WAKE THE GIANT PUSHES ON
COVID-19 Scrapped 2020 Music Festival, But Important Work Continues
While COVID-19 has cancelled the Wake the Giant music festival this month, organizers of the anti-racism and cultural awareness project say there’s still plenty of work going on to ensure the overall initiative continues to grow.
Sean Spenrath, one of the organizers, says with the music festival not happening this year, they’re putting their efforts into expanding the toolkit that businesses who wish to display the initiative’s sticker in their windows use. A business displaying the Wake the Giant logo has to satisfy a number of conditions aimed at ensuring that they educate staff and the community at-large as to how to be more welcoming to Indigenous people. The music festival—aside from being another major event on the city’s entertainment calendar—essentially promotes that work.
“The music festival is just a giant advertising campaign for what Wake the Giant stands for,” Spenrath says. “That gets bigger, that means our advertising campaign is getting bigger, and more people hear that messaging. And I think that’s what’s important to us.”
The Wake the Giant festival has been rescheduled for September 18, 2021, and Spenrath says they’re working to solidify the lineup for that. In the meantime, organizers are partnering with the Interstellar Outdoor Cinema this year for a September 12 broadcast of a July Talk concert that was recorded in Toronto. July Talk co-headlined the 2019 festival and was a major catalyst, along with students from Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School, in establishing Wake the Giant.
Currently, Spenrath says they’re expanding the training package for employers and employees with participating businesses. They’re also developing a mandatory online training course for one large business
“where, if their employees want to work there, they’re going to have to do that training,” he says, adding that he wouldn’t divulge who the business is, but says it’s “definitely the biggest one in Thunder Bay.”
Spenrath says the concept has even spread beyond the city. A woman from Edmonton launched a similar initiative in her city based on information local organizers provided. “To see that grow, it was like ‘whoa, that’s kind of cool,’” he says.