Manitoba Premier-elect Wab Kinew speaks at a press conference the morning after winning the Manitoba Provincial election at the Manitoba Legislative Building on Oct. 4.David Lipnowski/The Globe and Mail
The Anishinaabe believe in the Seven Fires Prophecy, a series of teachings that each represent a different point in our history. I can’t help but reflect on the prophecy after the election of Wabanakwut Kinew’s NDP in Manitoba, a province that has been at the epicentre of the attempt of our extinction as a People.
The first three fires deal with a time before Contact, when we moved from the east to the Great Lakes basin. The fourth fire predicts the arrival of the light-skinned race, a teaching that comes with a warning about what could occur: peace and harmony, or suffering and death. Sadly, Canada’s history – residential schools, the Indian Act, oppressive policies – shows us that the latter outcome occurred.
The fifth and sixth fires further warn of the promises of salvation from a prophet, and the arrival of sickness and death – of our People being torn apart from each other, from the land.
The seventh fire is a time of rising for our young people as they look to follow the ways of the past, while struggling to do so, with many in the older generations losing their connections to the past. But this fire shows us this is a time of rejuvenation and of hope – of the Anishinaabe gaining strength, and of the rebirth of our Nations.
There are those who say that an eighth fire has now been lit, signalling a new beginning and the potential of enduring harmony between settlers and Indigenous Peoples. Mr. Kinew’s victory gives us hope that this is now true.
That his historic win could go so far as to be a signal of the beginning of a new fire – the 41-year-old from Onigaming First Nation in Treaty Three territory in northwestern Ontario will become Manitoba’s first Anishinaabe premier – shows just how high the expectations are for Mr. Kinew. He arrives at a time when the health care system is in crisis, and when so many cases of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls remain unsolved in that province. Tina Fontaine, the 15-year-old whose body was found wrapped in plastic in the Red River in 2014, is on my mind. So too is Cambria Harris, the young woman who has relentlessly demanded a search of the Prairie Green landfill, where the remains of three of the four Indigenous women alleged to have been killed by Jeremy Skibicki – Cambria’s mother Morgan Harris, as well as Marcedes Myran and an unidentified victim named Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe (or Buffalo Woman) – are believed to be buried.
But Mr. Kinew understands the stakes. In 2012, he hosted a CBC TV series where he explained Canada’s relationship with our people. “We Aboriginal people thought we were getting a seat at the big table,” he said. “But it turns out we had a reservation at a much smaller table, out the back, near the garbage cans. At the big table they got Canada and all of its bounty. At our table, a total lack of benevolence; we got the plague, a plague of whisky, and our parents and grandparents were molested in schools designed to kill the Indian in the child.” The series was named The 8th Fire.
Mr. Kinew has walked his own path of addiction, healing and redemption. He is a former rapper and broadcaster who has dealt with violence and its consequences, having been convicted (and later pardoned) for assaulting a taxi driver, and having been accused of domestic violence in charges that were ultimately stayed. And as a People, we are constantly reckoning with the demons of colonization, including from the Indian Act, a paternalistic piece of legislation that othered First Nations Peoples and always left us at the little table by the garbage cans.
But now Mr. Kinew can teach a government, a province and a country about what is possible. He can appoint a cabinet aimed at change. He could start with Nahanni Fontaine, the NDP MLA from Sagkeeng First Nation who won her third consecutive term in the riding of St. Johns and was the first Indigenous woman to be House Leader in any Canadian legislature. She, along with federal NDP MP Leah Gazan, has led the fight to search the Prairie Green landfill.
Mr. Kinew promised on the campaign trail that if the NDP won, he would do what Heather Stefanson refused to do as premier – order a search of the landfill. He must make this one of his very first acts of office.
In his powerful victory speech on Tuesday night, Mr. Kinew spoke of his father Tobasonakwut, a residential school survivor, and about what he taught him: “Seek your vision. Dreams come true.”
This is the reason Mr. Kinew walks. With hope, Canada will walk beside him.