Nick Kakeeway: a story of Indigenous survival

After a hard fight against deteriorating health, Nick Kakeeway died on October 16, in St. Catharines, Ontario. Whatever may appear on his death certificate, Nick fell victim to Canada’s ongoing abusive colonial relationship with the Indigenous peoples that it dispossessed and pushed to the margins of society. He only lived into his early sixties, but even this was remarkable given the violence and hardships he faced during his lifetime.

I knew Nick for more than 30 years. We met and became friends because he was an active member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). Despite facing racism, poverty, homelessness, violence, abuse and imprisonment, he was a thoroughly decent human being whom I greatly admired and respected.

No monuments

After I learned of Nick’s death, I pondered whether I should offer some written tribute to him. Then, I happened to walk through a little wooded area close to my home that is named for a deceased member of Toronto’s political establishment. I know Nick won’t be honoured in that way, but it would be a crying injustice if his life and struggles were known only to his family and friends.

So I write this as a personal tribute to Nick that also considers what his fight for survival should mean for people struggling against oppression everywhere. I shall take care not to intrude on the privacy of the family members he cherished, though I hope his cat, Maverick, won’t mind me mentioning him.

My first encounter with Nick was in the early 1990s at an OCAP action in which we broke into an abandoned building in an ultimately successful campaign to have it turned into social housing. Taking risks and dealing with hostile cops was nothing new for Nick, so occupying the place and being taken out in handcuffs were things he took in his stride.

The police intervened very quickly so I didn’t have much chance to talk to Nick but I recall that he mentioned the shelter he was staying in and stressed that he was a member of the Ojibwe Nation who had been made homeless by those who had stolen the land of his people. This was a point he made very frequently with complete justification.

After the police took us out, they informed us that we would be released on the spot, after being issued trespass tickets. They went down the line writing out tickets. When they came to Nick, he crumpled his up and threw it in the cop’s face. He knew the potential consequences of such an act only too well but, for him, defiance was a very practical question, rather than an abstract principle.

Nick soon became a regular participant in OCAP actions and started to take an active part in some of our day-to-day work, helping to do outreach for actions and events and acting as an ambassador for us on the streets. The struggle for Indigenous rights always inspired him and he felt a sense of pride whenever the structures of Canadian colonialism where shaken.

Nick was born on a reserve north of Thunder Bay, Ontario that was one of the deeply inadequate holding facilities that the Indian Act created for the dispossessed Indigenous nations. Hoping for better, his family moved into the city when he was still a young child.

Thunder Bay is a notorious crucible of anti-Indigenous racism and Nick experienced this in full measure. Facing discrimination and social exclusion, he fell afoul of the ‘justice system’ and was incarcerated before he was an adult. For Nick, as for so many others, alcohol, for all the problems it brought with it, provided some relief from the pain he had to endure. He headed for Toronto and ended up on its streets for many years.

As my time as an OCAP organizer unfolded, Nick always seemed to be in the vicinity. He was a very big, very tough man and quite fearless when it came to physical confrontations. He told me that the police computer system had him pegged as “violent when intoxicated.” Still, despite his ferocious reputation, he could be kind-hearted and generous and he didn’t prey on those weaker than him. When he was elected onto the OCAP executive committee, I was surprised to see him wipe tears from his eyes; he told me it meant so much to him to be trusted in this way.

The police had Nick targeted and his association with OCAP made them even more hostile towards him. He would always defy them, often at severe cost. On one occasion, when he was in jail and had to go to court, he asked me to bring him a change of clothing. He told me that the clothes he had worn when he had been arrested were not in good condition because the cops had been rough on him. I opened the bag containing them and was shocked to find they had been soaked in blood.

There were times when the pain Nick carried became very clear. He came into the OCAP office one day, very drunk and upset, and shared with me terrible details of what he and his family had endured. He stood up and punched the office wall, shouting “I hate every one of those white motherfuckers.” Then, he paused for a few moments before turning and saying “Sorry, John. No offence.”

I could tell many stories about Nick’s activism but one that stands out for me was his role in a “mass panhandle” OCAP organized outside the Toronto Film Festival to challenge the City’s role in abandoning people to the streets, even as it posed as a centre of culture and enlightenment. Nick gathered up a lot of spare change that he badly needed, but it was the audacity of challenging the power structure in the process that energized him.

A lesson in survival

After I stepped down as an OCAP organizer, I taught a couple of social justice courses at York University in Toronto. I wanted to bring in a guest speaker to deal with Indigenous struggles and I thought of Nick. He wasn’t a recognized spokesperson or leader but I felt he had something to say, so I invited him.

I knew Nick wasn’t used to giving talks so I framed it as a question-and-answer session. I thought a university setting might be a bit intimidating for him but I was dead wrong. He was witty and gregarious, even as he presented an indictment of Canadian colonialism through the prism of his own life. He began by laughing and telling the students, “I can’t believe they’re letting John teach here!”

As the class unfolded, Nick put a human face on colonialism and Indigenous resistance. He told of breaking out of a detention facility as a 16-year-old, only to be arrested on the streets of Toronto for trying to steal a bicycle. They kept him in solitary confinement for months. One of the students, very shocked by this, asked how the authorities could do this to a young boy. Nick shrugged and told her, “As far as they were concerned, it was just one less Indian on the streets.”

In his later years, Nick was able to obtain a disability allowance and secure housing in St. Catharines. He became a cat person, ran a vigorous Facebook page and had people around whom he loved and who loved him. He made the most of this time, even though the hardships of his life led inevitably to a premature death.

When we think of Indigenous resistance, we conjure up images of key struggles and campaigns that have been taken up. These are all vital but we shouldn’t overlook an important additional consideration.

Resistance of Indigenous people occurs at the level of a day-to-day struggle to survive. This was true during the initial phase of colonial dispossession, in the residential schools and in the case of children stolen by the agencies of ‘child welfare.’ It remains true today on the reserves and on the streets of Canada’s cities. It is central to the lives of Indigenous women, as they face genocidal levels of violence. Nick’s life was one such struggle to survive. It had its moments of joy but it was a tough and bitter fight from start to finish.

I have often thought of Stephen Jay Gould’s memorable observation that “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” That rings true when it comes to Nick’s life.

Nick Kakeeway was a fine human being with a great deal to offer a society that was too racist and unjust to do anything other than lock him away and try to crush him. His qualities and considerable abilities had to be employed in a day-to-day battle to surmount the hardships and pain inflicted on him.
There will be no official tributes to Nick, but those of us who knew him honour his life, cherish his memory and carry on the struggle in which he played a greatly valued part.