Main Street Soldier

« June 24, 1972. A plane carrying eight students, aged 14 to 18, home to Bunibonibee Cree Nation for the summer from residential schools in Portage la Prairie and Stonewall, crashed in a vacant lot on Linwood Street in Winnipeg. There were no survivors. »

Ray was 17 when he was sent to fight a war for the very countries that had ravaged the homelands from which he’d been torn as a child. Orphaned and placed in St. Joseph’s Vocational School, the Sisters of the Church failed to nurture the children in their care. Instead, they lived as soldiers in a daily war—a war accepted, even normalized, by settler-colonial society across North America. The taking of children, the savage rampage of their minds—these became Ray’s battlefields, every waking day of his life.

Ray spoke in slurred messages of resistance. His life was witnessed by many and left a deep mark on our community in Winnipeg and on his family forever. He was a survivor of many fronts. He lived through the ongoing systemic assimilation of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and through the forgotten lives of Indigenous veterans who fought for freedom, only to return to a new urban world that once held millions of buffalo.

Among their graves in the centre of Winnipeg, Ray held up a Bible, defying its law through his raw words and through the haze of alcoholism. These wars, these religions, these all-powerful men only proved how many were crushed beneath the hands of fascism.

Had he not been labeled a pagan—an alien to the earth—by the very nations he fought for, his life might have been celebrated as a star’s. Instead, he lived through this film as yet another "Drunk Indian" caricature, used by white filmmakers to elevate their own careers, while deep, complex stories of history and places were reduced to flickers of light and celluloid.

Victoria Redsun
Denesuline and Nehitho Multi-media Artist and Activist from Northern Manitoba
Creator of Main Street Warrior, a project supported
by WFG and Archive/Counter-Archive