Thread by @thewalrus

Stay tuned for a Twitter takeover by @evaholland talking about her article on the Brayden Bushby trial, how Canada’s criminal justice system handles violence against Indigenous women, and what meaningful change might look like. thewalrus.ca/looking-for-ju… 1/17

Hey everyone! This is @evaholland. I’m a writer based in Whitehorse, Yukon, and the author of a nonfiction book, Nerve. I don't typically cover crime, but I became interested in this story right after the attack on Barbara Kentner, in January 2017. penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/600837/n… 2/17

It struck me that there was a disconnect between how the attack was received in much of the rest of Canada—as kind of a bizarre outlier—and how it seemed to be understood in Thunder Bay, as an escalation of an existing dynamic: white people throwing objects from cars. 3/17

I think people tend to mentally divide racism into boxes, with overt violence and hatred in one box and what is sometimes called “casual racism”—stereotypes, slurs, and so on—in another. I don't think people always see that the two are connected. 4/17

There are no discrete boxes, no "safe" or "harmless" amount of racism, only a continuum that leads inexorably to violence and death for the group being targeted. I thought the Bushby case might offer an opportunity to explore that connection. 5/17

I received funding from the @IWMF's Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists to spend three weeks in Thunder Bay, in January 2020, covering the trial. But, due to legal uncertainty around new jury-selection legislation, Bill C-75, the trial was bumped to April 2020. 6/17

I went to Thunder Bay anyway, for one week in January 2020, to lay some groundwork. I was able to attend a pretrial hearing in person and to access a mountain of pretrial court documents that were then still under a publication ban. I thought I'd return in April... 7/17

Then the pandemic hit and the trial was postponed for months. So, in the meantime, I read. I had already read @TanyaTalaga's essential book, Seven Fallen Feathers, and it helped me understand the scope of anti-Indigenous racism in Thunder Bay. houseofanansi.com/products/seven… 8/17

I dug in to three recent books that resulted from the Gerald Stanley trial, in Saskatchewan: Storying Violence, by @GStarblanket and @Dallas_Hunt. akpress.org/storying-viole… 9/17

Peace and Good Order, by @haroldrjohnson. penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/603639/p… 10/17

And Canadian Justice, Indigenous Justice, by Kent Roach. mqup.ca/canadian-justi… 11/17

I also read @BillyRayB's This Wound Is a World. I kept coming back to a line from his poem “If Our Bodies Could Rust, We Would Be Falling Apart.” He writes of the Bushby attack, “Some more than others know that all objects can be put to violent use.” frontenachouse.com/product/this-w… 12/17

I read that as being about the trailer hitch but also about much more. My sense of the story was shifting as I read and as the court delays dragged on. I wanted to explore how the court system itself can be put to violent use. That became my focus. 13/17

Finally, last November, the trial went ahead. I watched by Zoom, and even at that remove, I could feel how harmful and invasive the process must have been for the family. It was hard to watch. Afterward, I interviewed several lawyers about whether it has to be that way. 14/17

I'm grateful to @bevisiting, @kwetoday, Kent Roach, and others (including Bushby's defence team) for sharing their perspectives with me. I take seriously the possibility that changes made to the trial process will rebound more severely on already-marginalized defendants. 15/17

But, as I hope I've shown in my story, the current system is not working justly. It mirrors our society rather than rising above our flaws. We need to find a better way forward. I don't have answers, but I hope I've at least clarified the problem for some readers. 16/17

That’s it from me, @evaholland. Thanks to @thewalrus for sharing their Twitter account! You can read my story here: thewalrus.ca/looking-for-ju… And I'd encourage you to read further too—the books I've mentioned here are a great start. 17/17