Darlene Necan (third from right) discusses a build on her trap line with a coalition of Toronto-based indigenous solidarity activists at a morning meeting. The group raised nearly $6,000 for the two-week build. Photo credit: Alex Felipe

They’re not just building a cabin at the end of a logging road on the Sioux Lookout highway. They’re building solidarity.
Touched by the plight of Savant Lake residents who were excluded from Saugeen First Nation when the reserve was constructed in the early 1980s, a coalition of Toronto-based indigenous solidarity activists is spending two weeks constructing a trap line outpost in the remote wilderness.
Darlene Necan was bathing her newborn son on the table of the two-room shack she shared with 10 people in 1979 when a group of men burst through the door announcing her community would finally be getting its own reserve. She signed their list, anticipating when the call came to move north across the tracks, she would have a home of her own.
The call never came.
After 20 years of living among those left behind in Savant Lake, an ominous feeling that things were about to change caused Necan to give up drugs and alcohol. Her son committed suicide the next year and her politicization began.
“That’s when I found out, something is not right. Why are we still poor? Why are we still suffering,” Necan asked. “I go down Highway 17 both ways and I see nice houses for other reserves and businesses going up. That’s when I started noticing this is not right, what we’re going through.”
Necan organized others who still hadn’t been accommodated in Saugeen, read as much as she could find on her rights and began an outreach campaign to anyone who would listen. The band leadership did not accommodate and form letter responses from all levels and branches of government informed her the case was an internal matter of the First Nation and out of their jurisdictions.
Time was wearing on in Savant Lake and Necan’s patience was wearing thin. Over two winters in the late 2000s, she watched elder, Amelia Skunk’s feet burned with frostbite as the 75-year-old woman survived the winters living in an old chicken shack.
“When we heard she had frostbite on her toes was the first time we got really pissed off,” Necan recalled. “That’s when we said, ‘we’re going to take body action now. Never mind this paper writing. Paper writing don’t go nowhere.’ That’s when we stood up and made plans on our own to correct this problem without the chief.”
Necan began stripping the chief’s abandoned home in Savant Lake for wood to build Skunk a new home and when that proved unfruitful, she burned it down.
She served 10 days in the Kenora Jail.
Upon release, Necan began seeking construction expertise and finances. No help was available within reach so she reached further and on the verge of feeling “dead to the world,” she reached Toronto.
A network of indigenous solidarity activists in Canada’s biggest city assembled a diverse team to make the trek northward.
They were able to raise $5,948 over an indiegogo online campaign. Added to the $1,000 in donations Necan assembled, the effort not only finished construction on a home for Skunk, but is also building Necan a base on the land where she’ll have her own home, at last.
“Right now, I have a bunch of nice people who are helping me. I’m very grateful. I’m very happy. At least they heard me out and they’re here,” Necan said. “(They’re listening) to the people who are really struggling – the ones who want to change. Listen with their hearts. Hopefully, all races work together and stop hating each other… Even with my chief, I don’t hate them. I kind of feel sorry for them but I know they don’t like me and I know it all has to do with money as a division. It shouldn’t be like that. There has to be something changed.”
Brigitte (surname withheld) was born in the Cordilliera Mountains of the Philippines, a northern region unconquered by the Spanish for over 300 years that lost its independence under American occupation. Brigitte was displaced under a project of the Canadian mining company Ivanhoe and she immigrated to Canada under the Live-In Care Program. Upon seeing indigenous people in Toronto, she came to see what she regarded as political and even physical similarities to herself. It called her back to the struggle.
“Our story with Darlene is not separate,” she explained. “This colonization has brought havoc, destruction and displacement of our ancestral lands from the indigenous people all around the world. Our particular situation in the Philippines, which is not exactly the same as Darlene but the oppression is identical.”
Lucho Granados Ceja’s family came to Canada from Mexico as landed immigrants in 2001. He said creating the political, social and economic infrastructure for grassroots movements to thrive requires direct solidarity instead of relying on government, corporations and charities.
“I really do think, it’s going to be a moment we look back on that really showed what’s possible when people are able to co-operate and when there’s something we can define as people-to-people solidarity,” he said. “Coming from Toronto and the activist scene there, I think a lot of times, things get limited to a discursive level. In other words, it’s mostly talk. It’s an exchange of ideas, very good ideas, but it gets stuck there. I think if we’re serious about decolonization – if we’re serious about addressing the fact that this is a land that was illegally possessed by invading peoples from another continent, and all that implies – it’s making sure that our work changes and making sure our work ends up being direct.”

The MNR did not respond to interview requests.

A group of individuals working to get a new local multiplex off the ground provided an update to council last week on the recent research they’ve been conducting on building site selection.

“For the last few months our meetings have been focused on coming up with an objective process to choose a location within the Municipality of Red Lake,” said committee member Dave Lamme.

The committee is using Virden, Manitoba – which has a population and demographic similar to Red Lake and which built a new multiplex in 2011 – as the foundation of its current site selection research. At 101,000 square feet, Virden’s multiplex required approximately 5.76 useable acres of land.

The multiplex committee has identified nine locations with enough space for a building of that size and processed their eligibility using a Site Selection Criteria and Evaluation formula.

“We’re hoping that it does take the personal opinions out and leaves more of a numbers-based criteria so when the community says ‘Why did you pick that?’ or ‘Why didn’t you put it here?’ then we can go and we have back-up information and mathematical calculations that say why,” says committee member Kevin Harland.

Based on a number of different factors related to accessibility, proximity, services, noise and the environment, the top three scoring sites were all located in the highway commercial area on highway 105, while the site located on Highway 105, South of Red Lake near the storage lockers, scored the lowest.

Mayor Phil Vinet said he was pleased with the work the multiplex committee has conducted thus far and said choosing a Manitoba community as the foundation of its research was an appropriate because Red Lake is both geographically and culturally more similar to Manitoba than the rest of Ontario.

He also praised the multiplex committee for valuing sustainability – what he calls one of the most ‘critical issues’ to the area.

Up until this point, all the research conducted by the multiplex committee has been done at zero cost but, as Lamme says, moving forward will mean narrowing down the potential sites and testing the land which will come with a price tag attached. Having conducted much of the ‘back-end work’ already, Harland says the multiplex committee will be in a good position once it’s ready to move forward with fundraising efforts.

The multiplex committee plans to send its site selection research to the Recreation Committee for review and council is expected to provide direction as to how to move forward after next Monday’s council meeting.

The new local SIJHL team will be known as the English River Miners.
The jersey’s logo was adopted from a baseball team in southern Illinois and modified to replace the baseball with a puck and the bat with a stick.
Local artist Jennifer Globush then designed logos for the shoulder patches.
“We struggled with the name for a week or so just because it’s hard to incorporate both towns,” said club president, Jason Vinet, saying the new board had considered Highway 105 and Chukuni River as identities before deciding on English River to represent the area. “The cool thing about it (English River) is that it’s the backbone of the hydro that supplies power to both towns. The English River part will be secondary to the logo itself and if you have a tough miner on there, that’s the representative for this area.”
Season tickets for the fledgling team launched this week at $195 for between 26 to 28 home games. Eighty have already been sold and Vinet expects the team will sell at least 250 season tickets for the 450-seat Ear Falls Arena – where the team has arranged to share the Ear Falls Legion’s liquor license. Plans are underway to develop shuttle buses from Red Lake.
“We’re really intent on running a first-rate operation – no bush league stuff here,” Vinet said. “We want people to say, ‘it was fun to come up here and play. They showed a lot of respect to us, that we were welcomed.’”
Kevin Kahoot is the general manager and head coach for the Miners, responsible for all on-ice operations. Contacts from his days immersed in the mid-western United States game and others in western Canada have volunteered to reach out and recruit. Three or four local players are also expected to try out, including one that Kahoot foresees being among the top four defensemen.
The team will hold a prospect for up to 60 players in Thunder Bay on Aug. 24, from which it will cut the team to 30 for a main camp on Sept. 14, when they hope the ice in Red Lake to be ready. Once the final team is chosen, a 10-day on and off-ice camp will pull the laces as tight as possible in the short time frame before the season begins in the last week of September.
“It’s going to be tight but that’s the nature of the beast up here as far as the ice goes,” said Kevin Kahoot, the general manager and head coach for the miners, responsible for all on-ice operations. “We’re going to look at the first ten games to see what we’ve got as an expansion team. We’re not going to create our identity in training camp.”
The website www.englishriverminers.com is expected to come online by the end of June.
Founding executive of the English River Miners
President: Jason Vinet
Vice president: Sean Nichols
Treasurer: Michel Labonte
Secretary: Joanne Bennett
Head of hockey operations: Kevin Kahoot
Fundraising: Mark Barrow
Marketing: Donna Thiessen
Billing: Dave Lamme
Logistics/website/security/penalty box: Rob Doyle
Directors: Frank Ray and Shawn Parthenay