Rob: Last week we had some Black Lives Matter vigils in Canmore and Banff. I am amazed at the turnout for both. A few hundred people in Canmore. Probably double that in Banff. Just looking at some of the photos from Banff, the one you have in the Rocky Mountain Outlook this week with all the people kneeling on Banff Avenue, it’s a very powerful statement from our local community.

Tanya:  I’m always so grateful that I live here.  I find that our communities are super  compassionate, and we rise up to challenges. This is more than just having conversations and standing in solidarity with the communities of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour. It’s about changing the way things are done to fix the problems.

Rob: An interesting article in the Rocky Mountain Outlook this week, kind of tying the discussion of Black Lives Matter to Indigenous injustice. I think your colleague Jordan did a really good job with this in the article. I have personally been very hesitant to try to bring anything else into this conversation, because I’ve been very worried about using language that detracts from the very important conversations we’re having about specifically Black lives, but Indigenous injustice is also an important conversation that we should be having in Canada.

Tanya: I think that to have conversations about racism in Canada we cannot ignore our history of racism and genocide towards Indigenous people. It’s not about co-opting or piggybacking on top of other conversations, but it’s about the fact that this is a conversation we also need to invest in. There are parallels between what’s being experienced by both of these groups in terms of inequality and injustice. We have a long history of trying to brush this under the rug, or this feeling like we do a better job than Americans, perhaps. We do not. I think our history is pretty shameful. We have done the work to have some of the conversations around this, but in terms of actions, we have not stepped up to the challenge yet as Canadians. As we have conversations about Black racism in Canada, it’s not one conversation or the other, we have them both.

Rob: Absolutely. And anyone who thinks that kind of racism isn’t prevalent here in the Bow Valley just has to look up at the mountains that surround us. Both colonialism and the way we co-opted the names of some of the mountains that originally had Indigenous names, I’m thinking of Tunnel Mountain as an example, and even some mountain names that still exist that are racist.

Tanya: I’m not going to name the mountains because I don’t want to repeat the racist epithet, but there’s one in Banff and then there’s a peak near Canmore that has a nickname that is a racial term against Indigenous women. There have been years and years of people saying these have to change and we have not really seen that change happen.

Rob: With the conversations we’re having around race in general right now, and actually taking action on these things rather than just talking about them, maybe this is the time to really take some action on renaming some of these peaks.

Filed under: Banff, Canmore, Mountain Insider