You can listen to a podcast of this essay here.

There are three reasons why an international audience should care about the otherwise insignificant Canadian city of Thunder Bay, a community of 120,000 souls 100km North of the American border right in the middle of the world’s second most spacious nation-state.

The first is that, as Canada’s murder and hate-crime capital, with the vast majority of these terrors directed at Indigenous people, roughly 13-20 percent of the population, its example has a lot to teach us about the dire failure of the Canadian model of liberal capitalism, corporate multiculturalism, and half-hearted “reconciliation.”

Second, as a troubled (post-)extractive and logistics-based economy in a “first-world” country — a country that exports and finances extractive industries around the world — its patterns of racist violence reveal something profound about capitalism today.

Finally, Thunder Bay’s problems demand, and are generating, the kind of radical, grassroots solutions that point towards the kind of transformations all communities need to embrace in the years to come to overcome the dangerous intertwined orders of contemporary colonialism and capitalism as they descend into, or perhaps simply reveal themselves to have always been, gangsterism.

Recently, within Canada, Thunder Bay is much in the news. Anishinaabe journalist Tanya Talaga’s national bestseller, Seven Fallen Feathers, details the shocking case of seven Indigenous youth whose bodies were found in the city over the past decade. A devastating coroner’s report into these deaths in 2016 revealed widespread failings on the part of nearly every institution and level of government in the city. A recent high-profile investigation of the city’s police service and its municipal oversight board, one of them by noted Anishinaabe judge and Canadian Senator Murray Sinclair, found gross incompetence in these institutions as well as systemic racism against Indigenous people.

One of the country’s most popular podcasts released a five-episode series, co-produced by celebrated Anishinaabe journalist and comedian Ryan McMahon, detailing this ugly side of the city, including the abuse and human trafficking of Indigenous women and girls by parties that include senior city officials. Indeed, in what appears to be a case of a heavy-handed metaphor for racial strife coming to life, the bridge connecting Thunder Bay to the nearby Indigenous community of Fort William First Nation burnt down in 2013 under suspicious circumstances. No one was held accountable and the bridge has not been repaired.

The city has become a shameful icon of the ugly truth of colonial dispossession and violence hiding just under the surface of Canada’s buffed image as a benign force in the world. While not as dramatic as the courageous Indigenous-led resistance to pipelines and mining projects in Canada, Thunder Bay is where the logics of extraction and racial violence play out in agonizing slow motion. And it has a lot to teach us.

The coldest night

We’re on a busy highway: transport trucks that ply the arterial Trans-Canada highway speed by, snow whirls behind them in the slipstream. About a dozen of us, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have walked here from up the hill, site of a monument to Canadian folk hero Terry Fox, shielding small candles in plastic cups from the frigid wind that whips off Lake Superior, the largest body of freshwater in the world. While Fox is commemorated in national legend, and even pictured in our passports, we’re here tonight to remember others: Indigenous boys and girls who have shared stories that they have been dropped here by police over the years, on the outskirts of Thunder Bay, to die in the cold, so-called “Starlight Tours.”

“We have to show the youth somebody is listening to them, someone cares” says the Anishinaabe who has been invited by the organizer’s of tonight’s memorial: the Bear Clan, an Indigenous-led volunteer foot patrol that has arisen to generate a culture of solidarity in the city in the wake of extreme violence and police indifference.

As we stand by the highway, honoring the dead and the stories of the living, a large truck looms behind us, watching. We’re jumpy. Recently, white citizens of Thunder Bay have been threatening the Bear Clan online and more than once patrols have been circled and threatened by trucks full of jeering, angry men. High-profile members of the police force and city government have taken time to warn the Bear Clan that they’re in danger of reprisals.

As we finish the vigil, a man climbs down from the cab of the truck and greets us: he came for the vigil, but chose to use his huge vehicle to shine a light on us to illuminate us to passing drivers for our safety. He was waiting for his friends to also show up, but they never came. They’re all sick and tired of what’s happening in the city. It’s all they talk about. Maybe his friends got scared, he wonders.

Forgotten resistance

Thunder Bay is a city built on forgotten resistances. The indigenous Anishinaabe people, including those of Fort William First Nation, a community just outside Thunder Bay city limits, have for centuries refused to be annihilated — even when the Canadian government abducted their children and forced them into notorious church-run Residential Schools, where traditional languages and cultural and spiritual practices were forbidden and inmates were subjected to systematic sexual and physical abuse by staff.

Acts of Indigenous resistance, as dramatic as armed standoffs or as subtle as the tenacity to continue to practice traditions and speak the Anishinaabe language, define the struggle over the land here. In 1850 a compromise came in the form of the Robinson-Superior Treaty, which allowed “settler” communities like Thunder Bay to be built in the late 19th century. But Indigenous presence on the land, and profound connection to the land, continue to thwart the colonizing agenda that, as the late Secwepemc strategist Arthur Manuel illustrates, is at the heart of Canada’s essence: to transform the entire territory into private or public property for the profit and enjoyment of settlers (preferably white settlers) and international capital.

This logic of extraction and elimination at the meeting point of capitalism and colonialism is sewn into the fabric of Thunder Bay. Settlers first came to this city, at the end of the chain of Great Lakes, seeking to trade with Indigenous people for furs. One of the most lucrative “natural resources” of the 18th and 19th centuries, furs fetched high prices as fashion articles among the wealthy of Western Europe, whose pockets were full of looted wealth from around the world. In the contact zone of the fur trade, many ethnicities met and new ones emerged. As the fur trade declined thanks to changing fashions and over-harvesting driven by insatiable European demand, the railway opened new horizons of extraction and colonization to the West. Thunder Bay became a major transportation and logistics hub, shuttling new settlers West and the resources they produced — or stole — back East. The city became the world’s largest freshwater port, with lumber and grains flowing through its train yards and docks.

The ports, like the lumber camps and mines surrounding the city, became key zones of labor struggle as migrant workers, many of them Finns and Italians, mobilized under radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The state responded with violence: riots, the murder of labor organizers, and the deportation of leaders were common as the entrenched Protestant Anglophone elite bent or broke Canada’s fabled “rule of law” to protect the accumulation of capital at all costs. From the beginning, these actors studied and employed a devastatingly effective technique inherited from the British Empire: divide and conquer. Ethnic migrant communities were pitted against one another to prevent them organizing together. But in turn, everyone was pitted against the Indigenous people.

Belonging with the land

Years ago I knew a man, let’s call him Jerry, who kept the fire burning at Indigenous-led protests and gatherings, a sacred task that appears to me to require someone who had patience, perseverance and that unnamable quality of a person with whom everyone feels comfortable. He was key to creating a bridge between indigenous and non-indigenous protesters, with a warm smile for everyone. At the time I was thinking a lot about labor and work in capitalism, and he helped me realize how profoundly unjust and dangerous it is that our society does not value the kinds of gifts Jerry had to offer. But even while Jerry exuded a deep and generous peace with himself and his role, he had no idea who he was. In the 1950s he had been apprehended from his family as an infant and given to a series of white foster parents, some of whom were kind and some of whom abused him. He was, at the time I knew him, successfully fighting off the addictions which had almost murdered him in the past.

Jerry had travelled around Turtle Island (the Anishinabe term for North America — an accurate description of the shape of the continental geography developed long before satellite imagery) learning various Indigenous traditions. But he had no idea what community he had come from, and he would never know: the records had been lost by a careless bureaucrat, if records were ever kept. The kindly foster parents, with whom he still spoke, had no idea who his birth parents might have been — even what area of the country he might have come from. They regretted that they had tried to hide Jerry’s past from him when he was a child. The best among them had thought to raise him as their own white son, benignly ignorant of the depth and scale of the daily racism he faced in school and society at large that caused him to act out and retreat inwards.

When I met him, Jerry had recently been adopted into a nearby indigenous community and tasked to be a fire keeper at these kinds of events, and he was prized by many because of his vast knowledge of the traditions, stories and cultures of the many Indigenous nations he had visited trying to get home. He told me, in regard to an ongoing land dispute his adopted community was engaged in, “it’s not that the land belongs to us. That simply doesn’t make sense in our language. We belong to the land,” he corrected himself, “We come with this land. They can never get rid of us.”