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| Wiindo Debwe Mosewin Patrol Thunder Bay |
Wiindo Dwebe Mosewin Patrol is a group of around 40 volunteers who are patrolling the streets of Thunder Bay, Ontario, protecting members of indigenous communities from hate crimes and racist violence perpetrated by gangs and police.
With high endemic substance use, Northwestern Ontario has drawn gangs and guns from Toronto and Ottawa, and Thunder Bay has become the capital of Canada for homicide and hate crimes targeted at the city’s First Nations people who constitute 13 percent of its population.
However, an 2018 inquest into Thunder Bay’s police investigations of 37 murders of indigenous victims since 2009 determined that the police has systematically failed “conduct adequate investigations and the premature conclusions drawn in these cases is, at least in part, attributable to racist attitudes and racial stereotyping …” In fact, the Thunder Bay police is itself suspect of racialised violence, such as driving members of indigenous communities outside of the city and leaving them, at the risk of freezing to death, to try to make it through the cold back to the city, a practice called “starlight tour”.
The conditions of structural racism necessitated that the indigineous communities organise their own safety protocols to protect their members, while avoiding the involvement of police. Wiindo Debwe Mosewin thus organises regular patrols around Thunder Bay in the night to protect people in distress, particularly women, two-spirit people and youth - and collect their stories through the ancestral oral-culture practices, creating a different narrative to that provided by officials.
As Wiindo Debwe Mosewin state: “We believe that safety, equity, peace and abundance are possible for everyone. We believe in a world without prisons or police. We walk the path of decolonization by centering the voices and experience of women, two spirit people and those who resist being excluded, oppressed and bullied. We believe that those in power need us more than we need them. We believe that every one of us is damaged by settler colonialism and deserves to heal and to become a healer.”