Drinking Up the Revolution by James Wilt

Author:James Wilt [Wilt, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781913462772
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2022-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

The Racial Scapegoat: Punishing the “Problem Drinker”

Eishia Hudson was only sixteen years old when she was murdered by a police officer in Winnipeg, a city of 700,000 people in the heart of the Canadian Prairies.

By all accounts, Eishia was a kind and lovely girl; her father, William Hudson, recounted in an online legal fundraiser that she “had a strong bright smile that could lighten a room, she had a contagious laugh, and she was loved by everybody…. She was a Daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, an aunty, a cousin, a loyal person, a friend and so much more.”1 Eishia was also Indigenous. That matters a great deal, as Indigenous people in Canada are more than ten times likely to be killed by police than white people, especially in Winnipeg, which has the largest urban Indigenous population in the country.2

In the early evening of April 8, 2020, Eishia and a few friends allegedly lifted alcohol from a state-owned liquor store and escaped in a stolen Jeep.3 Police were called by the store, a cop car was hit, and a vehicle chase commenced. The SUV that Eishia drove was eventually stopped and its occupants actively and visibly in the process of surrendering. Yet a police officer still fired his gun several times, shooting Eishia once in the shoulder. The teen was taken to a nearby hospital where she was pronounced dead. The killing sent shockwaves throughout the city. This grief and outrage was soon compounded by a second police killing only hours later and yet another just over a week later; both victims were also Indigenous. On the Sunday after Eishia’s death, family and supporters occupied the intersection where Eishia was killed for a vigil of drumming and singing: “We’re here to let her soul rise,” said her mother, Christie Zebrasky.4

During the following summer, massive rallies in Winnipeg continued to draw thousands of people to demand justice for victims of policing in Canada — including Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Abraham Natanine, Chantel Moore, Rodney Levi, and Ejaz Choudry — and further propelled by the militant uprisings across the US following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. A new wave of anger surged in early 2021 when it was announced that the cop who killed Eishia would not face any charges. It was horrifying — but ultimately unsurprising, given the vitriolic anti-Indigenous racism in Winnipeg — that equally large numbers of social media users piled on any mention of her death to defend police actions and blame both Eishia and her family for the killing. Meanwhile, supposedly progressive city councillors refused to even say her name, eagerly displacing the violence of policing as something that only happens elsewhere: Minneapolis, Louisville, Ferguson, Baltimore.

But Eishia’s death — and this highly contested public response to it — did not happen in a vacuum. For almost two years prior, Winnipeg’s largely white and suburban populace had been whipped into a feverish outrage over a supposed crime wave of liquor store thefts, with media outlets frantically covering

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