Scott Rutherford, Canada’s Other Red Scare: Indigenous Protest and Colonial Encounters during the Global Sixties (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020)

In November 1965, several hundred people, mainly First Nations members from the Treaty #3 region, marched through the centre of Kenora, a small city in Northern Ontario, to demonstrate against the treatment of Indigenous peoples. This “Indian Rights March” or “Canada’s First Civil Rights March,” as it became known more widely, is one of the starting points for Scott Rutherford’s important new monograph, Canada’s Other Red Scare.

This book is unquestionably a transnational study and represents a determined effort to situate developments within Canada in a global context. However, to view it solely through that lens is to miss the range of what is covered. It is, at times, a global and national history, Indigenous history, and even an intellectual history of anti-colonialism, but it is also a form of local history. In fact, it is even a personal history of the author, who grew up as a self-described “white settler” in Kenora. As with many of a similar background, that childhood was one of obliviousness to large swathes of the story his book now details. This global/local or “glocal” narrative shows that Kenora and its milieu of racism, injustice, environmental degradation, but, just as significantly, resistance by Indigenous peoples, was not an aberration either in a Canadian or broader context. Indeed, Rutherford illustrates the dangers of attempting to depict locales such as Kenora as unique and how doing so is complicit in a wider denial of what he refers to on the book’s opening page as the “manifestations of settler-colonialism.”

The book is divided into six chapters with Indigenous resistance in Kenora a common thread. The first examines the lead up to and what came after the aforementioned protest by the “Indian White Committee” (iwc) in Kenora in 1965. Chapter two looks at lectures given in Kenora in 1967 by the iwc and their wider cultural significance. The third chapter concentrates on situating developments related to Indigenous resistance in Kenora and more widely in Canada within a transnational framework, including through connections and influences between Indigenous activists in Canada and the Black Panther Party in the United States. Chapter four refocuses on Kenora through three case studies around Red Power activism, including Jay Treaty protests at the US-Canada border. The following chapter converges on a nearly six-week occupation by armed protesters of Anicinabe Park and the intersection between the local and the global, including the United States. The book’s final chapter centres on efforts by the Canadian state to undermine Indigenous activism and protests, including through informants, and resistance to such practices.

It is a significant book for several reasons. First, is its framing of the situation at Kenora in a wider transnational environment. Second, it challenges and complicates several staples of both Canadian and broader historiography, namely the centrality of 1968 in relation to global protest and the Trudeau government’s 1969 White Paper in connection to Indigenous political consciousness and protest within Canada. Finally, on a systematic basis the book illustrates the perpetual tendency within Euro-Canada to avoid reality and responsibility. The method of escape from avoiding addressing racism, inequality, and injustice is by focusing on similar forces in the United States or by blaming outsiders, including Americans and communists in the case of Kenora, for protest within Canada. This avoidance of the consequences of colonialism in one’s backyard by gazing at the neighbour’s shortcomings is an inherent component of Euro-Canadian identity.

If there is a weakness in the book, it is that the local story, particularly its Indigenous component, is less well fleshed out compared to the broader global take or the role of prominent individuals on the macro level. This is no real criticism of the author given, as he recognizes in the book’s introduction, the biases of archives toward the prominent and the double burden this entails when it comes to detailing the lives of Indigenous peoples. Ironically, one primary source that may have yielded more paint for this difficult to complete portrait is Royal Canadian Mounted Police files. Rutherford’s final chapter addresses the state reaction, but with limited recourse to police records that might have provided details not just on state operations against Indigenous resistance, but equally in relation to the materials the police may have obtained in relation to Indigenous activists, such as pamphlets and text of speeches. The author is particularly excused here regarding the absence of police records given the unnecessary difficulties around obtaining such materials through Access to Information at Library and Archives Canada.

Ultimately, Canada is Kenora and Kenora is Canada and, as Scott Rutherford ably demonstrates in this fine work, both intersect with trends outside their borders. It is a book that in 2021 is timelier than ever. The echoes of the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples in Kenora resonate across Canada. Whether it is thousands of Indigenous children who died because of residential schools, or Indigenous men left to freeze to death by the Saskatoon Police outside the city dump, or Indigenous protesters against fracking in New Brunswick facing the weight of the state, it is essential that books like Rutherford’s not shed light on but rather open eyes to what is already visible. The stories may change but the colonial book cover remains the same. The ending, however, has yet to be written.

Steve Hewitt

University of Birmingham

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2021v88.0009.