INDIGENOUS LIVES MATTER
Time we start to care: Nicolas
Why does it take a spectacular death for politicians to give a damn about Indigenous lives?
If the question sounds unfair to you, think again. Think about the heartbreaking video Joyce Echaquan had to share on her deathbed to spark a conversation on systemic racism in the healthcare system. Remember that concerns for homeless people living through the curfew were considered niche before Raphael André's body was found last week, in a portable toilet, no less. Of all the disheartening places where a person could die alone, this one has to top the list.
And even then. After the tragic passing of Echaquan last fall, Premier François Legault was able to get away with naming former Montreal police PR man Ian Lafrenière as Indigenous Affairs minister, despite a well-documented track record of publicly denying racial profiling in policing.
Now, that same Lafrenière is advising the premier to repeat that the police can be trusted with not over-ticketing the homeless despite a recent study showing Montreal police have more than doubled the number of tickets given to that population since 2014, and that in 2018, Indigenous people who are homeless in Montreal were given five times more tickets than in 2012.
So André's life matters enough to increase public attention on the issue, but not enough to make the government budge on its curfew policy. Maybe if André had been able to film himself in his last moments, and that video had gone viral, then the shift in public opinion would spur change. Because I meant what I said at the beginning: Death itself is not enough. Death has to be a spectacle.
Those of us who have been involved in the movement for Black lives know it all too well. We remember how many hashtags with the names of those who were tragically killed had to be created before the powers that be started to pay attention. Just like we know that George Floyd's death would have been a statistic if it wasn't for the video. The “perfect” video.
Because we know that people have been killed on video before, right here in Montreal. Pierre Coriolan's death at the hands of the SPVM, in 2017, and Nicholas Gibbs', in 2018, can both be found on Youtube.
But I guess these weren't the perfect victims filmed from the perfect angle.
More spectacular deaths in the media powerhouse that is the United States had to occur for a massive shift in empathy and care to actually take place here.
Death itself doesn't suffice because the dehumanizing forces of systemic racism do not stop with death. Too often, when a marginalized Indigenous person or a Black person passes away in enough of a tragic circumstance for it to be newsworthy, mug shots and criminal records are circulated. As if they were not the victim. As if their death was deserved.
If not, then few details are shared with the public about the life of the person who passed away. Friends and family have to reach out and say: Hey, that person lived a full life and was much more than their death.
It usually takes a couple of days in the news cycle for that counter-narrative to become available. Very often, some reputational damage has already been done.
In the case of Raphael “Napa” André, some initial stories identified him as an Inuk rather than an Innu man, or even as an “Inuit” man. Because newsrooms that are perfectly able to cover the most complex political stories in the remotest corners of our planet can still, sometimes, not know the difference between Inuk and Innu, nor that Inuit is always plural.
It seems that level of ignorance of the basic facts about people who are Indigenous to the very land we live on is still professionally acceptable in 2021.
It is no wonder then that, yes, it often takes extraordinary circumstances for stories about Indigenous peoples to be told right.
Last week, Macleans published a “power list” of 50 Canadians who are “shaping how we live and think.” Several Indigenous people made the list, including the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs, Haida advocate Terri-lynn Williams Davidson, children's rights champion Cindy Blackstock, film industry powerhouse Jesse Wente and retiring Senator Murray Sinclair. But the one deemed the most influential of them all was Echaquan because of the impact of her viral video.
Of course, this was meant as an homage. But what is the message here? That the most one can do to advocate for Indigenous lives is to unwillingly give their life?
In all the conferences that I've given over the years on issues of anti-racism, the one question I get the most often is: How can I be a better ally?
There is no definitive answer to that question, but I think we could at least agree on this one piece of advice: Stop waiting for people to die in extraordinary circumstances to actually give a damn.
...Concerns for homeless people living through the curfew were considered niche before Raphael André's body was found last week, in a portable toilet, no less.