Indigenous searchers are calling for the creation of a permanent search and rescue team in Thunder Bay, where the bodies of four missing persons have been found over the past two weeks. Meanwhile, Thunder Bay’s police chief and the region’s First Nations leaders traded barbs on social media, amid criticism of the force’s actions during the search. Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler and Thunder Bay Police Service chief Darcy Fleury exchanged critical social media posts on Wednesday and Thursday. Fiddler accused the police of instructing searchers not to look in a set of abandoned grain elevators.
Searchers found the bodies of 25-year-old Nodin Skunk and 23-year-old Ashlynn Bottle from Mishkeegogamang First Nation in those elevators three days later.
Fiddler said the family of 36-year-old Webequie member Kelsey Anderson was “horrified” when police posted a final update on their deceased relative without having notified them. While Indigenous searchers were responsible for finding three of the four bodies, he accused police of marginalizing their work and restricting their communication.
“They discount our knowledge and culture because they don’t respect it,” Fiddler wrote, adding that faith in the police is faltering.
Fleury fired back that Fiddler’s statements, “do not accurately reflect the Thunder Bay Police Service’s efforts or commitment,” chastising the spokesperson for 49 northern First Nations chiefs for failing to mention “positive” relationships NAN staff have with the local police and positive interactions Indigenous people have with police in general.
Fleury insinuated that the families of missing persons may have chosen to exclude NAN from their relationships with the police and that, “inaccurate or incomplete information can undermine trust and impact the willingness of individuals to come forward with information.”
Anderson family spokesperson Titus Semple had hoped Fleury would use this week’s events to his advantage, meeting with NAN leaders as they’re requesting, and building stronger relationships.
“I think this was a missed opportunity for him to extend an invitation to First Nations leaders and communities to come together and work together and find solutions to the mishandling of these types of situations within the city and between First Nations communities and Thunder Bay police,” Semple said. Twenty-six years of searching Thunder Bay
Semple participated in the first large-scale Thunder Bay search in 2000 when his cousin Jethro Anderson went missing from the all-Indigenous Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School, which had opened only a month earlier.
Jethro was found in a river on Thunder Bay’s south side and the manner of his death remains a mystery. Six more youth from NAN territory would die in the city by 2011, prompting the Seven Youth Inquest in 2015. Seven years later, police would reinvestigate Anderson’s death among eight others after a provincial watchdog probe found systemic racism in the way Thunder Bay police investigates the deaths of Indigenous people.
Thunder Bay police employ a total of 255 sworn officers, who patrol a city of over 450 square kilometers. The search efforts for Anderson included 85 formal volunteers, and Semple pointed out that’s not including casual searchers or those who didn’t register. He says it’s clear that community efforts dwarf what police resources are available. After 26 years of grassroots efforts to find missing persons in Thunder Bay, he says the time has come for a permanent structure to support those efforts, independent of political bodies or law enforcement.
“Part of the problem is that all of it is left to the police to handle,” Semple says. “If we created a stand-alone organization that would be able to provide that additional support, it would go a long way to provide clear communication with the families and Thunder Bay police. We can be that liaison between all parties involved. How that’s going to be funded or structured is to be determined but it’s not impossible to do. It’s just a matter of whether Thunder Bay police are willing to work with our group, our communities, to make this happen.” Rule of the jungle
While search parties from all over northern Ontario and Manitoba were combing the city looking for Anderson, they happened to discover the body of another missing person, 42-year-old Richard Graham, hanging high in a tree along the same floodway where Anderson’s body was later found. Graham had been missing since July of 2024.
Graham’s father, Dwayne Poster, is a member of Fort William First Nation, a community of 2,500 people bordering on Thunder Bay. Poster has spent the past two years walking all over the city every day and talking to anyone who might be able to help in the search.
He said his son was homeless and struggling with addiction when he disappeared. Graham was technically non-status. His itinerant lifestyle and lack of identification held him back from applying. His pale skin and red hair made it challenging for his father and other searchers to describe him to strangers as Anishinaabe. Lacking the support of an experienced search network, the retired port worker faced a steep learning curve in Thunder Bay’s streets. “There’s no policing in the encampments. It’s the rule of the jungle,” he said. “There are no rules. The only rule is, you don’t talk. That’s the rule of the jungle. That’s what we ran into day after day.”He became familiar with the ecosystem of homeless encampments and trap houses. He says most of the people he met at the beginning of his two-year search are now dead. He became experienced with mental health and addictions, putting himself in unpredictable and violent situations. At times, he ventured into places where if he had gone missing, no one would have known where to look.
Poster said the information ecosystem among those living in extreme poverty constantly churned out stories of “the most horrific things people could do to each other being done to him.” The rumour he heard over and over until he believed it was that Graham had either overdosed, or been murdered, and then placed on the coupler of a train. Poster spent days searching ditches along the tracks. He spent nights digging holes in the fields where he heard Graham might be buried.
“When they took me into that police room on Friday night and they told me they had found him, this sense of relief came over me,” Poster recalled. “It’s not that he had been found, it was that the horrible things that they said happened to him, they didn’t happen.”
Poster paid the promised $5,000 reward to the searcher from Winnipeg who found Graham, believing it to be an investment in the ongoing effort. Another family might have their loved one brought home alive or at least closure might come faster, he explained.
If the search efforts that have gone on for a generation in Thunder Bay could be institutionalized, he said, families like his who have no experience with the urban ecosystem of extreme poverty could have the support of experienced searchers.
“We might have been able to bring Richie home sooner,” he said. “You know what they say about fresh eyes: when you look at something with fresh eyes, somebody will always see something differently. This is what those guys do.”
On Sunday evening, the families will hold a vigil on the floodway where their loved ones were found. They have publicly invited First Nations leaders and police to attend.
