Thunder Bay

2023, 4 episodes - Crave
created by Ryan McMahon

I grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. It's "home" to me, but I've never loved it there. I've always said it's "8 hours from nowhere" (because in the North, we measure distance in time, not kilometers): 8 hours west to Winnepeg, 8 hours east to Sault Ste. Marie, 8 hours south to Minneapolis.  The city has around 110,000 people, so it's not huge (for a weird contextualization, the largest football stadium in Korea can hold 150,000 people), but it's still the hub of Northwestern Ontario, what all the smaller towns to the northeast and west call "the city".  

Around the time I was born there, Thunder Bay was largely blue collar - pulp and paper and as the last port stop of the great lakes, transferring shipping from boat to train and truck, and vice versa.  That all started to die in the late 80s, and it took just shy of two decades for the city to reinvent itself, now more of a medical and educational hub. It's gone through a lot of changes in my lifetime. 

One thing seems to be a constant though, and that's the tension between the Indigenous peoples of the area and everyone else.

Thunder Bay started life as a podcast, in which host Ryan McMahan examines closely and critically a city he has fond affection for, and tries to understand the dark heart beating under the Canadian shield. It's focused on primarily the topic of the city's systemic and institutional... and societal... and cultural racism towards its Indigenous people, but it also looked at other stories of political corruption, media debacles and legal failures to paint a picture of what sort of horror show the place is when you look past its environmental beauty.

This new Crave mini-series is more laser-focused on Thunder Bay's treatment of Indigenous youth, and exposing more broadly a police department that has been formally diagnosed as systemically racist.  There have been a string of deaths of teenagers being found in the city's rivers (the seven fallen feathers and, sadly, beyond) and a completely inept handling of the deaths by the police and the coroner's office, and even when the TB Police Department was being investigated, additional deaths occurred, and were handled with similar irresponsibility.  Inept is an understatement. There is a complete dismissal of Indigenous people as people, the police not deeming these victims of whatever circumstance as worthy of their time.

The police dismiss the deaths, pretty much without any investigation, as accidental death by misadventure and substance abuse.  McMahon talks with people who have survived or witnessed the aftermath of assaults of groups of men forcing teens into the frigid waters.  McMahon examines the theories of serial killer or gang violence as the cause, but there's a societal dehumanization of Indigenous peoples in the rural and metropolitan settlers that is more likely to blame.

As a child, I was aware that there were Indigenous cultures around Thunder Bay, and that there was an influence upon the city as a result. But, I can't remember having any childhood friends, though, who were Indigenous (or at least made their Indigenous heritage part of their outward identity). As a teen I was more keenly aware of the Indigenous population, as I drove around the streets, watched/listened/read the news, went shopping...but I didn't have any knowledge of the people or their culture or their struggles.  I also was more aware of the conflict, hearing adults talk about "the native problem", hearing friends with Indigenous heritage disparage that part of their cultural background, and hearing hate speech about Canada's Indigenous populations from people who I otherwise considered decent, empathetic human beings.  I can say I've never held hate in my heart, but I also cannot say that I was an ally confronting these statements. I grew up in the 90's where the idea of entering a "post-racism" society was being shoved down our throats, wilful obliviousness was the path forward, and identifying anyone by their ethnicity or culture, or discussing it with them was kind of taboo.  I still struggle to talk about race or ethnicity openly because I was taught not to. 

I was visiting a friend's family while visiting Thunder Bay a couple years ago, and neighbours of theirs came by.  The conversation started into the wildfire problems in Northwestern Ontario, which caused the evacuation of many reservations, bringing a large number of remote Indigenous peoples into the city for shelter. These neighbours started talking about "the problems", relating stories from their police officer daughter, and there any attempt to steer the conversation into thoughts of compassion were not met, if not outright challenged.  They did not seem like bad people, these neighbours who came by to lend a helping hand to their neighbours, but at the same time, they represent an all-too-common cultural sensibility around the city of Thunder Bay.  There's tension, there's distrust, and there's so much trauma.  For the settler population of the city, it seems what they want, more than anything, is to not think about it. That is how racism and racist structures perpetuate, by not addressing the past and present, by not being open and honest, and by feeling threatened with change. Systemic racism is about there being parties who benefit and parties that not only don't benefit but are actively harmed by those systems.

McMahon had done two seasons of the podcast, which I have to say, were more journalistic in their presentation. This TV mini-series is more emotionally guided. I think after two seasons in Thunder Bay, McMahon is disappointed, frustrated and angry.  That love and sentimentality McMahon expresses for the city in the first season of the podcast (reiterated at the start of the TV series) seems to have given way to powerful emotions, and those emotions fuels the series.  It's been said (and was shown) that many attempts were made to talk with the people in charge of both police and city institutions and they were rebuffed in almost every attempt. They don't show enough of the city not wanting to talk about it, because in showing the reluctance to address its own issues, well no more a potent message can be said. 

After the release of the Broken Trust report from the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, one of the recommendations was to appoint an Indigenous person to sit on its board, to whom the chief of police is answerable to. Georjann Morriseau, is appointed and actually chaired the board, only to find herself butting heads with the chief, and subjected to unlawful investigations and harassment for doing the job she's asked to do. Her time as board chair is harrowing and led to a filing of a human rights complaint against the chief, members of the service, and the board. (My two cents, Morriseau is a fucking hero).

There's a "bombshell" in the show's final episode, a leaked confidential report to the media about an internal investigation shows the police are aware of their mishandling of Indigenous "sudden death" cases. The report identifies 16 cases that require reinvestigation, but McMahon misrepresents this in the show, highlighting the 1700+ cases of "sudden death" in a 7 year period, as if most of them equate to the same level of scrutiny of deaths that have been discussed on the show.  

It's manipulative in the edit, and McMahon is guilty of misrepresentation in this way a few times in the series.  For example, he calls Thunder Bay the "murder capital of Canada", which is not an inaccurate statement, but he equates this title to the deaths of Indigenous teens whose deaths are officially noted as "accidental", therefore not officially on record as murders. McMahon never really touches upon what are the actual murders that give Thunder Bay this shameful title (it was 15 murders in 2022, which when measured means more murders per capita than anywhere else in Canada). There is a substance abuse crisis in Thunder Bay, and gang issues. These aren't subjects that tie into McMahon's narrative for the series, and so they're barely scratched, and the fact that we don't get this kind of contextualization is a reminder that McMahon isn't an investigative reporter, so there's limits to where his production is going to go.

But the purpose of the show isn't to report all the facts. It's raising awareness, and it's a necessary narrative to say that the Thunder Bay Police Department have failed the Indigenous population on a spectacularly unprecedented and embarrassing level.  Yeah, they're not out shooting Indigenous teens on the streets, but that doesn't give them permission to so spectacularly fail or abuse a people, and then both try and hide from accountability and avoid acknowledging their part in upholding racist institutions. 

Recommended viewing for all Canadians with McMahon's podcast required supplementary listening. Throw off the shackles of wilful obliviousness and confront some of our most uncomfortable truths. 

As for me and Thunder Bay, we still see each other from time to time. Still not a lot of love (it's a town for lovers of the outdoors, which is definitely not me), but there's familiarity and that's okay.