According to a recent story in Maclean’s Magazine, Winnipeg is the most racist city in Canada. Here in Regina, some people beg to differ.
Rhonda Donais said she has been dealing with racism here since she was a small child. The 50-year-old, who now works as a community coordinator at Ecole Centennial Community School, didn’t always have the respect from the community that she does today.
When her family moved to the city she was one of the first generations to be raised off reserve and out of residential schools. When she was seven, her family settled in the area of Rosemont.
“That was the first time I realized I was a colour,” said Donais. “I experienced a lot of really horrible things.”
“I was called ‘wagon burner’, I was called ‘kooch’, I was called ‘dirty little Indian’, and everyday I went home crying.”
Over 20 years later, her own daughter came home from kindergarten and asked, “Mom, do you like Indians? Because we have a couple of them in our school.” Donais informed her that technically, she was one and her daughter began to scream with disbelief.
“I looked at her, and I realized, even then, that racism was alive and well, still, in Regina.”
Within a few years of moving to the city, racially charged incidences began to stack up in Donais’ life. A walk home from school led to pneumonia when three boys stole her jacket in -30 degree weather. A trip to the skating rink in her pre-teens turned her into a victim of sexual assault.
Grade seven brought on more bullying, this time from her teacher. Racial jokes about her and another classmate were common. During parent-teacher interviews the teacher informed the other parents of their children’s friendships with Donais.
When no one would talk to her the next day, she asked why. A friend replied, ‘I’m not allowed to anymore’.
“I had never disrespected authority, ever, in my life,” said Donais. “That day, I looked at [my teacher], and I gave him the finger and I said, ‘fuck you’, and I ran out of the school the entire way home, crying.”
According to Donais, she began to fear authority, as well as resent her own culture.
“I got to be angry as time went on,” she said. “By the time I got to high school I was everything but First Nations. I was really ashamed of being First Nations.”
By the age of 19 she had been raped three times by white males, conceiving two children that way. She turned to abusing alcohol and drugs.
The words from her teacher kept ringing in her head, she said. She would remember him mocking her if she got an answer wrong, saying, ‘see how dumb Indians are.’
Eventually, she said, she began to believe it, which took away her confidence to learn. Until the age of 30 she describes herself as illiterate. Donais said she impressed the screening committee at SUNTEP (Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program) due to her charisma, but soon they found out her writing was near a grade one level.
Her first two jobs at daycares she describes as ‘hell’ because of racist bosses.
It wasn’t until achieving a grant to attend Indigenous Theatre in Toronto that her life began to really change.
“I came back being proud of who I was and accepting my First Nations’ roots,” she said.
Christopher Tyrone Ross, Publisher and Editor in Chief at RezX magazine, said he’s definitely seen his share of problems in Regina.
“Is it just as bad as Winnipeg? I don’t know, but I know that it’s pretty bad if you look at some of the recent issues, like the police brutality that’s happened, some of the missing and murdered indigenous women, those cases,” said Ross.
Still, Ross advises that the article, and the studies featured in it, should be further analyzed and questioned.
“There’s a lot of poverty porn that’s in the article,” said Ross. “It takes issues with poverty and puts them under a microscope…saying that racism comes out of poverty.”
“That’s what a lot of media does. It gets you thinking how bad the situation is.”
According to Ross, while the ‘victims’ pictured in the article created a powerful image, without putting a face to the villains, racists are kept anonymous, which isn’t necessarily in the community’s best interest.
Peter Gilmer, advocate with Regina Anti-Poverty Ministry, said that our city is in denial when it comes to the severity of racism.
“The way that the civic leadership in Winnipeg responded to the Maclean’s article was considerably more responsible and mature than the way that Regina responded to critiques in the January 2007 Maclean’s article that had criticized Regina,” said Gilmer. “Here, there was a very high degree of defensiveness in terms of civic leadership at that time which was disappointing.”
“I think that Winnipeg has come out of this showing that they have a recognition that this is a very serious problem.”
