Young black men who have gone missing in the Greater Toronto Area are being found allegedly engaging in gang violence and fuelling the northern Ontario's brutal opioid crisis.JONATHAN HAYWARD/The Canadian Press
In both Black and First Nations communities, there are youth who struggle to belong, unsure of their place in this world.
Often, they don’t fit in at school. They may lack friends, confidence, self-esteem. Online bullying and the pressures of social media are intense. There is high youth unemployment, too, and Black and Indigenous youth are more likely to experience systemic racism in the justice and child-welfare systems.
This can leave them ripe for predatory gangs who are looking to recruit and groom young people into the drug trade. And in northern Ontario, where Black youth who have gone missing in southern cities are being found allegedly engaging in gang violence and fuelling the region’s brutal opioid crisis, we’re seeing these factors intersect in tragic ways.
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There are so many missing young Canadians, it is hard for any of their loved ones to get serious media and police attention without public pressure. But human trafficking is a national epidemic that First Nations people have borne witness to for decades. Our women, girls, two-spirit youth and boys have been taken, lured out of communities by false promises of belonging, love and attention. They’ve been shuttled in vans, hidden in putrid hotels, and forced into prostitution, gangs and drugs. It has taken years – not to mention far too many terrible high-profile tragedies – for Indigenous families, survivors and communities to get any attention on the issue of our missing and murdered.
In the Greater Toronto Area, the Black community is reportedly struggling with an all-too-similar crisis. Black adolescent boys and teens are going missing at alarming rates, many of them lured by false promises of riches in the drug trade, according to a recent Fifth Estate investigation. The CBC program is led by executive producer Allya Davidson, a veteran Black journalist, one of a chorus of Black media voices who have been championing this story; others include Camille Dundas, of ByBlacks.com, who wrote a series last year called “When Black Boys Go Missing.”
Last year, Toronto-based film and TV producer Shana McCalla launched a petition to bring attention to the issue after six Black boys went missing in Ontario. Incredibly, all were found, but a distressing pattern was emerging, all the same: These missing Black boys were often found hundreds of kilometres north in places like Thunder Bay, a city with the highest opioid death rate in the province, and where the drug crisis disproportionately affects Indigenous people.
Many First Nations have declared states of emergency due to the crisis, including my own, Fort William First Nation. In fact, during an emergency summit last October held by Nishnawbe Aski Nation in Thunder Bay to try to address gang infiltration and drug-related violence and deaths, a NAN member community, Ginoogaming First Nation, went into lockdown as armed fugitives reportedly roamed the streets, trapping terrified people in their homes. I heard Ginoogaming Chief Sheri Taylor plead for help during an online press conference with NAN leadership. The shooting left 27-year-old Sebastian Towegishig dead, and another victim was sent to hospital. Two Black youth – one 18, the other just 15 – were arrested and charged with second-degree murder. They were from Brampton, Ont. – more than 1,000 km away from the Anishinaabe community, on the north shore of Long Lake.
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The devastation and death in First Nations communities are deeply tied to the problem of kids being recruited or trafficked to be drug mules or worse, and the situation is only getting grimmer. The drug crisis is a huge, multiheaded beast of addiction and violence, affecting lives in vast and terrible ways. And authorities, parents and communities are being overwhelmed, making it harder and harder to heal the pain that’s typically at the root of the problem.
But every child that disappears has someone who loves them – a parent, a mom, a dad, a sibling. Black and Indigenous people know community outreach, quick police action and media attention can get the message out and help bring kids home.
Now, it’s time to get serious about the problem. Every adult found in a trap house with guns and drugs, and with any child 18 and under, should be charged with human trafficking. There should be a coordinated task force that moves beyond regular and Indigenous policing and combines social services, mental health and addiction counselling to help these kids avoid these insidious temptations. At the very least, our public response needs to be as huge and multiheaded as the beast we are working to slay.