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The Current Transcript for January 5, 2017

Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

He served overseas there in Afghanistan and he came back with the PTSD. And he had been, like, trying to get help and it seems like they put him on medication and take him off and then put him on something else and nothing was helping.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The stories have been spilling out now. Lionel Desmond's apparent decision to kill his family and then take his own life has left his wider family reeling, and shaking those who like him came home from the war in Afghanistan only to discover they could never leave it behind. We may never know the precise reason behind Lionel Desmond's actions, but we do know that an estimated ten per cent of Canadians who served in Afghanistan have received a diagnosis of PTSD. In a moment we'll hear from a former soldier whose own struggles prompted him to open a centre to offer the help he found so elusive. And then we'll introduce you to Wesley Lowery. Two summers ago, The Washington Post sent him to Ferguson, Missouri to cover anger in the streets after police killed an unarmed black man.

SOUNDCLIP

Oh, maybe this could happen where I live. It's not about some crazy racist in one place, or some crazy unruly crowd in one place, that all of a sudden the story, it becomes increasingly clear the story of Ferguson, the story of Baltimore, is the story of America.

AMT: The neighbourhood uprising that led to Black Lives Matter and a new era in the racial justice movement, in half an hour. And then, acclaimed novelist Joseph Boyden has always seemed imprecise about his Indigenous ancestry.

SOUNDCLIP

I come from so many different places, I’m the combination of so many different elements. The Métis side of me is as where my characters all come from, the Aboriginal side is where that real spark came from.

AMT: Now the controversy over his heritage has raised pointed questions over Indigenous identity and culture. We're on that in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

'He knew that he was sick': Relatives mourn after apparent murder-suicide

Guests: Shonda Borden, Trevor Bungay

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well, one family's tragedy in Nova Scotia this week has shocked the country. An apparent murder-suicide that has left four people dead, and which may have the horrors of Afghanistan and PTSD looming behind it. CBC News has confirmed that the deceased, discovered by relatives Tuesday evening at the family home in Upper Big Tracadie in Guysborough County — were a Canadian Forces veteran Lionel Desmond, his wife Shanna Desmond, their ten-year-old daughter Aaliyah, and Lionel's mother Brenda Desmond. RCMP and Nova Scotia remain tight lipped but they do say Lionel Desmond appears to have shot himself and the three others died of apparent gunshot wounds. Family members say he suffered from PTSD after returning from Afghanistan and now questions and concerns are being raised about the treatment he received. Yesterday afternoon, we reached Shanna Desmond's sister Shonda Borden. She received the news in Regina where she lives, and she flew back home right away to be with her family. Here is our conversation.

AMT: Shonda, I'm so sorry for your loss. Can you tell me how did you even find out?

SHONDA BORDEN: I was at home in Regina and I got a phone call by one of his friends saying that they found bodies, and automatically on the phone and tried to get in contact with Shanna, trying to get in contact with her. [unintelligible] called across the street, to go up to the house to see what was going on. That's when we found out.

AMT: And who are you in touch with now then? Are you in touch with family in Nova Scotia?

SHONDA BORDEN: Well, I flew down last night. So I got in this morning.

AMT: So you're in Nova Scotia now? You've flown in.

SHONDA BORDEN: Yes.

AMT: OK, where am I reaching you?

SHONDA BORDEN: At my aunt's, right across the street from the crime scene.

AMT: Oh my goodness. When was the last time you talked to Shanna?

SHONDA BORDEN: That day. [sighs]

AMT: Well tell me about your sister.

SHONDA BORDEN: She just graduated nursing at St. FX. And she's a great mother, sister, she was the rock of the family. And she always had people’s back.

AMT: Is she your older sister?

SHONDA BORDEN: Yeah.

AMT: Mm.

SHONDA BORDEN: There’s three of us. She's the oldest and then I have a twin brother.

AMT: Is your brother with you now too? Or where’s your brother?

SHONDA BORDEN: He’s on his way over, he’s at my grandmother's.

AMT: Your whole family's got to be reeling from this, huh?

SHONDA BORDEN: It's a shock to all of us. Especially, you know, when you're like right across the street from what’s happening and you know that their bodies are still there and they’ve been there all night. You have a ten-year-old child that's involved, you don't know what to think anymore.

AMT: Tell me about your niece.

SHONDA BORDEN: She just turned ten, December 28th. She had an awesome personality, she loved her mom and dad so much. Unfortunately she got caught up in the problems that a lot of military families face — PTSD. This is what she had to come home to.

AMT: What do you know about Lionel Desmond and what he was suffering through?

SHONDA BORDEN: He was such a loving person. I mean, he loved everyone and he was so great with kids and Shanna. One day he'll be, you know, the perfect person ever, like, the regular Lionel. And then other days he would have these [unintelligible] or mood swings that would just completely change his personality, like he was back in Afghanistan. He went to Montreal, rehab there, he was there for like four months then he came home, everything was fine for a little bit and then something would remind him of something in Afghanistan and [sighs] he would freak out. He asked for help numerous times, numerous times. Just recently he went to the doctor asking the doctors to help him to get the voices out of his head. And the doctors said they don't know what to do. [crying] It just shows that this is a huge problem that's worldwide. And people need to start solving it and fixing it.

AMT: So he wanted help. He knew he needed help.

SHONDA BORDEN: Wanted help. He knew he was sick. Everyone knew that he was sick but Shanna could only do so much for him. He went away to Montreal in a rehab place there to help him. He had pills, he had medicinal marijuana, he had pretty much every type of pill that they could possibly give him and he was still having voices in his head constantly. [sighs]

AMT: And when these things would happen, would he be violent in the past?

SHONDA BORDEN: Violent towards anyone? No. He would curse and yell and speed up and down the road, throw things but he would never ever touch anyone.

AMT: And this all started to happen when he came home did it? From Afghanistan.

SHONDA BORDEN: From Afghanistan.

AMT: Yeah.

SHONDA BORDEN: Yeah, 2006, 2007. He lost a lot of friends and he had to do things that people wouldn't even dare to dream about doing. He used to have nightmares. [deep sigh]

AMT: So your whole family knew, and you were all worried about him?

SHONDA BORDEN: We knew, but what can we do? At this time, he was staying at his grandparent’s house, because he wasn’t staying at the house because he was getting so out of control. So he’s like I’m going to go up to the house.

AMT: How frustrating was it for your sister, for Shanna, that he couldn't get the help, that he couldn't get help that would make a difference for him?

SHONDA BORDEN: It was very frustrating. To have someone have mood swings constantly and you have a ten-year-old child that you have to look out for, but you're trying to be the best wife possible. I always used to tell her, well, stick with him, till death do you apart, in sickness and through hell. But I just never knew it would be this bad. [sobbing] No one knew it was this bad. Because I always used to be like Shanna, like, calm down with him, don't yell at him, he’s sick or whatever, we all know that he's sick. She used to say Shanna, Shanna, Shanna, you guys are all going to be not saying Shanna, Shanna, anymore when you find Shanna dead.

AMT: So she was always worried, huh?

SHONDA BORDEN: She's a nurse and she knew the severity of it. She also knew that her husband was inside there somewhere too. But we knew she had to calm him down, something could calm him down. He called me that night and I didn’t answer, I missed the call.

AMT: When? Just the other night?

SHONDA BORDEN: Yes. Because he always used to call me to vent. [sighs]

AMT: I'm so sorry for your loss Shonda, I'm so sorry for what you're all going through.

SHONDA BORDEN: [sobbing]

AMT: What does your family do now? What are the police telling you? What?

SHONDA BORDEN: We basically know nothing at this moment. We didn't know that, it looks like it was planned. His two vehicles were not in the driveway. He snuck up to the house, surprised everyone pretty much. His military training taught him, he was a sniper in the military and that's what he did.

AMT: He wasn't staying at the house that night?

SHONDA BORDEN: Nope.

AMT: Where had he been staying?

SHONDA BORDEN: At his grandparents.

AMT: That’s a lot of powerful and disturbing information for you to absorb.

SHONDA BORDEN: Too much.

AMT: Yeah.

SHONDA BORDEN: Too much. Seems like a nightmare.

AMT: Have you heard from the Canadian Forces officials? Has anybody contacted you?

SHONDA BORDEN: No. No one has contacted us. The police didn’t even contact us. We had to find out through family members.

AMT: But you are family members, but yeah, they didn’t contact you.

SHONDA BORDEN: They didn’t contact us at all. We had to contact them to see what was going on.

AMT: I can't even begin to imagine the kind of grief you're going through. But you made a point to me at the beginning, which is that you don't think he was alone in going through this kind of thing. What are you trying to tell me?

SHONDA BORDEN: The military should have done a lot more for him. He tried to get help, multiple things to get help. He had all the family support you could ever imagine. If you don't have the government to back you up or even the health system to back you up, then you're going to remain the same.

AMT: Well, Shonda, I'm going to let you go. But I really appreciate you talking to us and also talking to us about your sister and niece as well so we know just a little bit about them. Thank you.

SHONDA BORDEN: Thank you.

AMT: Shonda Borden, the sister of Shanna Desmond, one of four family members found dead in Upper Big Tracadie, Nova Scotia. Shonda Borden spoke with us from her mother's house, across the street from where the killings occurred. The Current requested a response from the Department of National Defense and the Canadian Armed Forces. And we did receive a statement, DND confirms that Lionel Desmond, Corporal Lionel Desmond was deployed to Afghanistan from January to August of 2007. Seven years later, he was posted to what DND calls the Joint Personnel Support Unit. That was June of 2014. He was discharged in July of 2015. The department says the JPSU, the support unit, gives military personnel access to available benefits, programs, family services, all to allow ill and injured armed forces members and their families to focus on recovery. It offers no specific information on Lionel Desmond's medical matters because of privacy considerations. And I’m going to speak to someone else who knew Lionel Desmond, and who knows well the impact of PTSD. Trevor Bungay served with Lionel Desmond in Afghanistan. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Today he works at Trauma Healing Centers as Vice President for veteran relations. And Trevor Bungay is in our Fredericton studio. Hello.

TREVOR BUNGAY: Hi, how are you?

AMT: Well, I'm wondering how you are? You knew him, he was a friend.

TREVOR BUNGAY: Yeah, we're all reeling from this. This is something that obviously was never expected. This is as farfetched as anyone could ever thought this could have gone. So everyone’s sort of still shaken and we’re trying to put the pieces back together right now.

AMT: How did you even hear about the death of Lionel Desmond and his family?

TREVOR BUNGAY: I actually received a text from a friend that actually saw something on Facebook. And once I went on to Lionel’s page and looked at the news, I kind of put two to two together, but had to wait for confirmation obviously.

AMT: And so what was your immediate thought? What went through your head?

TREVOR BUNGAY: You know, there's a lot of things that go through your head when something like this happens. And, you know, you're not laying blame or anything like that. But, you know, there's anger, there's sadness. I was disgusted at where we are as a country when it comes to mental illness and how we're treating it. And there was a lot of things going through my mind at that point.

AMT: And the family is talking about how he was diagnosed with PTSD. Obviously, there's no official statements on that because of privacy, and I'm not asking you to talk about his case. But you talk about anger, it's because of what you see is happening to armed forces members who come home?

TREVOR BUNGAY: Well, I mean, I've had a personal struggle myself and, you know, luckily for me I was able to come back on my feet. PTSD is something that you deal with for the rest of your life. You know, it's not it's not a broken leg you can't put a cast on it. You have to work at it every single day to remain on top of it. So a lot of the people who are going through it, they don't have the options to do certain things like see a psychologist. For example, Veterans Affairs Canada doesn't pay for travel expenses for veterans to go get treatment. So somebody who lives two to three hours away from a location has no money because all they're living with is a pension. They have no employment because they can't work, they can't afford to drive over the road to get help. So where do you go?

AMT: Trevor, when you came home, how long after you got home were you diagnosed with PTSD?

TREVOR BUNGAY: Back in 2007, I couldn't have even probably told you what PTSD was. I knew there was something wrong and I knew you didn't talk about it. The couple of people that did talk about it that I knew disappeared and were quietly retired. And until later on, about 2010-2011, when the army realized we really do have a problem, there started to be more talk about it. I wasn't even actually diagnosed until 2012-2013, so I bottled it up and carried on for a good three, four years after.

AMT: And after you were diagnosed, what kind of help did you get?

TREVOR BUNGAY: I started off in trying to let, basically the military handle what I needed to do. I had no clue where to go. I started with some work with a psychologist, a psychiatrist. I was put on 22 pills a day and sent home and told to wait it out and somebody would be in contact when it was time for me to see my psychologist. I found myself considerably getting worse day after day and decided after a while that it was time for me to take it into my own hands. And I started looking for my own treatment options.

AMT: And you are now part of the Trauma Healing Centers. What happens there?

TREVOR BUNGAY: At Trauma Healing Centers, we provide basically what I like to call a one stop shop for somebody with mental illness or chronic pain. And all I mean by that is in all of our clinics you have a medical doctor, a psychologist, a massage therapist, a nutritionist, a dietitian and a peer support adviser. We put all of these professionals under one roof and anyone struggling with mental health can come in, they can see a psychologist, meet the doctor to help with prescriptions, you know, get a massage to relax or for pain, see a dietician. You know, the whole point of what we're doing is for people to realize that if you're just at home using medications you don't have a chance. There has to be some sort of plan. And with our team, we develop a plan, an individual plan for every person that comes through the door to try to get them back on their feet.

AMT: Did you help create this center?

TREVOR BUNGAY: I did, I did.

AMT: Specifically because of what you went through?

TREVOR BUNGAY: Yeah. I was sick and tired of driving, you know, I probably put a couple of hundred kilometres on my car every day going from appointment to appointment. And I found it very frustrating, I was getting angry, sometimes they wouldn't even go at all. And that doesn't work for somebody with a mental illness. You have to be able to get to where you're going and carry out your medical treatment.

AMT: What else can you tell me about, we know statistically one in ten of the Canadians who served in Afghanistan has been diagnosed with some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. What can you tell me about what you know?

TREVOR BUNGAY: What I know is, you know, I see this every day. I see, I get phone calls, I get texts, I get e-mails, I get Facebook messages every day from veterans who are struggling and looking for help and we try to provide that help for them. What we did in Afghanistan was something that I would never wish on my worst enemy. The things that we saw, the things that we had to do we're horrible. We lost friends, we lost family. We saw numerous times, you know, explosions, dead bodies, dead children and it takes a toll on each individual. It may not be today, it may be ten years down the road but somebody is going to get affected by this every single day. What I want people to understand is when you're asking the Canadian soldiers to go to war — there's a price tag, and it's not monetary. Every individual that comes home pays a price for the rest of his life.

AMT: You knew Lionel in Afghanistan, huh?

TREVOR BUNGAY: I did. I was one of his leaders on the ground.

AMT: What do you remember about him?

TREVOR BUNGAY: He was the happiest man I know. He always greeted me with a smile. He always was joking around. He was the type of guy if I was walking down the hall he would yell my name and when I turned around to try and find him he'd be gone. You know, he never had a bad word to say about anybody, he never had a violent bone in his body and--

AMT: Did you know he was struggling here?

TREVOR BUNGAY: I did. I did. We spoke a lot. You know, at the end of the day, I can't tie people up and bring them to places to get them help. The individual person has to be able to get himself or herself into treatment. And we spoke a lot and I tried to get him help, you know. We all did. We all keep in touch with each other. The guys that we fought with in Afghanistan side by side, we all keep in touch. It may not be every day or every week or every month but we all know where we are, we all keep in touch with each other and we all try to keep up on this stuff. Desmond, he slipped through my fingers.

AMT: Before I let you go, what do you want us to know then? What do we all need to know?

TREVOR BUNGAY: I want everybody to know that Desmond was a hero. He is not a monster. And what happened was not his character, Desmond was a great person. And I’ll always remember him as that.

AMT: Trevor, we have to go. Thank you for your time and I'm sorry for having to take you through all this.

TREVOR BUNGAY: No worries. Thank you.

AMT: Trevor Bungay, veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces. He served in Afghanistan, he was later diagnosed with PTSD. He's now Vice President for veteran relations at Trauma Healing Centers. And he joined us from our Fredericton studio. Stay with us. The news is next and then we'll be talking to Wesley Lowery about the frontlines of America's racial divide. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Journalist focused on racial unrest and police shootings in U.S. reveals hard truths

Guests: Wesley Lowery

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Well, still to come a question of Indigenous identity has sparked a heated national conversation. Joseph Boyden, the celebrated author of Tales From an Indigenous Perspective has had his own claims to Aboriginal ancestry questioned. In half an hour, we'll ask why it matters and what the conversations it sparks say about our understanding of Indigenous identity. But first, black citizens, white police and America's racial reckoning.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: gun shots]

VOICE 1: Ooh.

VOICE 2: Because if they gas again, which they might right here.

VOICE 3: I ain’t scared to die man. You let me live man.

VOICE 4: It shouldn’t come to that.

VOICE 3: I ain’t scared man. If I go right here, y’all seen this, you see how the white man did this dog. And it’ll go and they gon keep killing us, it ain’t gon never stop man. I hope this ain’t my last time, cause I’m talking I’m cool. They gon keep killing us man.

AMT: The sound of protest, black community members being tear gassed by police in Ferguson, Missouri in the fall of 2015. A St. Louis county prosecutor had decided not to lay charges against the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, the year before. And not for the first time that year the community was enraged. Those protests in Ferguson spread to other cities across the country and became a wakeup call to America and to the world, that relations between police and black citizens were at a breaking point. It was a critical story then and now, and one that Wesley Lowery, a young black reporter with The Washington Post threw himself into. He followed the grim trail across the US, to cities where unarmed black men and women had died at the hands of police. Wesley Lowery writes about his time on the frontline of this conflict in a new book, They Can't Kill Us All. And he joins us from Washington DC. Hello.

WESLEY LOWERY: Thank you so much for having me.

AMT: Your story begins with your arrest in Ferguson in the wake of the killing of Mike Brown. What happened?

WESLEY LOWERY: I start there, and just trying to walk through how I got to Ferguson and how I became kind of a figure in the story, and, you know, so part of that was, you know, I went, Michael Brown's killed on August 9th, 2014. I arrived on the 11th, which is when a lot of the national media got there, that was the morning after the gas station had been burned down. And then I, on the 13th, myself and a colleague, Ryan Reilly, of The Huffington Post were working out of a McDonald's which, you know, for people who aren't reporters who don't travel very often, when you drop into a place to work, you know, a city you're not from or you're in town to cover something, one of the first things most reporters do is they look for a place with Wi-Fi and outlets, right? Because I need to sit somewhere and type and then send emails into my bosses and file stories, right? And so in Ferguson there was a McDonald's that was about two blocks away from where most of the demonstrations were happening, and so this became a impromptu news room, almost every journalist across the country who had come in was using this as a place to work. And so at one point as we were sitting in there charging our phones, some officers came in and essentially arrested us, told us that we had we hadn't evacuated the McDonald's quickly enough, they were attempting to clear it out, and it became a bit of a media story. Many of our colleagues had seen what happened, they were outraged, they were confused. Why are reporters being arrested essentially for doing their jobs? It started to raise this question, you know, unfortunately when you look back at attention to this story, certainly on social media, you know, hundreds and thousands of people were paying attention the 9th and the 10th and the 11th and the 12th. But the mainstream media while many of us were there had not yet decided to devote major resources to covering this. After those arrests, after that day of ongoing unrest, there were also, you know, a lot of tear gassing that night, correspondents on MSNBC and CNN kind of covered that live, were tear gassed on the air. As that happened, it forced a lot of people who thought, who essentially were like what do I really care about some police shooting in some place I don't know about? It forced a lot of people, especially in the Beltway, you know, in between DC and New York, kind of our east coast media in the states, it forced them to pay attention in a way that maybe they hadn't otherwise. Because there was this idea that if the protesters had been saying the police are mistreating them, it all of a sudden had carried with it a new weight, because now members of the media could see how their colleagues had been treated and if they would treat us this way, how must they be treating these residents everyday?

AMT: But you actually thought that would be a quick assignment. How long did you end up spending?

WESLEY LOWERY: I thought I was going to be there, I remember getting on the plane and I said I was already dropping in like two days late. I thought I was going to show up, do a quick story for tomorrow and then maybe, you know, collect some anecdotes for a weekend piece. I thought I'd spend three or four days there and be back watching, you know, football with my buddies, [chuckles] you know, by Saturday. I ended up though spending, you know, more or less I mean, on and off about three months. And it became clear, you know, even before all that, it became clear very quickly in August when we first arrived, that this was something that was just going to be bigger and deeper. This wasn't just another story of a police shooting. That there is a, you know, I listened to other colleagues who covered Ferguson talk about it, this almost revolutionary feeling to the space where the police had seemingly lost all legitimacy in this community and that lack of legitimacy was driving these clashes every single day and every single night.

AMT: Because what you were this thing was a community uprising.

WESLEY LOWERY: Correct. Exactly. And you have to think about, you know, what drives someone? How do you get some suburban teenager to the point that he's throwing a water bottle at a line of police or throwing a rock at a line of police? And what gets that person there is a completely delegitimizing of the police in that space. Now, in Ferguson we saw that in part because of the way that traffic stops were used and arrest and warrants were used that the people who felt like their police were an oppressive force that was pillaging them, essentially. And now they had humiliated them, had killed this young man, wouldn't answer questions as to why, wouldn't tell them who the officer was. And then on top of that had left his body in the street for four hours in this act of humiliation and dehumanization. And I think that that was what drove, you know, people to just say enough is enough. Now that's not unlike other cities where we've seen levels of unrest, where you also have police legitimacy issues, right? You have your cases like Chicago and Baltimore, where you see high profile deaths at the hands of police. High profile allegations of cover ups as to what happens in those deaths. But you also have cities where your population, your black and brown population is victim of constant crime and yet the police departments there don't solve very many of those violent crimes, right? Whether that be homicides, whether that be robberies, right? And so, batteries. And so because of that, what legitimacy, you know, to a young man in Baltimore, a young man in Chicago, might the police have? And I think that we see this unrest continuously in places where there is no police legitimacy in these communities.

AMT: The kind of urban conflict you were covering, those riots, do you call that race riots? Do you use that phrase?

WESLEY LOWERY: You know, so I typically tend to avoid that nomenclature. I mean, certainly many nights in, whether it be Ferguson or Baltimore or Milwaukee or, amounted to riots. I mean, like, knowing what that word means, you know. But I do think that there is a, but I tried at some points to try to avoid that terminology as I describe it now. In part because I do think there can be a connotation--

AMT: [interposing] To the word riot.

WESLEY LOWERY: You know, people say oh well, yeah exactly. And so I just kind of, I typically use unrest, but again riot's not inaccurate.

AMT: What do you think the biggest public misperception is about what happened in Ferguson then?

WESLEY LOWERY: One is that this was some type of, a bunch of outside people somehow came in and that was the reason. If only all these people hadn't come to Ferguson, there wouldn't be this unrest. The reality was that there were thousands of people in the street. Days before the media got there, days before any prominent civil rights attorney or person was there, that the people of Ferguson were fed up with what was going on and that's why they were in the streets. And second, you know, I think one of the biggest misperceptions was that this was somehow completely about the details of the shooting. But I remember talking and doing these interviews to, you know, hundreds of these residents, the thing that set people off the most, in fact, the thing that made it so that people were willing to believe the police were capable of shooting a man surrendering with his hands up, was the way they had both treated these residents prior to that shooting and the way they treated Michael Brown after the shooting. They, again, the idea that we heard constantly for 4 and a half hours, and these demonstrations, when they go back for the anniversary there's a moment of silence at the spot of the shooting for four and a half minutes, right? That it was this idea that his body had been left to die in the street and that, you know, in the middle of this apartment complex. And that so many people are looking out their windows, looking at the body screaming why don't you guys do something for this person? And they sat there and watched him, watched them for one hour, for two, for three, for four and a half hours. And I think that was what, I just really believe that was one of the mobilizing factors of the unrest we saw.

AMT: You end up essentially on a beat that you weren't expecting to be on, and your work in the individual cases of the shooting of unarmed black men and women prompts you to push your own newspaper to do a much wider investigation into police shootings. What did you find?

WESLEY LOWERY: So we essentially end up launching a large project to look at fatal police shootings. And one of the reasons we did that was in the early days of this coverage, I would send in these stories and in the story there would be, you know, civil rights leader, an activist, a resident being quoted saying look, black men are being gunned down the streets everyday, they're being executed by police. We never get any justice. We never get any accountability. Then you'd call the police or the police union and they would say no they're all making it up. We never kill unarmed black people and when we do they all deserve it, and also police shootings are extra rare. And so, you know, I type all my quotes up and send them into the office and smart editors would ask questions, like, well OK, but both of these things can't be true. Either unarmed Black people are being executed in the streets everyday or police shootings are rare and they never happen, like, these are actually exclusive statements and they're both statements of fact, one of them has to be right the other one has to be wrong, right? We started looking. We said, alright who can tell us the answer to this? Does the attorney general keep this data on police shootings in the aggregate? Do the secretaries of state do it? And we were pretty shocked to find, pretty quickly, that no this data was not really available. That at the federal level and the national level there was not accurate or readily available data about who was being killed by the police and why? How often it was happening, right? We saw these, the FBI kept stats on it but the FBI would tell you when you called them don't cite our stats, they're wrong. And so we said alright, and then we looked at a few crowd projects and we realized that there were these, you know, projects being done by citizen journalists trying to track shootings, that actually at the time the best, most authoritative real time database of people being killed by the police is literally a website called killedbypolice.com, which is just a spreadsheet of names drawn from media reports and people's Facebook pictures, right? So we said could we do this? Could we create this data? Could we find a way to monitor media reports across the country, just file a bunch of records request and could we build a database in real time of who was being killed by the police and how? We launched that project and we ended up doing that, it’s still ongoing. We're now in our third year of tracking fatal police shootings. But among the things we found were that, you know, we documented twice as many fatal police shootings in the United States as the FBI said was happening, right? So we proved that their numbers were essentially false. We found that yes there are major racial disparities in who's being killed by the police, that black men are more likely to be killed than white men, that black people killed by the police are more likely to be unarmed. And then we also found some other things. We found that a quarter of the people killed by the police are mentally ill or are in the midst of some type of mental crisis when they're killed. Which raises questions about how our police should be trained. We found dozens of officers who killed someone in a shooting during 2015-2016, and it was not their first shooting. I think we had over 120 officers who are repeat officers. And that's, we accept that that's probably a pretty deep undercount because that's not easy information to come by. And so we ended up doing this massive project, essentially around the idea that if we're going to be covering police shootings, we need to know as much as possible, we need to build to bring this context to the conversation because then we can have a higher level conversation.

AMT: Mm. And, you know, I mean, it's interesting because you did the statistical clinical side of the reporting but you were also doing the visceral street level reporting and you are a young black man.

WESLEY LOWERY: Yeah.

AMT: You're the guy who's getting, you could be the same guy who is just standing next to you, who looks like you, who gets picked up. And you were arrested of course in trying to do your job, but how hard did it become for you to cover those kinds of killings, knowing those statistics day after day.

WESLEY LOWERY: It's always difficult when you're covering the trauma of people who look like you, and also when you are likely to be going through some level of that trauma yourself, right? And so it's not easy to watch on video watch black men be killed everyday, right? Or people who look like yourself or your father or your brother. There's also something to be said for kind of the black death beat, that because this was thematically something that was so large, that people were talking about and writing about constantly for the last eight years, we became, the reporters who cover these stories, become repositories for this information, right? So your inbox becomes full with e-mails pleading from family members of other people killed by the police. Look at our video, cover this one, right? Your voicemail and your social media become both tip sheets as well as places for attack, right? That the idea that, you know, there are a lot of people who were very uncomfortable with the idea that we would scrutinize the police, or anyone would scrutinize the police, very uncomfortable with the idea of these protests. And so rather than attack the actual individual activists very often, they would attack the media who covers it, as a means of trying to sway, you know, convince us not to cover it essentially, right? If they can harass me into submission then I won't write these stories anymore. And so we become kind of personal targets in a way. And I think that that, you know, can be frustrating, can be difficult over time. But I also think that it can be, it underscores how important some of this work is and how important is to continue having these conversations. Essentially, any time someone's attempting to keep you from asking a question, it means you probably should ask that question.

AMT: It's interesting because that really does speak to how charged this was and how, on another level, there was becoming a clear understanding that there was a movement that was coming out of there. I mean, the Black Lives Matter movement, but you talk about other movements as well. But there's a new empowerment of, not exclusively young, but of young black leaders coming out of the frustration of what this spawned.

WESLEY LOWERY: It's the drumbeat. It's not a Ferguson story, right? It's the story of all of these cases because again, what this period of time did is it forever, you know, disabused us of this idea that somehow these were some isolated incidents, or that this was just a story about one screwed up place in Missouri, right? OK. So you have Ferguson and then you have Staten Island where Eric Garner is killed and you have Cleveland where Tamir Rice was killed, and Beavercreek, Ohio where John Crawford’s killed. And you go to the next year and you've got North Charleston with Walter Scott, and down in Texas you're dealing with Sandra Bland, in Cincinnati it's Dubose. And all of a sudden, people sort of realize, Charlotte, Milwaukee, oh maybe this could happen where I live. It's not about some crazy racists in one place or some crazy unruly crowd in one place, that all of a sudden the story, it becomes increasingly clear the story of Ferguson, the story of Baltimore is the story of America and that we can't just sit and scoff at people far away having this conversation and raise our noses to them, because tomorrow this conversation might be happening in my metropolis, downtown at my house.

AMT: Well, you mentioned Walter Scott and of course that was Charleston, South Carolina. Police officer named Michael Slager.

WESLEY LOWERY: Michael Slager.

AMT: Kills 50-year-old Marine Corps veteran Walter Scott. Remind us why it this becomes so notorious?

WESLEY LOWERY: So in that case, you know, that shooting became so notorious in part because it was, and you hate to use this term of phrase, but you finally had the kind of quote unquote perfect victim. Here you had a black man, fleeing a very base level crime that was optional, right? Walter Scott’s pulled over for missing his third tail light, which is not actually a crime in South Carolina but he's pulled over missing his third tail light. He has some outstanding child support, so he runs, right? He doesn't want to deal with, he doesn't want to go to jail overnight because he missed a payment or had not sent in some payments, so he runs and he has some type of struggle with the officer, who has pulled his taser out. And then he kind of keeps running away and the officer’s story had been that Walter Scott had gotten hold of his taser was, you know, was holding the taser pointing it at him and was about to tase this officer when he pulled his gun and had to shoot and kill him in fear for his life. The early days of that shooting, that first weekend, that was all the police narrative. Was that, you know, a police officer shot and killed someone who had stolen the officer's taser and was ready to kill the officer. And then we saw the bystander video. Days later this video was released and what we see is not Walter Scott with the officer's taser about to tase the officer, we see Walter Scott running away very slowly with his back to the officer and the officer pulling his gun, unholstering it and shooting, you know, putting six bullets in the back of Walter Scott. So you saw with our own eyes, not only what many people believed to be a murder on video, but we also saw how the police narrative had been completely different than what we could see now with our eyes. And I think that is one of the reasons that that shooting became a touch point for people who would otherwise, there was no question about what happened, right? In the Michael Brown case, there is this question of what exactly the interaction was and was it really his fault, was he attacking the officer, right? The Eric Garner case, everyone’s like why wouldn't he comply or people would try to blame him for his health or, you know. In the Tamir Rice case it’s this idea that even though this is a 12-year-old in a park, how could the officers have known this gun wasn't real? In the Walter Scott case, it became clear to most people who I've talked to, who have watched this video that Scott should not be dead. And I think that's what was different about that shooting. And so we'll see what happens. But the reality is even in the most egregious cases it's very difficult in the United States for America, under our legal system, to prosecute a police officer. One, we see very few officers being charged and when they're charged they're almost never convicted. And so it is surprising to many people that this officer was not convicted but it should not be when we know, when we actually have the context at our fingers.

AMT: And of course, we've discussed that this is all happening during a time when America's first black president is in office. Will the new Trump administration have any bearing on police killings in your country?

WESLEY LOWERY: You know, I think we're very likely to see a very different posture from the federal government. Now, it's too early to tell completely, I mean, obviously he's not the president yet. But based on his statements previously, as well as on who he has submitted as his nominee for attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions, It seems very unlikely that the federal government’s going continue being the monitor that it has been of police. You know, in the last eight years, the Obama administration has been very aggressive, now, many would argue not aggressive enough, activists are not particularly pleased with them all the time right? But they've investigated many police departments, they have forced local police departments into reform agreements, they have in the most egregious cases prosecuted police officers. And they’ve also done a lot of work on data collection, the type of work that my colleagues and I do at The Washington Post. Saying, agreeing essentially, with the idea that of course the federal government should know how many people the police are killing every year, right? Now, the Trump administration seems very unlikely to adopt those same positions. His attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions has talked about how he thinks that these investigations of departments are overblown, are used too often. Trump has talked about how he doesn't necessarily believe that they should be forcing local police departments to tell the federal government who they're killing every year, right? And so it's very unclear what exactly that looks like in a policy space, but it seems like I said very unlikely that any of what we've seen these last few years continues.

AMT: Well, we've just seen the national and regional presidents of the NAACP and five other people arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, as they were part of a sit in in the office of the Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, protesting his nomination to Attorney General because of his record on prosecutions and civil rights. So how do you, as somebody who covers the movement now since Ferguson, and also the politics of Washington, what do you anticipate you will be covering?

WESLEY LOWERY: Well, you know, I think it’s going to be important to cover the undoing of what has happened. I think that there was a lot of progress made in the eight years of the Obama administration as it relates to the federal government bolstering its role in police accountability, and it seems very likely that that is going to be systematically undone. And I think it's going to be important to piece by piece note that. But I also think that at a time in which there's a federal partner not as interested in police accountability, I think it becomes even more important that the media remains interested in that, right? The police are not going to stop killing people, the police shoot and kill about three people every single day. And that's not something that's going to change next year, it seems very unlikely. We've seen now two years of about a thousand people shot and killed and we believe that will likely be the case again next year. And so because of that, I think the role of the press is even more important because it's our job, if something is important, if something matters, if something has a, you know, if there's an issue with accountability, that doesn't change if the people in Washington no longer agree, right? Our job, our responsibility remains what it is. And so I think the next few years will include a lot of, you know, continuing to ask hard questions, continuing to hold powerful people and powerful institutions to account. And continuing to have conversations about are there policy steps or resources or best practices that could be applied that lead to fewer dead people? Because everyone, the police unions, the police themselves, the activists, the residents, most Americans, I think all Americans, would like fewer people to be killed. And so how can we live in that world?

AMT: Wesley Lowery, it's good to talk to you. Thank you.

WESLEY LOWERY: No, it’s so great. Thank you for having me, I really appreciate chatting with you.

AMT: Wesley Lowery is the author of They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement. He joined us from Washington DC. Now The Washington Post was awarded a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of police shootings and the database that was created. They continue to update it and we're going to link to that project from our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Let us know what you're thinking about this, you can tweet us we are @TheCurrentCBC, find us on Facebook or online cbc.ca/thecurrent. Now, stay with us, in our next half hour, questions about author Joseph Boyden’s Indigenous identity have been swirling for weeks since a controversial news report. Wab Kinew for one says there is still room in the circle for the writer. He's part of our panel discussion in about 90 seconds. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Indigenous identity and the case of Joseph Boyden

Guests: Wab Kinew, Lee Maracle, Kim TallBear

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti this is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

JOSEPH BOYDEN: It's interesting, you know, my family, I was raised in a very kind of traditional Irish Catholic strict upbringing. My father was Irish Catholic. He had some Nipmuc blood actually from the 1860s, the last roll done in Massachusetts of the Nipmuc people in my father's family. My mother's Anishinaabe and Scottish. And we'd spent our summers up on reserves, like, Christian Island and Wasauksing but we never really talked about her side of the world.

AMT: That is Joseph Boyden, the acclaimed Canadian novelist speaking with CBC radio host Rosanna Deerchild on her program Unreserved in 2015. Joseph Boyden’s own story and his claims to Indigenous ancestry have become a much discussed and debated narrative across the country over the past couple of weeks. A report by APTN, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network brought questions about Joseph Boyden’s ethnic makeup into the open. It found that over the years, the writer had described his Indigenous ancestry in many different ways, perhaps too many different ways and it concluded that Joseph Boyden, long celebrated as one of Canada's finest Indigenous voices may not be Indigenous at all. The discussion that has ensued has given rise to many more questions about the nature of Indigenous identity and the nature of identity itself. Although Joseph Boyden, in that interview on Unreserved did seem to be wrestling with such questions himself.

SOUNDCLIP

JOSEPH BOYDEN: As a writer, people want me to be something, they want me to be when they meet me. They’re like oh you don’t look all that Indian. [chuckles]

ROSANNA DEERCHILD: What? You get that do you?

JOSEPH BOYDEN: And I don’t look Irish either, do I? And they’re like oh, I thought maybe you were Spanish. And I’m like no, no not a drop of Spanish blood in me. But, you know, I look at myself and I often say who am I? I live in New Orleans much of the year with my American wife, my family is Georgian Bay and James Bay. And so I'm just kind of this I'm a total nomad and I kind of love that.

AMT: Well, since the APTN report almost two weeks ago, Joseph Boyden has said little. He did reaffirm his mixed blood and Indigenous roots on both his mother and father's side in a statement on his Twitter account in response to the report. Now we did invite Joseph Boyden to join us here on The Current, he declined. We do have a panel of Indigenous thinkers and writers joining us to wrestle with some of the questions this controversy has raised. Wab Kinew is an Anishinaabe author and NDP member of the Manitoba legislature. He joins us from our Winnipeg studio. Kim TallBear is of Dakota heritage. She is also Canada Research Chair in Indigenous peoples, techno science and environment at the University of Alberta. She's in our Edmonton studio. And with me in Toronto is Lee Maracle, she is a member of the Sto:lo nation.

LEE MARACLE: [laughs]

AMT: Am I saying that right?

LEE MARACLE: No.

AMT: No? I’m sorry.

LEE MARACLE: No, Sto:lo.

AMT: Sto:lo nation, OK. And you also are an author and instructor at the University of Toronto. Thank you all of you for being here. Thank you.

WAB KINEW: Morning.

AMT: I'm going to start with Wab Kinew, because you count Joseph Boyden as a friend. Do you question his Indigenous identity?

WAB KINEW: Well, I have always seen him as somebody who grew up with a primarily non-Indigenous experience and with a limited biological connection to the community. So not much in the estimation that I've had of him has changed with the revelations of the APTN piece.

AMT: How legitimate do you think the questions being asked about him are then?

WAB KINEW: I think there's a lot of legitimate questions, to be honest. I think there's a number that are particularly relevant for the Indigenous community. I think the question of, you know, how appropriate was it for him to accept award money or grants that were set asides for Indigenous authors that could have gone to help advance, you know, writers who had the very real experience of facing obstacles based on being born a First Nations person or an Inuit person in Canada. I think a lot of those questions are legitimate. And then I think a lot of the follow up questions that people are asking too, along the lines of should we still read Joseph Boyden? I think that those are very interesting and legitimate questions as well.

AMT: Should people have been asking this before? Wab Kinew.

WAB KINEW: Well, I think people have been asking these questions to various degrees. And yeah, I think that they are relevant because I think that the way a reader approaches a Joseph Boyden novel is influenced by how they understand his identity. Like, I think they would probably pick up a copy of Wenjack and look at it differently if they think that he's non-Native versus when they assume that he was Indigenous.

AMT: Lee Maracle, does proof of Joseph Boyden's background matter to you?

LEE MARACLE: No, it doesn't actually, but it does matter that we have a fractured and completely nations in disarray and that we're still colonial and we're still relying on race based identity and we don't have any freedom to naturalize people into our nation. I know there's numbers of people in my nation that are not Sto:lo. In fact, I think the majority of the so-called Sto:lo nation is the [Indigenous speaking language], which is another nation north of us, that was brought down to make us sick and kill us and did. And so we don't have very much Sto:lo blood left in us. So if people ask me what my blood lines are, Sto:lo would not be one of them. But it wouldn't be for any other Sto:los either. Most of us are, in my case Squamish and [Indigenous speaking language] and in other cases it's [Indigenous speaking language] or Toppenish, which is in Washington. And, you know, this disarray that we're in has to do with colonization and the same with identity. I was talking to a person the other day and she said well, we find out we're not Ojibwe, although we are status, on and on, and Ojibwe Reserve were actually mainly Cree, and she's 42-years-old. We're still discovering who we are. We don't actually know, because Canada has completely set us into disarray through the epidemics, through residential school, through dislocation and relocation, all these colonial programs has left us with very little in terms of understanding who we are.

AMT: And very little ability then to trace it back.

LEE MARACLE: Exactly.

AMT: OK. Kim TallBear, what's your reaction to the response you're seeing on social media into questions about Mr. Boyden's heritage?

KIM TALLBEAR: Well, just, you know, building on what Lee and Wab have said, I'm an American, and so I look at this, and I just arrived in Edmonton a year and a half ago, I look at this from a structural point of view, of looking at the phenomenon of playing Indian in the United States, which is pervasive across the US. I'm coming to realize it's also more common than I thought in Canada. And so when I look at Joseph Boyden, I don't know his work, I didn't know who he was until I came here a year and a half ago. I quickly heard though, in conversations with Indigenous people, [clears throat] excuse me, that these stories were circulating about his identity. So on social media what I'm seeing is writers, scholars, activists, posting funny memes about it, but also asking kind of pointed questions about who his people are, and I see signs that they've been asking those questions for a while, as Wab said.

AMT: Lee Maracle, how do you respond to that?

LEE MARACLE: I watched the situation in the United States, by the way, I'm supposed to be an American, my great grandmother would have stayed on Lummi Reserve had both Canada and the United States not passed a law that women had to move. And so my people in Washington, that's who I went to ceremony with all my life, I can’t claim Lummi because of American law and Canadian law the same. That’s colonial law, that's not our law. That was never our way. My ta-ah used to take us to America to make sure we had that experience with the Lummi people. Lummi in my language actually means face yourself and that's an important concept. So I'm in disarray as well. You know, this whole business of racialized identity, no other nations in the world are judged by their race. What race is a Canadian? Nobody can answer that, because nationhood isn't about race, it isn't about blood quantum, it isn't about playing anything. Some of the people that have come up to me, I had a group of Cree people come up to me and say what do we call my friend who's teaching us Cree? She's white. And I say you don't call her anything. You can get your Chief to naturalize her and pass a law that you're entitled to naturalized non-Native people as citizens. That's what you do, that's what nations do. So they did that. They now have a Cree Viking language teacher. [laughs] I find it comic but.

AMT: Wab Kinew.

WAB KINEW: Yes.

AMT: How do you respond to what Lee Maracle is saying?

WAB KINEW: Well, I think that there is a very important point to be made about how if Indigenous nations are going to be self-determining, that we must be able to decide for ourselves who are the members or the citizens of our nations. And when we look to Indigenous traditions, you know, there's many nations the Anishinaabe, the Dakota, you know, others that allow for non-Indigenous people to be brought into the community, whether it be through adoption or through recognition of meritorious service. So I think that that is an important point. But the question that arises in this particular example was Joseph Boyden that I've heard, are people asking well, doesn't the possible misleading or the misrepresentation that may have happened on Joseph Boyden’s part, which we don't really know the answer to, as of yet we don't know if, you know, things were misrepresented or not, doesn't that change the legitimacy by which he may have been brought into the community? And I think that's an important question to answer. My answer to that question is, from what I know of Indigenous tradition, from what I know of Indigenous culture, we're very inclusive, we're also very forgiving. So even if somebody, perhaps, approached our community on less than 100 per cent disclosive terms, there still is room to bring them back into the circle. And I think the second point that we should bear in mind is that there can be different ways of having a role in the Indigenous community. So for instance, it is possible for somebody to have a place in our community and to be active in the Indigenous community without themselves being Indigenous. And I think that that's one of the issues that we're sorting out in this conversation.

AMT: And I've got a clip of someone who speaks to that as well. It's Bev Sellars, she's author, former chief of the Xat'sull band in British Columbia. Listen to what she says about all of this.

SOUNDCLIP

That is an issue between Joseph Boyden’s community and Joseph Boyden. I don't think anybody else can say whether he is Indigenous or not, just like from my tribe anybody that claims to be a Xat'sull descent, we know whether they are or they're not. The elders know all of the connections. So that's an issue between Joseph Boyden and his community.

AMT: Lee Maracle, I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing.

LEE MARACLE: Oh, I’m absolutely agreeing with Bev. [coughs] Excuse me. The Okanagans have a saying, everybody marries in, we don't marry out. And so every one that's in their nation is a member of that nation, no matter what race, creed, colour that they are. That's nationhood, and that's between whoever and the nation itself. I’m a Sto:lo, the Sto:lo recognize me and that's why I can say am a Sto:lo, not because the government says I’m a Sto:lo.

AMT: Kim TallBear, you have written extensively about tracing Indigenous identity.

LEE MARACLE: [coughs]

AMT: Your book is entitled Native American DNA. What do you say to people who have suggested that genetic testing could be an answer to questions of Indigenous identity, such as those questions surrounding Joseph Boyden?

KIM TALLBEAR: Well, there's a couple of things. The first is there are problems with the limitations of the science, which is kind of too much to get into on air today. But, you know, there's a handful of Native American markers that do not trace to particular Indigenous communities. They are found in higher and lower frequencies throughout the Americas. So even if Boyden, who has admitted that the vast majority of his ancestry is non-Indigenous, did find a low percentage of quote unquote, Native American DNA in his lineage, it would probably be such a low percentage that it would be below the margin of error. And even if it were say more than 5 per cent, it wouldn't point to a particular people. Now, I think settler culture, with its focus on lineal biological descent, as pointing back to racial categories, might be satisfied if he got a DNA test that showed say more than 5 per cent beyond the margin of error. I still think we'd have the same conversations circulating among Indigenous communities. Well, who are his people? Who claims him? Did he fabricate the story entirely of particular lineages? Because again, DNA won't point to those lineages. So one other thing I wanted to say, there's Lee and Wab have brought up the issue of Indigenous citizenship and those are really vibrant conversations in our communities. But I also think there's a couple of other things going on. This isn't simply about citizenship. This is about kinship, and kinship and citizenship overlap but they're not the same thing. And as Wab pointed out, you can have biological kinship but you can also have ceremonial kinship. We do welcome people into our circle. Métis poet Marilyn Dumont said a couple of days ago on social media that there's always been room in our circle, the reason this betrayal occurred in the first place. And so that's a voice from somebody who is a little bit concerned about this and I just want to say one other thing. I think playing Indian from my point of view, and this is part of the work that I do, it's yet another colonial act. It's made possible by structural racism in both Canada and the US, because both countries view it as the right of settler culture to define and control identity and race definitions, and Lee was talking about that. So that that control isn't only official control on the part of the settler state and all of its federal policies to manage Indians throughout the 19th and 20th century but it's also about these kind of informal ways in which non-Indigenous people feel it is their right to claim an Indian in the family tree without being claimed in return. So I think that's a structural race problem and one that we need to pay attention to and that's how I approach it because I see this as also a pervasive problem in the United States. That's one level of conversation. Then we can have these other level of conversation about Boyden in particular and his particular relations.

AMT: Right. You're making the point, it's so deeply embedded that it's like not even discussed in the wider community. It's deeply embedded, the way that the wider population sees this. We’re not even talking about the detail.

KIM TALLBEAR: Right. I mean, I think that the US and Canada, settler culture views it as their right to seize and control land. They've also viewed it as their right to seize and control bones for research, grave goods, blood samples for genetic research, seizing and controlling identity and the definition of race is just another colonial act in that long line of colonial acts.

AMT: Kim TallBear, you along with a number of Indigenous scholars wrote an open letter about American academic Andrea Smith, the woman who claimed Cherokee identity without proof. What happened in that case?

KIM TALLBEAR: Well, you know, I'm not sure what's happened in Andrea's personal and professional life. She's still employed at the University of California Riverside. What happened was you have the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, which has an extensive genealogy office, professional genealogists on staff, and they did a couple of genealogy projects at her request and the nation's request, and found out that they traced her lineage quite completely and there were no Indigenous ancestors. And so Cherokee Nation called that out originally because they actually go out and call out many people. The most cases of playing Indian in the United States, people claim to be Cherokee. Just like as I've seen in Canada, I think the most cases of playing Indian people claim to be Métis. And so the two cases are really quite similar in terms of how they are at the centre of these claims to Indigenous identity without proof. So, you know, I'm not sure what has happened with Andrea. I do think in terms of for us in Indigenous studies, it's opened up an ability to ask these questions and it's really painful to ask these questions. This is why I'm sure people in community might have been asking them about Joseph Boyden, but it's hard to bring this into the public light because you get accusations of lateral violence, of identity policing, it's painful for everybody involved in Indigenous community to do this. This is not something that's enjoyable.

AMT: Lee Maracle, you nodded your head when she said identity police.

LEE MARACLE: Yeah, I think it is. And I think that Bev Sellars said it, the Ojibwe people that he's claiming to be a part of, that's between Joseph and them. It has nothing to do with me as Sto:lo. I have no say in what the Ojibwe people do. If they accept anybody. I know the [Indigenous speaking language] go around adopting all kinds of people, including the Prince of Wales. That's not my business. That's what they want to do, that's what they do. So he's a citizen of theirs, that’s OK with me because it's their business. And I think that that's how we should do it. I've seen this, attacks on people as individuals. I think that's completely cruel and unwarranted. The people we should be talking to is the Ojibwes of Georgian Bay. If we really want to have a conversation about this, otherwise we’re overing on their sovereignty and possibly their relative. It is really that question of the individual is really none of our business. What is our business is having our identity tacked on, not to our culture and our laws, but to our bloodlines. My great uncle [Indigenous speaking language] said every single person in our territory is Squamish and just some of you aren't any good at it. That's just, that’s Vancouver. And he's saying this is our territory, this is our country, so everyone here is a citizen, doesn't matter. You might be very bad citizens but that's what we have to take care of. He's establishing territoriality as an nationhood as opposed to bloodlines.

AMT: Wab Kinew, both Kim and Lee are making the point that this is a painful discussion to have within the Indigenous community. The other part of this, another part of this, is the fact that the non-Indigenous community embraced Joseph Boyden as a representative of the Indigenous community. So is there something that the non-Indigenous community should be asking itself in this?

WAB KINEW: Well, I think it's not just one thing, but it's many things that non-Indigenous people should be asking themselves. I think maybe the most germane question to answer, with respect to this discussion, is how does the mainstream view First Nations peoples or Indigenous peoples? Because what this reveals to me is that people think of Indigenous communities as like one big blob of people basically and that we can have an appointed spokesperson. But the point that I would like readers of Boyden’s material to understand is that even if he does establish Anishinaabe identity, which is still an open question, as I’ve stated and I think that the onus is on him to disclose more to answer those questions. But the point is that even if Boyden establishes Anishinaabe identity, he is still an outsider to many of the peoples that he's written about. So for instance the Muskegwa Cree in Three Day Road, or the Huron or Haudenosaunee peoples in The Orenda. And as a result, he should have always been viewed as a talented outsider. And had readers always taken up his work in those ways, then their understanding of his novels wouldn't be changed much by these newer revelations. So that's the way that I would encourage people to start understanding this issue. So when we talk about, you know, citizenship versus race, you know, I think of what Ta-Nehisi Coates, you know, says about race, and he says that, you know, people assume that racism is the child of race but in fact it is the father, right? These categories don't exist. You know, the categories of race don't really exist out there in absolute space. They, people had the racist thought first and then they invented the categories of racism to justify those racist thoughts.

LEE MARACLE: [laughs]

WAB KINEW: And so what that gets to is the heart of one of the things that has been done in colonization of Canada and the US, which is that people have sought to amalgamate all these different nations and tribes into one group. You know, first they tried to make us the redskin race, then they tried to make us the Indian race and now it's the Aboriginal or the Indigenous race. But we have never been members of a race.

LEE MARACLE: No.

WAB KINEW: We have always been members of different Indigenous nations. So if there is one silver lining in this, I would hope it is that people begin to gain a more nuanced but also a more accurate understanding of Indigenous identity. And, you know, I say that while also, you know, pointing out that I think that the onus still is on Joseph to come forward and, you know, make himself accountable and answer some of the important questions that are being asked of him and about his work.

AMT: You're saying he shouldn't be afraid to come forward then? That this is part of a bigger conversation that just needs to keep going.

LEE MARACLE: He’s not nothing to fear.

WAB KINEW: Yeah, I think, well, no I think there are legitimate questions that he has to answer. And again, the whole conversation that we're having about, you know, there's other ways to find belonging in our community, whether it's through adoption or marriage or ceremonial induction into our community, what all those things have in common is that after you're brought into the community, you have a responsibility to continue maintaining the relationship. To put it simply, you have to keep showing up in order for those relationships to be valid. And so with Boyden being silent for the past couple of weeks, hey, I get it man, I know what it's like to be at the centre of a media controversy, it's very stressful. But at a certain point, he is going to have to re-emerge and he is going to have to start renewing the relationships with the Indigenous community. And I think that in this instance, the way that he would do that is to come out and start talking about his identity. It's to start answering the questions that people have about the position that he's taken on the UBC accountable letter. It's to start, you know, in my mind, atoning for the comments that he made about missing and murdered Indigenous women. It's starting to answer some of those other questions that people have had about the grants and the prize money. So again, he does have a place in the Indigenous community going forward. But the only way that that place will be guaranteed into the future is if he keeps showing up and he keeps renewing the relationships that he has in our communities.

AMT: I'm sitting across from Lee Maracle and she is nodding her head in agreement. But Kim TallBear, I can't see you, what are you thinking?

KIM TALLBEAR: You know, it was interesting to read Ryan McMahon, Anishinaabe comedian's piece when he said that Boyden has basically ghosted people on social media and hasn't been around to be accountable. I mean, to me this is really telling. Indigenous communities, we have to be accountable to each other and sometimes you have to humble yourself when you've made a mistake, you have to be called to task and that's not easy to do. But for Indigenous people that feel obligated to their communities, we don't get to just walk away from that. It's not an option. So to me again, it's not knowing him personally, his actions and the way in which he tells the stories about his heritage, the way that they shift around. They all follow a very typical pattern of other high profile cases I've seen of playing Indian, and that that's what I go off of. He doesn't seem to, he's not manifesting a sense of obligation to his Indigenous community that he professes to claim.

AMT: Lee Maracle.

LEE MARACLE: Yeah. I actually do know Joseph and I have been critical of his work and I think that's fair. I think he had some problems with Orenda, I mentioned that I actually talked to him about following the colonial narrative of cannibalism of the Longhouse people, which has, you know, affected my people too, we were referred to as cannibals as well, historically. And that was never the case, although we have other problems, you know, we used to kill people kind of at will, but that's a different story. I think that he was able to account for himself both publicly and privately. But the approach to him wasn’t as an attack, it was as calling to question. And that's a different thing than what's happening with him right now. I think this is a personal attack. I don't think it has anything to do with some of the problems that people have with his writing.

AMT: We are out of time, we have to leave it there. Thank you all of you for this discussion.

WAB KINEW: Miigwech.

LEE MARACLE: We.

KIM TALLBEAR: Thank you.

LEE MARACLE: Bye Wab.

WAB KINEW: Bye.

AMT: Wab Kinew, Anishinaabe the author and NDP member of the Manitoba legislature. Kim TallBear of Dakota heritage, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous peoples, technoscience and environment at the University of Alberta. Lee Maracle, member of the Sto:lo nation, author and instructor at the University of Toronto. That's our program for today. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, thanks for listening to The Current.

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January 5, 2017 full episode transcript

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