"We Have Bigotry All Right—but No Alabamas": Racism and Aboriginal Protest in Canada during the 1960s

I'm all for the Indians; I treat them like any other colored man. But in this area they are no damned good. Less than one percent will co-operate. Some of the older generation are O.K., but the young ones are no good. But that's the younger generation all over. Look at the South. Look at what's going on in Vietnam.

George Miller, tourist camp operator, Kenora, 1965¹

As day gave way to night on the evening of November 22, 1965, four hundred Aboriginal men and women, many bused in from close-by reserves, gathered at the Indian Friendship Centre in Kenora, Ontario. They prepared to march, a new sight to the town's ten thousand non-Aboriginal residents. With cold winter air pressed against their faces, they linked arm-in-arm four persons across and began what would be a quarter of a mile trek north along Main Street. Bundled in winter coats that hid their suits and dresses underneath, they passed by the Kenricia Hotel, the Woolworth's department store, and Fife's Hardware. The sight of peaceful marchers counteracted many of the common stereotypes that marked Aboriginal bodies in early 1960s Canada. These were not Hollywood Indians dressed in war paint, nor were they the drunk, docile, passive Indians portrayed through local media.²

With local police officers in tow, the group marched to the Legion Hall and into a town council meeting led by the mayor.³ Once the marchers were inside, seated and away from the stinging cold, all eyes turned to two men who spoke for the protesters: Peter Seymour and Fred Kelly. Facing the mayor and his councilors, they introduced themselves and began listing a long set of grievances. As one example gave way to another and then another, they all illustrated the denigrating nature of anti-Aboriginal discrimination in Kenora and surrounding reserves, including the various forms of economic, social, and political marginalization played out in everyday life.⁴ Through newspapers and radio broadcasts, news of the protest spread quickly across the country and beyond. People began referring to this moment as Canada's first civil rights march, and Kenora seemed to solidify its newfound reputation as Canada's Alabama, Mississippi, or Arkansas.⁵

This article has two goals. The first is to contribute to a history of the march, what motivated it, how it came to life, and what took place in its aftermath. As the volumes of reports filed by officers of the Ontario Human Rights Commission in the mid-1960s demonstrate, Aboriginal peoples in the Kenora area endured significant discrimination. The march emerged as one of numerous tactics used in an effort to challenge the conditions that shaped material and social experiences of daily life in the town and its many neighboring reserves.⁶ The collective oppositional response in late 1965 challenged the naturalized discourse of the "depoliticized Indians" who passively accepted their own oppression. In one small way, this work of recounting some of this history disrupts racialized discourses that still inform social hierarchies. As scholar David Austin argues, "We have to drag ourselves deeper into the gutter of race and racism in order to emancipate ourselves from it."⁷ This, he argues, "requires that we understand the irrational-rational logic that has facilitated its survival."⁸

Race, as David Theo Goldberg puts it, is "heavy." Its "heaviness" is created as "layered, volume piled upon mass, the layers or strata composed of varying substances and differentially born."⁹ Differentially born, differentially coded, and differentially enacted through power, yet not always visibly present. In official Canadian discourse, Austin notes, "racial categories, and by extension racism, are present in absentia, silently shaping and animating national debate while the government, state politicians, and theorists promote a neutered narrative of multiculturalism and inclusion."¹⁰ In this article, I am using the months surrounding the march in Kenora as a vehicle to understand how and why racial discourses and material practices produce certain types of presences and absences in a moment where racial tension seems...