Telling The Truth, Reconciling: Orange Shirt Day is an ongoing act . . .

In Canada, September 30th is Orange Shirt Day, an Indigenous-led day of remembrance intended to commemmorate the Indigenous victims of the residential school system and to raise awareness about the human rights abuses of the residential school system in Canada (and the ongoing colonial systems that continue to perpetuate racism.) In the U.S. a similar commemorating and honouring day falls on the 4th Friday in September (this year it was on Sept. 23). Today, September 30th, is also the government-designated National Day for Truth and Reconcilation.

In this blog, based on an account I wrote in 2016, I ask some of the questions that I continue to ask myself as a white settler in Canada, and I honour the story of Adam Capay, another young Anishnaabe man who survived horrific institutional violence right here ‘at home.’

May we remember the thousands of children and adults who did not survive.

May we honour the survivors who continue to feel the pain of centuries of colonial violence and silencing. May we face this violent history with courage and empathy.

May we participate in the act of reconciling with and listening to the truths of Indigenous people. May we confront and work on our own racism, however it manifests. May we acknowledge that this work is ongoing, complex, painful, and necessary for our collective minds, bodies, and spirits all across these lands.

The One On The Other Side

Me, On One Side 

Thunder Bay, Ontario, November 2016

At first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I paused on the steps and peered down. The creatures curled and twisted; I lifted my feet, not wanting to step on them.

But they were embedded in the slabs of granite: seashell spirals, palm-like fans, feather-like animals. Fossils.

Were they ten million years old? Or more than two billion, like the oldest metamorphic rock of the Canadian Shield, the land around and beneath the jail?

Or were they millions of years younger, like the mountains jutting here and there out of earth and out of water, forming that great island of shale and forest in the bay, the Sleeping Giant?

The earth can count that high, a million, a billion, two, four. She has lived a long, long time. Rocks tell the oldest stories we will ever know, the longest, deepest stories.

I wanted to walk off into the trees and lie down. Listen.

My own time was human, and short: I had only twenty-four hours left in Thunder Bay. I turned and faced the jail: it could be a gothic madhouse, a haunted building out of Dickens novel.

I’d brought some gifts for a young inmate, Adam Capay, who had been ‘forgotten’ in solitary confinement there . . . for four years. Four years. Alone. In an underground cell. The only reason he was discovered was because a guard who was concerned about Adam’s health told the Ontario Human Rights Commissioner where he was. After she visited him, his story exploded into the media as yet another case of egregious human rights violation against a vulnerable Indigenous person.

Even from the outside, I was intimidated by the Thunder Bay Jail. The imposing stone, the impending massive enclosure: I did not want to step inside. What was I doing anyway? Who was I, a stranger, to come here?

I am drawn to prisons. I’ve visited quite a few. Most of the Canadian prison buildings I know are in Alberta and British Columbia; they are not made of stone because the land does not provide it. My father, my uncle, my brother, my niece have all spent time as prison inmates in concrete warehouses. My two sisters: the older one, a prison guard, the younger one, a policewoman.

My family walked into a bar—if only I could write that joke! It would evolve, onstage, into a family therapy session that would include the dead, the missing, and the crazy. My mother worked for many years with the Calgary Police Service as an operator. She often found out early and directly when one of her children was in trouble with the cops because the cops were her friends. As a family, we have lived and loved on both sides of prison walls.

Holding cells, bull pens, drunk tanks, remand centres, low, medium, maximum security. The clink: as a child, I knew that word before I learned the word jail. Solitary. The hole. I spent years writing letters to prison addresses and paying punishingly expensive collect-call phone bills. I wrote years of words, a decade and a whole book, about the intimate violence of prison life (The Lizard Cage). Years waiting for court dates. Wrangling the depressions that haunt both incarcerated people and those who tend them.

My eldest sister, the prison guard, succumbed to her depression and committed suicide very close to the prison where she worked, the Lethbridge Correctional Centre. Years later, my brother became an inmate there.

The most humane person at his parole hearing resembled my deceased sister and shared her name. This double shock rattled me to such a degree that I was almost incoherent when I had to speak on his behalf ensuring the parole board that I would be his main contact when he was released from jail.

For my policewoman sister, fury welds itself to futility on a daily basis—though she would use other f-words to express her expert thoughts. The racism, misogyny, and ineptitude of her fellow officers and of the courts cause her more hurt and deeper grief than the criminals do. The Cree kid who stole the SUV got three and a half years in a tough prison without educational programs—almost a guarantee to evolve him into a serious offender. But the white man who cut open a Cree woman in Edmonton and “accidentally” let her bleed to death was acquitted outright.

The colonial system, the racist system, the violent system, the haphazard system of slow institutionalized death. Since I was a teenager, I’ve worked on behalf of international prisoners of conscience, as well as attending my brother during and after his long times in prison. Thirty years later, that work continues: writing, phone calls, network-building, the testimonies, the stories, the appeals. One word after another is not enough, but is all I have to offer those in Myanmar. In Iran. In Eritrea. In China. In Guantanamo Bay. In Russia. In the United States. In Canada.

On the steps of the Thunder Bay Jail, I turned away, as if to leave, and saw the lake.

Light spilled through heavy clouds turning mile-wide swaths of the grey water into fields of glittering blue-green opal. Lake!

It stretched its massive body in every direction. My only thought was: young Adam Capay cannot see this. And it’s his lake, his people’s lake, land, their life, part of their history, so many stories I don’t know.

I hoisted my bag of books onto my shoulder and continued up the steps.

Adam, On The Other Side

Thunder Bay Jail, northern Ontario, November 2016

 Every time I fly toward Thunder Bay, I stare down, expecting to see the end of the water. But I never do. The water goes on without you; it’s as though the city is in the middle of a lake, not on its shores.

Once out of the plane and back on the earth, you still feel touched all the time by water. Two hundred rivers and thousands of streams flow into Superior; that one enormous lake holds 10 percent of the planet’s fresh surface water.

The Indigenous people of these lands call it the Anishinaabewi-gichigami, Sea of the First People.

The jail is overcrowded, underfunded, and essentially segregated: mostly Indigenous inmates live inside it. One of them, Adam Capay, is a young Ojibwe man from Lac Seul First Nation, over 400 kilometres away from Thunder Bay.

Alleged crimes notwithstanding, Adam Capay is a political prisoner, like thousands of other Indigenous and Black inmates across the Americas, to say nothing of the men and women with mental illness who are housed in prisons.

According to the Government of Canada’s own Office of the Correctional Investigator, since 2005, there has been a 43.5 percent increase in the federal Indigenous inmate population, compared with a 9.6 percent increase in non-Indigenous inmates. Indigenous people are ten times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous people, even though they comprise only about 4 percent of the population.

The original colonial project—to starve, exterminate by disease, and otherwise kill or assimilate Indigenous peoples—has been abandoned officially, but even a cursory examination of prisons, child-welfare agencies, and judicial systems reveals how well it still works. The violence continues in the daily lives of people from the farthest reaches of the invisible North to the cities and towns of the South.

Not that any place is invisible, if you happen to be living there.

Adam Capay’s story hit the headlines a couple of weeks before my visit to Thunder Bay. In mid-October 2016, Ontario Human Rights Commissioner Renu Mandhane visited the Thunder Bay District Jail and asked corrections officers if there was anything she needed to see. Officer Michael Lundy, who has a long history of speaking out about the poor conditions of the facility, told her about a young inmate who had been held in solitary confinement for four and a half years. She was skeptical about this claim; she asked if anyone else knew about his imprisonment. Yes, he said, the superintendent of the jail knew. The former provincial public safety and corrections minister, Yasir Naqvi, had met Adam (and later claimed he couldn’t remember that.)

Mandhane went into the lower cells of the building. Through a small hole cut into the Plexiglas cell, she spoke to a thin young man. Yes, he had been here more than four years, since he was nineteen. Misdemeanour charges, to which he pled guilty, landed him in jail. Incarcerated, he got into a violent altercation with another man, who died of his injuries. Adam Capay was charged with first-degree murder. Four and a half years later, his case had still not gone to trial. He was kept in “administrative segregation,” as the Canadian prison system calls solitary confinement, in order to keep him “safe” from himself and others.

The artificial light was never turned off or dimmed; for twenty-three hours a day he was inside the five-by-ten-foot room, allowed out only to shower. Once a month, or twice, he went into the exterior yard. He had no way of keeping track of the time, neither the hours nor the days. He often didn’t know whether it was day or night.

The scars on his arms and head provided a record of his attempts to self-harm. Unable to assuage the anguish of years-long total isolation, he had taken to bashing his head against the wall. And he was always, always hungry.

He spoke to Renu Mandhane haltingly, awkwardly. He apologized for that. But it was hard to express himself. He had lost the habit of speaking to other people.

Though independent bookstores have disappeared from Thunder Bay, the local Chapters chain carried two titles about the real lives of Indigenous peoples in Canada: The Outside Circle by Patti LaBoucane-Benson and Kelly Melling and One Native Life by Richard Wagamese. I also got a thick journal, a colouring book, some coloured pencils, a pencil sharpener. Would he be allowed to have the pencils or sharpener? I should have brought wax crayons instead.

From the outside, Thunder BayJail looked imposing, almost like a military college. The sally port made it feel like a jail from another time. Most things in the narrow vestibule were old, frayed, yellowed, curled up at the edges, worn out. And this was the public area, the jail’s good side. Had there ever been any renovations? Someone else was talking to the completely invisible corrections officer inside the blacked-over, glassed-in box.

The mind catches on certain details. The Globe and Mail reported that he apologized to the human rights commissioner for speaking so slowly. He said sorry for the effects of the abuse inflicted upon him by a powerful state institution. Torture turns the body and the spirit inside out. I am sorry. The violated person often apologizes for how he has been harmed by others, as though human vulnerability itself were a crime. I am sorry. I am sorry that you hurt me.

In other cultures, not speaking denotes various qualities, such as respect, strength, patience, wisdom, reticence, shyness. But in white North America, the failure to speak is shameful. It implies both weakness and guilt.

If you cannot speak clearly, you are guilty. Of what? It doesn’t matter. Nothing. Everything. Lack of knowledge. Being caged, being damaged. I am sorry.

It was my turn. “I’ve brought some things for Adam Capay.” I couldn’t see the officer behind the black glass. It was a woman, though, her voice clear and friendly. I wondered what she looked like. What was her name?

“Has he put in a request to receive them?”

“He doesn’t know me. But here, I wrote him a card.” From other prison visits, I knew that he’d likely have to make a request to Property to receive what I was leaving for him.

“When he gets your card, he can ask for this stuff. Of course, we’ll inspect it. What is it?”

“Books. Writing material.” I spoke in my own friendly tone to the black glass, trying to get on her good side. “He can receive books, right?”

“I don’t think there’s a problem with books. I just need to get some ID from you before you leave the bag. And fill out this form, please.” She pushed a metal tray through the slot; I took the form and put down my driver’s license. The process was familiar to me.

So was the double weight of knowing and of ignorance: I can approach the border, but I cannot walk through these walls.

I’ve never been able to walk through them, not once, even when the man on the other side was my brother, known to me. Beloved. I spent many years reaching out, but not reaching him.

Stranger, settler, I knew this moment was more complicated than all the complicated, intimate moments I’d known with my brother. My very presence could be an intrusion.

As a white person, as a settler approaching that wall, I held that awareness in my chest and in my throat: a tightness, a constriction freighted with the colonial violence that continues to wound and to destroy the lives of Indigenous people.

That colonial violence, my whiteness, my privilege enabled me to come to the jail and to leave a gift behind.

To give and to receive a gift—and to reject one--are powerful acts. Was it wrong, to do what I was doing?

Adam might not welcome gifts from a stranger, a white woman who knew nothing about him except what she’d read in the newspapers. Yet everything I’d learned about prisons and solitary confinement—in many countries, for many people—compelled me to get books and writing material to him.  

During one of my brother’s prison stays, he received a precious gift. He was mentored by a much older Indigenous man, a stone carver. Among many lessons, my brother learned how lucky he was. Despite the violence and addictions that had marked his entire life, his whiteness protected him, especially as an adult in prison. His mentor had never known such protection.

Learning to carve restored my brother’s faith in himself. Out of the wreckage of his life, using his own hands, he could make something new, and beautiful. Many of the Indigenous men who were with him in that prison—Bowden Institution, in Alberta--were artists.

My brother had never carved before. He had been told in school that he was ‘not good with his hands’ (he later became a journeyman carpenter). But his fellow inmates did not judge him. They welcomed him into their circle as a fellow creator. In many different guises, this is what art can offer: another possibility. And, sometimes, another possible life.

I pushed the form in the tray back to the woman behind the dark glass, then read the signs above the security door. Inmates in “administrative segregation” could receive only two visitors a week, for one hour. I wondered if I should request to visit him, but decided against it. I didn’t want to risk taking up a family member or a friend’s chance to see him. Visits are almost always the inmates’ favourite times.

Staring into the glass partition, I naturally saw the reflection of my own face.

Here I was, again, hands still out, seeking the wall, the one on the other side.

When Adam Capay went into prison, he was just nineteen years old, his brain still growing its gorgeous loops and circuits. 

The woman behind the dark glass spoke, “Okay, here you go. He’ll get the card today, but Property will take some time inspecting this stuff.”

Knowing she could see me, I smiled into the glass. “Thank you,” I said, and picked up my license, a document that identified both me and my ability to drive away from every prison I’ve ever visited.

I slipped my license quickly into my wallet. I walked back through the door, into the silver-cloud light of the lake and sky, down those granite stairs again—spiral shells, feather-like animals—aware of the life, so much miraculous life, still trapped within.

Following the public outcry regarding Adam Capay’s long incarceration in solitary confinement in Thunder Bay Jail, he was moved to the Thunder Bay Correctional Centre. Through his lawyer, he sent me a message of thanks for the books and writing material. Soon after, due to the miscarriage of justice in his case, he was released from prison. No. That is not a happy ending. It is not even an ending—