[URBAN NOTE] DiManno on the life and death of Rodney Whitefish

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Rosie DiManno tells the story of a man recently murdered in Toronto, a First Nations man battling homelessness and poverty for decades.

It was the misfortune of Ramsey Whitefish to become Toronto’s 30th homicide a mere three days after the murder of a five-month pregnant woman whose premature baby was saved by emergency caesarean section.

How does a victim compete with that kind of shocking narrative? Because it apparently requires exceptional circumstances for a city to sit up and take notice as the bodies pile up this year at a record pace. It feels numbingly like the new normal, a reprise of the Year of the Gun in 2005.

Candace Rochelle Bobb was homicide No. 29, slain as she sat in the back seat of a vehicle that was fired upon repeatedly alongside the Jamestown public housing complex. Her murder was front-page news, avidly followed by an appalled public.

Whitefish’s life wasn’t extinguished by gunfire, so he doesn’t even fall within the arc of bang-bang melodrama; what lies not beneath but very much in the open, brazen. The 42-year-old aboriginal man died of blunt force trauma to the head, possibly inflicted by a rock found near his body where it was discovered in a pool of blood on Gloucester St., just before midnight Wednesday. The Star ran an online story, first reporting his death, then later an update saying an arrest had been made within hours.

Yet the murder of Whitefish is just as much a vital tale of this city, of how people live in our midst and how they die in our midst.

For some two decades, since arriving in Toronto from a reserve in the Turtle Island area — Whitefish was part Sioux, part Ojibway — he had been among the chronically homeless, with its drastic over-representation of aboriginals: 16 per cent of the homeless, despite accounting for only one per cent of the local population, according to the 2013 Street Needs Assessment survey; one-third of those found to be sleeping rough, that is outside, in parks, on benches, inside doorways.