Indigenous activism put small-town northern Ontario on the map in the
1960s and early 1970s. Kenora, Ontario, was home to a
four-hundred-person march, popularly called "Canada's First Civil Rights
March," and a two-month-long armed occupation of a small lakefront park.
Canada's Other Red Scare shows how important it is to link the local and
the global to broaden narratives of resistance in the 1960s; it is a
history not of isolated events closed off from the present but of
decolonization as a continuing process. Scott Rutherford explores with
rigour and sensitivity the Indigenous political protest and social
struggle that took place in Northwestern Ontario and Treaty 3 territory
from 1965 to 1974. Drawing on archival documents, media coverage,
published interviews, memoirs, and social movement literature, as well
as his own lived experience as a settler growing up in Kenora, he
reconstructs a period of turbulent protest and the responses it
provoked, from support to disbelief to outright hostility. Indigenous
organizers advocated for a wide range of issues, from better employment
opportunities to the recognition of nationhood, by using such tactics as
marches, cultural production, community organizing, journalism, and
armed occupation. They drew inspiration from global currents - from
black American freedom movements to Third World decolonization - to
challenge the inequalities and racial logics that shaped
settler-colonialism and daily life in Kenora. Accessible and
wide-reaching, Canada's Other Red Scare makes the case that Indigenous
political protest during this period should be thought of as both local
and transnational, an urgent exercise in confronting the experience of
settler-colonialism in places and moments of protest, when its logic and
acts of dispossession are held up like a mirror.
