Distinct Histories, Shared Solidarity

Black and Indigenous activists’ reflections on land, policing, and gender

- Nickita Longman & Phillip Dwight Morgan

The recent, high-profile acquittals of two white men, Gerald Stanley and Raymond Cormier, for the deaths of two Indigenous youth, Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine, have caused a spike in public awareness of the failure of the Canadian justice system to protect Indigenous lives. In an effort to help Americans understand the importance of the acquittals, many have referred to Colten Boushie as the “Rodney King of Western Canada,” and described his death as “Canada’s Trayvon Martin moment.” These comparisons between the conditions of Black folks in the U.S. and Indigenous peoples in Canada are not new. In Nancy Macdonald’s 2016 Maclean’s article “Canada’s prisons are the ‘new residential schools,’” an unnamed doctor quips “there is a good reason they call Saskatchewan ‘Alabama North.’” Activists, academics, and journalists have increasingly adopted such comparisons in an attempt to induce a sympathetic reaction from the white Canadian settler state and allies alike.

Though usually well intentioned, equating Indigenous struggles with Black struggles is an inaccurate parallel – one that glosses over important differences in the ways that the Canadian and U.S. settler states operate, and erases the differences in the injustices that each group experiences.

Tina Fontaine spent months in the foster care system, followed by a run-in with police, and a documented visit to the hospital days before her body was pulled from the Red River. Black and Indigenous people clearly cannot look to the state and its sympathizers for protection or systemic change. Instead, our movements must be rooted in recognizing the differences between our experiences of oppression, and continuing to learn from and stand beside each other while building new, shared spaces to exist.