by locals, isn’t helping matters: “The police, like the community it draws from, have little exposure to Indigenous culture and lack an understanding of the history. When you don’t have Indigenous friends and colleagues and all you see are Indigenous people on the street, it becomes easy to slip into stereotype.” Police, like everyone else, make mistakes, the prosecutor adds. In an overheated environment, their every decision gets scrutinized. The police here have also made some blunders, like the joke press release apparently mistakenly sent out by the force after the murder of an Indigenous man who was known to drink mouthwash. “Fresh Mouth Killer Captured!!” it began. Last winter there was an incident involving a good Samaritan, Robin Sutherland, who’d wrapped his sweater around the victim of a vicious sexual assault. An officer allegedly told him to “burn” the sweater as soon as he “got the chance.” Sutherland had found the terrified, 28-year-old Indigenous woman naked, screaming for help.