'Two canoes, sharing the river': Clayton Thomas-Müller and Suzanne Simard on Life in the City of Dirty Water
Suzanne Simard will champion Life in the City of Dirty Water by Clayton Thomas-Müller on Canada Reads 2022
Clayton Thomas-Müller's memoir Life in the City of Dirty Water will be defended by ecologist Suzanne Simard on Canada Reads 2022.
The book shares stories from Thomas-Müller's tumultuous, often violent, coming-of-age in Winnipeg. A member of Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, the son of a residential school survivor and a former gang member, Thomas-Müller found his calling as a climate change activist and brings traditional Indigenous knowledge to the global movement.
Simard, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, interviews Thomas-Müller before the debates take place from March 28 to 31st.
Simard and Thomas-Müller sat down to talk about the book, climate change and activism before the debates. Watch their conversation above, or read the transcript below.
Canada Reads 2022 will be hosted by Ali Hassan and broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem and on CBC Books.
Take care: Stories of abuse are shared in this interview.
Thomas-Müller: It's nice to be here.
Simard: It's nice to see you. The reason that I chose your book is because I wanted to hear, firsthand, your perspective as an Indigenous man, as a person who has experienced the oppression of First Nations people in Canada. The way you see the world is really so critical at this time, as we're all facing climate change, which is going to have traumatic impacts on all of us.
I'd like to hear about your insights into how you turned yourself into an activist.
Thomas-Müller: Ever since I was a little guy, just a child really, I've always had a deep sense of fairness and a hunger for justice, whether it was a bully on the playground picking on my cousin Star, or getting jumped at school by some of the school bullies and getting into fights over bullies talking smack about my mother when they hadn't even met her. I would approach conflict head on.
I think that a lot of that drive came from the stories of my mother. My mom telling me about the terror she faced, but was unable to really express because she had to show strength, in residential school, staying up all hours of the night to make sure that her sisters didn't get molested. In deep ERDM therapy sessions, through ancestral memory, I've seen the place where they had all the beds, where my mom slept as a child, and I smelled the smell of urine from all the children who were terrified, peeing in their beds in the night. And that sickly sweet smell of fear. The smell of fear is a very unique smell. But she talked about how she did not quit, you know. She always got up and no matter how screwed up things were, she would always look out for her sisters, and of course, her brothers. They separated the genders at residential schools, so she only got to see her brothers once in a while.
Then in my own living memory, I remember my ma working at A&W, that was back when they'd have roller skates and skate out to your car and put your burgers and stuff on a tray on the window, you'd drive up. She was going to Daniel Mac High School in Winnipeg, full time, trying to get her high school diploma and working full time. After she graduated from high school, the first in our family to graduate, she went to university.
The people I had around me to learn from were women who had survived residential school and had survived the violence of the patriarchy, and were enduring it as I grew up with them as my mentors, as my teachers, as the people who provided care for me. I think that just translated into a set of principles in my own mind and my own heart that, when s--t got hard in my path, I would always try to take the time to think about how it got to be that way and learn from it and then get right back up and right back on the Red Road again.
Simard: You've been involved in defending the land against the expansion of the pipelines, from the tar sands. You've jumped in feet first, fighting the big corporations that are basically exploiting the land, just as you're describing the exploitation of your family and your mom. You're at a disadvantage compared to the big money, obviously, that is defending these huge corporate interests. Can you tell me... what special thing is being brought to bear on that fight, that you have been pretty successful at?
Thomas-Müller: Well, certainly culture, language and the power and protection and guidance of our ancestors.
I didn't just get right into fighting corporations. I started off as a community organizer in the city of Winnipeg, in my hometown.
My older brother started the largest Native gang in the country, the Manitoba Warriors. My first real job was running a drug house for my older brother, John and my uncle, Brian, who was the president at the time. There came a time when my brother, John, sat me down and he said, "Do you know what, I'm going to go back up to Pukatawagan to our reserve, and I'm going to hunt moose and I'm going to fish, and I'm going to have a gang of children and get married, and I'm never coming back to the city again."
And he said, "The heat's coming down, and I don't want you to throw your life away doing this stuff, you're way too smart for this, Clayton."
He said, "I want you to go to school, do something for our people. Help our family."
And, it's interesting because the next day, my girlfriend at the time, now my son's mother, she said the same thing. She said, "I'm in love with you and I like being with you, but I didn't sign up for this gangster s--t. So you got to choose between that or doing something better with your life going to school, or getting a job that's not selling drugs. You got to make a choice." So I did make a choice and I got myself into some inner-city educational programs that were designed and rooted in decolonization.
Eventually at the age of 19, I started my own organization called Aboriginal Youth Initiative, a community development organization. Our sole purpose was to confront the gang epidemic, the youth gang epidemic, that was happening in the Native community in the inner-city of Winnipeg. One thing I learned working with all those young people for those years in the early stages of my career was that our origin story was all the same. We had all, if you go back far enough, some corporation — whether it was a mega hydro corporation like Manitoba Hydro or an oil company like Syncrude or Suncor, or a mining company like Cameco uranium or Hudbay Gold or some forestry company, like Tolko or whatever — all of us had our ability to hunt, fish and trap, to gather medicines, to hold ceremony impacted by an entirely new wave of colonialism. And that's what brought me to working on these issues of extractivism because Indigenous peoples in Canada, we're being extracted just like gold, just like oil, gas, tar sands, timber, fish and all of these things. We're also being extracted from the land for this economic, capitalist, neoliberalist, industrial madness.
Indigenous peoples in Canada, we're being extracted just like gold, just like oil, gas, tar sands, timber, fish and all of these things.- Clayton Thomas-Müller
So for me, over the years, I've had more doorways opened up, more responsibilities requested of me to assume in the movement, to help people, to resource people, grassroots frontline land defenders and water protectors. And, yes, these corporations and the governments that they work in collusion with and manipulate and control have infinite cash resources. But we have our own resources as well. We have power and protection of our ancestors and the connection to the sacredness of Mother Earth that they don't have.
We saw that at its greatest might during things and in moments like Idle No More in 2012. We saw it at its greatest height during Standing Rock. Tens of millions of people were touched by Indigenous independent media, controlled by Indigenous peoples during Standing Rock, and we proved that we don't need the corporate intermediaries to translate our stories, to touch people and to activate them at a profound spiritual level, right deep into the marrow of their bones, to take action on existential threats that we collectively face, like climate change.
Simard: I've worked with a number of Indigenous people in my own work in forest ecology, and when I try to look through your eyes, through the eyes of Indigenous people, as I am learning, it's more about being part of the land, being connected to the land. You talk a lot about the land and your connection in your book and how, when you're dispossessed from the land, how things fall apart.
Most people in colonial, settler Canada aren't very connected to the land, and to me, this is one of the crucial aspects of trying to address climate change. I'm wondering what you can tell people, who really do care, who are going to be watching their children, watching their grandchildren, experiencing fires and floods. Climate change is here, and we've brought this upon ourselves by, to me, by this extractive kind of mentality. Can you help people understand, so that we can transform our whole society, fundamentally to be inclusive, but also to be more regenerative? Is there a way for people to learn?
Thomas-Müller: So Indigenous peoples have been very, very patient, very generous with settlers.
The frequency of violent and unpredictable climate and weather-related calamities is increasing. And unfortunately, the way that climate change works, it's much like a Richter scale. It's a compounding scale where one is bad, but two on the scale is 10,000 times worse than one and three is 100,000 times worse than one.
We see entire communities like Lytton First Nation just being burnt in a day by these wildfires that are raging. We see places like Abbotsford become a lake again in the fertile valley where the majority of Canada's produce comes from. This is not the first stuff that's happening. I mean like Fort Mac burnt down.
The frequency of violent and unpredictable climate and weather-related calamities is increasing.- Clayton Thomas-Müller
Indigenous peoples, we play a very incredibly important and vital role in whatever conversation takes place by decision makers and by those with resources, with cash, in terms of how we're going to transition the Canadian economy off of fossil fuels.
We have the technology, we have a people-powered social movement, which is growing exponentially day by day by day. A million kids marched September 27th, when Greta Thunberg, that little Swedish girl, came to Canada. A million kids marched on the streets, demanding Trudeau stop the pipeline, demanding climate justice, demanding the end to old growth logging.
And I saw these little grade three kids, with all these other children walking, and some were so small they had to get out of the school bus backwards, like a ladder, because they were so tiny and they had signs as big as they were saying, "Stop the pipeline, no TMX." So there is a profound shift that is happening right now as well that is also on a compounding scale, and this new generation of young people are not going to tolerate and will not be as patient with these neo-colonizers.
We need to reorganize ourselves in a way that embraces traditional Indigenous knowledge, in a way that embraces progressive science. We need a lot of young people to embrace green chemistry. We need more scientists to be developing things like hemp concrete.
And so like, yes, do conservation, be an environmentalist. But, if you're going to do activism, you've got to attack these systems. We need everybody to change these fossil fuel dependent systems.
Simard: It's fascinating. I'm going to ask you a few more things just about the process of writing your book and how it made you feel.
You look back over the whole course of your life, and I'm just wondering, how did that make you feel, and, what did you learn from that process that you might not have known before you did it?
Thomas-Müller: You know, in going through my process of writing my memoir, in reflecting on life, it almost killed me.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it. My wife and I separated. She left me, asked me to move out because I was too difficult to live with because I was drinking to cope with the trauma that I was surfacing and unearthing and sharing, especially, the recounts of being raped as a child in a state-run group home. And I wasn't even a kid in the group home. My dad worked there, you know? That was real heavy stuff to share. And luckily, I had built a powerful network of friends and family to support me, and therapy.
Healing doesn't just happen like that [snaps fingers]. It's something that you got to keep revisiting and working on. It's just like having a six pack. You want to have the nice washboard tummy? Well you've got to do sit ups for the rest of your life and probably not eat so many burgers.
Simard: That's so great.
Thomas-Müller: I will say though, things are looking up. You put in the hard work and I have not had such a close relationship with my sons in their entire life. Their mother and I may not be living together, but we still love each other very much. We're raising our kids in a good way. And I'm very grateful for that.
I'm very grateful that I can see again and not be clouded by trauma.- Clayton Thomas-Müller
I'm very grateful that I can see again and not be clouded by trauma. It's not that it isn't still there, but it's not clouding my vision. I give great thanks to where I'm at in life right now, and the fact that Life in the City of Dirty Water is being defended by you for Canada Reads. I prayed for that literally. When I started writing this book, I prayed that my book would be a part of Canada Reads so it could touch as many people as possible.
Simard: The theme of Canada Reads this year is One Book To Connect Us. I'm wondering what you think of that and how your book might connect us in the world and across Canada?
Thomas-Müller: I think that Life in the City of Dirty Water is perfect for this year's theme. There is vast polarity between Indigenous peoples in Canada and the rest of the country. The purpose of this memoir is to hopefully close the gap on that polarity a little bit and bring us back to the original spirit and intention of the treaties that our ancestors signed with the colonizers. Two canoes going down the river, sharing the river and not interfering with each other's paths.
I think that we can get there again. But when we talk about truth and reconciliation, Native people aren't talking about meaningless promises. We're talking about land back.
Simard: Well, I'm so glad that you wrote this book and that I love your book and that I get to help promote this book to Canada and the world. It's a wonderful book.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
