Jethro Anderson disappears one day in October 2000, just never coming home. He comes from a First Nation, from a remote indigenous reservation. The 15-year-old goes to high school in the Canadian city of Thunder Bay and lives with his aunt Dora. She does the obvious: she seeks help from the police, the “Thunder Bay Police”.
Journalist Tanya Talaga, herself an indigenous person, has researched Jethro’s story in great detail: “The police told her not to worry. The boy probably just partied, like all indigenous kids. Then the policeman hung up. ” Dora searches on her own, drives the family car through town for hours. She informs the mother of the teenage boy who is flying to Thunder Bay with members of her remote community.
They covered six hundred kilometers to look for the boy in town. The police only started looking after six days, says Talaga. On November 11th, Jethro is found dead in the freezing Kaministiquia River south of Thunder Bay.
Legend:
The Kaministiquia River near its confluence with Lake Superior: Jethro Anderson was found in this river.
SRF / Andrea Christen
When Dora looks at her dead nephew, she noticed a wound on her head and round marks on her face, as if someone had put out a cigarette there. The police quickly came to the conclusion: the teenager’s death was an accident, he drowned in the river without any outside interference. A pattern is thus sketched out that will be repeated several times in the years to come.
“Murder Bay”
Thunder Bay is in the midst of idyllic nature: in the province of Ontario, at the northwestern end of Lake Superior, on the largest freshwater lake in the world. Several rivers meander through the city, an elongated rock formation, the “sleeping giant”, lies in the lake and dominates the horizon. The city has over 100,000 inhabitants – and is the only city far and wide. The provincial capital Toronto is 900 kilometers away.
An idyllic surface, but underneath there is something dark: racism and violence. Thunder Bay has the highest homicide rate in Canada in years. The city has earned inglorious surnames like “Murder Bay”.
Legend:
The «sleeping giant» .: Does he sleep or does he look away in view of the many dead? The rock formation is the landmark of Thunder Bay.
SRF / Andrea Christen
For many indigenous people in Ontario, there is hardly a way around Thunder Bay: When the Canadian state expanded westward, it signed treaties with the indigenous people, the First Nations, in order to get to the resource-rich land. The indigenous people were forced into small reserves that still exist today. In the vast expanses of Northern Ontario, they can usually only be reached by plane.
Endless trauma
The “Residential Schools”, the notorious re-education schools for indigenous children, have left their mark there: entire generations came back traumatized from boarding schools, drowned the pain with alcohol or numbed it with drugs.
The students who go to school in Thunder Bay today are the descendants of this “residential school” generation. They often come from difficult, shattered backgrounds. The poor, remote reservations in Northern Ontario also lack housing, health care, jobs, shops and education.
Those looking for all of these things will find them in Thunder Bay. Teenagers who want to go to high school also have no other choice: They fly to the city without parents, where they often live with host families.
Legend:
Thunder Bay has 107,909 inhabitants, is the only town far and wide and thus forms the center of the region.
imago images
For the teenagers, Thunder Bay is an exciting, overwhelming place – and a scary one. Indigenous people report everyday racism. “Our youngsters are thrown garbage from passing cars, and in the shops they are monitored at every turn by security personnel,” says Tanya Talaga. And in Thunder Bay, the students come into contact with alcohol and drugs.
Like Curran Strang. The 18-year-old often gets drunk and has problems at school. In 2005 he disappears too. Friends later declare that he got drunk and passed out on a river bank. Four days later, his body is found in the river, where he often drank. The police quickly come to another conclusion: it was an accident.
The worst thing for families is the uncertainty of not knowing what happened to their children.
Curran Strang is not the last. By 2011 three more indigenous youths will disappear, all of them found dead in the rivers. “Many of these kids grew up in communities that are on a river or lake,” says Sam Achneepineskum. “I never heard anyone drowned there. And here they keep falling into the rivers and drowning? You scratch your head and wonder how that should be possible. ”
Legend:
The name of the river Kaministiquia is derived from the language of the Ojibwe indigenous people and means “with islands”.
SRF / Andrea Christen
Achneepineskum is a respected “elder” of his people, a particularly wise man, a well-known figure among the indigenous people in Thunder Bay. The worst thing for families is the uncertainty of not knowing what happened to their children, says Achneepineskum, an impressive figure with a long, white goatee.
Allegations to the police
Journalist Tanya Talaga writes a book about the five dead students, reconstructs their last lessons as closely as possible, writes about the failure of the police. And she also describes two other deaths: a young indigenous woman who is brought to her host family while drunk. The next morning she is dead.
She also writes about the case of a boy who suddenly collapses and dies in his mother’s kitchen. This means that there are seven dead indigenous youths in around ten years. Everyone came to attend high school in Thunder Bay. All found death.
Indigenous lives are worth less than whites.
The police investigated these cases sloppily and half-heartedly, says Talaga. «Investigations were not carried out to the end, information was not followed up, no interrogations were made. It’s amazing how there was no real effort to find out who killed those kids. ” Talaga expresses what many think: “I’m one hundred percent sure that in some cases it was murder, if not most.”
The case of the seven dead youths showed one thing clearly, says Julian Falconer, a well-known human rights lawyer in Canada: “Indigenous lives are worth less than white ones”. If seven white youths had died in Canada under mysterious circumstances, this would have led to a commission of inquiry, he is sure that politicians at the highest level would have campaigned for the clarification.
In 2012, Falconer is the lawyer for the “Nishnawbe Aski Nation”, a political organization that represents the First Nations in Northern Ontario. With Falconer’s help, she got an official investigation into all seven deaths. The result: three of the young people died in accidents, in four cases it remains unclear how the young indigenous people lost their lives.
Scathing report on the police work
Then, in 2018, there will be an independent report on the work of the Thunder Bay Police. It bears the title “Broken Trust”. He paints the picture of an incompetent, racist police force, a police force that insufficiently investigates the deaths of indigenous peoples, who start from racist stereotypes and come to the conclusion too quickly that indigenous peoples are drunk and fall into the rivers.
It is exactly the police that the powerful in Thunder Bay want: a police that protects the whites above all.
Although not all police officers are racists, the police are “institutionally racist”. Three years after this report, attorney Falconer comes to a sobering conclusion: “The Thunder Bay Police will not change. Why? Because it is precisely the police that the powerful in Thunder Bay want: a police that primarily protects the whites, for whom white lives are more than indigenous. The “Thunder Bay Police” should be completely dissolved. ”
Falconer says there are many good people in Thunder Bay. But whoever listens to him gets the impression of a city that does not want to acknowledge its deep-seated racism problem, a remote city that cannot be told by the outside world, has its own rules of the game. What do those responsible say about it, for example the mayor? Even after numerous emails and phone calls, no interview was possible.
Little glimmer of hope
Not only is there racism and violence against indigenous peoples in Thunder Bay, but elsewhere in Canada too. Indigenous women and girls are particularly likely to be victims of violent crimes.
But certain things are moving too: When the seven deaths were re-examined, 145 suggestions resulted – for example, suggestions for how Thunder Bay could be made safer for indigenous youths. The city also said it wanted to do its part. On her website she explains how far she is in implementation.
But violence and racism still exist. While the investigation into the seven deaths was still ongoing, a body was found in a river, this time that of a 41-year-old indigenous peoples. It was later revealed that someone had used the dead man’s bank card. But again after a short time the police determined: accidental death. No outside influence.
Seven fallen feathers
Or there is the case of an indigenous woman who was walking down the street with her sister in 2017. “A man threw a tow bar weighing nine kilograms into her stomach from a moving car,” says Tanya Talaga.
The woman died slowly and painfully. “I caught one!” The perpetrator shouted. That is pure racism, says Talaga. Her book “Seven Fallen Feathers” becomes an award-winning bestseller – and draws the attention of the whole of Canada to the conditions in Thunder Bay.
Eternal uncertainty
A slew of indigenous deaths in Thunder Bay are currently under investigation, including some of the seven deaths featured here. Journalist Tanya Talaga and others are not hoping for much from it – trust in the police has been shaken.
I will never know what happened to my grandson.
The families are left with their unanswered questions. Elder Sam Achneepineskum knows what that feels like. Because in 2015 it hits him too: His grandson is found dead in the snow in Thunder Bay.
The firefighters, who are first to see the body, believe they see signs of a fight. But the police come to the conclusion: It was an accident. Death from hypothermia. “There is an official version of it, but I will probably never find out what happened to him,” says Achneepineskum. The families of the dead youths have to live with this uncertainty every day.